Faculty News

Faculty Activity

Professor John R. Bradley’s supplement to his book Mississippi Workers’ Compensation was published in July 2007 by Thomson West. The supplement both added to and updated the original 2006 publication of this extensive treatise. A book reviewer at 76 Mississippi Law Journal 1101-1108 (2007) wrote the following, praising the book’s value to lawyers: “Nothing else is necessary. More importantly, nothing else will do.” Of Bradley, the reviewer wrote, “Simply put, he is the guru of compensation law in Mississippi, the most prolific and respected author of the Act and its judicial construction over the past generation (his work is frequently cited by the appellate courts in Mississippi).”

Assistant Professor Mercer Bullard testified in July before a congressional committee for the eighth time in the past five years presenting testimony on the regulation of hedge fund managers. He discussed the related issue in appearances on CNBC and the “Nightly Business Report.” He continues to be one of the most quoted securities experts in the country, with more than 100 references in the national media in the last year alone. In March, he was featured on MarketWatch in “Holding Mutual Funds to the Fire: Investor Advocate Mercer Ballard on Independent Board and Greedy Brokers.” His article, “Dura, Loss Causation, and Mutual Funds: A Requiem for Private Claims,” was published in fall 2007 by Cincinnati Law Review. Bullard had presented the article at the University of Cincinnati conference “Twenty Years After Shearson/American Express” in March and presented his paper, “Monitoring, Systematic Risk and Investment Liability,” at George Mason University. He also moderated a panel on the effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act at a conference sponsored by the North American Association for Securities Administrators in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia also vacated an SEC rule that Bullard had challenged in an amicus brief submitted with the Consumer Federation of America in 2006. In April, Bullard made a presentation on investment adviser regulation before the CFA Society of Mississippi.

Thomas Clancy, research professor and director of the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, spoke at trial and appellate judicial colleges in Nevada, Wisconsin and Oxford on search and seizure and computer crime in spring 2007. He developed two new courses for trial judges and law enforcement on the search and seizure of digital evidence, which has become part of NCJRL’s permanent conference schedule. His proposed treatise designed to be a one-volume resource on search and seizure, The Fourth Amendment: Its History and Interpretation, was accepted for publication by Carolina Academic Press and will be in print in 2008. He also taught during summer 2007 at the University of Hawaii School of Law as a visiting professor.

Dean Samuel M. Davis, Jamie L. Whitten Chair of Law and Government, has a chapter in Law School Leadership Strategies, published recently by Aspatore Books. The chapter is titled “There and Back Again—A Dean’s Tale.” He was elected treasurer of the Fellows of the Young Lawyers. He continues to serve on the boards of Northeast Mississippi Rural Legal Services and the Mississippi Legal Services Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and is a member of the Professionalism Committee of the Mississippi Bar.

Joanne Gabrynowicz, research professor and director of the National Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law Center, was invited to speak in Beijing at the International Forum on Air and Space Law in June. It was the inaugural event for the newly founded Institute of Air and Space Law by the Faculty of International Law at the China University of Political Science and Law. She was asked to make three presentations: a welcoming address on behalf of the invited Western scholars; a presentation on aerospace law education at the UM School of Law; and U.S. federal remote sensing law. The center has begun processing and archiving its special space law collection. The collection consists of the original papers, correspondence and manuscripts of the late Andrew G. Haley, the nation’s first space law practitioner and author of the 1963 seminal space law text, Space Law and Governance. The center is working with Dr. Stephan Doyle, who, as a law student, served as Haley’s law clerk at the time the materials in the collection were generated.

Assistant Professor Christopher R. Green presented “Punishing Corporations: The Food-Chain Schizophrenia in Punitive Damages and Criminal Law” at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools meeting and has submitted it for publication. He is completing work on “Constitutional Indexicals as a Basis for Textualist Semi-Originalism,” “The Original Sense of the (Equal) Protection Clause” and “Punishing Corporations: An Evaluation of Arguments and Suggested Approach.” He will present “The Epistemic Parity of Testimony and Perception” to the Department of Philosophy in the spring and is preparing an invited essay on the epistemology of testimony for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Professor Karen Green, Mississippi Defense Lawyers Association Distinguished Lecturer, is serving as an adjunct professor in the LL.M. (taxation) program for the University of Alabama School of Law. She joins other tax law faculty from Emory University, Georgia State University, the University of Alabama and the University of Tennessee who are offering courses in the program by means of video conferencing and Web-based technologies. This fall, she taught Advanced Partnership Tax to attorneys at locations throughout Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi. Beginning in 2008, the program will be available for attorneys nationwide.

Visiting Professor Marc M. Harrold, senior counsel for the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, was invited to serve on the national SafeNowProject Task Force to offer expertise in the area of the Fourth Amendment and computer monitoring of Internet sex offenders on probation or parole. After an initial meeting in Denver, Colo., the task force has been working to advise legislators and to prepare a white paper related to the supervision of sex offenders who may use technology to exploit children. He recently gave presentations at the Lafayette County Police Academy, the Mississippi State Prosecutor’s Conference in Tunica and the Mississippi Law Enforcement Command College. He has continued to work on behalf of numerous refugees and victims of human trafficking in the Mid-South on matters related to trafficking, asylum, withholding of removal and relief under the Convention Against Torture. Harrold’s recent book, Borders of Faith, was published in July. He is a regular contributing columnist for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

Professor Michael Hoffheimer, Mississippi Defense Lawyers Association Distinguished Lecturer, spent the summer teaching Civil Procedure and Conflict of Laws. His questions have been used this year on another state’s bar exam, and his study of the necessity defense is pending publication in the Tulane Law Review. Hoffheimer’s scholarship has been cited by several courts this year, and his opinions quoted by syndicated journalists. He is currently collaborating with Professor Anne Quinney in the Department of Modern Languages on a translation of a manuscript by Alexandre Dumas (the author of The Three Musketeers).

Donald R. Mason, lecturer and associate director of the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, presented commentary on the challenges of applying substantive and procedural cybercrime law, including Fourth Amendment and statutory privacy protections, to Second Life and similar “virtual world” at the June 15 conference on virtual world at Columbia University sponsored by the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information and the Conference Board. On behalf of UM, the NCJRL and the School of Law, Mason presented congratulatory remarks July 31 in Jackson at the grand opening of the Mississippi Cyber Crime Fusion Center, considered to be a unique model of law-enforcement cooperation for the nation. He also gave the opening presentation and participated as a panelist for the Sept. 28 plenary on “Tensions on the Fourth Amendment: As Search and Seizure Collides with Advancing Technology” at the Missouri Bar/Missouri Judicial Conference in Springfield.

Professor Gary Myers continues to work on his new treatise on intellectual property, which will be completed by the end of the year and published in early 2008 by Thomson West. His two 2007 books, West casebooks on Intellectual Property and on the Intersection of Antitrust & Intellectual Property, are now in print and are being adopted at a number of law schools across the United States. In August, Myers gave a talk at the Intellectual Property Scholars’ Conference in Chicago. The conference is sponsored by the law schools at Stanford, Berkeley, Cardozo and DePaul. His topic was “Toward a Unified Theory of Intellectual Property Misuse.” Myers will be gave a talk at the University of Southern Mississippi this fall on “Copyright Issues in the Classroom.” Myers also taught in the law school’s summer program at Downing College, Cambridge, England. He continues to serve as a member of the American Law Institute.

Associate Professor Lisa Roy’s article “History, Transparency, and the Establishment Clause: A Proposal for Reform,” will appear in the winter 2007 issue of the Penn State Law Review. In October, Roy was a panelist for the ABA’s Aviation and Space Law Forum session on “Conflicts of Interest.” Her opinion editorial piece “Religions and Inclusion: The Impact of Signs” was featured in the National Law Journal in March. Roy continues to serve as a member of the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Law and Religion.

Ronald J. Rychlak, MDLA Professor and associate dean for academic affairs, was named to the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission earlier this year. Over the past few months, he spoke on “The Patriot Act and the Fourth Amendment” at the Mississippi Supreme Court’s CLE and at Chapman University. He also spoke at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools Conference on the DNA Fingerprinting Act. In June, he was a participant at an eight-day seminar sponsored by the George Mason Law and Economics Program on Politics and Economics. He also spoke on various topics at Vanderbilt University, Pepperdine University and the University of North Alabama. His recent publications include “The Silent Treatment: How Boston College Law School Went to War with the U.S. Military,” Crisis Magazine, June 2007, and “The International Criminal Court: An Obstacle to Peace?” First Things Online (w/J. Czarnetzky) May 14, 2007.

Assistant Professor Paul Secunda was named research fellow at the NYU Center for Labor and Employment Law. In this capacity, he will edit the book Retaliation and Whistleblowers: Proceedings of NYU 60th Annual Conference on Labor. He also submitted his new paper for publication in the Comparative Labor Law & Policy Review: “Towards the Viability of State-Based Legislation to Address Workplace Captive Audience Meetings in the United States.” His co-authored employment law treatise, Understanding Employment Law, came out from Lexis-Nexis in September. He also joined a United States Supreme Court amicus brief in the ERISA remedies case of LaRue v. DeWolff, Boberg. His co-edited blog, Workplace Prof Blog, was recently rated the fifth most popular law professor blog in a recent law review article.

Jacqueline E. Serrao, associate director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law, was selected as the aviation adviser to the United States Agency for International Development to provide legal advisory services to the United Nations Mission in Kosovo and the Ministry of Transport and Communication and to draft the Kosovo Civil Aviation Law. She was in Kosovo late August through early September 2007.