Professor Roger I. Abrams

Professor Stacey L. Dogan

Professor Peter D. Enrich

Professor Wendy E. Parmet

Winter 2006 | Faculty News

Faculty Notes

Richardson Professor of Law Roger I. Abrams is the go-to guy for baseball expertise on WGBH’s “Greater Boston” with Emily Rooney. He appeared on the show in August talking about Manny Ramirez; in October he sized up the Major League Playoffs; and in November he weighed in on Theo Epstein’s departure from the Red Sox. Also in August, he was quoted about sports law in The Washington Post. Abrams recently published three labor arbitration opinions, all in the Bureau of National Affairs Labor Arbitration Reports: “Frontier Telephone of Rochester and CWA”; “American Airlines and T.W.U.”; and “Kraft Foods N.A. and O.P.E.I.U., Local 1295.” He also invited students in his summer Labor Arbitration Workshop to attend three of his labor arbitrations in the Boston area.

In September, Professor Brook K. Baker ’76 presented “Activism and the AIDS Pandemic in Africa” to the Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights. Baker is also collaborating with Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Project on legal activism challenging US efforts in bilateral and regional trade agreements to expand intellectual property right protections that impede access to medicines. In addition, he has remained active in criticizing India’s 2005 Patent Act and published “INDIA’S 2005 PATENT ACT: Death by Patent or Universal Access to Second- and Future-Generation ARVs?” in 93 Global AIDSLink 17 (Sept./Oct. 2005). Baker wrote “It Is Fully TRIPS-Compliant to Limit the Scope of Patentability for Pharmaceutical Substances to ‘New Chemical Entities’ Only,” for the Technical Expert Group on Patent Law Issues in India. Closer to home, Baker organized a World AIDS Day forum on AIDS activism along with NU’s African-American Studies Department, Women’s Studies Program and the Institute on Urban Health Research. This year’s event focused on a prevention-oriented program that draws a connection between behaviors, sexuality and pandemics, and the impact of cultural issues, economic concerns and social behaviors. Baker’s chapter, “Placing Access to Medicines on the Human Rights Agenda,” appears in the The Power of Pills, edited by NU philosophy professor Patricia Illingworth. In November, Baker gave three presentations at the Venezuelan International Seminar on International Treaties and Access to Medicines, attended by more than 150 Latin-American officials. He discussed human rights and access to essential medicines, access to Tamiflu stockpiles for a possible bird flu pandemic, and simplifying procedures for issuing compulsory licenses.

For the past two springs (2004 and 2005), Matthews Distinguished University Professor Clare Dalton has been in Oxford, England, learning about the UK’s recent responses to domestic violence across all service sectors. Dalton reports there have been consistently good guidelines issuing from the national government, but slim resources, competing priorities, and cultural inertia or resistance raise the same kinds of challenges as there are here. Her geographical area of focus has been the Thames Valley Region, which includes Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire; her goal is to find promising initiatives in the UK that the US might be able to borrow, and at the same time to learn whether promising initiatives from this side of the Atlantic might be of help on the other.

As a result of this project, Dalton is coteaching an intensive course in the medical school at Oxford University in January. She and her faculty partner, a physician who combines teaching with a general practice near Oxford, are introducing students to the dynamics of abusive relationships, training them in effective clinical responses to patients who present with abuse-related issues, and helping them understand what other resources are available to their patients, and how to access them. This is the first time domestic violence has made an explicit appearance in the Oxford medical curriculum.

In August, Associate Professor Martha F. Davis participated in an online debate sponsored by Legal Affairs magazine on the question, “Should ‘Ugly’ be a Protected Class?” In October, she spoke at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s conference at the Airlie Center in Virginia on “International Law and Domestic Advocacy.” In November, she talked about the impact of international law on domestic reproductive health advocacy at a forum in New York City sponsored by the Open Society Institute.

Davis continues to write on domestic law and human rights. Her article, “Child Care as a Human Right: A New Perspective on an Old Debate,” appeared in the summer 2005 issue of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, and was simultaneously published as a chapter in Gendering Politics and Policy: Recent Developments in Europe, Latin America and the United States (Heidi Hartman, ed., Haworth Press, 2005). Her chapter, “International Human Rights from the Ground Up: The Potential for Subnational, Human Rights-Based Reproductive Health Advocacy in the United States,” was published in Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium (Ellen Chesler and Wendy Chavkin, eds., Rutgers University Press, 2005).

As a cooperating attorney for the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union, Davis drafted an amicus brief in Dupont v. Wyzanski, pending in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The brief, joined by the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association, argues that the state’s policy of administering sex-specific prison discipline violates the Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment.

Professor Richard A. Daynard spoke about tobacco litigation in a wide variety of settings this fall: at a meeting of Uruguayan lawyers in Montevideo; at a meeting sponsored by the Argentine Ministry of Health in Buenos Aires about his experience in promoting legislation protecting nonsmokers from secondhand smoke; at a conference sponsored by the Taiwan Ministry of Health in Taipei; and at the University of Michigan, Tufts and Harvard.

Professor Stacey L. Dogan presented “What the Right of Publicity Can Learn from Trademark Law” (coauthored with Mark Lemley) at the “Colloquium on Technology, Innovation, and Intellectual Property Policy” at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona, in October. Later that month, she presented a talk on pending trademark legislation at “Hot Topics in Trademark Law,” sponsored by the Boston Patent Law Association. Dogan’s most recent publications are “Copyright Law and Subject Matter Specificity: The Case of Computer Software” (coauthored with Joseph P. Liu), in 51 NYU Annual Survey of American Law 203 (2005), and “Comment: Sony, Fair Use and File Sharing,” in 55 Case Western Reserve Law Review 971 (2005).

Senior Academic Specialist Melinda F. Drew ’87 published “Whistleblower Protection for Nurses and Other Health Care Professionals” (coauthored with Katherine Garrahan ’04), in 10 Journal of Nursing Law 79 (summer 2005).

Professor Peter D. Enrich will mount the Supreme Court steps this term to present oral argument in Cuno v. DaimlerChrysler (see pages 5 and 16), the Sixth Circuit case invalidating Ohio’s investment tax credit. This fall, Enrich was in demand at conferences where he spoke about the case and Commerce Clause constraints on state business tax incentives, including a conference about the case sponsored by the University of Minnesota Law School; the annual Summit at Como on Competition Policy, Law and Economics (held in Italy, this forum brings together the leading minds of the world on EU competition policy); the annual conferences of the Tax Executives Institute and the North Eastern States Tax Officials Association; the annual NYU Institute on State and Local Taxation; and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ annual funding state services conference, held in Maryland. His review of Greg LeRoy’s book,The Great American Jobs Scam, was published in 38 State Tax Notes 401 (2005).

Professor Daniel J. Givelber describes the Certiorari Clinic he heads at the law school, “Report from the Certiorari Clinic: Impression of Routine Capital Cases,” in 3 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 201 (2005). Givelber’s other recent publications include, “Lost Innocence: Speculation and Data About the Acquitted,” in 40 American Criminal Law Review 1167 (2005), and “Pure Smoke: Products Liability, Innovation and the Search for the Safe Cigarette” in 7 Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 1 (2005).

In October, Professor James R. Hackney Jr. attended the LatCrit X conference, “Critical Approaches to Economic In/justice,” in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he presented on “Critical Race Theory and Socio-Economic Analysis.”

In September, Matthews Distinguished University Professor Karl E. Klare traveled to New York Law School, where he presented a paper, “The Common Law and South Africa’s Constitutional Project,” summarizing research he is conducting in collaboration with the Hon. Dennis M. Davis, judge of the High Court of the Republic of South Africa. The presentation was a live teleconference, with Judge Davis and a group of law professors at the University of Cape Town participating in the discussion. In December, he spoke about “Transformative Constitutionalism” at the opening plenary of the conference on “Comparative Constitutionalism and Rights: Global Perspectives,” sponsored by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.

This fall, Professor Hope Lewis was appointed faculty director of the law school’s new Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (see page 5). The program is working collaboratively with faculty, students and other members of the law school community to further research and action on economic, social and cultural human rights, and the impact of globalization on all human rights. She also edited a report on the program’s June consultation, “Realizing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Communities, Courts and the Academy” (available at www.slaw.neu.edu/clinics/rights.html). Lewis coauthored, with Ibrahim Gassama, an op-ed on the human rights implications of Hurricane Katrina, “Human Rights Must Include Freedom from Economic Discrimination,” in Oregon’s Register-Guard (Sept. 26, 2005). She also moderated a panel on “International Human Rights Law” at Harvard Law School’s “Celebration of Black Alumni” in September.

Matthews Distinguished University Professor Michael Meltsner read an excerpt from his new book, The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer (University of Virginia Press, 2006), as part of an alumni/ae discussion, “A Yale Law School Education in the Late Eisenhower Years,” held in conjunction with his 45th law school reunion. The book offers a critical analysis of early civil rights efforts to achieve social change through litigation while also providing the wider context of the personalities, policies and tactics that continue to shape reform efforts today (see page 20). On Constitution Day this fall, Meltsner addressed a university gathering on “The Influence of the US Constitution Abroad.”

In November, Professor Mary E. O’Connell ’75 conducted the Freedman Retreat for Massachusetts Probate Judges; this seminar on current topics in family law is sponsored by the Flaschner Judicial Institute.

Matthews Distinguished University Professor Wendy E. Parmet delivered a presentation, “Terri and Katrina: A Population-Based Perspective on the Right to Die,” at a Temple University School of Law symposium, “End-of-life Decisionmaking: A Right to Die?” held in October. Parmet delivered a similar lecture at Northeastern in November as part of an event devoted to Matthews Distinguished University Professors. Also this fall, Parmet participated as a visiting scholar in the Health Law Scholars’ Workshop sponsored by Saint Louis University School of Law.

Professor Deborah A. Ramirez received funding from the National Institute of Justice to conduct a case study on London focusing on community-law enforcement partnerships prior to and after the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings. She is conducting community and law enforcement focus groups in May, and will then post a report on the Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative Web site at www.ace.neu.edu/pfp.

Professor Lucy A. Williams attended a December conference on “Comparative Constitutionalism and Rights: Global Perspectives,” sponsored by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban, South Africa. For a panel on “Constitutionalism and the Redress of Poverty: Possibilities and Limitations,” she presented a paper based on her forthcoming article, “Issues and Challenges in Addressing Poverty and Legal Rights: A Comparative United States/South African Analysis,” which will appear in the South African Journal on Human Rights. Williams’ chapter, “Beyond Labour Law’s Parochialism: A Re-envisioning of the Discourse of Redistribution,” originally published in Labour Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative Practices and Possibilities, was reprinted in Theories of Social and Economic Justice (AJ van der Walt, ed., Sun Press, 2005). Williams’ chapter, “Law and Poverty,” in The Polyscopic Landscape of Poverty Research: A Report by the Comparative Research on Poverty Programme, was published online by the Research Council of Norway. Her chapter, “Poor Women’s Work Experiences: Gaps in the Work/Family Discussion,” appears in Labour Law, Work and Family: Critical and Comparative Perspectives (Joanne Conaghan and Kerry Rittich, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005).

In November, Professor Margaret Y.K. Woo traveled to Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where she met with the Committee for Legal Education Exchange with China, an organization that sponsors visits of legal scholars from China to law schools in the United States. Later that month, she held discussions with US State Department officials about the rule of law in China. At the University of Buffalo in October, she talked about “Boundaries Without Walls: Chinese Laws and the Public/Private Divide” for a conference, “The Roles and Representations of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity.”