Lectures/Symposia/Conferences

On February 7, 2017, the Texas Law Review will host the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations Symposium, co-sponsored by the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law and the Lieber Institute for Law & Land Warfare at the United States Military Academy. This day-long event will feature panels addressing sovereignty in cyberspace, jurisdiction over cyber activities, international human rights law in cyberspace, among other timely topics.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Click

“Making the Sharing Economy Work for Everyone”

An address by visionary attorney Janelle Orsi, Executive Director & Co-Founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, visiting the Law School as the G. Rollie White Scholar in Residence

Lunch provided

Event synopsis: From tool lending libraries, to municipal bike shares, to multi-billion dollar online platforms like Uber and Airbnb, the "sharing economy" is spreading rapidly. While there are clear environmental and social benefits, the sharing economy has not yet proven itself to be a complete remedy for social inequities and environmental ills, particularly when profit-driven companies act as intermediaries of peer-to-peer sharing. What can we do to ensure that the sharing economy will reduce consumption, while building economic prosperity for all? What safeguards exist to protect workers, users, communities, and environments? How should governments regulate activities in the sharing economy? What governance and ownership structures will produce the best social outcomes? Janelle Orsi will discuss the rapidly changing state of the sharing economy as well as ways in which the sharing economy could be, and in some cases is already, a truly transformative force for social and environmental justice.

About Janelle Orsi: Janelle Orsi is the Executive Director & Co-Founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, CA, which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Orsi also has her own law and mediation practice focused on helping individuals and organizations share resources and create more sustainable communities. She works with social enterprises, non-profits, cooperatives, community gardens, cohousing communities, ecovillages, and others doing innovative work to change the world. Her primary areas of legal specialty are real estate, small business, nonprofit, and estate planning law. She is also the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy. For more information, see http://www.theselc.org/staff

Orsi's visit as a G. Rollie White Public Interest Scholar is supported by a generous gift from the G. Rollie White Trust. The program brings outstanding legal scholars, practitioners and advocates from the field of public service to Texas Law to foster discussion of issues related to public interest law, to raise the profile of lawyers working in this area, and to encourage students to view public service as an honored and expected part of every legal career. Orsi is Texas Law’s sixth G. Rollie White Public Interest Scholar.

Patent Damages Conference to be held February 17 & 18 at the Law School.

If you want to attend, please RSVP here.

Patent Damages Conference to be held February 17 & 18 at the Law School.

Whatever one’s political views, it is hard to believe that the past election campaign and its result—most dramatically, the election of a person who received almost three million fewer votes than his rival, but nonetheless prevailed in the electoral college—put to rest widely shared concerns about the health of American democracy. And, with Brexit in the United Kingdom and the more general travails of the European Union, not to mention other parts of the world, there is probably more general anxiety about the prospects for liberal democracy than at any time at least since World War II (and the run-up to World War II in the 1930s).

The University of Texas Law School is sponsoring a symposium, “In the Winter of Our Discontent: The State of Democracy in the Age of Trump,” on Thursday, February 23, and Friday, February 24, which will address some of these widespread anxieties. In particular, it will focus on four recent books reflecting on the challenges facing democratic political systems at home and abroad:

Bruce Cain (Stanford University), DEMOCRACY MORE OR LESS: AMERICA’S POLITICAL REFORM QUANDARY

Edward Foley (Ohio State School of Law), BALLOT BATTLES: THE HISTORY OF DISPUTED ELECTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

Samuel Issacharoff (New York University School of Law), FRAGILE DEMOCRACIES: CONTESTED DEMOCRACY IN THE ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL COURTS

Nancy Rosenblum (Professor Emerita, Harvard Department of Government), GOOD NEIGHBORS: THE DEMOCRACY OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN AMERICA (Princeton)

The symposium will begin on Thursday at 5:30, when Sam Issacharoff, a cherished former member of the UT faculty and now a professor at the New York University School of Law, will deliver a public lecture on “Anxieties of Democracy.” That lecture, like all of the events will take place in the Eidman Courtroom.

Please RSVP here.

The University of Texas Law School is sponsoring a symposium, “In the Winter of Our Discontent: The State of Democracy in the Age of Trump,” on Thursday, February 23, and Friday, February 24, which will address some of these widespread anxieties. In particular, it will focus on four recent books reflecting on the challenges facing democratic political systems at home and abroad:

Bruce Cain (Stanford University), DEMOCRACY MORE OR LESS: AMERICA’S POLITICAL REFORM QUANDARY

Edward Foley (Ohio State School of Law), BALLOT BATTLES: THE HISTORY OF DISPUTED ELECTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

Samuel Issacharoff (New York University School of Law), FRAGILE DEMOCRACIES: CONTESTED DEMOCRACY IN THE ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL COURTS

Nancy Rosenblum (Professor Emerita, Harvard Department of Government), GOOD NEIGHBORS: THE DEMOCRACY OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN AMERICA (Princeton)

In part because of the press of current events, which has resulted in the expansion of the conference originally envisioned last summer, Friday will be a packed day, beginning with a welcome and general overview of the symposium at 8:45 by Dean Ward Farnsworth and Professor Levinson, respectively. The first panel, on Issacharoff’s Fragile Democracies, will follow immediately from 9-10:45. The panel, moderated by Prof. Gary Jacobsohn (UT Department of Government and Law School), will include Zack Elkins (UT Department of Government), Jack Balkin (Yale Law School), Victor Ferreres (UT Law School), and Willy Forbath (UT Law School), with a reply by Issacharoff. Following a short break, a second panel, from 11-12:15 will address the issues raised by Rosenblum’s Good Neighbors. The discussants will be Dana Stauffer of the U.T. Government Department, and Levinson.

A lunch for everyone in attendance will commence at 12:30 in the Francis Auditorium, with a talk at 12:45 by Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard’s J.F.K. School, on his forthcoming book on why the electoral college persists in spite of all of the criticism directed at it. That will be followed, around 1:30, by a discussion/debate between Princeton Professor of Politics Keith Whittington, on the one hand and U.T. Professors Levinson, Jeffrey Tulis, and Jeremi Suri, who co-authored an op-ed in the New York Daily News pleading with Republican electors to exercise their “Hamiltonian prerogative” (as enunciated in Federalist 68) to vote for someone other than the egregious Donald Trump for the presidency.

A third panel, from 2:30-4:00, will consider Bruce Cain’s Democracy More or Less. The principal discussant will be Harvard Prof. Jennifer Hochschild, the immediate past president of the American Political Science Association, who will be joined by Nancy Rosenblum, prior to a response by Cain. The final event of this long day, from 4:15-5:45, will examine Ned Foley’s definitive examination of post-election disputes in American history. The primary discussant will be Keith Whittington, with the further participation of Zack Elkins, Issacharoff, and Mimi Marziani, now the Executive Director, Texas Civil Rights Project, and, of course, Foley himself.

The questions presented by these books and their authors obviously are all too timely. Given the topics and our current “discontents”, it is easy to promise these issues will be address with proper seriousness and scholarly knowledge.

Special seminar on "Patent Pools and Clearinghouses in the Life Sciences". Professor Geertrui van Overwalle of the University of Leuven in Belgium will present in a special seminar at Texas Law from 3:45 pm to 5 pm on Wednesday, April 5. Professor van Overwalle is one of Europe's leading researchers on gene patents (see https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/en/staff/00015469). A copy of her forthcoming paper on the seminar topic is attached.

April 7-8, Capital Punishment Center Conference: "Comparative Capital Punishment."

This conference, “Comparative Capital Punishment” will address the many commonalities (and some significant differences) in the worldwide movement away from the death penalty that began in the late eighteenth century and that sharply accelerated in the last half of the twentieth century. At the present moment, the industrialized West is an almost completely abolitionist zone (with the notable exception of the United States), while the death penalty is seeing a resurgence in some parts of the Middle East and Africa. This conference will look broadly and deeply at the practice of capital punishment around the world. There are many common themes even in apparently disparate parts of the world, such as the kinds of restrictions and reforms that usually precede abolition, the moral, political, and legal strategies of reformers and abolitionists, the forces that promote retention, and the distinctive possibilities and pitfalls of various pathways to change (legislative action vs. judicial intervention vs. international or transnational institutions and influences). The conference brings together experts on different regions and issues to evaluate the past, present, and future of the practice of capital punishment.

April 7 - 8, 2017 Capital Punishment Center Conference: "Comparative Capital Punishment."

This conference, “Comparative Capital Punishment” will address the many commonalities (and some significant differences) in the worldwide movement away from the death penalty that began in the late eighteenth century and that sharply accelerated in the last half of the twentieth century. At the present moment, the industrialized West is an almost completely abolitionist zone (with the notable exception of the United States), while the death penalty is seeing a resurgence in some parts of the Middle East and Africa. This conference will look broadly and deeply at the practice of capital punishment around the world. There are many common themes even in apparently disparate parts of the world, such as the kinds of restrictions and reforms that usually precede abolition, the moral, political, and legal strategies of reformers and abolitionists, the forces that promote retention, and the distinctive possibilities and pitfalls of various pathways to change (legislative action vs. judicial intervention vs. international or transnational institutions and influences). The conference brings together experts on different regions and issues to evaluate the past, present, and future of the practice of capital punishment.

Professor Doug Laycock will be the guest speaker during the lunchtime Harrington Symposium