UF Federalist Society sends delegation to national student symposium
A delegation from the UF Federalist Society represented UF at the 2010 Federalist Society National Student Symposium, an annual gathering of conservative and libertarian students, lawyers, and law professors from around the nation. The symposium was held Feb. 26 & 27, at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia. The theme was “Originalism 2.0.” Members of the UF delegation included, Federalist Society President Joshua Mize, Nakku Chung, Eugenia Fischer, Jason Yoepp, Christine Pratt, Michael Kelley, and Jordan Pratt. At the symposium, law professors and judges conducted panel discussions and debates on topics such as “Originalism: A Rationalization for Conservatism or a Principled Theory of Interpretation?,” “Originalism and Construction: Does Originalism Always Provide the Answer?,” and “Originalism, Precedent and Judicial Restraint.” Panelists included, Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin of the legal blog “Balkanization,” Professor Richard Fallon of Harvard Law School, former U.S. Solicitor General Greg Garre, Judge A. Raymond Randolph of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Judge Diane Sykes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Professor Jeffrey Rosen of George Washington University School of Law. The keynote speaker was Dr. Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.

Congratulations to the UF Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Team
Over the weekend, the Vis team travelled to the University of Miami campus to compete in the Florida scrimmage competition hosted by The Florida Bar. The participants were Olga Butkevich, Chana Cannon, Sasha Funk, Anastasia Campbell, Julianne Parker and Andres Healy. Campbell received the highest score awarded in UF’s match-up against the University of Versaille, Healy received the highest score awarded in UF’s match-up against Florida Coastal, and Parker received the highest score awarded in UF’s match-up against Stetson University. Additionally, Healy was one of three students recognized for “Top Oralist” honors. Thanks to the generous donation from adjunct coach Eduardo Palmer (JD 85) the team will travel to the competition in Vienna from March 26 through April 1. For more information please visit http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/vis.html. Tryouts for UF’s team are held each fall.

Congratulations to the 2010-2011 JMBA Executive Board
President: Joe Joyce; Vice President Student Services: Laurie Tyler Yonge; Vice President Social: Ashley Johnson; Secretary: Katie Kellam; Treasurer: Justin Pacific. General Board: Jenny Albano, Sarah Casey, Jessica Couvertier, Amber Curtis, Martin Holland, Brian Johnson, Joe Kovecses, Dan Lazaro, Jay Levin, Vincent Massaro, Matt Michel, Sarah Moore, Katie Moum, Josh Nemser, Moish Peltz, Sal Picataggio, Megan Policastro, Lindsay Powell, Christina Russo, Bethany Turner, Genevieve Turner, and Chase Wiley.

2010 Census Information
This March, the 2010 Census will arrive in every Gainesville resident’s mailbox. The responses will directly affect the distribution of more than $400 billion in federal funding for education, healthcare, transportation and the environment. Off-campus students must fill out the form with their housemates and return it by mail before April 1. It is important that everyone in Gainesville fill out the census form to ensure funding that will help keep The Gator Nation great.

• “Toyota, Tiger – Here’s how to apologize” (March 3, TheStreet.com)
  Cohen explained what makes an effective apology in the world of corporate business. “Apologizing is a humbling step that gives the people you’ve offended some power over you,” says Jonathan Cohen, a law professor at University of Florida who studies the legal aspects of apologies. “There’s a particular drama that comes when it’s very powerful people who are taking that step in the public eye.” “The biggest mistake people typically make is waiting too long to apologize, meaning they do it reactively once the issue has broken out, almost like a type of damage control,” Cohen says. “The best way when corporations discover a problem is to proactively accept responsibility for the problem.”

Professor James Jacobs

When Professor James Jacobs first started hearing about drug legalization, he was intrigued. But those advocating for it could not give him answers he was looking for.

James spoke for the Federalist Society on March 3 about the effects legalization would have.

“I started working on this when I heard people that I respected as very thoughtful and bright in general proclaiming proudly that they were for drug legalization and that got my antennae up,” said Jacobs, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the courts director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at the New York University School of Law. “I said, ‘Well what does that mean?’ Mostly the answer was, ‘I don’t know exactly what that means. It just means legalize and we’ll worry about the details later.’”

James was open to the idea of some legalization, but he wanted more information.

“I’m kind of a detail person, so I don’t want to sign on to the legalization plan without having some idea,” he said. “Before we embark on this as an experiment that no other country does or, to my knowledge, has ever done, I would like to have a better idea of what this is going to look like, how it’s going to work, and all the details to try to assess what would be the cost and benefits, what might go along with it.

He said drugs are an interesting topic for the Federalist Society because traditional conservatives are divided with libertarians on the issue.

James predicted that demand for psychotropic drugs would increase greatly and many problems would come from it. He argued that we would have more drug emergencies and addictions to deal with. He compared it to how alcohol and other drugs are regulated today, noting that there’s no reason to believe Americans would all be responsible users.

“Other kinds of drugs like valium and Prozac and Zoloft and so forth are widely used and we have lots of overuse and lots of abuse of those even prescription drugs,” James said. “So I don’t read the record as saying that Americans are strong and disciplined and knowledgeable, reluctant, careful users of psychotropic medication. I think that’s not at all the case.”

High school and college students would come to class high more and homework productivity would decrease, James said.

Another problem would come in trying to figure out what to do with the FDA. If illicit drugs were legalized, would we keep the FDA out of it completely?

“That would lead us to kind of a strange situation where if a person wanted a cold medication – codeine – they would have to get a prescription, but if they just wanted the cocaine, they could just go down to the 24-hour-a-day drugstore and purchase it, no questions asked,” James said. “I don’t know how long a system like that could be maintained before we just dropped the whole FDA process altogether. As bizarre as you might think that sounds, there are libertarians who would do that right now because that’s unnecessary government regulation.”

Further, James said drunk driving is a big enough problem that it merits considering how bad driving while on drugs would be.

“Importantly, will we see an increase in drug driving? Is that a big issue or a little issue?” James said. “Right now we assume that drunk drivers take about 15,000 lives in the United States a year. You’ve got to swallow hard to absorb that – 15,000 lives. What about an increase in drug driving?”

Overall, James seemed willing to consider legalization but would want more studies done about what would eventually happen. He admitted that legalizing marijuana is a different issue than the rest of drugs because its use is already significantly higher than the other drugs.

It did not take long for Fox-Isicoff to find success. Having started with the Department of Justice as an INS trial attorney, she soon became a special assistant U.S. attorney for immigration. Despite this, she wasn’t completely satisfied with her work. A good deal of that came from seeing first-hand how unpleasant immigration enforcement can be.

“You see things in this field that you can’t make right in your heart or in your head,” she said. “It makes you question humanity, honestly. You’ll see things that’ll make you say, ‘I can’t understand how this can be.’ And that’s a very frustrating part of enforcement.” Fox-Isicoff cited a couple of recent examples that she’s dealt with, adding that the revenue that she generates from her corporate work allows her to take some enforcement cases pro bono.

One such case involved a beauty queen from Colombia who spoke out against the FARC, a powerful guerilla group there. FARC then kidnapped her and her brothers, and used acid to burn the hands off one of them. Despite this treatment, he was not granted asylum in the United States. “There’s something that’s got to tear at your heart if you’re a human being, she said. “How unfair can a law be?”

Fox-Isicoff said that while transitioning to the business side of immigration has spared her from some of these cases, business immigration law is not without its frustrations. She described the laws as being little better.

“On the business side, they may not be cruel and inhumane,” she said. “They’re just idiotic.”

Fox-Isicoff said that a major reason why the business immigration laws are inadequate is because the congressmen who are voting on them usually have very little expertise in the subject.

“It’s like they’re a jack of all trades and a master of none,” she said.

During her presentation, Fox-Isicoff cited many examples of inefficient or inadequate laws, one being how L Visas are treated. L Visas are given to managerial employees who come to the United States to work for a branch in the United States. While that may not seem problematic on its face, how they are handled for companies that seek to set up new U.S. branches causes some issues, Fox-Isicoff said.

While most L Visas are good for three years, if the U.S. branch is new, it becomes only one year. This means that a company has very little time to become successful and obtain an extension. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that L Visa holders must manage employees, forcing these companies to employ workers, even if it is not financially wise, or even financially possible.

“It’s created almost an impenetrable bar for anything but the largest business establishing branches in the U.S.,” Fox-Isicoff said, “in my opinion a bar that we don’t want to create. We want foreign businesses to succeed here, and have the opportunity to employ U.S. workers in due course. We don’t want to create a situation where they’ve got to hire so many people their first year of operation that they can’t keep their doors open.”

Fennell will be on the University of Florida Levin College of Law campus to deliver the Wolf Family Lecture in the American Law of Real Property. The free lecture, titled “Possession Puzzles,” will be held in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom (room 180). The law school community is encouraged to attend.

Fennell said a primary rationale for property rights is the capacity to deliver the benefits of secure possession, but making property entitlements easier to break apart and alienate can also increase the risk of dispossession.

“Cutting back on the choices afforded to homeowners is an alternative that comes with a high price tag – diminished access to real property,” Fennell said. “During my lecture, I hope to provide insight on how relevant tradeoffs might be approached, and how property bundles might be structured in residential contexts to advance stable possession without sacrificing access.”

Fennell received her JD magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1990. She came to the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law in 1999, after practicing at Pettit & Martin, the State and Local Legal Center, Washington, D.C., and the Virginia School Boards Association. In 2001, she became an associate professor at the University of Texas School of Law and in 2004, an associate professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. She was promoted to professor at Illinois in 2006 and returned to the University of Chicago Law School faculty as a professor in 2007. Fennell is the author of The Unbounded Home: Property Values Beyond Property Lines (Yale University Press).

“In the past decade, Professor Fennell’s creative mind has produced some of the most provocative real property scholarship,” Wolf said. “We are very excited that she is joining the list of distinguished experts who have visited UF College of Law under the auspices of the Wolf Family Lecture.”

The lecture series was endowed by a gift from UF Law Professor Michael Allan Wolf and his wife, Betty. Wolf, the Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law, is the general editor of a 17-volume treatise, Powell on Real Property, the most referenced real property treatise in the country, which is regularly cited by the courts, including several citations in the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, Wolf condensed the 60 year-old treatise into Powell on Real Property: Michael Allan Wolf Desk Edition (LexisNexis 2009) and recently co-authored Land Use Planning and the Environment: A Casebook (Eli Press).

“It is a great honor to join the list of accomplished speakers who have given the Wolf Family Lecture in the American Law of Real Property,” Fennell said. “I am excited to have the chance to exchange ideas with members of the university’s College of Law community on a property topic of such immediate relevance and enduring resonance.”

Past scholars who have delivered the Wolf Family Lecture in the American Law of Real Property include Thomas W. Merrill, Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and Gregory S. Alexander, A. Robert Noll Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.

The distinguished panel of retired chief justices, all of whom are UF Law alumni, included the Hon. Harry Lee Anstead (JD 63), Hon. Stephen H. Grimes (JD 78), Hon. Parker Lee McDonald (JD 50), Hon. Ben F. Overton (JD 67), and Hon. Charles T. Wells (JD 64).

“Today, we recognize not only the great legal minds that comprise this distinguished panel of judges, but also their strong ethic and unwavering professionalism,” said Rob Davis, president of the Florida Moot Court Team, after welcoming the guests to the competition. “As we embark on our legal careers, these are traits that all of us, I am confident, will emulate with pride.”

Hughes argued the first issue for the petitioner and was immediately met with questions from the justices.

“Justice Wells started questioning me in the middle of my roadmap and I had to get back to the third part of it later in the competition,” said Hughes. Despite the tough start, Hughes remarked, “I genuinely thought that was the most fun I have ever had in 15 minutes of oral argument. The judges had this way of asking really hard questions without sounding confrontational, which allowed me to enjoy the experience.”

The purpose of the Maguire competition was to provide the competitors with useful critiques regarding their oral arguments before going on to compete against other moot court teams from across the nation in the American Bar Association’s National Appellate Advocacy Competition.

“Preparing for the Maguire competition helped immensely for the preparation for the ABA. We were given a set date by which we had to be competition ready and because that date was a week earlier than the ABA competition, it served as an invaluable benchmark in our preparation,” said Moring.

“We spent our winter break writing the brief for this competition and we’ve all prepared for oral arguments ever since. It was an exceptional opportunity to make an oral argument before these justices,” added Aronovitz. Together, Moring and Aronovitz won the competition for the respondent.

Justice Overton announced the winners and also gave Moring the award for Best Oralist. Justice Anstead followed by congratulating the competitors.

“In terms of the preparation of the presentations today, I was more impressed by the four of you than any other moot court team that I have ever seen. The four of you were so incredibly impressive,” he said.

Justice Grimes, also impressed, added, “We asked you so many questions and we compliment you for answering them so well.”

It was undoubtedly a great honor for the competitors to receive such glowing remarks from the justices.

“It feels really good to be rewarded for our efforts and to hear the positive feedback from such an esteemed panel of judges,” said Aronovitz.

For Aronovitz and Morning, both 3Ls, the ABA competition will be their last as members of the Florida Moot Court Team. Moring reflected on the experience, “Amidst the long hours of preparation it seems like a relief that it’s almost over, but I know that after the competition and especially after graduation, the realization that I won’t get to represent UF in moot court competitions anymore will set in.”

For more information on the Florida Moot Court Team, visit www.law.ufl.edu/students/organizations/mootcourt.