West Virginia University College of Law

The United States District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia at Wheeling and the judges in the First and Second Judicial Circuits of West Virginia, have sponsored the Judicial Scholars Program since it’s inception in 1999. The program is for juniors and seniors selected by their respective high schools in the immediate area. The event occurs every two years and consists of 5 sessions which cover the following topics: Careers in Law and Law Enforcement; The West Virginia University College of Law and the Forensic Science Program; the State Court system; a mock grand jury and jury trial; and a “graduation” ceremony for the students. At the College of Law students will attend a class conducted by Prof. Hollee Temple and will learn about applying to law school from Asst. Dean of Admissions and Student Affairs, Janet Armistead. This year we have 53 students participating from 7 area high schools including Bishop Donahue High School, Brooke High School, Wheeling Central Catholic High School, John Marshal High School, The Linsly School, Weir High School, and Wheeling Park High School.

Dean Joyce E. McConnell and Prof. Hollee Temple meet
with students from the Judicial Scholars Program

William & Mary Law School to host families, fundamentalism, & the First Amendment symposium

(Williamsburg, VA) – The Institute of Bill of Rights Law at William & Mary Law School will bring together scholars with expertise in the First Amendment; family and juvenile law; and law, religion, and culture at a conference, Nov. 6 from 9:00 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. in room 124, William & Mary Law School. Registration is free and all are welcome.

The symposium will explore ways in which fundamentalism forces an examination of some of the American polity’s core values: commitments to pluralism, religious liberty, and individual self-determination; repudiation of gender-based oppression; and ensuring the well-being of children and future citizens.

Participants will include William & Mary Law faculty, James Dwyer and William Van Alstyne in addition to Randall Balmer (Barnard/Columbia); Emily Buss (University of Chicago); Naomi Cahn (George Washington); June Carbone (University of Missouri-Kansas City); Fred Gedicks (Brigham Young); Marci Hamilton (Cardozo); Vivian Hamilton (William & Mary); Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern); Catherine Ross (George Washington); John Taylor (West Virginia); and Robin Fretwell Wilson (Washington & Lee).

Papers from the symposium will be published in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal.

For more information, please contact Melody Nichols at IBRL@wm.edu.

The WVU College of Law chapter of the Federalist Society is sponsoring a visiting speaker presentation by Capt. Glenn Sulmasy, J.D., L.L.M., to be held next Thursday, November 5, at 3:30 PM in the Davis Gallery. All students, faculty, and staff are welcome.

The title of his talk is “Neither Gitmo nor NIMBY: The Case for a National Security Court.” In his recent book (published in August) titled The National Security Court System, Capt. Sulmasy proposes a separate, hybrid court system, overseen by civilians, with detention, trials and hearings held on U.S. military bases.

Capt. Sulmasy is a Professor of Law at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

October 27, 2009
By Andrew Clevenger
The Charleston Gazette

CHARLESTON, W.Va. —On a 96-0 vote, the U.S. Senate confirmed Kanawha Circuit Judge Irene C. Berger as a federal judge on Tuesday.

Berger will become the first black federal judge in West Virginia’s history. She has been a state judge since 1994.

President Obama nominated the McDowell County native in July. After a September hearing, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved her nomination on Oct. 1.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., called Berger “not only an outstanding jurist, she is also an exemplary person.”

“Through her drive and determination, Judge Berger broke barrier after barrier. She was the first in her family to attend college, and she was the first African American woman to serve as a circuit judge in West Virginia,” Byrd said.

“Embodying true Mountaineer spirit and pride, Judge Berger’s contributions to legal service and education have been substantial. Sitting on the bench, she will continue her fine service to her community and to the great state of West Virginia.”

After the vote, Berger said she was honored at every stage of the long process, from the initial recommendation from Byrd and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., to the President’s nomination, to the unanimous approval of the Senate Judiciary and finally Tuesday’s unanimous Senate vote.

“It’s a little bit overwhelming to think that that has happened over my career,” she said.

Berger said she appreciated the mentoring and support she has received during her “charmed career,” from her first days as a Legal Aid attorney, then through her time as a state and federal prosecutor and 15 years on the state bench. More…

PATH and TrAIL

A Panel Discussion of Citizens’ Concerns about High-Voltage Interstate Power Line Development

Thursday, November 12
WVU College of Law
7:30 p.m.
Room 154

Construction has already begun on the Trans-Allegheny Interstate Line (TrAIL), and the West Virginia Public Service Commission will soon determine the fate of yet another giant transmission line proposal, the Potomac Appalachian Transmission Highway (PATH). Join us as we discover the issues affecting citizens and landowners, as well as the lasting environmental impacts related to the both of these unprecedented lines of power.

Where do they actually lead?

Featured Panelists

• Bill Howley is the author of the blog, The Power Line, The View from Calhoun County, which covers numerous topics related to the proposed PATH transmission line and energy production.

• Morgantown attorney Brad Stephens represents West Virginia landowner groups affected by the proposed PATH transmission line. Stephens also represented similar groups in the TrAIL case.

• Attorney Bill DePaulo has represented Sierra Club in environmental litigation in West Virginia for several years, including the TrAIL proceedings in 2008. DePaulo is representing both Sierra Club and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy in the PATH case.

Sponsored by the WVU College of Law Environmental Law Society

Professor Anne M. Lofaso, conducted two workshops on basic labor law for students from all across the nation at the The Peggy Browning Fund National Law Students Worker’s Rights Conference in Silver Spring, Maryland on Saturday Oct. 17, 2009.

The workshops were to provide an overview of the basic concepts of labor law, focusing on the National Labor Relations Act, its primary purposes, its structure, and its administration by the National Labor Relations Board, with a little bit of labor law history thrown in for good measure. It was geared toward those who have not completed an introductory Labor Law course.

Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, Valorie K. Vojdik, facilitated a group discussion at the 24th Annual Midwest Clinical Law Teachers Conference at Wayne State School of Law held Oct. 9-11. The award-winning book by Ohio State University history professor, Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, served as the “one book” at the heart of the Conference. Arc of Justice recounts the trial of Ossian Sweet, an African-American doctor who bought a house in an all-white neighborhood in Detroit in 1925. He was arrested and prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder after he and friends were forced to defend themselves after a white mob sought to remove him from his home. Clarence Darrow and the NAACP defended Dr. Sweet. The book describes the process of residential segregation in Detroit and the role of the federal government and white prejudice in creating and perpetuating racism in Detroit.

The Democratic Law Caucus & Labor Law Society are cosponsoring a Health Care Reform Lunch Series this fall at the WVU College of Law.

The second event will take place Monday October 26th from 12-1 pm in the Davis Gallery at the WVU College of Law.

The guest speaker will be Dr. Chris Plein, Chair of the WVU Public Administration Department. Dr. Plein is an expert on public policy, public administration, and policy analysis. He has recently focused on health care reform and will be able to discuss the complex policy questions concerning reform that students may have.

Lunch and refreshments will be provided courtesy of the Democratic Law Caucus.

Because health care is such an important issue, we encourage all students and faculty interested in the current health care reform debate to attend.

Courts Force U.S. Reckoning With Dominance of GM Crops
By PAUL VOOSEN of Greenwire
Published: October 8, 2009
NYTimes.com

These days, there is no rarer commodity in farming than trust.

Take Oregon’s Willamette Valley, which for generations has been the germ of the U.S. sugar beet industry, producing nearly all the country’s seeds. Such breeding is complicated when neighbors grow genetically similar crops and stiff Pacific winds, baffled by the Coast Range mountains, shove pollen every which way.

But Willamette’s growers have cooperated, establishing a system in which seed producers flag their plots on a collective map, giving fair warning of what is grown where. Voluntary distances between crops were established and, if abutting farms had a conflict in what they grew, well, they could usually figure it out.

“It’s a very complex system based on social relationships,” said Frank Morton, a Willamette organic seed farmer. “We can all operate in the same area without screwing up each other’s work.”

That changed, Morton said, when the genetically modified (GM) beets arrived.

Planting of the GM beets was well under way by the time the main growers went public at a farmers’ meeting in December 2006. In the tightly consolidated industry, adoption was quick: 95 percent of the U.S. sugar beet crop is now engineered to resist herbicide.

Morton was flummoxed. The growers refused to flag their GM beets on the collective map, saying they feared ecoterrorism and burned crops. That left Morton concerned that their beets would cross-pollinate with his organic Swiss chard and table beets.

Any trace of GM cells in his seeds could see them rejected by Japanese and European customers, which have near-impossible standards for GM-free products. And whom would he blame if such contamination, as he terms it, occurred? Who would know which way the wind blew that day? Morton was finding few answers.

“I did not have the sense that any authorities were protecting my interests,” he said.

So Morton followed the best of American traditions: He sued.

Voices in a thicket

The United States is well into its mass experiment with GM crops. Some 90 percent of soy and cotton crops include genes engineered by firms like Monsanto Co., Dow Chemical Co. and DuPont to resist weedkillers and act as pesticides. Eighty-five percent of the corn crop is also genetically modified, and, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, is found throughout the food system.

With GM genes so widely spread, some agriculture giants have had to move their conventional seed production out of the United States to meet strict foreign standards banning GM material. There could soon come a day, activists warn, that thanks to the drift of pollen, no ear of corn will be free of at least a trace of cells concocted by man.

These crops are safe to eat. The science on that is unequivocal, even in Europe, where a moratorium on new GM crops has existed for a decade. And by most accounts, GM crops have been an economic benefit to farmers, simplifying field maintenance and reducing the number of hands needed for weeding.

But as these crops have come to dominate the agricultural landscape, farmers who eschew their growing—for ethical, organic or trade reasons—have found themselves at a loss, frustrated by regulators and the majority of fellow farmers who have accepted GM crops as the new normal.

For a long time, these farmers have been lonely voices calling out through the thicket. But several recent rulings by federal courts have joined their chorus, criticizing regulators who have paid little attention to the potential economic impact of GM crops on organic and other farmers—an awareness that is just now beginning to change in the new Obama administration.

For the past two decades, the government has argued “essentially that there’s no difference between a GM crop and its nonmodified sibling,” said Alison Peck, a law professor at West Virginia University.

“Their arguments all sort of flowed from this presumption—that these two kinds of crops are fungible,” Peck said. More…

Participating on Drafting Committee on a Certificate of Title Act for Boats

Professor Vincent Cardi will be working with the Uniform Law Commission in Chicago on October 15 through 18 drafting the Uniform Certificate of Title Act for Vessels as a member of the drafting committee for this emerging act. Professor Cardi is a West Virginia Commissioner on Uniform State Laws and a member of the national Uniform Law Commission.

This committee will draft an act establishing a certificate of title system for boats. Many states do not have certificate of title laws governing watercraft, and those that do have considerable differences in terms. The committee will coordinate its work with the United States Coast Guard and developments concerning the Coast Guard’s vessel identification and documentation systems. The committee will present a draft for initial consideration at the July 2010 Annual Meeting and is expected to present its act for final approval in July 2011.