• “Experts differ on merits, political impact of McCollum’s health care lawsuit” (March 26, Tampa Tribune)
  Baldwin commented on Florida AG Bill McCollum’s suit challenging the constitutionality of the new Health Care Act. “As far as I can tell the commerce clause has been treated as providing a very, very wide range of powers,” he said. Court rulings have given Congress ability to regulate even such seemingly private matters as how much grain farmers grow on their own land for their own personal use, he noted. “I think the suit is really nothing more than a political ploy to keep the argument alive and convince people … that their rights are being trampled,” Baldwin said.

On April 30, sponsored by the Journal of Law and Public Policy, Jourdan discussed her upcoming article that will appear in the JLPP titled, “Valuing Grief: A Proposal to Compensate Relocated Public housing Residents for Intangibles.”

Much of the difficulty in compensating dislocated residents of a public housing unit, Jourdan said, comes in calculating damages.

While not all dislocated residents experience negative effects — some are happy to leave — for many, the move is devastating. Relocated residents are faced with the loss of social relationships and the sudden loss of all that is familiar.

“When you get displaced from where you live, it actually has emotional, social, and psychological impact,” Jourdan said, emphasizing that these factors are magnified for the poor because they are limited in technology and transportation to maintain strong social ties with friends and former neighbors who live miles away.

Jourdan focused on the treatment of the residents of Kennedy Homes, a public housing development in Gainesville, whose residents were displaced after a 2003 fire resulted in city investigators discovering that the buildings were woefully dilapidated. Jourdan explained that the residents of Kennedy Homes were among Gainesville’s poorest.

“You could live at Kennedy Homes for fifteen dollars a week,” Jourdan said, calling the state of the buildings themselves “horrible,” but noting that Kennedy Homes was the least expensive public housing unit and “the place of last resort.” The walls of Kennedy Homes were often only a paper-thin shield between residents and the harshness of homelessness, Jourdan said.

Jourdan also noted that, despite the ill repair that Kennedy Homes was in, all of the residents indicated that they would happily return since Kennedy Homes had been their home.

To provide temporary housing for the displaced residents, a condemned downtown hotel was made available, which carried its own issues, such as no kitchens in the rooms and a broken elevator.

“They stayed here for six months because nobody knew what to do with them,” Jourdan said.

It was at this point that Three Rivers Legal Services and Southern Legal Services intervened to begin the daunting task of bringing suit against the Kennedy Homes developers on behalf of hundreds of plaintiffs.

A settlement was reached, but its details have been kept confidential, Jourdan said.

Jourdan also referenced a book penned by attorney Pierce Kelly that detailed the saga surrounding Kennedy Homes and the plight of its residents titled, Kennedy Homes: An American Tragedy. She explained that Kelly had been working at Three Rivers Legal Services during the time that the Kennedy Homes case was being litigated.

For Jourdan, the Kennedy Homes represents both a tragedy and a lesson.

“This is going to keep continuing to happen so we need to figure out what’s it worth so we can get out our checkbook and pay people what they deserve,” she said.

Jourdan advocates a compensation scheme for dislocated residents by working “directly with the residents [to] ask what they want and what they need to help stabilize the transition from one place to another.

“People are not by their nature extraordinarily greedy,” she suggested.

Jourdan finished her lecture by encouraging her audience, largely composed of future attorneys, to pursue pro-bono work and help give a voice and offer aid to those who are both voiceless and helpless.

“I’m here today because of John Travolta, not because of me,” McDermott said. “I’m here because of karma.”

McDermott stumbled upon Travolta as a client by chance, he said. He helped some friends through law school and it later paid off well for him.

“I had a couple of buddies that I carried the bulk of the work for. I graduated in the top of the class, these guys didn’t fare as well,” McDermott said. “We were best friends; I made it a point to help them because they are good guys. We all managed getting through law school, some of us with better grades than others.”

Then, about 12 years ago McDermott was travelling through Jacksonville where they practiced. He had not seen his old friends in a while, so he called to meet up with them. They invited him to his office and what he saw surprised him. There were pictures of Hollywood stars plastered all over their walls.

One of them met rockstar Alice Cooper golfing. He was unhappy with his representation, so he hired McDermott’s old friend. Eventually, Cooper led to more clients, including Travolta.

When they were involved with some tough litigation involving the runway at Travolta’s Ocala estate, they turned to someone they knew they could rely on.

“Just like the old days in law school, these guys called me to bail them out. I got John Travolta because of karma because I helped these guys through law school and then it came back to me 20 years later when they had a problem.”

They told McDermott they could meet Travolta at a barbecue at his house they were invited to.

“That’s pretty cool, I’m like you guys, I’ve watched the movies and all that stuff,” McDermott said. “All of the sudden, this guy just comes running up to me yelling ‘Are we going to win?! Are we going to win?!’ ‘Of course we’re going to win!’ You’re not allowed to do that – guaranteeing victory, but there was no way I was saying no in that situation.”

McDermott won that case and has represented Travolta ever since. Although he was brought to speak by the ESLS, McDermott never saw entertainment law that as part of his practice coming out of law school.

“I never envisioned it, I never thought it’d be possible, I never pursued entertainment law,” he said.

McDermott originally pursued law school to work in real estate, but the market dried up when he graduated. He decided to start his own practice right out of law school. He did not have an office at the time and would pay a friend to use his office to meet with clients and then would go home to do the work.

“They would laugh at me and they called it the traveling law office, because for nine months I operated like that,” McDermott said.

Along with treating people well, McDermott offered one more peace of parting advice to the law students attending.

It’s not the cases that you take that make you, it’s the cases that you don’t take,” McDermott said. “If you take the wrong cases, it’s like swimming with an anchor around your neck; you will eventually drown.”

The Youth Summit is designed to engage high school students in discussion about matters concerning law and policy and how each of these affects them. This year the summit focused on youth involvement in the juvenile justice system. The program addressed topics ranging from what activities could be illegal or result in suspension or expulsion from school, to the consequences of involvement in the juvenile justice system.

Students rotated through three classes during the day, each with a different presentation. The first presentation dealt with delinquent acts, sentencing, probation, and other forms of punishment. The second presentation discussed what happens if a person is arrested, their rights during an arrest, and how a juvenile could be charged as an adult. The third presentation dealt with consequences of an arrest and conviction in the juvenile and adult justice systems, and statutory rape. At the end of the presentations, the volunteers and students played games and quizzes to test the students’ new knowledge.

Law student volunteers went through training before the Youth Summit in order to give the presentations. Several local attorneys, including attorneys from the Public Defender’s and State Attorney’s office, attended the Youth Summit to assist the law students during the presentations. Lunch for participants was provided by the Florida Bar Foundation Public Interest Law Fellows.

The Youth Summit makes an impact on teens in the Gainesville community and is an annual event. If you would like to volunteer for the 2011 Youth Summit please contact the Center on Children and Families.

In 2007-2008, 261 Vietnamese workers were sent to Jordan to work for W&D Apparel. W&D confiscated their passports and injured one woman so badly that she later died from her injuries. The W&D case is just one example of the growing worldwide human trafficking problem.

“When you talk about trafficking, this is modern day slavery; it’s slavery,” said Thang Nguyen, the executive director of Boat People S.O.S., a national Vietnamese-American community-based organization that helps Vietnamese people. “We thought that we had abolished slavery many years ago, but no, it’s on the rise now.”

Nguyen spoke at UF Law on Tuesday about the W&D case and the growth of human trafficking. UF Law Professors Berta Hernandez and Winston Nagan also spoke after Nguyen.

W&D once provided uniforms for Aramark, which provides the food services for UF and is the largest company on college campuses in the country. The UF student senate pressured Aramark to stop working with W&D, and eventually Aramark ended ties with the apparel company.

Nguyen said there are 12.3 million people in forced labor worldwide and 1.39 million in sexual servitude. To be considered human trafficking, an act requires three elements, Nguyen said.

“One: there must be a victim. People who are smuggled are not necessarily victims of trafficking if they intentionally agree to that,” he said. “Non-voluntary participation and inability to escape – they cannot escape, just like in the case in Jordan. They got beaten up, locked up and forced back to work for the traffickers by their own government.”

In Vietnam, exporting labor has become commonplace. Since 2001, over 700,000 workers have been exported to 30 countries, although many of them were not trafficked. Each year, another 80,000 people leave Vietnam for work.

“Vietnam doesn’t have a law against trafficking, so there’s no way to prosecute the traffickers and there’s no way for anyone to help the trafficking victims because we cannot have access to victims of labor trafficking for two reasons,” Nguyen said. “One – there’s no law, two – the government is involved in trafficking.”

In 2000, the U.S. passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Under it, the Department of Justice went after Kil Soo Lee, the owner of Daewoosa in American Samoa that had trafficked over 200 Vietnamese and Chinese workers. This was the largest human trafficking case prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Lee is serving a 40 year sentence in Honolulu. The High Court of American Samoa ruled that Vietnam must pay the victims $3.5 million in compensation, but the country still hasn’t paid anything nine years later.

Over half of the countries in the world have enacted human trafficking laws, but enforcing them remains a problem.

“Why? Because labor trafficking involves governments, government officials, big corporations, organized crime syndicates and traffickers,” Nguyen said. “Anyone involved in any step in this process would be considered a trafficker – either recruitment, transportation, transferring, harboring or receiving the victims.”

Also, the attention on sex trafficking takes much of the attention away from labor trafficking. Even though 10 times more people are captive in labor trafficking than sex trafficking, sex trafficking cases are prosecuted 10 times more commonly, Nguyen said.

“It’s a tough problem to deal with. There are so many influential factors that we have to confront and people don’t want to confront them,” Nguyen said. “That’s why there’s a bias toward working on sex trafficking. It’s more compelling and easier because government is usually not involved in sex trafficking and they are involved in labor trafficking.”

Wilkins began his presentation with a description of the Office of Chief Counsel, which turns out to be a large department in what is a very large agency. According to Wilkins, the Office of Chief Counsel has 2,564 employees. While that may seem like a lot, it is fairly small when one considers the task that they must perform.

If taxes are inevitable, it is just as inevitable that people and companies will do their best to get around paying them. To enforce the tax code in courts across the country, the Office of Chief Counsel must employ hundreds of attorneys and their support staff. On top of all of this, the Office of Chief Counsel also serves as the chief legal advisor to the IRS commissioner, and also gives tax advice to the Treasury and taxpayers. Like any area of law, the envelope is always being pushed, and Wilkins and his staff must be watchful of trends and address them as needed.

The global movement of money and how it impacts taxes is an important issue that the IRS is currently dealing with. Wilkins said that the IRS is moving toward more international arrangements, and touched on the cooperation between Switzerland and the United States in uncovering the crimes of the Swiss bank UBS. In February 2009, UBS handed over the names of 250 Americans who had been evading taxes by stashing money in offshore UBS accounts. Since then, the IRS and the Swiss government have been working out a deal to deliver the names of thousands of other tax evaders. “And this kind of process will become more routine and more regularized,” Wilkins said.

Not every international case will be of this size, of course, but Wilkins said that these cases are usually not just your average audit. “The typical case is to develop evidence for an investigation, usually a criminal one,” he said.

But the IRS does more these days than simply enforcing tax regulations.

“We’re pretty long past the point where we’re only a tax collector,” Wilkins said.

With many government programs, like the first-time homebuyer credit, being implemented through the IRS, Wilkins described the office as also being a program administrator.

That role is already coming center-stage, as the implementation of the newly passed health care reform law begins. The law imposes new penalties for large employers who don’t provide insurance, grants new benefits to small businesses that do, and a multitude of other provisions. It also includes more traditional taxes, like the 10 percent tax on tanning beds. “That’s going to be an interesting one to apply,” Wilkins told the laughing crowd.

Neily said that while Heller answered some important questions, it raised further questions. Not only did the Heller opinion not specify a standard of review, but it left open the question of whether the right to bear arms had been incorporated. The case of McDonald v. Chicago seeks to enter that question. For those not familiar with the incorporation doctrine, Neily summarized the questions as “whether the right to use and bear arms applies against the state and local governments.”

The question is of high importance for a reason that Neily pointed out, saying, “most of the gun laws are on the state level.” Such is the case in McDonald, where the city of Chicago has issued a handgun ban, and has also restricted use of other firearms to a degree that the plaintiffs think is unconstitutional. If the Second Amendment has not been incorporated, state and local governments are under no obligation to abide by it, as the Bill of Rights originally applied to only the federal government.

While Neily, who was co-counsel in Heller, did not serve as counsel to the plaintiffs in McDonald, the Institute for Justice did file an amicus brief, and Neily has some strong views on the subject. Neily also noted that his interest in these cases was not borne from beliefs about gun rights in particular, saying “originally, Heller wasn’t supposed to be about guns, it was supposed to be about liberty.”

Neily said that he has encountered very little disagreement with the idea that the Second Amendment is incorporated against the states, but added that that is only a portion of the McDonald case. For the rest of it, Neily had to give a bit of a history lesson, starting in mid-19th century New Orleans. This was the birthplace of what we now know as the Slaughter-House Cases. In what Neily described as a “rampantly dishonest opinion” the court interpreted the 14th Amendment as having very little impact, and more or less completely writing out the Privileges and Immunities Clause. The effect of this has been that the Supreme Court must now use the substantive due process framework to analyze the protection of individual rights. Neily argued that these analyses were meant to be done through the Privileges and Immunities Clause, saying that, at the time, “‘privileges and immunities’ was pretty well synonymous with ‘rights.’”

The oral arguments for McDonald were heard in early March, and while Neily seemed optimistic that the court would hold that the Second Amendment has been incorporated, Neily said he could not be as optimistic that the court would overturn the Slaughter-House Cases. The court’s questioning on the subject had been quite harsh, including what Neily described as “snide and snarky” comments from Justice Antonin Scalia about why long-decided law should be changed.

After Neily finished his presentation, UF Law professor Joseph Little raised issue of the 14th Amendment, pointing out that his interest in it was not nearly that of Neily, but did commend him for helping to enforce individual rights, something that Little said is not done nearly enough.

Beginning April 6, as a part of diversity week, join the Center for Career Development at 10 a.m. in the faculty dining room for a series of workshops designed to help students explore the complex relationships that exist between lawyers, clients, co-workers and community. Join us on:

• Tuesday, April 6– learn how GLBT client issues can arise in the workplace and how to handle them in a professional manner.
• Wednesday, April 7– discuss how your ability to relate to your co-workers of a different generation and potentially different background can impact your career.
• Thursday, April 8– participate in a workshop designed to assist you in recognizing and responding to client diversity.

Finally, to bring diversity week to a close, immediately following Thursday’s workshop, attend the Multicultural Fair from 11a.m.-1p.m. in the law school courtyard, organized by Student Affairs and UF Law’s diverse student organizations. Travel “around the world” enjoying and celebrating law school’s cultural fabric with food and games. We hope you will participate in this series and gain an understanding of how diversity in the legal profession impacts both you and your career.

Chang, professor and founding director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University, is an accomplished scholar, talented writer, successful lawyer, and himself a beneficiary of affirmative action.

In his talk, Chang addressed a recent rash of litigation, most notably from the United States Supreme Court case of Ricci v. DeStefano, which he feared could lead to the elimination of affirmative action practices as failing to comport with Equal Protection.

In Ricci, New Haven, Connecticut firefighters were administered a multiple-choice test that was to be largely determinative of who would receive promotions. The results, however, merited the promotion of at least thirteen Caucasian firefighters, only one or two Latino firefighters, and no African-American firefighters. As a result, the city withdrew the test results. The plaintiffs in Ricci, a Caucasian and a Latino firefighter, filed suit on the basis that they were denied promotions because of race.

Current Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor famously ruled against the Ricci plaintiffs when their case was before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, for which she was then a sitting judge. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Ricci plaintiffs in holding that New Haven’s decision to disregard the results of the promotional examination showed unlawful racial bias.

Chang said that this ruling “marked a dramatic shift in Title VII jurisprudence” and also noted that the facts of the case were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court “as though there were no history.” According to Chang, citing from Ginsburg’s Ricci opinion, in which she referenced Grutter v. Bollinger, “context matters.”

Chang placed the context of affirmative action in an historical framework, in which affirmative action employment practices seek to correct prior discrimination that left ethnic groups generations behind the majority in both progress and opportunity. He added that he is fearful that soon such measures will be deemed wholly prohibited in light of Equal Protection if future decisions follow the reasoning from the majority in Ricci.

Chang, however, is not yet willing to give up hope. He praised the professors at UF Law for doing work that advances the cause of social justice and proclaimed that “change doesn’t happen without hard work.” He also advocated individual commitment to vigilance in addition to hard work in warding off intimidation based on race.

“Despite what you are sometimes told…we can all be heroes,” he urged.

The Center for Governmental Responsibility’s annual symposium will feature leading international experts in press and access freedoms on Friday, April 16, from 9 to 11 a.m. in Room 180, Holland Hall, at the Levin College of Law.

Jon Mills, CGR director and dean emeritus, will moderate a panel on “Threats to Freedom of Expression, Freedom of the Press, and Access Laws throughout the Americas.” Panelists include: Julio Muñoz, executive director, Inter American Press Association; Sandra Chance, executive director, Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, McClatchy Professor in Freedom of Information and UF law graduate; and Diana Daniels, trustee, Goldman Sachs Mutual Funds Complex and former vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of The Washington Post Company.

Law faculty and students are invited to attend the forum.

“The symposium initiates a collaborative agreement between CGR and the Inter American Press Association,” Mills said. “We have shared interests in human rights, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and strengthening the rule of law throughout the world. We look forward to future programs that examine our mutual efforts at improved legal systems internationally.”

The symposium will examine case histories on transparency and access laws in Latin America and in the United States, influences of power and money as threats to freedom, and the effects of globalization on freedoms.

The event is sponsored by Anne Conway, Chief District Judge for the Middle District of Florida and a UF law graduate, and Jon Mills. It is held in conjunction with CGR’s annual board of advisors meeting.

About the panelists: