Category: Faculty News

Professor William Sage has been awarded a research grant to study the relationship between federal competition policy and health care reform, a subject he first became interested in during the Clinton years. His grantor is the Commonwealth Fund, a New York–based foundation dedicated to identifying practices and formulating solutions to help the U.S. build an effective, affordable, and high-quality health care system. Sage’s research project will be titled "Health Reform, Competition Policy, and Emerging Health Care Markets” and will run during calendar year 2013.

On November 5, 2012, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases dealing with appeals in class action litigation: Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, and Comcast Corp. v. Behrend. Professor Linda Mullenix has written analyses of each of these appeals for the ABA Preview of Supreme Court Cases.

University of Texas at Austin President William Powers Jr. has, along with coauthor Mike Green, been awarded the John G. Fleming Memorial Prize for Torts Scholarship. The Fleming Prize is awarded every other year to an outstanding tort law scholar. Powers, a former dean of the Law School, and Green received the prize for, among other things, their “outstanding work as American Law Institute co-reporters for two core portions of the Restatement (Third) of Torts.” Powers and Green will jointly deliver the second Fleming Lecture at Berkeley Law at the University of California, Berkeley, on November 5, 2012.

The academic ties between the University of Texas School of Law and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), which began with the establishment of a dual-degree program in 2011, are growing stronger. On October 19–20, 2012, a group of professors from the Law School traveled south to Mexico City, Mexico, to participate in a scholarly symposium with their ITAM colleagues.

The William L. Prosser Award will be presented to Jane Stapleton, Ernest E. Smith Professor in Law at the Law School, at the annual Association of American Law Schools meeting on January 6, 2013. The Prosser Award was created and presented to its first recipient, Leon Green, in 1974, and honors those who have made an outstanding contribution to the world of tort law scholarship.

The work of Community Development Clinic Director Heather Way and Lucille Wood, a Research Fellow in the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law, was featured in a recent article in the Austin American-Statesman. The article examines the recent release of a report, coauthored by Way and Wood with Professor Peter Ward, C.B. Smith Sr. Centennial Chair in U.S.-Mexico Relations and Professor of Public Affairs and Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, examining the use and prevalence of “contracts for deed”—informal transactions for property that often have interest rates of as high as twenty percent—in Texas from 1989 to 2010.

Professor Lino A. Graglia, A. W. Walker Centennial Chair in Law, has written two recent op-ed pieces discussing the issues at stake in the Supreme Court's pending decision on Fisher v. University of Texas, a controversial case involving the use of race as a criterion in college admissions.

John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010 after serving as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for thirty-four years, , has written an extensive review of Professor Sanford Levinson’s latest book, Framed: America’s Fifty-one Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2012), in the October 11, 2012, edition of The New York Review of Books.

A group of researchers including Charles M. Silver, the Roy W. and Eugenia C. MacDonald Endowed Chair in Civil Procedure at the School of Law, recently completed a study that found no evidence that “tort reform” for medical malpractice has resulted in cost savings. The study’s results, “Will Tort Reform Bend the Cost Curve? Evidence […]

Sanford Levinson speaks to UT Law about his new book, Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance.

Justin Driver, an assistant professor at the Law School, will give a presentation on “The Constitutional Conservatism of the Warren Court” at the Junior Faculty Forum at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 1, 2012.

Ward Farnsworth, associate dean for academic affairs at Boston University School of Law, has been named dean of the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Farnsworth’s appointment, effective June 1, fills the position currently held by Interim Dean Stefanie Lindquist.