Faculty Events Calendar: Colloquia, Workshops, Lectures and Conferences

https://utexas.zoom.us/j/96074808668?pwd=VklVWEM4eHYycUd5UjJ6RU5KZHVZUT09

Meeting ID: 960 7480 8668 Passcode: 187458

This spring's Chalkboard will be a lightning-round presentation of the greatest law school teaching policy pointers followed by office hours which will provide an opportunity to raise questions and concerns.

A conference designed specifically for graduate students currently writing on subjects involving constitutional change, including formal and informal amendment, constitutional mutation, constitutional dismemberment, constitutional reform, constitutional replacement, and related subjects. Registration is now closed.

A conference designed specifically for graduate students currently writing on subjects involving constitutional change, including formal and informal amendment, constitutional mutation, constitutional dismemberment, constitutional reform, constitutional replacement, and related subjects. Registration is now closed.

A conference designed specifically for graduate students currently writing on subjects involving constitutional change, including formal and informal amendment, constitutional mutation, constitutional dismemberment, constitutional reform, constitutional replacement, and related subjects. Registration is now closed.

Your House is Worth More Than They Think: The Strange Case of Property Tax Assessment Regressivity

"In the last few years, researchers have revealed something shocking about the property tax, the mainstay of local governmental finance. In virtually all jurisdictions in the country, expensive homes are undervalued by property tax assessors – and hence under-taxed – while less expensive homes are over-valued and over-taxed. Put another way, one of the major methods of taxation in America is premised on a consistently-told lie that the rich are less rich than they actually are, and that the less-well off are better off than they actually are. To give it name, there is almost universal Property Tax Assessment Regressivity, or PTAR. "

Outcome Reasons and Process Reasons in Normative Constitutional Theory

Fundamental questions regarding the constitutional order in the United States are much discussed and disputed. For example, there is a longstanding debate between originalists and living constitutionalists; both are challenged by the opponents of judicial review. Just mapping the landscape of contemporary normative constitutional theory is a daunting task. There are so many theories: the list might start with common law constitutionalism, constitutional pluralism, and the moral readings approach, but then there is contemporary ratification theory and public meaning originalism—not to mention representation reinforcement theory and the more radical view that Congress should have the final say on all matters constitutional. And that is just the beginning of a much longer list.

Summer Kim presents an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

Join us for a discussion on Victor Ferreres Comella’s book “The Constitution of Arbitration,” published by Cambridge University Press. Details on the book are available here:

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/law/constitutional-and-administrative-law/constitution-arbitration?format=PB.

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of seven workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with both law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

Book: The People’s Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration Chapter 8: Social Engineers on a Grand Scale?: Federally-Funded Legal Aid and the Civil Rights Movement

Chapter 8, which I’ve circulated, focuses on the legislatively created and executive endorsed War on Poverty. I zoom in on the Legal Services Program (LSP), which was part of this initiative. LSP pumped over 2,000 attorneys and millions of dollars into poor communities. I describe how federal dollars earmarked for poverty were deployed by advocates to advance racial justice agendas—specifically the enforcement of newly-minted civil rights statutes (e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Fair Housing Act) and the leveraging of Warren Court interpretations of previously dormant statutory and constitutional provisions (e.g., Section 1983, the Equal Protection Clause). This story differs from traditional civil rights narratives that focus on mainstream organizations (e.g., NAACP and the ACLU) to the neglect of federally funded legal services and poverty law scholarship that is sometimes less specific about the racial implications of public interest lawyering during this period.

Amanda Rose presenting an original paper in the Business Law Seminar

Faculty meeting and lunch

The Health, Innovation, and the Law Colloquium closely studies the works-in-progress of leading scholars of health innovation from across the country and engages with the authors about their work.

Spring 2024 Speakers:

Feb. 6 – Ameet Sarpatwari – Harvard University Feb. 20 – Matthew Lawrence – Emory University March 5 – Wendy Epstein – DePaul University March 26 – Erin Fuse Brown – Georgia State University College April 9 – Myrisha Lewis – College of William & Mary April 23 – Rachel Sachs – Washington University

Jonathan Klick presenting an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

TO SAVE DEMOCRACY FROM JURISTOCRACY: J.B. THAYER AND CONGRESSIONAL POWER AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

As many Americans once again worry that their democracy is hostage to judicial power, this Article is an archival reconstruction of how famed Harvard law professor James Bradley Thayer set out on a mission to stave off the syndrome before it stuck — though he failed in the end.

The Article shows how Thayer (1831-1902) arrived at his epochmaking theory of judicial deference to safeguard Congress’s power after democratic revolutions of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Indeed, he hoped to see America transformed in the direction of British legislative supremacy, in which Parliament — and not the courts — reigned supreme. Scandalized by growing ventures to weaponize the federal judiciary so as to preempt the newly federalized American democracy, Thayer bet on something new in global history: mass democracy on a national scale, understood as an experiment in collective learning. The Article thereby provides a new periodization and transatlantic contextualization of the struggles over judicial fiat routinely associated the Supreme Court’s defense of laissez-faire in the early twentieth century.

And yet, as this Article emphasizes, Thayer failed in the long run. His democratizing fix, judicial self-restraint under the “clear error standard” — which this Article shows had the same English roots as his democratic and parliamentary theory — has tragically misled reform. It embroiled Americans in a neverending debate on judicial “restraint,” even as Thayer proposed a doctrinal prescription encouraging judges to limit their power themselves. He therefore postponed an institutional remedy for an institutional syndrome. For this reason, his mission, in spite of its partial implementation after his death, now has to be rescued in its own right. Judicial self-restraint has not prevented the continuation and even the intensification of the very juristocratic syndrome Thayer rightly found so troubling. If Americans still remain with him at the dawn of our commitment to democracy, they will have to save it from judges in a new way all their own

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and sconstitutional theory. Organized around a series of seven workshops, each features a deifferent leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with both law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

Health, Innovation, and the Law Colloquium closely studies the works-in-progress of leading scholars of health innovation from across the country and engages with the authors about their work.

Spring 2024 Speakers:

Feb. 6 – Ameet Sarpatwari – Harvard University Feb. 20 – Matthew Lawrence – Emory University March 5 – Wendy Epstein – DePaul University March 26 – Erin Fuse Brown – Georgia State University College April 9 – Myrisha Lewis – College of William & Mary April 23 – Rachel Sachs – Washington University

Bartenwerfer v. Buckley and Coerced Debt

In Bartenwerfer v. Buckley, the Supreme Court held that Mrs. Kate Bartenwerfer could be denied the discharge of a debt under Section 523(a)(2) of the Bankruptcy Code on the basis of fraud that her partner and husband, Mr. David Bartenwerfer, committed in selling a house that he remodeled and both spouses owned. Partnership was key to the decision; the Court embraced a Nineteenth Century precedent holding that the fraud of one partner prevented an innocent partner from discharging the debt. And the concurrence explicitly stated that the decision is limited to partners, defined using principals of agency law. Because the Bartenwerfers were both martial and business partners, a key question is which type of partnership is relevant. Fortunately for debtors with liabilities created by domestic violence, the Supreme Court characterized the Bartenwerfers as “business partners,” and caselaw under the precedent Bartenwerfer embraced largely limits partnership-imputed denials of discharge to business partnerships. Thus, much coerced debt – debt created by an abusive partner using fraud or coercion – should not be subject to denial of discharge under Bartenwerfer, because most coerced debt appears to be consumer debt. Unfortunately, in both the case law and our data, marital and business debt are not mutually exclusive. This manuscript uses data from the first in-depth study of coerced debt to argue that bankruptcy is an important avenue for relief from coerced debt, and that while Bartenwerfer is unlikely to broadly limit the discharge of coerced debt, it still may have negative effects on a narrower band of cases.

Emily Strauss presenting an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

Gordon Smith presenting an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

Drawing Board Luncheon: Abraham Wickelgren

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of seven workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with both law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

Health, Innovation, and the Law Colloquium closely studies the works-in-progress of leading scholars of health innovation from across the country and engages with the authors about their work. Spring 2024 Speakers:

Feb. 6 – Ameet Sarpatwari – Harvard University Feb. 20 – Matthew Lawrence – Emory University March 5 – Wendy Epstein – DePaul University March 26 – Erin Fuse Brown – Georgia State University College April 9 – Myrisha Lewis – College of William & Mary April 23 – Rachel Sachs – Washington University

UNLOCKING LEX TALIONIS Critics argue that judgments about the “proportionality” of punishment are inherently subject to discretionary bias, impossible to operationalize, and unable to provide a meaningful critique of American Mass Incarceration. In this paper, I attempt to operationalize the classical retributive formulation of proportionality—Lex Talionis, or “an eye for an eye,” which is widely regarded as barbarically punitive. I do so in conjunction with a conservative set of assumptions that should be biased against my conclusions, to give some rough estimates of what it might in fact entail as a limit on the severity of permissible punishment. I argue that Lex Talionis would in fact demand a radically lenient transformation of the criminal legal systems of the United States (and many other countries), reducing incarceration for non-homicide offenses by at least an order of magnitude. One might still reject Lex Talionis, but not because it is barbarically punitive. Indeed, if I am right about what it entails, many skeptics will likely think that it is not punitive enough.

Natlaya Shnitser presenting an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

Faculty meeting and lunch

Sponsored by Swedish Excellence Endowment, The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Excellence Endowment, and Texas Global.

Swedish lawyer and nuclear disarmament advocate Beatrice Fihn will reflect on her Nobel Peace Prize winning work toward the 2017 adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), Fihn led the mobilization of civil society, diplomats, scientists, and legal experts in support of the treaty. In her lecture, Fihn will speak on the ongoing threats posed by nuclear weapons, and on the power of movement-based advocacy to fight them.

Register here

Visit the conference website

The world is at “90 seconds to midnight,” the closest it has ever been, according to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. However alarming this prognosis is, nuclear disaster has long been in the making, demonstrated by decades of Indigenous, Third World, and feminist anti-nuclear advocacy. For decades, these advocates have recognized that nuclear and environmental threats and harms are intrinsically connected through legal, political, and economic structures of imperialism.

“Disarming Toxic Empire” will bring fresh, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches to peace, nuclear disarmament, and environmental justice. Participants will consider and contest the unjust, imperial histories and geographies of nuclear testing, production, storage, and weaponry. The conference will bring together academics, advocates, and artists working through intergenerational channels of memory and justice to respond to nuclear toxicity in all its forms and manifestations, in sites ranging from the Navajo Nation and the Pacific Islands to Japan, North Africa, and Ghana.

The conference will open with a keynote address by 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). It will end with a performance of A Body in Fukushima by the movement–based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake.

Hosted by the Sissy Farenthold Fund for Peace and Social Justice of the Rapoport Center, the conference is a collaborative effort among many institutions at the University of Texas and beyond. Fihn’s keynote event is sponsored by the Swedish Excellence Endowment, the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Excellence Endowment, and Texas Global.

Co-sponsored by the Sissy Farenthold Fund for Peace and Social Justice; Swedish Excellence Endowment and The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Excellence Endowment; Texas Global; Center for European Studies and France-UT Institute; Humanities Institute, funding support provided by Viola S. Hoffman and George W. Hoffman Lectureship in Liberal Arts and Fine Arts; the Charles N. Wilson Chair in South Asian Studies and the Department of Government; Planet Texas 2050; Center for East Asian Studies; South Asia Institute; the Oscar Brockett Center for Theatre History and Performance as Public Practice in the Department of Theatre and Dance; Briscoe Center for American History; the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies; and Rude Mechs.

Drawing Board Luncheon: Mechele Dickerson

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of seven workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with both law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

Health, Innovation, and the Law Colloquium closely studies the works-in-progress of leading scholars of health innovation from across the country and engages with the authors about their work.

Spring 2024 Speakers:

Feb. 6 – Ameet Sarpatwari – Harvard University Feb. 20 – Matthew Lawrence – Emory University March 5 – Wendy Epstein – DePaul University March 26 – Erin Fuse Brown – Georgia State University College April 9 – Myrisha Lewis – College of William & Mary April 23 – Rachel Sachs – Washington University

HOW DID CORPORATIONS GET STUCK IN POLITICS AND CAN THEY ESCAPE? Corporations have always been involved in politics, but today is different. They are publicly taking positions, either directly or indirectly, on contested political and social issues unrelated to their businesses. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, we argue that this practice, which we term “corporate political posturing,” is problematic. First, it is of dubious value to the corporation and its stakeholders. Corporate political posturing often backfires, it does so unpredictably and potentially catastrophically, and it is particularly susceptible to agency costs. Second, it is harmful to society. The fundamental problem is that corporations are institutionally ill-equipped to take center stage in policy debates. They are inherently self-interested economic actors with goals that often conflict with those of society. This manifests in statements that tend to polarize rather than enlighten and actions that undermine the positions that they back publicly.

Tomer Stein presenting an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

Drawing Board Luncheon: James Spindler

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of seven workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with both law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

Clear Statement Rules in Administrative Law In Sackett v. EPA, the Supreme Court took up for the fourth time the elusive meaning of the term “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act. The phrase was important because it determined the scope of the authority of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (COE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prevent the destruction of the wetlands that are critical to preserving and enhancing surface water quality in the United States. The Clean Water Act prohibits “the discharge of any pollutant” into “navigable waters,” which are in turn defined to be the “waters of the United States.” But discharges are permissible if done pursuant to a permit issued by CoE or EPA, depending on the nature of the discharge. Because obtaining permits can be time-consuming and expensive, land developers would prefer to avoid the permit process. They have therefore pursued a narrow definition of WOTUS that would largely exclude activities that affect wetlands from the permit requirement. Michael and Chantell Sackett, private landowners who wanted to build a home near Priest Lake in Bonner County, Idaho, forced the issue when in 2004, they began backfilling their property with dirt and rocks. That precipitated a letter from EPA informing them that their actions violated the Clean Water Act, because they were filling protected wetlands. EPA warned that if the Sacketts did not cease their filling activities and come up with a restoration plan, they would be subject to civil and criminal penalties.

Health, Innovation, and the Law Colloquium closely studies the works-in-progress of leading scholars of health innovation from across the country and engages with the authors about their work.

Spring 2024 Speakers:

Feb. 6 – Ameet Sarpatwari – Harvard University Feb. 20 – Matthew Lawrence – Emory University March 5 – Wendy Epstein – DePaul University March 26 – Erin Fuse Brown – Georgia State University College April 9 – Myrisha Lewis – College of William & Mary April 23 – Rachel Sachs – Washington University

TBD

Drawing Board Luncheon: Theodore Rave

The Law and Philosophy Seminar Workshop surveys different topics in legal philosophy and constitutional theory. Organized around a series of seven workshops, each features a different leading scholar who presents and discusses their own work with both law and philosophy faculty and the students in the seminar.

TBD

William Moon presenting an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

Professor Steve Meili (University of Minnesota) will present his book, “The Constitutionalization of Human Rights Law: Implications for Refugees“.

Drawing Board Luncheon: Jamein Cunningham

Health, Innovation, and the Law Colloquium closely studies the works-in-progress of leading scholars of health innovation from across the country and engages with the authors about their work.

Spring 2024 Speakers:

Feb. 6 – Ameet Sarpatwari – Harvard University Feb. 20 – Matthew Lawrence – Emory University March 5 – Wendy Epstein – DePaul University March 26 – Erin Fuse Brown – Georgia State University College April 9 – Myrisha Lewis – College of William & Mary April 23 – Rachel Sachs – Washington University

Edwin hu presenting an original paper in the Business Law Workshop

Drawing Board Luncheon: Erik Encarnacion

https://utexas.zoom.us/j/91692089861?pwd=cXVocG96ckdsSXQ0NVFHL2JKRno4UT09

Meeting ID: 916 9208 9861 Passcode: 535326

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