Maximizing the Recruitment of Scholarship-Hungry Law Faculty: A Modest Change to the FAR Form

Porcher Taylor

In 1992, law professor-to-be David W. Case attended the annual AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference (FRC), as an aspiring law professor, along with several hundred other law professor candidates. To his surprise, Case found himself unprepared to answer specific questions regarding his long term research and scholarship agenda. Case's self-described "debacle" at the FRC is in similar failure vein to law professor-to-be Jeffrey M. Lipshaw's 2005 and 2006 FRC screening interviews, because, as Associate Professor of Law Lipshaw noted in a law review article in 2008, he did not realize something crucial until hindsight set in: "Everything in that thirty minute interview, assuming it goes well, is about whether you show the predictors of being a productive scholar." Recognizing the critical need for law school recruitment teams to better assess in advance the scholarship agendas of entry-level candidates registered with the AALS Faculty Appointments Register (FAR) and of candidates who receive on-campus interviews, this Article innovatively explores how a modest change to the FAR form might facilitate and transform the recruitment of scholarship-hungry tenure-track faculty.

Beyond Chemicals: The Lessons that Toxic Substance Regulatory Reform Can Learn from Nanotechnology

Scott Bomkamp

Nanotechnology is a revolution in materials science. By manipulating molecules on the scale of billionths-of-a-meter, scientists have created materials that exhibit incredible feats of conductivity, reactivity, and optical sensitivity. By 2015, nanotechnology is projected to be a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. But despite this promise, regulation will be necessary because nanotechnology presents novel, serious, and possibly irreversible threats to human health and the environment. A key point for nanotechnology regulation is the point of manufacture. The current point-of-manufacture statute for chemicals in the United States is The Toxic Substances Control Act ("TSCA"). TSCA has long been recognized as an underperformer among United States environmental laws because it fails to adequately protect human health and the environment. Presently, legislators are looking to a recently-enacted European directive known as REACH for ideas to improve TSCA. However, both REACH and TSCA have serious gaps with regard to nanotechnology. This article discusses how a third-generation chemical substances statute can fill these gaps and maximize nanotechnology's economic benefit.

Rethinking Sports Wagering

Michael C. Macchiarola

Against the backdrop of shrinking tax revenues and growing budget deficits, Rethinking Sports Wagering highlights our nation's arbitrary and confusing patchwork manner of regulating sports wagering and attempts to begin the dialogue toward a more rational and efficient approach.

The Article hopes to stimulate debate beyond the reflexive moral posturing that has habitually shunned gambling for the last two centuries. Instead, the Article asserts that it is time to give serious consideration to regulating certain styles of sports wager under the nation's robust federal securities law regime. Structured correctly, such a system could benefit the investing public, the issuing institutions and the various sports leagues. At the same time, it might harmonize the arbitrary and disparate treatment of sports wagering within the different sates and fill the coffers of the federal and state governments.

A Response to Professor Camp: The Importance of Oversight

Leslie Book

In this brief Response to Professor Bryan T. Camp's Article The Problem of Adversarial Process in the Administrative State, Professor Book situates IRS collection determinations within the broader landscape of administrative law, highlights the principles that administrative law scholars have emphasized in identifying fair agency practice, and applies those principles to the collection context. Professor Book concludes that Professor Camp rightfully highlights some of the problems with Collection Due Process (CDP), but misses its benefits, and thus fails in prescribing the repeal of CDP. Professor Book acknowledges, however, that Professor Camp's article is a significant achievement for those considering tax collection. Its targeting of CDP's shortfalls highlights some of the problems of the legislative process and allows us to consider how Congress and the IRS can improve collection rights without sacrificing essential efficiency concerns associated with collecting taxes.

The Unabomber Revisited: Reexamining the Use of Mental Disorder Diagnoses as Evidence of the Mental Condition of Criminal Defendants

Adam K. Magid

This Article revisits a longstanding debate concerning the appropriateness of diagnostic evidence in criminal cases in which a defendant's mental condition is at issue. As illustrated through a case study of Theodore Kaczynski, more widely known as the "Unabomber," a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia poses a risk of confounding a judge or jury attempting to ascertain an accurate picture of the mental state of a criminal defendant, specifically by (i) suggesting symptoms not actually present, (ii) creating a distorted picture of symptoms that are present, and (iii) suggesting organic, determinative factors as the mechanism behind a defendant's actions, even where deliberate choice is a more convincing explanation. The misleading nature of such a diagnosis, moreover, can lead to legal outcomes inconsistent with the theoretical goals of the criminal law, at least with respect to the insanity defense and the death penalty. This Article does not necessarily call for the complete abolition of the use of diagnostic evidence in criminal proceedings; instead, it highlights some of the perils associated with such evidence so that, at minimum, courts can employ an appropriate level of thoughtful caution when faced with such evidence in the future.

The Uses and Abuses of Religion in Child Custody Cases: Parents Outside the "Wall of Separation"

Josh Press

Religious custody disputes such as those at the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints compound in April, 2008 are very complex and are finding their way into courts with increasing regularity. This Essay argues that in responding to these religious custody disputes, courts should abstain from either analyzing a parent's religious practices for their perceived "risks of harm" to the child, or from applying a flat rule to ensure that the custodial parent's religious preferences take primacy. Instead, courts should employ the actual or substantial harm standard—which would only bar a parent from fully practicing her religion if it would cause physical or psychological harm to the child—to such situations. Like the other custody approaches, this standard exists for the secular purpose of preventing harm to the children's physical and emotional well-being. Unlike the other two approaches, however, the actual or substantial harm standard only incidentally affects parents' free exercise rights. In this way, the actual or substantial harm approach provides courts with a way of avoiding any constitutional violations of the Religion Clauses, and will almost always allow the parents to practice their different faiths.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down? Removing the Privacy Law Obstacles to Healthcare Reform in the National Healthcare Crisis

John W. Hill, Arlen W. Langvardt & Jonathan E. Rinehart

Issues of healthcare availability and quality are among the most profound facing our nation. If a high-quality, accessible healthcare system of a truly national nature is to be devised, electronic connectivity—including increased use of electronic medical records and similar technological advances—must be a key feature. Yet such connectivity may give rise to patients' concerns regarding the privacy of their medical information. Because such concerns demand respect, a challenge lies in balancing patients' privacy interests against the important information-sharing interests underlying a national healthcare network. The Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPPAA) is a key federal law that addresses many privacy issues regarding patients' medical information, but HIPAA does not preempt state laws that furnish greater privacy protection than HIPAA provides. Accordingly, there exists a patchwork quilt of differing privacy protection provisions. This Article explores the issues just outlined and stresses the importance of a stronger federal role in standardizing medical information privacy rules, so that the current patchwork quilt of privacy regulations does not impede the development of a national healthcare network.