Faculty Notes Debra Bassett Professor Debra Bassett joined the MSU-DCL faculty this summer. She previously taught at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the 2002 UC Davis William and Sally Rutter Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2002 UC Davis Outstanding Service Award. Her teaching areas are civil procedure, professional responsibility, and complex civil litigation. Professor Bassett’s article, “Judicial Disqualification in the Federal Appellate Courts,” was published recently by the Iowa Law Review. Over the summer, Professor Bassett completed her contributions as a co-author for the sixth edition of Problems in Legal Ethics (with Schwartz et al.) and the fourth edition of California Legal Ethics (with Wydick et al.). In addition, her most recent article, “Ruralism,” was accepted for publication by the Iowa Law Review. Professor Bassett has accepted an invitation to be a presenter at the 2003 AALS Conference on Civil Procedure to be held in New York City during June 2003. Her presentation will address innovative teaching methods. Susan Bitensky Professor Susan Bitensky is writing a book tentatively titled Corporal Punishment of Children: A Human Rights Violation. Five publishers, including Transnational Publishers, State University of New York Press, Charles C. Thomas Publisher and Ashgate Publishing, offered her contracts for the book. She ultimately signed a contract with Georgetown University Press, which will publish the book in 2004. In July 2002, Professor Bitensky presented a paper titled “Report on Corporal Punishment of Children in the U.S.: Obstacles to Abolition” at an international briefing conference sponsored by Save the Children-Sweden and EPOCH (End Physical Punishment of Children) Worldwide. She also presented a paper titled “Using and Defusing Expert Witnesses: Case Law Update in the Federal and Michigan State Courts” at the Michigan Defense Trial Counsels’ 2002 Summer Conference in Traverse City, Michigan. Professor Bitensky’s most recent article, “Cat in the Hat Moves to Michigan; Expert Witnesses and Their Proponents Curse Dr. Seuss,” was accepted for publication by the MSU-DCL Law Review. The article focuses on the inconsistencies and muddled thinking manifested in Michigan’s laws on the admissibility of scientific expert witness testimony. In addition, Professor Bitensky’s appearance as a panelist on National Public Radio’s “Justice Talking,” an hour-long program devoted on this occasion to the legal aspects of corporal punishment of children, aired during the week of June 24, 2002. Amy Christian Michele Halloran Stacy Hickox In April 2002, Professor Amy Christian accepted an invitation and grant to attend a tax policy conference at Tulane University Law School, where she discussed her forthcoming article on student athletes and the NCAA. She focused on related tax issues, including the income tax treatment of athletic scholarships and the non-taxability of university income from major athletic events. Completion of the article, co-authored with Professor Robert McCormick, is expected in the spring of 2003. Professor Michele Halloran took second place in the poetry division of the CLEA (Clinical Legal Education Association) writing contest for her poem titled “An Adirondack Mountain.” Professor Stacy Hickox continues to teach Research, Writing and Advocacy for her fourth year while also teaching as a visiting professor in the areas of property law and civil rights. She also developed and taught a new course in employment law for the Summer 2002 term. She continues her pro bono work, including representation of domestic relations clients for Legal Aid and membership on the Board of Directors for the Lansing branch of American Civil Liberties Union. Professor Hickox’s article titled “Reduction of Punitive Damages for Employment Discrimination: Are Courts Ignoring Our Juries?” is slated for publication in the Mercer Law Review. Professor Hickox also published a book titled A Legal Analysis of the Americans With Disabilities Act earlier in 2002. Her recent presentations include a seminar on developments in employment law for the Michigan State University Human Relations Certificate Series, an employment law update for Bed, Bath and Beyond human resource regional managers, and talks on employee rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, for the Human Resource Managers of Mid-Michigan and the Lansing Industrial Relations Association. Clark Johnson Brian Kalt Professor Clark Johnson received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree at the MSU-DCL commencement exercises in June 2002. Professor Johnson has taught at the law college since 1974. He currently teaches in a variety of areas, including contracts, medical legal problems, property, and small business enterprises. He also is faculty advisor to the Journal of Medicine and Law and to the Medical Legal Society. Professor Brian Kalt had editorials published in the National Post in Canada regarding the Ninth Circuit ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance, and in the Detroit News on freedom, security and the Constitution. He also commented in the Detroit News on the University of Michigan affirmative action case. Professor Kalt participated in a panel discussion at the University of Michigan Law School on the Supreme Court year in review and upcoming year in preview. The panel was co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society. Christine Klein Professor Christine Klein published an article in the Cornell Law Review titled “Preserving Monumental Landscapes Under the Antiquities Act.” The article discusses the controversy surrounding natural resource laws, such as the Antiquities Act, that have been used to protect both human and natural landscapes. As faculty chair of the law college’s Environmental and Natural Resource Law Concentration, Professor Klein established a website that provides information on topics such as environmental externships, summer programs, LLM programs, and writing competitions. Mae Kuykendall Professor Mae Kuykendall is serving as the reporter for the Nonprofit Corporations Committee of the Michigan State Bar Business Law Section. The committee will propose amendments to the Michigan Nonprofit Corporation Act. The anticipated amendments will bring the nonprofit act into conformity, as appropriate, with changes in the Business Corporation Act over the last decade. As the immediate past president of the Central States Law Schools Association, Professor Kuykendall attended the association’s late September meetings held at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She presented a paper titled “Corporate Law As Text: Reflections on the Corporate Federalism Debate.” Professor Kuykendall and MSU-DCL President Clifton Haley are preparing an electronic book for the law college’s spring course in mergers and acquisitions. The book uses transactions in which Mr. Haley participated as CEO of Budget Rent-a-Car as a thread for studying basic problems in business combinations. As he did last year, Mr. Haley will co-teach the course. As chair of the Corporate Concentration, Professor Kuykendall, along with Vice Chair Elliot Spoon, has worked actively with students and adjunct faculty to fine-tune and strengthen the concentration. In this connection, Professor Kuykendall and other members of the corporate law faculty met with Hugh Makens of Warner Norcross to plan his participation as an adjunct faculty member. Mr. Makens is a nationally recognized expert on securities law, with a practice involving wide representation of broker-dealers. Mr. Makens will teach a class in advanced securities, give two general lectures for the benefit of the law school community, and be available for informal meetings with students. Professor Kuykendall provided a letter to the Michigan bar examiners concerning the corporate question on the July bar exam, and identified issues that were not included in the proposed model answer and for which credit would be appropriate. Finally, Professor Kuykendall’s article titled “Respecting Choice and Enforcing Connection in an Experimental Society Blessed by Liberty” is forthcoming in the UCLA Women’s Law Journal. Michael Lawrence Robert McCormick This fall, Associate Dean Michael Lawrence taught a two-week comparative constitutional law course at Vytautus Magnus University Law School in Kaunas, Lithuania. While in Eastern Europe, Associate Dean Lawrence met with administrators at St. Petersburg State University Law School in St. Petersburg, Russia, to discuss possible collaborations. On his way back to the United States, he completed the Amsterdam Marathon in just over four hours. Professor Robert McCormick taught a new course in comparative labor law during the MSU-DCL summer program in Guadalajara, Mexico. The course compared labor law and policy among the three NAFTA signatory countries—the United States, Canada and Mexico. Professor McCormick also was awarded a $20,000 grant from the State Bar of Michigan to create a film commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Bar’s Labor and Employment Law Section. The film will trace the contributions of Michigan lawyers to the development of labor and employment law. In August 2002, he addressed the annual meeting of the Labor Arbitration Institute in Dearborn, Michigan, on the topic of “The Troubled Employee in Labor Arbitration.” Nicholas Mercuro During the 2001-02 academic year, Professor Nicholas Mercuro published “Relevant Output Categories for a Comparative Institutional Approach to Law and Economics” in a book titled Economics Broadly Considered: Essays in Honor of Warren J. Samuels, edited by Steven G. Medema. Professor Mercuro and Michael D. Kaplowitz, MSU-DCL adjunct faculty member and member of the MSU Department of Resource Development, published “Performance Indicators for Natural Resource and Environmental Policy: Contributions from American Institutional Law and Economics” in the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum, Vol. 11. Professor Mercuro and Professor Philip Smith of MSU served as series editors of two volumes of the International Review of Comparative Public Policy. One volume focused on international urban settings, and was edited by Jack F. Williams of the MSU Department of Geography and Robert J. Stimsom of the Department of Geographical Sciences and Planning at the University of Queensland (Australia). The other volume looked at international financial systems and stock volatility, and was edited by Nidal Rashid Sabri of Birzeit University in Palestine. Professor Mercuro was invited to serve on the Scientific Committee of Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, sponsored by the Centre D’analyse Economique, Faculte D’economie Appliquee at Universite D’aix-Marseiille. He also was invited to be a member of a new project aimed at bringing together researchers who investigate legal and regulatory dimensions from different social science perspectives (economics, sociology, political science and law). The project, sponsored by the Centre National De la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), will take the form of interdisciplinary seminars to be held in France. Sharon Pocock In May, Professor Sharon Pocock gave a presentation titled “Doing the Two-Step: Using a Two-Step Problem to Teach Research of Federal and State Administrative Law” as part of a panel presentation on “Administrative Law: The Case Study Approach to Teaching State, Federal and International Sources Using Traditional and Computerized Media” at the 2002 Legal Writing Institute Conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. Professor Pocock is the new director of the Research, Writing and Advocacy Program. She comes to MSU-DCL from Quinnipiac University School of Law, where she was an assistant professor of legal skills, teaching basic and advanced legal writing and research, for five years. Kathleen Payne Professor Kathleen Payne spent more than a year drafting and refining an electronic casebook on the Revised Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code that became effective throughout the country on July 1, 2001. For three semesters, students have used the electronic Secured Transactions casebook materials provided over the Westlaw TWEN service, and the reaction is extremely positive. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for the popularity of the materials is that they are provided electronically, at no cost to the students. The great advantage to using electronic materials is the ease with which students can click on the appropriate code section without shuffling through a several-inch-thick paper copy of the Code. The electronic materials make the Uniform Commercial Code more student friendly. Elliot Spoon During the summer of 2002, Professor Elliot Spoon was a presenter to the Michigan League of Community Banks at their Banking Law and Compliance Conference. He spoke on residential lending law, including topics such as document preparation fees, class actions, predatory lending developments, and other developments under federal laws.