Florida Moot Court Team excels in Thomas Tang Moot Court Competition
The Florida Moot Court Team competed last semester in the Thomas Tang Moot Court Competition at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Miami. Team members Rob Davis (3L) and C. Andrew Roy (2L) advanced to the semi-final round after achieving the highest overall score in the preliminary rounds, beating out 10 other teams including teams from the University of Oklahoma, University of Miami, and Emory University. In addition, Roy received the Best Oralist award for the regional competition. Encompassing both First Amendment freedom of speech issues as well Fourteenth Amendment equal protection issues, the competition problem involved a public defender whose employment contract was not renewed following several presentations at CLE seminars regarding the lack of funding for certain minority, indigent clients. The Florida Moot Court Team is UF’s premiere competitive moot court team and is governed by the Justice Campbell Thornal Executive Board.

Tax Moot Court Team places second in national competition
Congratulations to Tax Moot Court Team Captain Joshua Landsman (3L) and James Baley (2L) on their second place finish in the recent National Tax Moot Court Competition. Congratulations also to Chris Pavilonis (JD 09, LLM 10) and Professor Steven Willis, who co-coached the team. The competition included teams from Oregon, New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, Massachusetts, Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida and other states. The Levin College of Law team placed second for the second consecutive year. The UF Tax Law Society sponsored the team for this competition as well as another team for the upcoming Tax Moot Court competition in Buffalo. In addition, the UF Tax Law Society sponsors a team for the National Securities Dispute Resolution Competition in New York. Last year the UF Law team placed first in securities mediation in that event. On behalf of the UF Tax Law Society, the team would like to thank the Law College Council, The Florida Moot Court Team, and the Student Government Association for financial contributions that partially funded the team’s participation this year. In addition, the team would like to thank the Levin College of Law and also Jason Yoepp for his assistance and contributions. (Photo from left to right: James Baley, Joshua Landsman and Chris Pavilonis)

Earn extern credits with UF Law Costa Rica Program
Got Spanish? The UF Law Costa Rica Program enjoys a unique relationship with the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights, the research organ of the Inter-American Court for Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica. As a result, a qualified UF Law student enrolled in the program can extern with the institute for three credits during the summer program. For students with an interest in international human rights, Latin America and in developing their ability to write and speak in professional Spanish this is a unique opportunity. For more information contact Costa Rica Program Director Tom Ankersen or Michelle Ocepek. Those wishing to get a student’s perspective on the experience should feel free to speak with Miredys Gonzalez, last year’s extern at the Institute.

The Journal of Technology Law and Policy introduces new Web site
The Journal of Technology Law and Policy presents their new and improved Web site, with information on how to contribute, subscribe, and find out more information about the journal and its members. Special thanks to Web site Executive Miriam Cortes and Assistant Editor-in-Chief Jared Beckerman for their outstanding contributions to the site. Interested students should check the site later this semester for updated information about our next write-on/grade-on competition. Visit http://jtlp.org for more information.

Ankersen and Hamann attend international wetlands symposium
Tom Ankersen, director of UF Law Conservation Clinic, and Richard Hamann, associate in law at the UF Law Center for Governmental Responsibility, along with UF PhD students and faculty affiliated with the National Science Foundation’s Integrated Graduate Research, Education and Training Program in Water, Wetlands and Watersheds presented their research at the international symposium “Wetlands in a Flood Pulsing Environment: Effects and Responses in Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functioning and Human Society” in Maun, Botswana, the gateway to Southern Africa’s storied Okavango Delta. Hosted by the Henry Oppenheimer Okavango Research Center at the University of Botswana, the week long symposium was attended by leading researchers representing some of the world’s most significant wetland environments, including the Okavango, the Pantanal and Amazon flooded forests of Brazil, Florida’s Everglades and the Mississippi River Delta, the TonLe Sap Great Lake wetlands of Cambodia, and the famed marshes of the Tigris & Euphrates River Valley of Southern Iraq – among many others.

Trial Team travels to National Trial Competition
Congratulations to 3L’s Kali Feinman and Aaron Kelley and 2L’s Jennifer Leitner and Brian Wolf, who travelled through the snow to Jackson, Mississippi this weekend to compete in the National Trial Competition. The competition capped nearly two months of diligent preparation and resulted in each team trying the case three times over two days. In addition to handling motions and evidentiary issues, this competition requires all advocates to have both sides of the case prepared and to try either side with very little notice. The team’s next competition will be the American Association for Justice competition held in Atlanta, Feb. 25-28.

• Spoke to the Orlando Chapter of The Federal Bar Association on Feb. 18. The topic was “Grand Jury Screening & Indictment Challenges.”

Tax lawyers likewise deal with ethical matters, but for them, tax season is January through December. With this in mind, the Graduate Tax program held a workshop on legal ethics for tax lawyers last Friday, hosting three prominent tax attorneys from around the state.

Michael Lampert, who runs his own firm in West Palm Beach, began by telling the assembled students how many organizations are looking over the shoulders of tax lawyers. “There are an awful lot of groups out there that tell us how to practice,” he said.

Not only are tax lawyers in Florida regulated by The Florida Bar and American Bar Association, but also by more specific regulations, like those described in Treasury Circular 230, which describes the specifics of appearing before the IRS. Since many tax attorneys are also certified public accountants, they are accordingly regulated by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Lampert said infringing one group’s rules can often get you in trouble with other groups, and that a punishment by The Florida Bar could impact a lawyer’s ability to practice tax law, whether the issue was tax related or not. “So if you rob a bank, but report the income, you’ll still be in trouble,” Lampert told the laughing crowd.

Lauren Detzel, a shareholder with Dean, Mead, Egerton, Bloodworth, Capouano & Bozarth in Orlando, spoke next. She began detailing the ethical dilemmas that tax attorney’s face, focusing on what she described as the biggest problem. “The hardest one to deal with,” she said, “the one that going to come up day after day, is the duty of loyalty.”

A layman may not understand why fulfilling the duty of loyalty poses such issue, but a lawyer who has dealt with conflicts of interests will understand. Detzel is certified as a wills, trusts, and estates lawyer, a field that presents many possible conflicts of interest, as relatives and their competing interests make matters difficult. As soon as a duty of confidentiality owed to one client impairs the duty of loyalty to another, a lawyer has a big problem. And at that point, the responsibility is on their lawyer.

“When a conflict arises, it is the lawyer’s responsibility to take care of it,” Detzel said. “Most of time, what is that going to involve? Withdrawing from representation.”

Lampart further discussed the duty of confidentiality, and then Samuel Ullman spoke about the duties of truthfulness and zealous representation. Ullman, a partner with Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod in Miami, said that those two duties often interact, and not always in a good way. “I have seen lawyers in pursuit of that zealous representation fudge the truth a little bit,” Ullman said.

UF Law Professor Michelle Jacobs

Less than 50 percent of black students graduate from high school in Florida, and a part of that can be attributed to the “school-to-prison pipeline,” Professor Michelle Jacobs said.

Jacobs, professor at UF Law, spoke on Wednesday about how big a problem the school-to-prison pipeline is for black students in an event sponsored by the Black Law Students Association and the UF chapter of the ACLU.

“The notion of school-to-prison pipeline is about a series of policies that create a system where children go directly from school into custody of whatever state they belong to as prisoners as opposed to anything else,” said Jacobs, noting that the issue is particularly bad in Florida.

There are four main policies or procedures that contribute to the end result: zero tolerance policies, juveniles being prosecuted as adults, problems in identifying and teaching special needs children and racism in the juvenile justice system, according to Jacobs.

Zero tolerance programs are put in place by many school districts, and young children with disciplinary problems are often sent to the juvenile justice system instead of the school handling their problems.

“Zero tolerance is this phrase that communities use to say, ‘We’re not going to take any kind of disruption in the school environment whatsoever. To the extent that there is a disruption, we’re going to have immediate sanctions, and the sanction is going to be severe,’” Jacobs said.

She said the policy often leads to five and six-year-old children getting picked up by the police for misbehaving in class. Eventually children are suspended or expelled and get behind in classes with no way to catch up, Jacobs said. This leads children from a very young age down the wrong path and sets the student up to fail, Jacobs said.

Jacobs was especially critical of zero tolerance programs because according to the FBI, juvenile crime is at its lowest level ever and has been since 2003, she said.

After zero-tolerance programs, children are more likely to be prosecuted as adults, which is pushing more out of schools and into prisons, Jacobs said.

She gave the example of 14-year-old black girl who pushed a hallway monitor in Texas. She was expelled, prosecuted for assault on a safety monitor and sentenced to incarceration. However, a 14-year-old white girl was charged with arson and only got probation, Jacobs said.

When this happens, the chips fall into place so the child cannot re-enter the school system to catch up, Jacobs said.

“We also know that the alternative schools for kids who have either been expelled or convicted of a crime do not get the same resources as the local school centers, and even they don’t get enough resources, but the alternative schools get even less,” Jacobs said. “So you’re sort of solidifying that this child will not be able to function in society unless they take a path toward criminality.”

Third, there are problems identifying children with special needs, Jacobs said. Many teachers will identify black students as special needs even though they are not, Jacobs said. This leads to them being put into special needs classes when they don’t need to be, which hurts everyone in the classes.

Jacobs said that Florida’s percentage of special needs children that are black and Hispanic is much higher than the national average. At least 60 percent of children in the juvenile justice system are identified as special needs children, Jacobs said.

The final piece to the puzzle is that black children are treated differently than white children once they are in the juvenile justice system, Jacobs said. Jacobs described “bootstrapping” as keeping more black children in the juvenile justice system by penalizing status offenses. Basically, these kids are kept in the system for doing something that would be legal if they were adults.

The Department of Justice made detaining a child for a status offense illegal, but Florida got around it by making the status offenses court orders, Jacobs said.

“So you tell that child, ‘OK, stop doing the thing that you’re doing. It’s making us all crazy; we don’t like it. I’m the judge; I’m going to sign an order telling you to stop that,’” Jacobs said. “The child gets released. The next time the child does that particular offensive thing –like the next day – what happens? It’s still a status offense, isn’t it? No, now it’s contempt of court, which is actionable, for which you can be detained and incarcerated.”

On Feb. 27, local lawyers, law students, and law firms, together with their employees, families and friends will volunteer to clean up the Midtown area during the Florida Bar Young Lawyers Division (LSD) “Raising the Bar” community service event. Throughout Florida, these individuals will give back to their communities through service. Volunteers are asked to meet at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center parking lot at 1 p.m., and walk to the Midtown area shortly after.

For the community service event, the University of Florida chapter of the Law Student Division has formed a partnership with Keep Alachua County Beautiful to help clean up Gainesville. Keep Alachua County Beautiful is an affiliate of Keep America Beautiful, and seeks to prevent litter, clean the litter that has already accumulated, and educate the community to better deal with waste. The Midtown area of Gainesville is a highly visible area of town, as well as highly trafficked. Not only will this area benefit greatly from the efforts of these volunteers, but the results will be noticeable to a large part of the Gainesville community.

Law students and the local legal community have shown time and again that they care about the people of Alachua County, and will now have the opportunity to demonstrate how much they care about the county’s aesthetics.

The event will engage law students in their local communities and instill a community service ethic in Florida’s future lawyers, and strengthen citizens’ faith in the pursuits of lawyers within their communities.

This event is sponsored by The Florida Bar Young Lawyers Division, Law Student Division, Lexis Nexis, and the Eighth Judicial Circuit Young Lawyers Division in partner with the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

For more information on the event or to register as a volunteer, please contact Troy Hillier at troyhillier@ufl.edu or 727-967-0104.

John C. Jeffries Jr.

Some see it as a legal loophole for errant government officials. Others view it as a necessary doctrine to protect police officers from the liability for bad outcomes in doing their difficult jobs. But most scholars agree it has turned into something like constitutional quicksand because of the way the U.S. Supreme Court has formulated the doctrine.

Prominent federal courts scholar, John C. Jeffries Jr., the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, provided his legal insight regarding qualified immunity as the speaker for the Florida Law Review’s 29th annual Dunwody Distinguished Lecture.

“Qualified immunity is a doctrine that precludes damages where the defendant did not violate a clearly established constitutional right,” Jeffries said. “More fully, damages are barred if, and I’m quoting from the court, ‘a reasonable officer could have believed his or her actions to be lawful in light of clearly established law.’ Qualified immunity is the general liability rule for damage actions against government, and it is the most important doctrine in the law of constitutional tort.”

Jeffries added that while qualified immunity is an important doctrine, it can be a real snarl for attorneys and the courts.

“The instability and confusion of qualified immunity law has been so persistent and so pronounced that one scholar describes the doctrine as existing in a ‘perpetual state of crisis,’” Jeffries said. “Some sense of just how deep the problem is can be gathered by looking at the complexity of the efforts to resolve it.”

Jeffries offered the audience two suggestions on how to make qualified immunity clearer.

“First, the Supreme Court needs to say explicitly-openly-what has been implicit in its decisions for 20 years. They need to say explicitly that they wish to have summary judgment laws applied differently in this area,” Jeffries said. “A second suggestion is to change the doctrinal formulation of qualified immunity. Rather than asking if the defendant violated a clearly established right, I would ask whether the defendant’s conduct was clearly unconstitutional.”

Jeffries concluded that there should be a course correction in the errant law and that qualified immunity should create a balance between the competing values of the importance of damages in vindicating rights and the need to protect officials, which is required to exercise their discretion in hard circumstances.

“Today qualified immunity is out of balance particularly in excessive force cases, and the Supreme Court needs to intervene and help straighten this out. I hope the changes I suggested would be modest steps in that direction,” Jeffries said.

The Dunwody Distinguished Lecture Series was established by the U.S. Sugar Corporation and law firms of Dunwody, White & Landon, and Mershon, Sawyer, Johnson, Dunwody & Cole in honor of UF Law graduates Elliot (JD 33) and Atwood (JD 33) Dunwody, two brothers who dedicated their lives to the legal profession and labored to better social and economic conditions in Florida.

Justice Clarence Thomas delivers Criser Lecture

As blistering winter weather threatened to snow-in the nation’s capital on Feb. 4, it was sunny but cool in Florida. Despite the sunshine, 700 law students, faculty and others seated the University of Florida Levin College of Law Marcia Whitney Schott courtyard or standing on the second-floor balcony shivered from time to time as they waited for United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to make his appearance as the college’s special guest during the second annual Marshall M. Criser Distinguished Lecture.

After an introduction from UF Law Dean Robert Jerry, Thomas took the stage, saying, “I don’t know how you can tolerate this consistently good weather.” The resulting laughter from the crowd was a sound that was heard often, as Thomas delighted his audience with his sense of humor.

Thomas, the fifth Supreme Court justice to visit the Levin College of Law in the past five years, came to UF Law with the express intention of interacting with law students, which he thoroughly accomplished during several lunches, dinners, classroom visits and other meetings prior to and after the lecture.

“My wife told me some years ago that it’s better to do conversations instead of lectures,” Thomas said, “because you get to talk about things people are really interested in, as opposed to what you’re interested in.”

During the lecture, billed as a “conversation,” four UF Law students — Joshua Mize (3L), Leah Edelman (2L), Jon Philipson (2L), and Dwayne Robinson (2L) — asked Thomas a series of pre-selected questions on topics ranging from personal to professional.

After being asked his perspectives of how attitudes toward race have changed, Thomas spoke poignantly about his youth and the frustrations he faced as a young black man in the segregated, Jim Crow South. He recounted his excitement as a high school senior upon receiving notice of outstanding SAT scores qualifying him to attend the University of Georgia or the University of North Carolina — only to be devastated and angered by the realization that he couldn’t attend those institutions due to the color of his skin. “I’m not going to gild a lily and tell that you everything was peaches and cream,” he said, “because it was not. I was really, really upset for a long time.”

But eventually, Thomas said he realized that he was on a self-destructive path, and that he could seek positive reform through the law.

“In the law, I saw a possibility for fairness,” he said, “a possibility for change, a possibility to do something to help others.”

Having been so cynical earlier in life, Thomas showed that he has little tolerance for it now, especially when that cynicism is directed toward the court.

Noting the attacks on Supreme Court decisions, Thomas said, “I think we do run the risk, in our society, of undermining institutions that we will need to preserve our liberties.”

Thomas noted that the criticism comes almost exclusively from those who have not been in his shoes.

“I keep hearing people make up reasons why we do our business,” he said, “and, it’s fascinating, it’s not from judges, it’s not from former members of the court, it’s from people who don’t do the job. It’s not easy for anyone — except the people who have no responsibility to do it, for the people who have never had to vote whether somebody dies.”

While Thomas’ reputation as a friendly and down-to-earth individual was known to the students who shared the stage with him, he exceeded their expectations.

“Speaking to friends at schools Justice Thomas previously visited, I was told that Justice Thomas was personable and very engaging,” Philipson said. “However, the words did not do justice to the experience. It felt as if the five of us were sitting around at someone’s house — simply sharing ideas and jokes.”

Philipson, the editor in chief of Florida Law Review, said that the event was as educational as it was entertaining.

“By inviting judges and justices to the campus, the law school provides us the opportunity to understand judicial opinions and the people who write them and to understand how they arrive at their opinions,” he said. “Similar to previous visits by justices and judges, when I read Justice Thomas’ opinions in the future, I now have a better understanding of how he approaches the law.”

Edelman, a member of the Florida Moot Court Team, was equally impressed. “I think his accessibility surprised me in the best way,” she said. “You don’t expect a Supreme Court justice to answer that many questions or shake hands and take pictures with everyone in the room.”

Mize, the president of the Federalist Society at UF Law and an editor of the Florida Law Review, described him similarly.

“Justice Thomas was engaging and thoughtful throughout the conversation,” Mize said. “It was an once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Robinson, a junior research editor of Florida Law Review, said that Thomas’ visit provided insight into not only Thomas himself, but others in the public light. “Justice Thomas’ visit was more than I could have ever expected,” he said. “Personally, it had a profound effect on how I view people in public life.”

Robinson added that he has not heard a single negative comment from a student about Justice Thomas’ visit. “He had a great impression on the school,” he said, “and hopefully we made a great impression on him.

These comments reflected the feelings of the audience, who enjoyed the Thomas’ humility, insight, and especially his sense of humor. “Justice Thomas has one of the best laughs I have ever heard,” Edelman said, “and I’m glad that we got to hear it so often.”

The lecture was one of just many events that Thomas attended during his visit to the law school. Wide eyes and whispers of “Oh my gosh” greeted Thomas as he surprised first-year students on Wednesday by unexpectedly showing up in their classes. While a visit to only one of the three first-year sections was planned at first, Thomas insisted on visiting all three.

After the lecture on Thursday, he met with a group of student leaders, answering questions ranging from his legal writing pet peeves to the wisdom of looking to other countries laws for guidance.

Thomas also joined students and the local legal community (see sidebar story on the Federal Bar Association dinner) for meals and meetings, where mingled and conversed in smaller groups.

The Marshall M. Criser Distinguished Lecture Series was created in early 2007 by Lewis Schott (B.A. 1943, LL.B. 1946) of Palm Beach, Fla., as a tribute to his fellow UF Law alumnus, former UF President Marshall Criser (JD 51). The goal of the speaker series is to host prestigious national and international speakers every year on topics of particular interest to law students.

For more information on Justice Thomas’ visit, including a photo gallery and video of his Feb. 4 lecture to University of Florida Levin College of Law students, visit www.law.ufl.edu/news/events/2010/JusticeThomas/.

Julian Juergensmeyer

UF students, faculty and staff who want to be part of the solution to Florida’s environmental challenges but don’t know where to begin can start by attending the University of Florida Levin College of Law’s 16th Annual Public Interest Environmental Conference Feb. 25-27.

New and longtime environmental advocates and legal professionals are invited to attend the two-day conference titled, “Bringing it All Back Home: Leadership, Land Use and Local-nomics.” The event, to be held in UF Law’s Holland Hall, will emphasize the power of local environmental leadership, the potential of innovative local land-use tools and the promise of place-based economics and agriculture. Paid participants can earn CLEs while interacting with legal experts, environmental writers, and wildlife and ecology scientists during panel discussions and two workshops.

“With this conference, we wanted to bring environmental responsibility back to the local scale while incorporating the realities of modern society,” said Zach Broome, a second-year UF law student and co-chair of PIEC 2010. “We also wanted to make environmental responsibility something viable for attorneys outside the land use or environmental fields, which is why we have a panel on professional responsibility and two workshops on the ethical and legal approach to development.”

The first workshop on Saturday, Feb. 27, is titled, “The Rezoning and Development Order Approval Process.” This workshop will benefit those interested in learning how Florida’s land-use laws are applied and how to effectively participate in the process from a citizen and public-interest perspective. The following workshop, “Cultivating the Next Generation of Environmental Leadership,” will provide tips and advice on how to be an effective board member and how to assume leadership roles. This workshop will also address the impact of technology and the generational differences in leading effectively.

In addition to the panel discussions and workshops, there will be two distinguished keynote speakers. Julian Juergensmeyer, the Ben F. Johnson Jr. Chair in Law at Georgia State University College of Law and co-director of the GSU Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth, will give the keynote address Thursday night during the opening reception. The title of his presentation is, “Bringing It All Back Home: Where the Wild Things Are!”

“During my presentation, I will outline two main ideas,” Juergensmeyer said. “First, that current problems (energy and resource shortages, climate change and economic uncertainties) require land-use planners and regulators to consider wild ideas. Second, that wild ideas are best tried and tested on a small scale at the local level. After developing these ideas I will attempt examples of some of the wild ideas that may not be so wild after all.”

Bill Belleville, a Sanford, Fla., resident who is a documentary filmmaker and award-winning environmental author, will give the keynote address during the Friday night banquet. Bellville’s books include River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida’s St. John’s River and Losing it all to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape.

The conference is free for UF students, faculty and staff. A discounted registration of $15 is available for non-UF students.

To view the agenda, speakers, room assignments and registration form, visit www.law.ufl.edu/piec.