Mary Jane Angelo
Professor of Law

Angelo has been chosen to be the “2011 Sustainable Food Systems Summer Scholar” at the Vermont Law School.

Angelo presented “Building a Resilient Agricultural System to Adapt to Climate Change” at the First Annual Fall Colloquium on Environmental Scholarship at Vermont Law School on Friday, Oct. 22.

Angelo published “Water Quality Regulations and Policy Evolution” (with Kati Migliaccio) in Water Quality, Concepts, Sampling, and Analysis (Yuncong Li and Kati Migliaccio, eds., CRC Press 2010).

Dennis Calfee
Alumni Research Scholar & Professor of Law
“UF law professor succumbs to cancer” (Nov. 20, 2010, Gainesville Sun)

“Colleagues remember law professor” (Nov. 22, 2010, The Alligator)

Calfee spoke with the Gainesville Sun and The Alligator, offering memories of Professor Moffat as a dedicated and beloved professor at UF Law.

Robert Jerry
Dean; Levin Mabie & Levin Professor of Law
“UF law professor succumbs to cancer” (Nov. 20, 2010, Gainesville Sun)

“Colleagues remember law professor” (Nov. 22, 2010, The Alligator)

Dean Jerry spoke with the Gainesville Sun and The Alligator, offering memories of Professor Moffat as a dedicated and beloved professor at UF Law.

Joseph Little
Emeritus Professor
“Nonlawyers on JNC raising eyebrows, red flags” (Nov. 18, 2010, Daily Business Review)

Florida’s process for appointing members of judicial nominating commissions has come under increased scrutiny after the news that a member of the 4th District Court of Appeal’s judicial nominating committee was revealed to have been involved in a Ponzi scheme. Little commented on concerns raised about Anthony V. Pugliese III, a real estate developer who was appointed to the Palm Beach Circuit judicial nominating committee.

From the article:
His limited understanding of the judicial system doesn’t surprise Joseph W. Little, a professor emeritus of constitutional law and the judiciary at the University of Florida School of Law.

Pugliese was a gubernatorial appointee and as such was required to meet only two basic requirements. Crist’s choice must be registered to vote and live within the commission’s jurisdiction.

“That being the case, it’s highly political,” Little said. “These are people the governor believes, first, are competent, second, they lean in the direction the governor leans in.”

Daniel Sokol
Assistant Professor
“State-Sponsored Competition Is New Antitrust” (Nov. 22, 2010, The Street.com)

Sokol commented on the changing nature of antitrust laws in the modern world in this article that explores state-sponsored competition between companies.

From the article:
Antitrust law historically has responded to advances in economics,” says David D. Sokol, assistant professor of law at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. “Unlike the 1950s or 1960s, antitrust today does not assume that merely because you are big, you are bad: You have to harm consumers.”

Michael Allan Wolf
Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law
“Adverse possession case in Sarasota County” (Nov. 23, 2010, Sarasota Herald-Tribune)

Wolf commented on Florida’s adverse possession law, a statute that has been on the books since 1869 in Florida. Although the law allows for abandoned property to be claimed and maintained by an outside party, people have recently been taking advantage of the law by moving into or renting out homes in foreclosure; counting on the original owners not to notice.

From the article:
The law is basically a statute of limitations, said Michael Allan Wolf, a real estate expert at the University of Florida School of Law. If a property is abandoned and the owners do not notice within seven years that someone else has moved in, the squatters can file to claim ownership.

The squatters are required to pay taxes, fix up the property and maintain it.

“It’s not designed to encourage people to steal other people’s property,” said Wolf. “That’s a side effect.”

Wolf said he was worried that the state Legislature would try to throw out the law due to the recent attention it has garnered. One lawmaker tried unsuccessfully to take the law off the books last year.

The Lawyer's Running Club, better known as Running with Lidsky, shows off their matching shirts before an afternoon jog. (Photo by Vincent Massaro)

If you see a group of law students – and maybe a few professors – running away from the law school, it’s not a mass exodus. It’s just Running with Lidsky – and they’ll be back.

On Friday afternoons, Stephen C. O’Connell Chair and Professor of Law Lyrissa Lidsky’s group of law school runners can be seen circling Lake Alice a little after 2 p.m. during fall and spring semesters, forging connections with each other and maybe blowing off a little steam from the previous week.

Lidsky – who started the weekly running club in the fall of 2008 – said the weekly runs have been more rewarding than she ever expected them to be. As her schedule became increasingly busy over the years, it was becoming more difficult to make time to connect with students on a personal level, Lidsky said, and thought a running club might provide her with such an opportunity.

“I just really appreciate the chance to get to know students whom I wouldn’t otherwise know, to have a relationship with them that’s less formal than it normally is,” she said, “it’s just been very valuable for me.”

Lidsky also points out the health benefits – it helps keep her blood pressure down and manages stress – and the unexpected benefits of an unofficial mentoring function among the students.

“It makes connections between students who might not otherwise meet, particularly between 2L and 3L students with 1Ls,” she said. “The 3Ls can say ‘I’ve been through this, you’re going to get through this, it’s ok.’”

Second-year law student Chris Grobbel agrees, saying Running with Lidsky is “a great social environment where like-minded people get together in pursuit of a common goal.”

“Law school is a stressful time for just about everyone, so an activity that is healthy, reduces stress, and empowers practitioners to deal with the mental challenges of law school is a pretty ideal match in my book,” he said.

And Grobbel is taking an active role in seeing that Running with Lidsky continues. He registered the club as an official organization with the University of Florida, which puts it in a position to keep growing.

Grobbel said registering as an official UF organization comes with its benefits. The group is a finalist for a Pepsi Refresh $15,000 campus improvement grant, which would be used to install an exercise circuit around Lake Alice for anybody on campus to use. And he said they hope to be a budgeted organization soon, which would provide opportunities for sponsoring races or bringing speakers to campus.

Although the new name for the club – the one UF officially recognizes – is the Lawyer’s Running Club, Grobbel said it will always be known as Running with Lidsky.

“Professor Lidsky is really the driving force of our organization, we would not be where we are but for her,” he said, adding, “that’s a torts joke by the way.”

The group meets on Fridays at 2 p.m. at the UF Law campus. The group size varies, but a good week will have 10 to 15 people running, Lidsky said. The group’s jog takes them on a 5k route – a little over three miles – around the west side of Lake Alice, over to Gale Lemerand Drive, then back up Village Drive to the UF Law campus. Lidsky said it is usually about a 30-minute commitment, depending on how fast one goes. And student affairs provides Gatorade for the group afterwards.

Lidsky stresses the fact that anybody in the law school is welcome and that the group accommodates people of all abilities. She said some people choose to walk while others run; either way is fine.

“All abilities, all ages, all speeds,” she said.

For the most up-to-date information about Running with Lidsky, look at its Facebook page, which will have any changes or updated information about meetings.

Francisco Valdes returned to UF to speak to a group of faculty and students. (Photo by Joey Springer)

A grey, collarless shirt fits snugly to his slim, athletic build, and his salt-and-pepper hair is tied up in a pony tail as Francisco Valdes (JD 84) backs away from the lectern, then shifts on his heels and paces forward.

He extends his arms to his left and grabs the ideas hanging there; he reaches to his right, grasping the historical figures who loiter nearby. These phantoms were Valdes’ dancing partners as the University of Miami law professor lectured Monday, Nov. 15, to a group of faculty at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Valdes, 55, returned to his alma mater to speak to faculty and students as founder and a leader for 15 years of the LatCrit legal scholarship movement, which attempts to expand the bounds of law beyond what Valdes sees as the “conventional, domestic-only, unidimensional” confines of race, gender or sexual orientation.

“It is an effort to instill the consciousness and the practice of coalitional analysis and politics — and action,” he explained.

Valdes believes LatCrit has influenced legal scholarship by conducting conferences that promote the work of junior scholars rather than senior ones, by helping students lay the groundwork for entry into the academic world and by highlighting the cooperative nature of legal research.

“We’ve tried to promote the idea that scholarship is produced in tandem with others — the ‘democratic’ exchange of ideas, not the ‘imperial scholar’ sitting alone in your room,” he said.

In the practical world of politics and judges, Valdes called the elevation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor an important landmark, but whether she will make a substantive contribution to the law is yet to be determined.

“She is the first woman of color ever to be on the Supreme Court,” Valdes said. “Beyond that, which is to some extent symbolic, the jury is out.”

And while LatCrit’s name points toward legal scholarship of problems facing Latinos (or as Valdes would have it “Latinas/os”), Valdes said the scholarship is intentionally “borderless.”

The January 1995 issue of the California Law Review was devoted exclusively to Valdes’ widely cited work, “Queers, Sissies, Dykes and Tomboys: Deconstructing the Conflation of ‘Sex,’ ‘Gender,’ and ‘Sexual Orientation’ in Euro-American Law and Society.” The work also represented Valdes’ dissertation for his doctorate of law from Stanford Law School.

UF Law Professor Berta Hernández-Truyol, who has worked with Valdes to spearhead the rise of LatCrit as an academic movement, noted the difficulty of placing an article in the California Law Review, let alone having an entire issue devoted to one’s work.

“Frank is a key figure in the critical legal movement touching on race gender, sexuality, queerness, gender, religion, class – all of the axes on which people are or can be subordinated,” Hernández -Truyol said.

The goal of LatCrit is to oppose the subordination of groups through legal policy and social action, he said. Valdes notes that laws “discriminate” or “differentiate” as a matter of course: Certain people are allowed to enter the men’s bathroom; others are allowed to enter the women’s. It is when rules and laws structurally or systematically subordinate one group to another that they fall afoul of justice. And justice, Valdes says, is his animating mission.

On Monday, Valdes glided among the ideas and characters of American constitutional law and history to explain his theory of anti-subordination as integral to the original Constitution. It is the idea that the Founding Fathers developed the structures of the document — the separation of legislative and executive powers, the division of federal and state responsibilities — in a bid to protect any one group from being structurally subordinated by any other, and to prevent the establishment of a caste system in the new republic. At that time, it was meant to protect Southerners from being overwhelmed by Yankees and vice versa, the rich from the poor, plantation owners from merchants.

Valdes emphasizes that at the time of the founding documents, the policies applied to a narrow polity —mainly white property-owning males in the different ex-colonies. But as the polity opened up after the Civil War with passage of the 14th Amendment, including its Equal Protection clause, the word equality enters the Constitution and the notion of anti-caste or anti-subordination was made textually explicit for all groups in society.

Valdes is a left-wing scholar, but he puts forward an originalist argument — more often associated with conservative legal analysis — to help correct what he considers to be the distortion of Equal Protection jurisprudence.

It is with originalism that Valdes hopes to persuade judges to abandon an interpretation of the Equal Protection clause that leads to Supreme Court victories almost exclusively by white people who file suit under the 14th Amendment to stop, as he says, “democratically adopted remedies for invidious discrimination.” He explains that “reverse” discrimination plaintiffs wrongly win these cases because of judicial conflation of remedial or “antisubordination” discrimination with “invidious” discrimination — or subordination itself. Valdes cites the pervasive and entrenched socioeconomic advantages of whites in American society as “evidence” against claims that they are structurally or legally subordinated.

And while he has hopes for social change, Valdes does not expect it to come over night.

“Legal scholarship is never about changing the world tomorrow but about changing the world over time. So, whether it’s LatCrit or anything else, the project in legal scholarship cannot be about the social results you personally can see in your own lifetime but about helping to chart a path towards them,” he said.