Atilla Andrade

ProfessorAndrade will be speaking to the members of the Home Builders Association of Florida on the new opportunities for Florida builders in his home country of Brazil.

Nancy Dowd

Professor; David H. Levin Chair in Family Law; Director, Center on Children & FamiliesDowd presented “Barriers to Redefining Fatherhood: Masculinities and Nurture,” as part of a panel on “Redefining Parenthood” at the National People of Color Conference at the Seton Hall University School of Law. The talk focused on how dominant social and cultural concepts of masculinities, as well as public policy founded on an economic definition of fatherhood, operate as barriers to redefining fatherhood around men nurturing their children.

Paul Gugliuzza

Legal Skills ProfessorGugliuzza co-authored and published “Ten Federal Circuit Cases From 2009 That Veterans Benefits Attorneys Should Know,” in American University Law Review, with Miguel F. Eaton and Sumon Dantiki.

Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol

Levin Mabie & Levin Professor of LawHernández-Truyol presented “On Post-Racial and Post-Other Isms: A Human Rights Approach to Justice” at the National People of Color Conference at the Seton Hall University School of Law.

Shani King

Associate Professor; Co-Director, Center on Children and FamiliesKing presented “The Family Law Canon in a (Post?) Racial Era” at the National People of Color Conference at the Seton Hall University School of Law. He argued that the canon of family law inaccurately describes a race-neutral or post-racial state for family law and that the canon should correct its colorblindness so that legal authorities can address the problems that structural racism creates for African-American families. The article was the first to engage the canon’s relationship to race, or more specifically, to African-Americans in an in-depth and sustained way.

JoAnn Klein

Development Director, Center for Governmental ResponsibilityTim McLendon and JoAnn Klein, both of CGR, have just completed and published a two-year study on “Economic Impacts of Historic Preservation in Florida, Update 2010.” This was a joint CGR project with the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey and also involved UF Emeritus Professor of Law Jim Nicholas. The study was funded by a grant from the Florida Dept. of State Division of Historical Resources.

Joseph Little

Professor Emeritus“Health reform amendment thrown off Florida ballot” (Sept. 13, 2010, American Medical News)

Little commented on the Florida Supreme Court’s decision not to include a challenge to the national health care reform bill on November’s ballot on the grounds that it was not worded to accurately represent the amendment’s impact.

From the article:
“The Florida Supreme Court has denied several proposed amendments because they were inaccurately worded, said Joseph W. Little, professor of law emeritus at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in Gainesville. Often the authors try to insert confusing wording to make the proposal sound like something more attractive than it is.” “‘My guess is the Legislature was attempting to create votes for this [amendment],’ Little said.”

Pedro Malavet

ProfessorTV interview (Sept. 15, 2010, WCJB TV-20)
Malavet commented about UF Law being ranked no. 5 for Hispanic students by Hispanic Business magazine.

Tim McLendon

Staff Attorney, Center for Governmental ResponsibilityTim McLendon and JoAnn Klein, both of CGR, have just completed and published a two-year study on “Economic Impacts of Historic Preservation in Florida, Update 2010.” This was a joint CGR project with the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey and also involved UF Emeritus Professor of Law Jim Nicholas. The study was funded by a grant from the Florida Dept. of State Division of Historical Resources.

Don Peters

Professor; Trustee Research FellowDon Peters, along with his co-author Catherine Ross Dunham, professor and associate dean at Elon Law School has published “Civil Procedure: Skills and Values” in the new LexisNexis Skills and Values series.

Sharon Rush

Irving Cypen Professor of LawRush presented a paper at a conference in Athens, Greece in July that was sponsored by the Athens Institute on Education and Research. Her paper focused on what the U.S. and South Africa can learn from each other about fixing a problem we share: the existence and persistence of racially identifiable and unequal schools.

Michael Seigel

UF Research Foundation Professor“Granting of transfer requests ‘rare’” (Sept. 13, 2010, Ocala Star-Banner)

A federal judge recently denied Lee Farkas’ motion to have his case moved from Virginia to Florida. The former chairman of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. was indicted on fraud charges earlier this year.

From the article:
“‘To move a case because it presents an inconvenience to the defendant is…an extremely rare event,’ said Mike L. Seigel, a law professor specializing in criminal law and white collar crime at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. To actually succeed in moving a trial, moreover, a case must be ‘really, really high profile and very emotional, typically,’ Seigel added.”

Danny Sokol

Assistant ProfessorSokol presented his research at the Latin American Competition Forum in San Jose, Costa Rica. The event was organized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Inter-American Development Bank, the Comisión para Promover la Competencia (COPROCOM) and the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Commerce of Costa Rica.

Sokol’s article “Antitrust, Institutions and Merger Control” was published in the George Mason Law Review.

All of them agreed that there are problems with the death penalty today, though.

“The more we ask questions about the death penalty, the more we begin to see, at least from my perspective, that whether you’re for it or against it, it’s got problems,” Rambo said.

One of the problems agreed on are that the death penalty is arbitrarily imposed. For example, not all states have the death penalty, so a crime could be significantly worse in one state but not have the possibility of capital punishment. Nunn saw this first-hand as a defense attorney in Washington, D.C., which does not have the death penalty.

“I can assure you that the cases that I dealt with were as vile, troubling, vicious and cruel as any case in which the death penalty was imposed,” Nunn said. “None of these people received capital punishment.”

Nunn, who said the death penalty does not work and is arbitrarily imposed, spoke a lot about race’s effect on the death penalty. He raised a comprehensive study done by Iowa professor David Baldus, which has been cited by the Supreme Court. The study, done in Georgia, found that African-Americans were four times more like to be sentenced to death than white criminals when accounting for the crimes. Even more significantly, the color of the victim mattered more in the study. Criminals who murdered white victims were much more likely to get the death penalty. If an African-American killed a white victim, he was 11 times more likely to get the death penalty than a white person killing an African-American.

In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court debated if there was enough evidence of racial bias to stop the death penalty. The justices cited the Baldus study, but in a 5-4 decision voted that the evidence was not sufficient enough to change the death penalty. Justice Scalia, who voted to sustain the death penalty, sent out a memo to his colleagues that was later leaked, Nunn said, arguing that Scalia admitted to racial bias but voted not to change anything for political reasons.

Nunn paraphrased Scalia’s memo: “I don’t think we need to debate on whether or not there is sufficient evidence of racial bias in implementation of the death penalty. I am convinced that there is sufficient evidence of racial bias in the administration of justice and particularly the death penalty in America. However, I’m not going to vote for this because I think that if I do the consequences will be so severe that we will not be able to maintain our criminal justice system in the manner in which we have done so throughout the history of the United States.”

Even Dekle admitted that the death penalty could be better imposed. He spent 32 years as a prosecutor and defense attorney and prosecuted 15 death penalty cases. He has attended two executions of criminals that he prosecuted and has other convictions sitting on death row.

“I will say this: over the 32 years that I practiced criminal law and prosecuted and defended death penalty cases, my views and opinions about the death penalty have evolved and changed, and now at the end of my career, looking at the death penalty and the way that it is being imposed in the United States, I see some problems,” Dekle said.