Faculty Activities & Accolades

Lackland Bloom served as a panelist at a webinar sponsored by the SMU Center for Presidential History titled “President Trump and the Current Constitutional Crisis” on January 15th.

Lolita Buckner Inniss presented her chapter titled “The Lucky Law Professor and the Eucatastrophic Moment,” from the book Presumed Incompetent II on January 6th at the AALS Annual meeting. The session garnered one of the highest attendance levels at the conference. She also presented her work in progress titled Toward a Principled Ethical Egoism: Unpaid Caretaking and Black Women Legal Academics at the Symposium on the COVID Care Crisis and its Implications for Legal Academia on January 14th at the Indiana University Bloomington Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. Professor Inniss was featured in the January 12th Princeton Alumni Weekly along with several other Princeton alumni around the country (including Dallas mayor Eric Johnson) who wrote or spoke in various political fora and media outlets about the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath. The journal, the most frequently published college alumni magazine in the world, has a circulation of 65,000. Professor Inniss was also recently named treasurer of the AALS Women in Legal Education Section.

Dale Carpenter was interviewed live by Spectrum News on January 6th, 7th, and 13th regarding the impeachment of President Donald Trump and the 25th Amendment. Parts of the interview on impeachment ran on the local CBS affiliate several times on January 14th. Professor Carpenter’s live interview on the local CBS Evening News can be viewed here. On January 15th, he spoke on a panel regarding the legal and political significance of the attack on the Capitol. The panel was hosted by the SMU Center for Presidential History. His op-ed, “No, the Constitution does not allow President Trump to pardon himself,” appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday January 17th. On January 20th, he was interviewed regarding presidential pardons on a national NBC live-streaming program geared toward Millennials and Gen Z. On Jan. 25th, He was interviewed regarding impeachment on "Capital Tonight," a Spectrum News program.

James Coleman appeared live on January 19th on Radio 630 CHED “Afternoons with J'lyn Nye” on the topic “What legal recourse could Canada and Alberta’s governments seek in fighting Biden’s proposed cancellation of Keystone XL?.  He also appeared on CBC Calgary News on January 18th discussing the Keystone XL Pipeline in a Joe Biden presidency (starts at 4:02).  Professor Coleman published a short piece with the C.D. Howe Institute on December 8, 2020, co-authored with Kristen Van De Biezenbos: Yes He Can: Joe Biden’s Power to Stop Pipelines.  He presented his draft titled Environmental Matching Commitments to the University of Maryland’s “Online Workshop for Environmental Scholarship” in November 2020.  He also published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle on October 30, 2020: Texas Railroad Commission should reinstate production limits. 

Professor Coleman was also quoted in the following 14 articles:  1) With U.S. vote, another white-knuckle moment for Keystone XL, by Chris Varcoe, Calgary Herald, October 31, 2020;  2) How a Biden victory could shake up Alberta's oil and gas sector, by Tony Seskus, CBC, November 2, 2020;  3) Canada's oilpatch finds fresh hope for Keystone XL despite Biden victory, by Geoffrey Morgan, Financial Post, November 10, 2020;  4) TC Energy keeps pressing on Keystone XL with 'historic' agreement with First Nations, by Chris Varcoe, Calgary Herald, November 18, 2020;  5) Energy industry braces for Biden-era court clashes, by Niina Farah, E&E News, November 30, 2020;  6) 2021 legal fights will test Biden energy agenda, by Niina Farah, E&E News, January 15, 2021;  7) Biden indicates plans to cancel Keystone XL pipeline permit on 1st day in office, sources confirm, by Kyle Bakx, CBC, January 17th;  8) Why Kenney is having a rougher ride than Trudeau with his pipeline purchase, by Kyle Bakx, CBC, January 19th;  9) Biden Blocking Keystone Threatens to End Era of Mega Pipelines, by Gerson Freitas Jr., Rachel Heard, & Ellen Gilmer, Bloomberg Law, January 20th;  10) Canada mounts final plea for Keystone XL, as prospects dim for Alberta's investment, by Chris Varcoe, Calgary Herald, January 20th;  11) Baltimore Seeking Millions for Damage Allegedly Caused by Climate Change, by Kevin Daley, Washington Free Beacon, January 20th;  12) Biden Move to Nix Keystone XL Puts Other Pipelines in Bull’s-Eye, by Ellen Gilmer, Bloomberg Law, January 22nd;  13) Dakota Access Pipeline to remain open as environmental impact review continues, court rules, by Jordan Blum and Laura Huchzermeyer, S&P Global Platts, January 26th;  14) Biden Holds Key to Dakota Access Pipeline Fate After Ruling (1), by Ellen Gilmer, Bloomberg Law, January 27th. 

Nathan Cortez joined a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-funded project in 2020 with the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry and the NIH BRAIN Neuroethics Program at Harvard Medical School titled "The Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Return of Results in Deep Phenotyping Research."  The project examines the use of big data to diagnose and treat mental and psychiatric disorders.  He was also named to the Advisory Board of DIME (Disruptive Innovation in Medical Ethics), which was awarded a major grant by the European Research Council.  The DIME project was inspired by Professor Cortez's article, Regulating Disruptive Innovation.  He is also a Co-Applicant on the project “Just Coverage Decisions: Including Legal Analysis into the Assessment of Health Technologies” (2019-23), funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR).  And he is part of a grant finalist team, “Surgery of the Future,” led by surgeons from the University of Toronto, evaluating the use of big data analytics to improve surgical outcomes.  He is co-lead of the legal and ethical working group.  Professor Cortez and Matthew Herder of Dalhousie University contributed a chapter titled "DESI for Devices? Can an Experiment in Pharmaceutical Regulation from the 1960s Improve the FDA's Oversight of Medical Devices?," for the book The Future of Medical Device Regulation: Innovation and Protection, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and developed as part of the annual health law conference at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School.  He was also asked to contribute a blog post to a Balkanization symposium on Helen Norton's new book, The Government's Speech and the Constitution.  His contribution is titled "What To Do About Government Lies?"  In 2020 he also contributed to the Telehealth Foundations Course by Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston with a module on "Legal Considerations in Telehealth," led by several Harvard Medical School faculty.  In August 2020 he was invited to be a senior commenter at the "Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable" hosted by Yale Law School.  In September 2020 he joined the St. Louis University Health Law Scholars Workshop as a senior commenter for the third time.  In October 2020 he presented "What COVID-19 Testing Can (And Can't) Tell Us" at Gonzaga Law School, and presented his work-in-progress, The Artifices of Corporate Speech, at Harvard Law School with his co-author Bill Sage of the University of Texas.  His research and commentary also appeared in The Regulatory Review by the Penn Program on Regulation, the Houston Chronicle, the Austin-American Statesman, The Athletic, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and several local media outlets.

Chris Jenks’ op-ed, “Why pretend senators can ‘do impartial justice’?” was published in The Hill on January 20th.  His op-ed, “What impeachment article really accuses Trump of doing on Jan. 6 – and why,” (co-authored Geoffrey Corn) was published in the Houston Chronicle on January 21st.  The article outlines the precise charges against President Trump that may make it easier to convict if the U.S. Senate pursues a trial.

Jeff Kahn participated in a flash class on January 14th with Professors Pam Metzger and Tom Leatherbury entitled “January 6, 2021: Looking Back and Looking Forward.”

Tom Mayo served on a panel, “Updated Mass Critical Care Guidelines for Hospital & ICU Triage: A Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” at Parkland Health & Hospital System on December 17, 2020.

Orly Mazur published a book review in The Journal of the American Taxation Association: Book Review, 42 J. American Taxation Association 159 (2020) (peer reviewed) on Xavier Oberson’s book, Taxing Robots.  She also published Closing the Digital Divide in State Taxation: A Consumption Tax Agenda, in 98 Tax Notes State 961 (November 2020) (with Adam Thimmesch).

Anna Offit accepted invitations to speak on two AALS Annual Meeting panels, “Defining Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century” and “Re-presenting Qualitative Scholarship.”  She will also be featured in an upcoming ABA Journal article, "Judges differ on when it’s safe to hold in-person jury trials."

Carla Reyes accepted an offer of publication from the Washington Law Review for her article Autonomous Corporate Personhood. Professor Reyes was elected to the position of Chair-Elect of the AALS Section on Agency, Partnership, and Unincorporated Associations. She participated in meetings of the Wyoming State Legislative working group on digital identity on January 4th and January 18th.  She was also appointed to and contributed to the first meetings of two subgroups for the UNIDROIT Working Group on Best Practices for Effective Enforcement on January 11th and January 14th, and to the first meetings of subgroups of the UNIDROIT Working Group on Private Law and Digital Assets on January 18th and January 20th.  On January 21st, She presented her work-in-progress Creating a Crypto-Legal Structure: Smart-Contract Based UCC-1 Filings to Stanford’s CodeX Roundtable.  On January 26th, She conducted a “fireside chat” with SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce regarding developments in securities regulations and blockchain-based financial assets at the 2021 Stanford Blockchain Law and Policy Summit.  From January 15-17, Professor Reyes coached SMU 3L Floy Gaidarski in Baylor Law’s “The Closer” – an elite, invite-only national transactional law competition, considered the national championship of transactional law competitions.  Floy was the top negotiator for the seller in the transaction, and was named winner of the seller’s side of the competition.

Mary Spector’s book chapter, “Austerity and Access to Justice: Exploring the Role of Clinical Legal Education in Cambridge” (Jodi Garner coauthor), was published in Innovation and the Transformation of Consumer Law (Dan Wei, James P. Nehf, Claudia Lima Marques, eds., 2020).  She was interviewed live on January 6th on FOX 4News Good Day about the clinic’s COVID-19 Legal Helpline.

Marc Steinberg’s Release #62 to his two volume treatise Securities Regulation: Liabilities and Remedies (Law Journal Press) was published. The treatise was first published in 1984 and is updated once or twice on an annual basis.

Jenia Turner’s book chapter, “Fair Trial or Efficient Administration of Justice? Trends in Modern Criminal Procedure,” in The Future of Criminal Law (Elisa Hoven & Michael Kubiciel eds. 2020), is now in print.  On December 11, 2020, Professor Turner was a keynote speaker on “Managing Digital Evidence in Criminal Cases in the United States” at the DEVICES Conference on Digital Forensic Evidence at the University of Bologna, Italy (online).  She also served as a discussant of Carissa Hessick et al., “The Prosecutor Lobby” at the Duke Empirical Criminal Law Roundtable, December 3, 2020 (online).  This past fall, she also joined the editorial board of the Criminal Law Forum, and she served as a peer reviewer for Law and Human Behavior, American Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of International Criminal Justice, and Brazilian Journal on Criminal Procedure. Her article, Transparency in Plea Bargaining, 96 Notre Dame L. Rev. 973 (2021), has been selected by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ “Getting Scholarship Into the Courtroom Project” to be featured in The Champion Magazine as a "must read" article.

Jessica Weaver was interviewed on KERA on January 28th discussing the bar complaints against Senator Ted Cruz and the standards of professional responsibility. Professor Weaver's book, Family Law Simulations: Bridge to Practice, was digitally released on January 25th for advanced review and printed copy orders.