Environmental Law(n) sports event April 2
The faculty affiliated with the Environmental and Land Use Law Program invite all interested students to join us for lawn sports (volleyball, bocce, badminton, croquet) on Thursday, April 2, from 4:30-6 p.m. The faculty will seek to improve its overall record against the teams mustered by the students. Pizza will be served. If you have an interest in environmental or land use law, please join us on Thursday afternoon, on the lawn to the south of Bruton-Geer for a chance to get to know your fellow students and professors. For more information contact Lena Hinson at elulp@law.ufl.edu.

Attention Student Alumni Association members
You are cordially invited to SAA’s inaugural Distinguished Gator Series event featuring Attorney General Bill McCollum on Thursday, April 2, at 3:30 p.m. in Emerson Alumni Hall. Available to SAA members only, the Distinguished Gator Series is free and connects current students with prestigious alumni. Alumni discuss how their university experience shaped their careers and why staying connected to their alma mater is so important. Students will also have the unique opportunity to ask questions and mingle with our featured guest. Attire is business casual. Space is limited so be sure to register early. The deadline to RSVP is March 31. For more information contact saa@ufalumni.ufl.edu or 352-392-9533.

Enrollment deadline for Environmental & Land Use Law certificate program
Students wishing to enroll in the Environmental & Land Use Law Certificate Program this semester are encouraged to do so before Friday, April 3. For information on the ELUL Certificate Program and visit www.law.ufl.edu/elulp/certificate/index.shtml. Enrollment forms are available at www.law.ufl.edu/elulp/pdf/ELULP_Application.pdf or in 319 Holland Hall or Student Affairs. Students enrolled in the certificate program will receive e-mail notification regarding priority pre-registration for core courses.

Grad Tax speaker discusses policy and personal identity
Lawrence Zelenak, a law professor at Duke University, explained the philosophy underlying personal equity at on Friday. Zelenak addressed more than 50 students in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom and outlined several arguments proposed by public finance economists. “Philosophers have been raising questions about personal equity since Locke and Hume,” Zelenak said. One approach taken by public finance economists is to calculate a “lifetime endowment,” which looks at a person’s career over his or her lifetime. Congress, however, looks at one-year “slices” of a person’s life. “Congress, at the other extreme, says ‘maybe we should just look at the single year,’” Zelenak said. The current tax system, nevertheless, makes no effort to achieve lifetime equity, Zelenak said in a 30-minute question-and-answer session.

Conservation Clinic camping trip on bank of St. Marys
Faculty and students in UF Law’s Environmental and Land Use Law Program took advantage of the glorious spring weather and the largesse of White Oaks Plantation Conservation Center to camp on the banks of the St. Marys River on the Florida Georgia border. Students in the Conservation Clinic and the Professor Richard Hamann’s Adaptive Watershed Management course have been examining legal, scientific and management issues related to management of the transboundary river, including designation as an Outstanding Florida Water, harmonized local environmental regulation and the potential for an interstate compact. They have been collaborating with the University of Georgia’s environmental law practicum under the direction of Professor Laurie Fowler. Fowler will visit the UF Water Institute on April 14 to discuss her work developing River Basin Centers in Georgia. At White Oak students were treated to a tour of the facility, which provides a refuge for 35 species of endangered African wildlife. Several students braved the season’s last chill and swam across the river to Georgia and back.

2009-2010 law school calendar photo contest
Do you like taking photos? Are you interested in seeing your work in print? This year, the Communications Office and Student Affairs is asking you to submit your best photo for the 2009-2010 calendar. You do not have to be a professional photographer to enter this contest. The winning photo will be chosen by a committee and published in the 2009-2010 calendar. The deadline to submit is April 1, 2009. For examples of photos used in previous calendars, visit www.law.ufl.edu/news/calendar.shtml. For more information contact Communications Coordinator Katie Blasewitz at blasewitz@law.ufl.edu or 352-273-0652. (Photo by Joshua Lukman)

L.A.W. donates money raised from professor auction
Officers from Law Association for Women met with Alachua County P.A.C.E. to donate $2,040. The money was raised as part of L.A.W.’s annual professor auction held last semester. P.A.C.E. (Practical Academic Cultural Education) is a not-for-profit, state-wide organization dedicated to helping at-risk girls from 12-18 who are experiencing difficulty at home or school. Since 1985, PACE has helped more than 12,000 girls to stay in school and to stay out of the juvenile justice system. UF’s L.A.W. is proud to support our community and such a worthwhile endeavor. L.A.W. also thanks the professors and students at the Levin College of Law who made it possible by their generous contributions.

Cahn, the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, received her J.D. from Columbia and her B.A. from Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She spoke at the Levin College of Law as the speaker for the third annual Weyrauch lecture, a lecture dedicated to the memory of the late Walter Weyrauch, a Levin College of Law professor and legal scholar.

The first topic that Cahn discussed is the way that class controls general thought about conception and family planning, coloring the “entire range of issues from contraception to abortion.”

“Here, not only is class central, but also sex is,” Cahn told her audience. She pointed to both research and popular news reports, such as a recent front-page New York Post story about the rise in teen birthrates in the United States for the second consecutive year. One of the individuals profiled was Yasmin Hererra, a nineteen-year-old pregnant with her second child. Hererra became pregnant while she had a prescription for a birth control patch, but lacked the financial resources to have her prescription filled.

Quoting from an observation that Weyrauch wrote of, Cahn said, “the American lower classes and large parts of the middle class have no voices or no options, and the upper class is unconcerned.”

One of the books that Cahn is currently working on publishing is Red Families, Blue Families, along with co-author June Carbone. Cahn shared what she has defined as “two different sets of family values that are at the core of culture wars today,” dubbing them “red” and “blue” values, which correspond to popular notions of colors and their associations with political parties and ideologies – red for predominantly republican states and blue for predominantly democratic states.

“What we call ‘blue values’ have created new legal and practical pathways to middle class status. Women and men postpone their readiness for family life until their careers are complete and their primary lives are established,” Cahn explained, noting that the biggest difference between red families and blue families is the age of the parents at the time of forming a family. For blue families, Cahn said that “fertility control is critical and abstinence is unrealistic because of the long gap between puberty and marriage.”

Therefore, contraception is permitted and even compelled, and abortion, while used only seldom, is an option.

The remaining families – red families – represent two groups of families left out of the blue family category. One group is left out by choice of ideology, and the other group is left out of because of low income.

As a result, Cahn said that ideological “red families” continue to affirm more traditional understandings of a family that celebrate the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation. This places greater emphasis on abstinence. Divorce and single parenthood are deemed “moral failings.” Interestingly, as Cahn noted, in states where red families dominate, teen births are the highest in the country, leading to calls for the creation of a legal system that celebrates and enforces traditional “red family” ideology and bans comprehensive sex education. One such example is adopting abstinence-only education in schools and teaching against the recognition of alternative families.

The other group of red families are those left out of blue families because of low income, such as Yasmin Hererra of the New York Post story.

“Access to contraception has historically been a class issue,” Cahn explained. She asserted that the “rates of unplanned pregnancies, abortion, and unplanned births” are lower for higher-income groups who have greater financial resources and more options as a result. Adding to the problem is Medicaid’s spotty coverage for contraception. Cahn declared that this is not a new problem.

Cahn also cited a correlation between use of contraception and education, saying that those with less than a high school education are less likely to use contraception.

Abortion, a notorious “toxic issue in the culture wars” has also “always been a class issue,” she said. Because of the increased rate of unplanned pregnancies, poor women are more likely to get an abortion than wealthier women are, but Cahn countered a recent New York Times claim that abortion was safe, legal, and inexpensive and therefore nothing to be worried about. She cited letters of protest submitted to the Times that an abortion at 10 weeks gestation costs $523 on average.

“To call this inexpensive, in this economy, is ludicrous,” Cahn railed.

Poorer families are also disadvantaged when trying to conceive.

“Infertility services are expensive and segregation continues in terms of who receives fertility services,” Cahn explained. Medicaid also does not provide coverage for fertility prescriptions.

With the self-perpetuating cycle of little access to contraception, lower levels of education, and limited healthcare, the rates of unplanned pregnancies for lower socioeconomic classes are on the rise and availability of treatment for infertility is nearly non-existent.

“Are we stuck forever?” Cahn asked her audience, before posing three steps that will lead “the way forward” in terms of establishing a pattern for policymakers to follow.

First, comprehensive sex education, including education about birth control in addition to or in lieu of abstinence education is key. Second, Cahn proposes providing comprehensive access to contraception, so that those currently limited by financial constraints will have access to better family planning. Her third suggestion is to increase adolescent access to contraception and education to empower them to protect themselves and to make educated choices.

Solving the problem of sex education and limited contraceptive access for some economic classes, however, does not help to broaden the categorical classifications of families allowed to benefit from the rule of law. Cahn identified one of the most controversial families with no legal recognition—those that include a homosexual relationship—as lacking “a whole set of rights that are attached to the class of the family that you are able to enter into,” especially involving inheritance, medical decisions, and social recognition.

A classification that also has yet to be clearly defined is donor-conceived families. In preparing to write her book Test Tube Families, Cahn spent years researching the complicated network of social and biological relationships that form when children are conceived using donated gametes or embryos. She also discussed whether or not children conceived using donor eggs or sperm should have a legal right to knowing who their biological parents are, even though their legal parents have been established.

Citing a law in the United Kingdom which grants individuals the legal right to know who their biological parents are once they reach the age of eighteen, Cahn acknowledged that while this may aid some who desperately want to know their biological roots, it also may discourage many from donating gametes for fear of legal obligations that may arise.

Many donors may also shun the thought of forced membership into a “family.” Laws must be written that take parental autonomy, a child’s best interests, and the meaning of “family” into account, Cahn said. She added that “I’m not sure about recognizing familial rights in this context, but we should at least keep track” of which donor gametes are responsible for the conception of which children, especially to prevent “accidental incest.” She also cited a voluntary online registry, The Donor Sibling Registry, which has helped connect at least 6,000 half siblings with each other and their donors since 2000, as a step in the right direction.

With a diverse range of interests and values at stake, Cahn stressed the importance of great care and precise language in the wording of any laws or policies written to apply to reproductive rights and defining what it means to be a family. Quoting again from Walter Weyrauch, Cahn likened the words of lawyers to the words of witch doctors.

“You have to be very precise with what you say, lest you make the wrong incantation and have the spell go awry; the words must be spoken perfectly, or else the spell will fail.”

CRL collections are diverse and highly developed, including:

• Largest collection of circulating newspapers in North America
  • 6,500 international newspapers
  • 2,500 U.S. newspapers, many dating to the colonial era
  • 2,000 U.S. ethnic titles
  • Approx. 5,000 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp newspapers and newsletters
• More than 38,000 foreign journals that are rarely held in U.S. libraries.
• More than 800,000 foreign dissertations—mostly from European institutions
• Area Studies – Major microform and paper collections from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, and more
• In-depth holdings that support research in history of science, economics, law and government, immigration and population studies, international diplomacy, cultural studies, and more

Beginning March 23, the UF online library catalog includes all the records for the CRL collection. If you are searching the catalog, you will know you have found a CRL item because the location will say “Center for Research Libraries” (instead of “Legal Information Center” or “Library West,” for example). If you want to borrow a CRL item, you can place a request for it using our interlibrary loan service. Visit the Interlibrary Loan page on the law library’s Web site to place a request. For more information about CRL or Interlibrary Loan, talk to a reference librarian.

But that’s not even close to the case, said an anthropologist who did a field study there.

“He’s not visiting what I would call the real Cuba,” said Katherine Hirschfield, a University of Oklahoma anthropologist. The Health Care Law Society brought Hirschfield to speak on Thursday about socialized medicine.

Moore showed a hospital in the movie and said he wanted the patients he brought with him to be treated exactly like native Cubans would be. That was not what he got, Hirschfield said.

“I know that hospital,” she said. “It has one floor that is completely reserved for foreigners only. It has its own pharmacy; its pharmacy is well stocked. You buy everything in American dollars on that floor of that hospital.”

She said it was also one of the best hospitals in the country and many Cubans would try to get transferred there from other hospitals.

Hirschfield spoke mostly about the problems with Cuban health care as well as that of other countries. However, she said she was for some form of health care reform in the United States.

Although much of what is written about Cuban health care is positive, Hirschfield said there are many reasons why the facts are distorted. One main reason is the lack of internet access for citizens to get the news out. In fact, Haiti has more Internet uses than Cuba, Hirschfield said.

Cuba also claims the best infant mortality rate in the hemisphere, but Hirschfield said this is because the government forces women to have abortions if there is expected to be any problems with the pregnancies.

On the contrary to the miraculous health system Cuba is portrayed to have, there are many dissident reports that describe exactly what she saw there.

“There was a secret epidemic when I was there,” Hirschfield said. “I found out about it when I got sent to the hospital with a mysterious disease and discovered that all of the hospitals were full of people with this mysterious disease, which the Cuban government said was just a virus.”

It turned out to be dengue fever, which the Cuban government had said was completely eradicated.

Hirschfield saw horrible conditions in the hospital. She did not even see a doctor in her time in the hospital.

“They did have sheets, but they were never changed,” she said. “They gave you a hospital gown and a towel. No soap, no disinfectant. One day, they did do a blood draw, and they sterilized my arm with rum because there was no disinfectant.”

Hirschfield said the National Health Service in the Great Britain has its share of problems too.

She said that some patients receive excellent care, but there are others at the opposite end of the spectrum.

“Last time I was in England, the papers were full of headlines,” she said. “The most awful one I read was this poor man could not get in to see a dentist for like a year and a half and he extracted his own tooth with a pair of pliers or something. A horrific story.”

Another problem she pointed out with the National Health Service was how doctors are evaluated, which is similar to the situation in Cuba.

“The physicians who work for the National Health Service in Great Britain – they’re salaried government employees. Their ability to be promoted or demoted is really more contingent on their functioning within that bureaucracy than their ability to make you feel good.”

Renowned constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, spoke at the 28th Annual Florida Law Review Dunwody Distinguished Lecture in Law. The lecture was established by the law firms of Dunwody, White and Landon, P.A. and Mershon, Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwody and Cole and the U.S. Sugar Corporation in honor of Elliot and Atwood Dunwody.

The topic of Amar’s lecture, titled “Bush, Gore, Florida, and the Constitution,” dealt with the problems behind what he referred to as “the Bush-Gore Florida extravaganza of 2000.” He said since 2000 scholars from across the spectrum have weighed in on the statutory and constitutional issues dealing with this case.

“At this late date, now that all the shouting here in Florida has subsided and so many scholarly assessments are already in print, some of you may quite reasonably be wondering whether there are any new things left to say about the Bush-Gore episode,” said Amar, who received the DeVane Medal, Yale’s highest award for teaching excellence in 2008. “I think there are.”

Throughout the lecture, Amar discussed different sections of the Bush-Gore debacle, including the courts and the Constitution, the role of the legislature, equal protection, voter intent, and reform. He used humor and fact to express to the audience his views on the case and explained who he felt was at fault. In his opinion, the fault rested in the arms of the U.S. Supreme Court, not the Florida Supreme Court.

Amar drew a comparison during the lecture between America’s favorite pastime and the process of voting.

“For decades if not centuries, American voters have been asked to put their “X” marks in boxes next to candidate names, and human umpires have had to judge if the “X” is close enough to the box to count,” Amar said. “On election day, different umpires officiating in different precincts have always called slightly different strike zones. If these judgments are made in good faith and within a small zone of close calls, why are they unconstitutional? If they are unconstitutional, then every election America has ever had is unconstitutional.”

He said the idea of voter intent was an important factor in this case. Because of voting mechanisms such as butterfly ballots, many voters were left confused in the 2000 election process. For those that weren’t confused, he said the strategic route was probably used.

“Think first about the election. Sometimes, a voter might sensibly cast a vote for someone who is not in fact the voter’s true first choice,” Amar said, “Via a strategic vote, a voter might well vote for candidate A, even though she truly prefers candidate C—because of sincere vote for C may increase the odds that her least favorite candidate, B, might win. Thus, in Florida 2000, many voters strategically voted for Al Gore, even if they sincerely preferred Ralph Nader, because they understood that a sincere vote for Nader would make it more likely that George W. Bush would in fact prevail.”

“And to those who actually did cast their votes for Nader, I ask: ‘What were you thinking,’” he said, drawing many laughs.

Ending his lecture, Amar said he believed that election reform should be a high priority and urges the people to do something about it.

“I urge all the persons in this room, and all the persons who have occasion hereafter to read this lecture in the pages of the Florida Law Review, to make election reform in Florida—heck, in America—a priority,” Amar said. “If all of today’s listeners and tomorrow’s readers do so, we shall have good reason to hope that when one of you stands here at this podium in the not-to-distant future—as, say, the Dunwody Lecturer of 2019—you will be able to say to your audience, with truth in your voice and a smile on your lips, that the right to vote has made great strides in the new millennium.”