Blair’s paper, co-authored with Christine Durrance, “Restrains on Quality Competition,” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Competition Law and Economics.

Jonathan R. Cohen
Professor of Law

On April 5, Cohen spoke on two panels at the American Bar Association Section on Dispute Resolution’s Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Bob Dekle
Director, Criminal Prosecution Clinic; Assistant Director, Criminal Justice Center; Master Lecturer

“Linguist: Accused shooter didn’t really mean man ‘begged’ to be shot” (April 2, 2013, The Daytona Beach News-Journal)

In the case of Paul Miller shooting his neighbor about an argument revolving around barking dogs, a linguist stated that statements from Miller, who is from the mountains of Tennessee, could be misconstrued because of dialect and colloquialisms.

From the article:
University of Florida Law Professor George Dekle said some defense attorneys don’t go that route in part because the burden of proof at such a hearing is on the accused while at a trial the burden of proof is on the prosecution.

“Why assume a burden of proof and tip your hand on what your defense is going to be, give the prosecution an opportunity to prepare for it at trial?” Dekle said.

Larry A. DiMatteo
Huber Hurst Professor of Contract Law & Legal Studies; Warrington College of Business Administration; Affiliated Professor, Levin College of Law

On April 10, DiMatteo was among several announced winners of the 2013 SEC Faculty Achievement Awards. The award recognizes professors from the 14 SEC-member universities who have praiseworthy records in teaching and scholarship and who serve as role models.

Alyson Flournoy
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and UFRF Professor and Alumni Research Scholar

Flournoy was selected by the Center for Law, Environment, Adaptation and Resources (CLEAR) at UNC-Chapel Hill as its highlighted “Scholar of the Week” for the week of Feb. 18.

William Hamilton
Adjunct Professor; Executive Director of ICAIR and the E-Discovery Project

Six Big E-Discovery Blunders (April 8, 2013, Law.com)

This article, written by Hamilton, discusses the recent e-discovery conference at UF Law, and the six biggest mistakes when using e-discovery and how to banish them for good.

From the article:

Our Florida conference also busted traditional conference boundaries. We had 82 in-person registrants, and 150 participants live online (that number, however, includes organizations that aired the program in conference rooms, so the “body count” for online attendees is actually higher). We streamed the entire conference live, and online attendees could ask questions of panelists via email. Most panels became engaged debates. The conference also was recorded, users who sign up for the recorded version can download all tools and resources. (Registration: www. law.ufl.edu/academics/ediscoveryconference. Fee: $99.)

Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol
Levin Mabie & Levin Professor of Law

Hernández-Truyol was appointed to the board of Southern Legal Counsel in Gainesville.

Robert H. Jerry II
Dean and Levin Mabie & Levin Professor of Law

 Dean Jerry’s essay, “Leadership and Followership” was part of the Leadership in Legal Education Symposium XII and was published in the Toledo Law Review. The cite is 44 Toledo L. Rev. 345 (2013). “Leadership and Followership,” (Toledo Law Review).

Lea Johnston
Associate Professor of Law and Assistant Director, Criminal Justice Center

Johnston presented her work-in-progress, “Resentencing Prisoners with Serious Mental Illnesses,” at the Finality in Sentencing Symposium at Wake Forest School of Law on April 5.

Lyrissa Lidsky
Professor of Law; Stephen C. O’Connell Chair 

“Fiddler’s Creek suits become latest in libel, slander cases involving bloggers” (April 8, 2013, Naples Daily News)

Bloggers and Internet critics are increasingly becoming the target of slander and libel lawsuits after posting bad reviews or negative comments. An example of this is a 14-year resident of a Naples residential community.

From the article:
Consumers are increasingly turning to online reviews before purchasing products or services, prompting businesses to take negative reviews seriously, said Lyrissa Lidsky, a University of Florida Levin School of Law professor.

“Suing one’s critics, however, is a risky strategy,” said Lidsky, who specializes in defamation, First Amendment law and Internet speech. “It may be bringing more attention to the negative publicity and may even produce a backlash if it appears to be a frivolous lawsuit designed to intimidate one’s critics into silence.”

Martin J. McMahon Jr.
Stephen C. O’Connell Professor of Law

“Silicon Valley’s Mouthwatering Tax Break” (April 7, 2013, The Wall Street Journal)

Many Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook provide free lunches for their employees, which is causing some controversy among tax experts – some say these perks should be taxed.

From the article:
“I clearly think it ought to be taxable income,” said Martin J. McMahon, Jr., a tax-law professor at the University of Florida, who argues that in most cases the meals are really part of a compensation package.

“I buy my lunch with after-tax dollars,” said Mr. McMahon, the University of Florida professor. “And I have to pay taxes to support free meals for those Google employees.”

“Google, Facebook Workers Could Owe Taxes On Their Free Lunches” (April 8, 2013, The Huffington Post)

This article also looks at the debate over whether free lunches for employees should be a taxable fringe benefit.

From the article:
According to Professor McMahon, companies like Facebook and Google report these meals as tax-free fringe benefits, when they should be considered taxable fringe benefits. The cost of these meals, McMahon explains, should be considered a part of the employee’s salary. “Let’s say that an employee gets $2,000 in free meals and makes $50,000 a year. The company should report to the IRS that it paid the employee $52,000 in compensation on which the employee would be taxed,” McMahon says.

As Professor McMahon explained to us: “A company cannot provide tax-free meals if workers commute from home and have the ability to bring their lunches with them.”

McMahon’s paper, co-authored by Ira Shepard and Daniel Simmons, “Recent Developments in Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2012,” was published in Florida Tax Review. The cite is 13 Florida Tax Review 503-721 (2013). “Recent Developments in Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2012,” (Florida Tax Review).

On March 22, McMahon participated in a panel discussion and presented a paper about “Aspirational Tax Reform” at the 2013 University of Virginia School of Law Tax Study Group Meeting.

Winston Nagan
Samuel T. Dell Research Scholar Professor of Law 

Nagan’s article, co-authored with Joshua Root, “The Emerging Restrictions on Sovereign Immunity: Peremptory Norms of International Law, the U.N. Charter, and the Application of Modern Communications Theory,” was published in the North Carolina Journal of International Law & Commercial Regulation. The cite is 38 N. C. J. of Int’l L. & Commercial Reg. 375 (2013). “The Emerging Restrictions on Sovereign Immunity: Peremptory Norms of International Law, the U.N. Charter, and the Application of Modern Communications Theory,” (North Carolina Journal of International Law & Commercial Regulation).

Nagan also recently published “Eruditio, Issue 2, Part 1,” which is the E-Journal of the World Academy of Art & Science for which Nagan serves as editor-in-chief.

Kenneth Nunn
Professor of Law; Associate Director, Center on Children and Families; Assistant Director, Criminal Justice Center 

“Body image forum promotes open discussion” (April 2, 2013, The Gainesville Sun)

Students gathered at the Institute of Black Culture Tuesday night to discuss body issues and race issues, and how those two often go hand-in-hand.

From the article:
Nunn, a UF law professor, said he spoke at the forum because students are his No. 1 priority.

“I want to make sure the next generation of scholars we need in this country and community are well-prepared,” he said in an interview.

Nunn spent a lot of his presentation discussing relationships and family structure.

“It’s really healthy for the African-American community both inside and outside of the community to encourage healthy relationships,” he said.

Meshon Rawls
Master Legal Skills Professor

Rawls played a leadership role in the Law and Justice Conference, held at UF Law on Feb. 27. About 85 high school students attended, and WCJB-20 covered the event.

Danny Sokol
Assistant Professor of Law

Sokol was named chairman of the Hispanic National Bar Association’s new Law Professor Committee.

Professor Michael W. Lewis, Ohio Northern University professor and graduate from U.S. Navy Top Gun flight school, talks about the legality of target killings carried out by drone strikes at the Federalist Society’s “The Constitutionality of Drone Strikes and Targeted Killings” lecture at UF Law on Feb. 13. (Photo by Haley Stracher)

By Jenna Box
Student writer

From pulling the trigger on the battlefield to pushing a button behind a computer screen, the development of drone use is a fiery subject.

The topic sparked discussion among UF Law scholars of the Federalist Society Feb. 13 in Room 285C.

The talk was led by veteran and professor Michael W. Lewis of Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law and commented on by Winston Nagan, UF Law’s Samuel T. Dell Research Scholar Professor of Law.

Lewis addressed common preconceived notions about drones and discussed how international law regulates the scope of where and when they are allowed to be used.

“The one misconception that I hear repeated again and again and again is the sort of PlayStation mentality that drones supposedly provide: You’re just playing a video game, you are killing people from 8,000 miles away, and you’re not at risk. It makes war easy,” Lewis said.

In fact, drone operators suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder like their counterparts on the battlefield, he said.

Although a Special Forces soldier may kill someone up close and personal, he said, the soldier doesn’t know the person he is killing. For days, the drone operator follows a target and sees him come home and kiss his wife, play soccer with his son and interact with his daughter.

“Four days later you follow him up a road and you hit him with a missile. Then you go and look and make sure that he’s dead,” he said. “You get to see what you did in great detail, and that is very much like killing your neighbor. You know this person now.”

While they may not ease the psychological consequences of war, drones are more cost effective than manned aircraft and keep operators physically safer than those on the battlefield, Lewis said.

The question of whether American citizens living abroad could be targeted by a drone strike was addressed by Lewis via explanation of war boundaries.

In a war on terrorism, participants of the armed conflict are often on the land of a nation uninvolved in the fight. America is at war with al-Qaeda, not with a specific country.

Under the boundaries of this category — called a non-international armed conflict — any state outside of the two conflicting territories is considered neutral and is not permitted to allow conflict on their soil.

However, al-Qaeda isn’t a nation, so geographic boundaries for drone strikes are hazy.

Recently, NBC news released a “Department of Justice White Paper” that states under the following three conditions it is legal to use lethal force against a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda (or an associated group) who is a U.S. citizen abroad: if an “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government” decides the person targeted presents an “imminent threat” of attack on the U.S., capture of the target is not possible and the operation would follow “applicable law of war principles.”

“The asymmetrical element in terroristic operations is that it has the quality of lethality as well as the element of complete unpredictability,” wrote the commentator, Nagan, in an email after the talk.

“[The Bush Administration] considered a degree of responsibility attributable to states that were in bed with terrorists,” he said.

Nagan agrees that when a nation supports terrorism, it is abusing its sovereignty.

He added that the use of drones “depends on the ability of final decision makers to make the case that it is a reasonable use of power for defending the vital interests of the United States.”

Lewis flew F-14 Tomcats for the U.S. Navy and is a 1992 graduate of the Navy’s Top Gun flight school. After his military service, he earned a juris doctorate from Harvard Law School, cum laude. He has published more than a dozen articles and essays on the law of war and the conflict between the U.S. and al-Qaeda.  He has testified before Congress on the legality of drone strikes and civil liberties trade-offs associated with trying terror suspects before military tribunals, and has appeared on public radio.

Nagan is the founding director of the Institute of Human Rights and Peace Development, and he has served as board chairman of Amnesty International USA.

Nagan received his doctorate of juridical science from Yale Law School and has taught courses including: International Human Rights, Legal Theory, International Law, International Courts, and Human Rights of Indigenous People. He currently teaches a course in National Security Law.

Alyson Flournoy
Professor of Law,
Director, Environmental & Land Use Law Program
Flournoy coordinated and served as editor for a report that was released recently on regulatory failures in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and how to avoid future catastrophes. The report – “Regulatory Blowout: How Regulatory Failures Made the BP Disaster Possible and How the System Can Be Fixed to Avoid a Recurrence” – was written under the auspices of the Center for Progressive Reform and can be found here.

“Study shows BP oil spill could have been prevented by regulation” (Sept. 30, 2010, Inhabitat.com)

The oil spill regulations report coordinated and edited by Flournoy was used as the basis for this article, which presents some of the report’s findings.

From the article:
“‘BP is responsible for this disaster, without question,’ said study co-author Alyson Flournoy, CPR Member Scholar and law professor at the University of Florida. ‘But the Minerals Management Service’s permissive approach to its regulatory responsibilities together with inadequate legislative mandates for safety and environmental protection, and Congress’s inadequate funding of MMS created an environment that allowed BP to take shortcuts with safety, with disastrous results.’”

“Greater oversight from feds needed to avoid another BP oil spill” (October 4, 2010, The Examiner)

Flournoy was interviewed about the CPR study that was released last week about the ideas presented in the study.

An excerpt from the interview:
“So, to another point cited in the report, why in the world is the big business of oil so cozy with those who regulate the industry? And while CPR is calling for changes now, why didn’t they occur sooner?”
“Flournoy laughed heartily. It seemed so obvious, and yet she said ‘the sad fact is when you read the current statute that governs drilling for oil and gas — our public natural resources — there is very, very little attention to health, safety or environmental protection …And over time that helped to create an environment with a weak agency with little or inadequate funding and lack of a mandate to protect the public, and the environment became a captive of industry and dependent on industry. So now, it is abundantly and sadly, tragically obvious that we need this kind of independence.’”

Fletcher N. Baldwin, Jr.
Emeritus Professor
Baldwin is currently on a three-week lecture series on the subject of international financial crimes and money laundering at Beijing University and the University of Shanghai.

Nancy Dowd
David H. Levin Chair in Family Law and Director, Center on Children & Families
Dowd just received reprints for her recently published article, “The “F” Factor: Fineman as Method and Substance” for a colloquim celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, 59 Emory Law Journal 1191 (2010).

Shani King
Associate Professor
King presented “The Ethics of Representing Children” with adjunct professor Gabriela Ruiz to the Children’s Legal Services Grantees Conference, a statewide conference of children’s legal services advocates. The intent was to explore some of the complex ethical issues that arise in the legal representation of children.

Lyrissa Lidsky
Stephen C. O’Connell Chair
“Deltona ‘gigolo’ says his online ads are legal” (Oct. 4, 2010, Daytona Beach News-Journal)

Lidsky commented on an article about online ads on websites like Craigslist.org and Backpage.org where escort services are advertised. Although Craigslist.org has banned the ads, Backpage.com has not; and they are not screening the ads.

From the article:
“Lyrissa Lidsky, a professor of law at the University of Florida, said commercial speech proposing a transaction gets less protection than other types of speech.”
“‘(An ad) has to be lawful. It has to propose a lawful transaction,’ she said. ‘It seems to me if these are transparently ads for illegal activities, then the First Amendment protection is not there.’”
“The question of what liability media outlets incur when publishing ads suggestive of illegal behavior remains open, Lidsky said, pointing to two pre-Internet cases involving the magazine Soldier of Fortune. In the 1980s, the magazine published classified ads for mercenaries that led to two cases that resulted in murders.”

Joseph Little
Emeritus ProfessorLaw shields Volusia from beach-driving suits” (Oct. 3, 2010, The Daytona Beach News-Journal)

Little comments in this article that examines cases where pedestrians have been hit or killed by cars driving on the beach in Volusia County, and why there have been few cases of the county facing lawsuits because of it. One main reason is the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which in Florida, extends to planning-level decisions, but not operational-level actions.

From the article:
“‘Whether or not to put up a traffic light at a particular intersection is a planning-level decision,’ explained Joseph Little, emeritus professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. ‘Once you put it up and, say, the light burns out, and the city fails to replace the light … and a crash occurs, that would be operational.’”
“Ironically, Little pointed out, those signs [the county has recently put on the beach] could actually make the county liable.”
“‘If you put up a sign that people begin to rely upon, and someone knocks it down, and the county doesn’t put it back up again in a reasonable amount of time … there could be certain risks,’ he said.”

Jon Mills
Dean Emeritus Director, Center for Governmental Responsibility Rutgers University case highlights how advancing technology can easily be misused” (Oct. 4, 2010, Orlando Sentinel)

Mills commented on privacy in the digital age in an article that looks at technology and the law in relation to the case of the Rutgers University student who committed suicide.

From the article:
“‘The core problem is the technology has gotten so far ahead of our culture that we don’t realize collectively the impact,’ said Jon Mills, a law professor at the University of Florida, and nationally known expert on privacy. ‘It’s so easy to intrude … that intrusions are going to happen. We have to both realize that and we have to learn to punish too.’”
“Mills and prosecutors weren’t aware of any proposals to toughen the law in Florida.”

Winston Nagan
Samuel T. Dell Research Scholar Professor of Law Founding Director, Institute for Human Rights and Peace DevelopmentMarco Rubio’s Tea Party: A blank check” (Oct. 6, 2010, The Gainesville Sun)

Nagan contributed an op-ed article where he criticized Republican senatorial candidate Marco Rubio’s seeming lack of fresh ideas or willingness to express his position on issues. Nagan also criticized the Tea Party movement, citing racist motivations and misguided ideas about governance.

From the article:
“In the hope of finding something fresh in Rubio’s ideas, alas, I listened as he recited some old hackneyed phrases from the GOP headquarters in Washington. He was incredibly disappointing. So I wonder what it is that has energized the Tea Party community in their ardent support of him. I take three of the points he has made and try to show that candidate Rubio has almost no sense of what’s going on.”

Gabriela Ruiz
Adjunct Professor
Ruiz presented “The Ethics of Representing Children” with Professor Shani King to the Children’s Legal Services Grantees Conference, a statewide conference of children’s legal services advocates. The intent was to explore some of the complex ethical issues that arise in the legal representation of children.

Michael Seigel
Professor“Lawmakers seek to close corruption loophole” (Oct. 1, 2010, Security Management)

Seigel’s testimony during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in Skilling v. United States was referenced in an article examining the case. The hearing was to discuss legislation regarding honest services mail and wire fraud.

From the article:
“Michael L. Seigel, University of Florida Research Foundation Professor of Law, agreed with Breuer, but also noted that Congress should make the new law specific in establishing what conduct would be illegal. Such precise language is necessary, said Seigel, to prevent erroneous interpretation.”

Michael Siebecker
Associate Professor
Recently presented “Corporate Social Responsibility and a New Discourse Theory of the Firm” at the EABIS 9th Annual Colloquium on Corporate Responsibility and Emerging Markets at St. Petersburg State University Graduate School of Management (Russia).

He also presented “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law: An Alternative Career Path for Lawyers” for the Corporate and Securities Litigation Group and Association of Law & Business at the Levin College of Law.

• Presented “How to Get What You Want: Embracing the Art of Negotiation in Your Personal and Professional Life,” at the American Bar Association Midyear Meeting, Orlando, Fla., Feb. 5.