Kara Carnley, editor of the Journal of Law and Public Policy, introduces panelists at the March 14 JLPP Media Law Symposium in the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center courtroom. (Photo by Elise Giordano)

By Lindsey Tercilla
Student writer

The protection of false factual statements under the First Amendment in the case of United Sates v. Alvarez was the topic of a panel discussion at the Journal of Law and Public Policy’s Media Law Symposium on March 14 in the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center.

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court overturned the Stolen Valor Act, which attempted to criminalize lying about receiving a military medal.

A new version of the act was passed in September that created penalties for individuals who lied about receiving military medals and profited from their deception.

Panelists included UF Law Professor Lyrissa Lidsky; First Amendment and media law attorney Craig D. Feiser, attorney Kristen Rasmussen, who authored the amicus brief presented to the U.S. Supreme Court for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; and Col. Michael L. Smidt, staff judge advocate of U.S. Special Operations Command.

Professor Lidsky lead the discussion by posing the question: “Does the Alvarez case protect lies?”

When making the decision, the Justices asked themselves two questions, Lidsky said. The first was if the speech was valuable, and the second was did the speech cause harm? Six of the justices said they started with the harm question, she said.

“How you come out on this case depends on which one you ask first,” Lidsky said. “These lies muddy the message of military medals, and that pollutes public disclosure.”

While these lies dilute the value of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the majority decided that the Stolen Valor Act violated the First Amendment by prohibiting people from making false statements.

Craig D. Feiser spoke about the history of false factual statements with regards to media law.

Kristen Rasmussen expressed the important not-so-obvious interests of the news media in the Alvarez case. This included a discussion of what animated the Reporters Committee’s decision to get involved in the case via an amicus effort.

This symposium was sponsored by the Florida Free Speech Forum and the American Bar Association Law Student Division at UF Law.

Carol Browner (JD 79) spoke of her work experiences under the Clinton and Obama Administration and of the importance to protect the environment during her keynote address at PIEC Friday. (Photo by Marcela Suter)

Forty years ago, drivers could buy a gallon of gasoline with just a few coins, the Cuyahoga River smoldered rather than flowed and the two most significant water laws in our state and nation — the Florida Water Resources Act and the Clean Water Act — took effect.

“No question. The waters are cleaner. We’re closer to the goals of the Clean Water Act,” said Jonathan Cannon, a PIEC panelist and former Environmental Protection Agency general counsel, said. “But we seem to have hit a plateau.”

More than 300 registrants attended panels and events held Thursday through Saturday at UF Law’s 18th annual Public Interest Environmental Conference, “Fishable, Swimmable? 40 Years of Water Law in Florida and the United States.” The conference brought together land use lawyers, journalists, legislators, authors, historians and water warriors from across the nation.

Speaker after speaker, including keynote addresses from Richard Ausness (JD 68) and longtime federal environmental policymaker Carol Browner (JD 79), came together for a weekend with one unified message: We’re not swimming; we’re sinking.

“It’s sort of like a midlife crisis,” said Richard Hamann, another PIEC panelist and assistant director of UF Law’s Center for Governmental Responsibility. “That’s where we’re at now.”

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of former UF Law Dean Frank Maloney drafting the Florida Water Resources Act (FWRA), an act that created a statewide system of five water management districts to govern the Sunshine State’s water, this year’s PIEC fell smack dab in the middle of a political whirlpool over what to do with the state’s water.

In what would be the largest change to the FWRA in 40 years, the Florida Legislature is debating a bill that would redefine state water rights.

Florida law subjects all state waters to permitting based on “beneficial use in the public interest.” The bill before the Legislature would remove reclaimed water, wastewater that is treated for reuse, from consideration as a “water of the state” and give ownership of that water to the utility companies who control its distribution. The water management districts would, if the bill passes, lose control over reclaimed water.

In most states, the issue of who owns cleaned sewage would be a rather unimportant question. But for Florida, the state leading the nation in reclaimed water use with 10 percent of the state’s daily water needs, a state often plagued by droughts and saddled with watering restrictions, the issue of who owns sewage is vital.

“The decision makers have lost sight of what doctors take an oath on, and that’s ‘Do no harm,’” said Daniel Fernandez (JD 76), an assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Lugert School of Business.

And in the nation’s fourth-most-populous state with a population that’s nearly tripled since the Clean Water Act and the FWRA became law, the issue of water has only grown in importance over the years.

“We have three times as many people as we did 40 years ago. We have to create all this water,” said Henry Dean, former executive director of both the St. John’s River Water Management District and the South Florida Water Management District. “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken feathers.”

Even Browner, one of the conference’s keynote speakers, a former secretary of Florida’s Department of Environmental Regulation, EPA administrator during the entire 1990s and White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy director during the first half of the Obama administration, had a sobering view of Florida’s watery narrative.

“Water is Florida’s lifeblood; it’s what our economy is based on,” she said in her keynote address. “Imagine if Texas was treating its oil like we treated our water. We’d be horrified.”

But Browner also provided hope to conference attendees at the annual PIEC banquet.

“The responsibility of environmental protection is one that will always be with us,” she said. “We must rededicate ourselves to solve these challenges. I’m not suggesting that this will be easy, but we have to get started.”

From left: UF Law Professor Kenneth Nunn; Jackson State University Political Science Professor Michelle D. Deardorff; Mississippi School of Law Professor Angela M. Kupenda; UF Law Irving Cypen Professor of Law Sharon Rush; and UF Law Professor Jonathan R. Cohen. (Photo by Marcela Suter)

When Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States in 2008, the question of whether America had finally moved into a post-racial society became a widely discussed topic. While the answer to the question is still being debated, it is clear that there are many valid questions about how to approach and discuss issues of race in the modern world.

Scholars at “Race Talk in the Age of Obama,” addressed some of these questions by participating in a panel discussion based on the December 2011 issue of the University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy to which each of the five panelists contributed an article. The event, which was held Feb. 8 at UF Law, was co-sponsored by the JLPP and the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations.

The panel was comprised of UF Law Professor Jonathan R. Cohen; Jackson State University Political Science Professor Michelle D. Deardorff; Mississippi School of Law Professor Angela M. Kupenda; UF Law Professor Kenneth Nunn and UF Law Professor Sharon Rush, the Irving Cypen Professor of Law.

Each participant brought a unique academic perspective to the discussion, which was facilitated by brief summaries of each panelists’ article and questions from members of the JLPP.

A recurring theme of the discussion was that race should be looked at as a structural institution rather than viewed in terms of personal relationships — an idea initially put forth by Deardorff in summarizing her article co-authored with Kupenda titled “Negotiating Social Mobility and Critical Citizenship.”

“We had 300 years of racialized, legalized, maintained oppression,” Deardorff said, “and then we removed the legalized part of it and said it was done.”

Yet, all the other structures still remain, she said.

The panel also examined how to address issues of race in educational institutions — and looked at examples of it being ignored and other situations where it is being addressed.

“Talking about race is difficult and it is challenging,” Nunn said. “It takes courage, perseverance, leadership and a thick skin.”

Cohen said in terms of exchanging ideas in the classroom, you can’t guarantee that people will fully understand you, but it shouldn’t prevent you from expressing your perspective. And he pointed out that the part of the conversation that is in your control is the act of trying to understand what other people in the conversation are saying.

Rush’s article, “Talking About Race and Equality,” which posits the idea that many people fall into two categories when it comes to talking about race — those who let blindness to racial inequality lead to the avoidance of talking about race, and those who see racial inequality everywhere and want to talk about it all the time. She suggests there is a middle ground people can find where they can comfortably address topics of race and inequality.

This led to the questions of whether Obama’s “approach concedes too much by ignoring the discriminatory intent that some people have that undermines (his good intentions).” Rush said she believes Obama understands that many equality-minded people don’t think about, or understand structural racism and that he is “managing the color line with extreme aplomb.”

On the other hand, Nunn stated that “Obama’s treatment of race is his consequence of negotiating a culture in our society where he knows it’s an explosive issue. His failure to engage it shows more than anything that we haven’t gotten beyond it.”

The University of Florida Levin College of Law Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations is committed to fostering communities of dialogue on race. The center creates and supports programs designed to enhance race-related curriculum development for faculty, staff and students in collegiate and professional schools. Of the five U.S. law schools with race centers, the CSRRR is uniquely focused on curriculum development.

The event, “Race Talk in the Age of Obama,” will be a timely and provocative panel discussion by contributors to the December 2011 issue of the University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Representing diverse race, gender and academic perspectives, panelists will discuss how they confront race at a time when many claim America is now a post-racial society.

In light of the historic election of President Barack Obama, how does race matter? How should we engage in everyday conversations about race at work, at school and informally? What are the potential risks and benefits? What are the consequences of not talking about race? What is “critical citizenship” and how does it impact public policy and our work as students, lawyers and educators?

Panelists will include: Professor Jonathan R. Cohen, professor of law, University of Florida; Michelle D. Deardorff, professor of political science, Jackson State University, Jackson, Miss.; Angela Mae Kupenda, professor of law, Mississippi College School of Law, Jackson, Miss.; Professor Kenneth B. Nunn, professor of law, University of Florida; and Professor Sharon E. Rush, Irving Cypen Professor of Law, University of Florida.

Contact Melissa Bamba with questions at 273-0614 or bamba@law.ufl.edu.

• Assistant Editor-in-Chief: Will Stein
• Assistant Managing Editor: Lauren Woodruff
• Assistant Student Works Editor: Nicole Critelli
• Assistant Articles Editors: Samantha Aylward, Sammi Culp, Phil Rossman-Reich and Tyler Hudson
• Assistant Research Editors: Allison Symulevich, Christine Bustamante, Tamar Soroker and Kelsey Veitengruber
• Notes Chair: Alexandra Michelini; Fundraising & Alumni Chair: Justin York
• Bylaws Chair: Christine Bustamante
• Productions Chair: Anitra Raiford; Community Affairs Chair: Kara Carnley Murhee
• Policy Chair: Suzanne Tzuanos

• Samantha Aylward
• Nicole Bayer
• Paydon Broeder
• Nicole Critelli
• Charles DelPapa
• Eric Fisher
• Benjamin Lichter
• Amy Limontes
• Matt Nemeroff
• Armando Nozzolillo
• Brandon Meadows
• Alexandra Michelini
• Ben Schott
• Suzanne Tzuanos
• Lauren Woodruff

Journal members made dinner for 40 residents of the house.

In conjunction with their visit, JLPP held a drive to collect household cleaning supplies and personal hygiene items.

After the drive, JLPP donated several boxes of supplies to St. Francis House.

The article examines the issue through the doctrine of insane delusion. This doctrine doesn’t often come up in regards to family law, but Ronner said it “tends to come up a lot in wills and trusts, when individuals seek to invalidate wills on that basis.”

While Ronner has done a good deal of scholarship in this area of the law, having written articles and books on homophobia, she used the first part of the presentation to explain the somewhat unorthodox inspiration for this article.

“This article started with a phone call and two stories,” Ronner said. The phone call was from the FSU College of Law’s Public Interest Law Center, who asked Ronner to participate in an amicus brief for a recent homosexual adoption case.

“What about the stories?,” she asked, rhetorically. “I happened to be re-reading William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. In that short story, Emily Grierson has been sleeping with her dead lover’s rotting corpse for 40 years.”

Grierson, Ronner explained, believed her husband to be alive, despite being surrounded by his unused possessions and unworn clothing. “She clung to this false conception of reality, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.”

The second story was the one of Martin Gill, his partner, and the two young boys they had recently tried to adopt. The two boys came to Gill and his partner when the eldest was 4 years old, and the other just 4 months old. They had been badly neglected, but found a comfortable home with Gill. When he decided to take the next step and adopt the children, he was denied based on the Florida statute that keeps homosexuals from adopting

Gill sued to overturn the decision, and after making a compelling argument based on accepted science and fact, Judge Cindy Lederman sided with Gill, ruling the bar against homosexuals unconstitutional. Ronner quoted Lederman’s opinion, in which Lederman wrote that when taken into Gill’s home, the children “left a world of chronic neglect, emotional impoverishment and deprivation to enter a new world, foreign to them, that was nurturing, safe, structured and stimulating.”

“So what does all this have to do with Emily Grierson?,” Ronner said, as she began to tie the two vastly different stories together. “The narrow thesis in the article is that any court reversing Judge Lederman’s ruling has a lot in common in with Faulkner’s Emily Grierson. That is, that court is laboring under what fits both the psychiatric and legal definitions of an insane delusion.”

Ronner described the experts that appeared in the Gill case as further support for her argument. The government put only two experts on the stand. One wound up more or less siding with Gill, and Lederman found the other less than credible.

For a court to accept the state’s argument, despite all the evidence introduced by Gill, would require more than a differing opinion, Ronner said. It would require the court to be under an insane delusion.

“My thesis is that the only way a court can disagree is if it adheres to a false perception of reality despite being bombarded with overwhelming facts to the contrary,” Ronner 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.