Members of Florida Moot Court Team return from successful Navy JAG Corps national competition
Leah Edelman, David Evans, Jesse Isom, and Patrick Mize, members of the Florida Moot Court Team, recently traveled to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville on Oct. 28-30 to compete in the U.S. Navy JAG Corps 2010 National Moot Court Competition. The team made it through several rounds of oral arguments advancing to the Finals. Ultimately, the team was awarded Runner-Up of the competition and 3L David Evans was named Best Oralist. The team was coached by Alex Landback and Elizabeth Bryan. Pictured from left to right is Alex Landback, Patrick Mize, Leah Edelman, David Evans, Jesse Isom and Elizabeth Bryan.

Space still available for London Law Consortium
There is still room in the London Law Consortium, Spring Semester Study Abroad Program, which takes place from Jan. 10 – April 29, 2011. For more information on this program, check out the website. To discuss this opportunity, contact Michelle Ocepek in the Office of Student Affairs – HOL 164, ocepek@law.ufl.edu or 352-273-0620.

Stu Cohn
Associate Dean, International Studies
A new edition of Cohn’s two-volume treatise, Securities Counseling for Small and Emerging Companies, has just been published by Thomson/West.

Elizabeth Dale
Affiliate Professor of Law
Dale gave a paper titled “The Su Bao Case and the Layers of Everyday Citizenship in Shanghai, 1900-1905″ at the Multilevel Citizenship Conference at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, and a paper titled “Putting ‘Liberty’ in its Place: Discussions of ziyou, Slavery, and Sovereignty in Turn-of-the-Century China” at the American Bar Foundation/U. Illinois Legal History Seminar.

Jeffrey Harrison
Stephen C. O’Connell Chair
Harrison presented a paper titled “Privacy, Copyright, and Letters,” at a conference on transparency, secrecy, and the Internet at Elon Law School; and a paper entitled “Regulation, Deregulation and Happiness” at a conference honoring Paul Verkuil at Cardozo Law School.

Robert Jerry
Dean, UF Law; Levin Mabie & Levin Professor of Law
“JBA hosts ‘Dueling Deans,’ Welcomes judges from First DCA” (Nov. 1, 2010, Financial Review & Daily Record)

Dean Jerry was quoted in this article about the “Dueling Deans” Georgia-Florida themed luncheon Friday, Oct. 29. Jerry and former University of Georgia Law Dean David Shipley both presented arguments addressing both the school’s football teams and moot court competitions.

From the article:
University of Florida Levin College of Law Dean Robert Jerry presented a case, based on numerous statistics, on why the Gators would win the game Saturday.

“The most important question on everyone’s mind is who will win the game Saturday,” said Jerry. “Since the beginning of the competition 30 years ago, the winner of the moot court has lost the football game about 70 percent of the time.” (Georgia lost to Florida Saturday.)

Joseph Little
Professor Emeritus
TV segment, “Before you vote…Alachua County charter amendments breakdown” (Nov. 1, 2010, WCJB TV-20)

This segment offered a primer for the Alachua County charter amendments on Tuesday’s ballot. Little addressed Amendment 3 on the ballot.

From the piece:
The purpose of this item is to permit the people of one city, whether it’s the City of Gainesville, or the City of Micanopy, or the City of Lacrosse, to veto a matter that might need county wide regulation.

Diane Mazur
Professor of Law
“Retired chaplains warn against ‘don’t ask’ repeal” (Oct. 29, 2010, Associated Press)

Retired military chaplains have said that if the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is thrown out, current chaplains will not be able to serve both God and the military because their faith considers homosexuality a sin. Some churches have threatened to withdraw their endorsements if the policy, making their clergy ineligible to serve as chaplains also.

From the article:
A good military chaplain must minister to everyone, said Diane Mazur, a retired Air Force captain and University of Florida Law Professor who specializes in interaction between civilian and military law. “It’s really very different than in the civilian world, and repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ doesn’t really change that basic difference.”

Winston P. Nagan
Samuel T. Dell Research Scholar Professor of Law; Affiliate Professor of Anthropology; Founding Director, Institute for Human Rights and Peace Development

Winston Nagan’s contribution “Human Rights and Employment” has appeared in Volume 1, No. 1 of CADMUS, a journal of the World Academy of Art and Science, at pp. 49-52.

“Tea Party agenda and right-wing extremism” (Oct. 29, 2010, The Gainesville Sun)Nagan contributed an op-ed article to The Gainesville Sun in which he addressed his concerns about the motivations and philosophies behind the Tea Party movement.

From the article:
Perhaps the best that we can glean from the Tea Party crowd is that their disjunctive and uncoordinated message is really a single issue: that they oppose a black President, and that, like Sen. Mitch McConnell indicated, they will spend the next two years trying to ensure that Obama will not be an 8-year president.

Don Peters
Professor of Law
Peters has published “It Takes Two to Tango, and to Mediate: Legal Cultural and Other Factors Influencing United States and Latin American Lawyers’ Resistance to Mediating Commercial Disputes,” in 9 Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business 381 (2010).

Leonard Riskin
Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law
Riskin gave a talk on “The Negotiation Within” at the Dispute Resolution Research Center, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Danny Sokol
Assistant Professor of Law
Sokol contributed a chapter entitled “International Antitrust Institutions” in Cooperation, Comity, and Competition Policy (Andrew T. Guzman, ed.) Oxford University Press, 2010).

Servicemembers Legal Defense Network attorneys lead a workshop Oct. 26. (Photo by Andres Farfan)

Attorneys from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network educated students on the intricacies of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” at a workshop Oct. 26.

The workshop focused on analyzing military laws and their effects on gay people, trans people, and those who are HIV positive by working through fact patterns involving typical issues handled by the SLDN.

SLDN Legal Director Aaron Tax reviewed the things that can trigger “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or DADT, which are a statements that one is gay, a gay action, or marriage or attempted marriage to someone of the same sex. He went on to discuss various defenses available to someone during a DADT hearing, including protected associational activities and the “queen for a day defense.”

“These defenses sometimes work no matter how bizarre they sound,” said Tax, noting that oftentimes the military wants an excuse to keep someone in service.

David McKean, SLDN Staff Attorney, noted that there is a discrepancy between the application of DADT on men and women in the military. As a practical manner, women have a lot more leeway in actions that “look gay,” but as a practical matter, women are disproportionately discharged for DADT reasons.

“The takeaway is that the DADT is completely arbitrary in its application,” McKean said. “Some people serve 20 years openly, and some never come out.”

SLDN is a national, non-profit legal service, watchdog and policy organization dedicated to ending discrimination against and harassment of military personnel affected by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and related forms of intolerance.

The American Constitution Society and OutLaw sponsored the event.

Tax symposium attendees applaud the various expert speakers. (Photo by Andres Farfan)

The University of Florida Levin College of Law’s Graduate Tax Program held its sixth annual International Tax Law Symposium on Oct. 29 at the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center at UF Law. The symposium featured presentations by distinguished members of the global tax community and commentary from UF Law Graduate Tax Professors Stephen J. Powell, Lawrence Lokken and Yariv Brauner.

“It was a very successful conference,” said Michael Friel, associate dean and director of the Graduate Tax Program at UF Law. “The speakers did an excellent job on cutting-edge topics in the world of international taxation.”

The symposium began with a presentation by economist Charles E. McLure Jr., senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In the lecture, which was titled “The GATT – Legality of Border Adjustments for Carbon Taxes and the Cost of Emissions Permits: a Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma,” McLure discussed the sometimes difficult topic of carbon taxes and how they are handled in developed countries like the United States and in less industrialized countries.

Next, University of Southern California Gould School of Law Professor Edward D. Kleinbard presented his lecture, “Stateless Income.” Kleinbard defined stateless income as being “income derived by a multinational group from business activities in a country other than the domicile (however defined) of the group’s ultimate parent company, but which is subject to tax only in a jurisdiction that is neither the source of the factors of production through which the income was derived, nor the domicile of the group’s parent company.”

The last presentation, “The Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base,” was given by Bertil Wiman, professor of international tax law at Uppsala University. Wiman discussed the international tax implications of a common corporate tax base in Europe.

Friel said the feedback on the symposium has been very positive and he is looking forward to doing it again next year.

For the first time, the symposium was streamed live via the Internet and people attended the conference via the webcast from several locations in the United States and a number of foreign countries, Friel said.

An archived version of the International Tax Law Symposium can be viewed from the UF Law homepage.