In an August 28th letter to the editor of The Washington Post, bankruptcy expert and professor Ralph Brubaker strongly condemned the Purdue Pharma settlement plan. He wrote:
“There are eminently feasible, well-trodden means of rendering justice for massive iniquity, which can and will produce much better (and actual) settlements for victims, if the Supreme Court repudiates the kind of ad hoc, designer justice system for the wealthy of which the Purdue deal is emblematic.”
Professor Jennifer Robbennolt and 2023 graduate Sam Barder have co-authored a paper titled “Optimistic Overconfidence: A Study of Law Student Academic Predictions.” Their findings, which indicate that a majority of incoming law students are wildly overconfident, drew the attention of Reuters, ABA Journal, and Above the Law.
Speaking to Reuters, Robbennolt suggested there may be several factors contributing to the optimism of new students.
“They are coming into a totally new environment,” Robbennolt said. “They don’t have much information about the tasks they will be asked to do and the kind of thinking they will be asked to do. They don’t know much about their peers.”
Read commentary about the paper at Reuters and ABA Journal.
Professor Jacob Sherkow has co-authored a paper, “Regulating Direct-to-Consumer Polygenic Risk Scores,” that was published in JAMA. In the paper, the authors argue that polygenic risk scores, which are used to predict risk factors for particular conditions using genetic data, require better government regulation.
On July 7, 2023, the iSchool at the University of Illinois announced the recipients of their 2022 Alumni Awards.
Pia Hunter (MSLIS ’14) is the recipient of the Leadership Award, which is given to an alum who has graduated in the past ten years and shown leadership in the field.
Since earning her MSLIS, Hunter has completed her JD degree and emerged as a leader in law librarianship. She currently serves as teaching associate professor and associate director for research and instruction with the Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Memorial Law Library at the University of Illinois College of Law. Throughout her career, Hunter has advocated for fair use in higher education and open access to scholarly publishing. In 2013, she led the initiative to create Fair Use Week, an annual celebration that highlights the fair use doctrine and its significance to artists, students, faculty, librarians, journalists, and all users of copyrighted content. In 2018, the Harvard University Library and the Association of Research Libraries presented her with the first annual Fair Use Week Founders Award in honor of her achievement in the creation of Fair Use Week and her role as a scholar and leader in the promotion of fair use. Hunter gives generously of her time to the iSchool, frequently appearing as a guest speaker for classes and student events.
Congratulations, Professor Hunter!
Professor Arden Rowell recently spoke to Stateline about the lack of federal regulations to protect outdoor workers from wildfire smoke. Rowell, who has studied respiratory safety regulations, said that only three states — California, Oregon and Washington, which is in the process of finalizing its rules — have developed their own enforceable standards on worker safety and wildfire smoke.
“The guarantee of worker protections that so many of us presume we have seems like it’s falling down here,” Rowell said. “As we see more fires, we’re going to see more risks. Does every single state then need to fill this gap?”
Cash bail is set to end in Illinois on September 18th, and Professor Andrew Leipold joined WLS AM radio to discuss what the new law means, the measures judges will take to ensure that dangerous offenders remain behind bars, and how cash bail ending will benefit residents of Illinois.
Listen to the interview at wlsam.com.
Should states or the federal government have control over the National Guard? A recent ruling from the 5th Circuit has set up a battle over this question and made the matter more complicated than before. Army Times spoke to Professor Jason Mazzone, who was cited in the 5th Circuit opinion, to help clarify some of the issues at stake. He also gave an interview to Veterans Radio on the same topic.
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn affirmative action earlier this summer, Professor Jason Mazzone speculated that it would be harder for universities to achieve diversity goals, especially for schools that are more selective in their admissions process.
“If those schools became less selective in their admissions, then they wouldn’t have a problem bringing in larger numbers of students from a wider set of backgrounds,” Mazzone said.
The proposed bankruptcy plan for Purdue Pharma, which would allocate billions of dollars to help ease the nation’s opioid crisis but shield the Sackler family from future lawsuits, has been placed on hold by the Supreme Court. Speaking to The Washington Post, Professor Ralph Brubaker, an expert in bankruptcy law, called the case one of the most important bankruptcy cases to ever come before the Court “from both a practical and a fundamental-justice perspective.” Appellate courts have long been divided on whether those who haven’t declared bankruptcy, such as the individuals in the Sackler family, can be “released” from potential lawsuits through a bankruptcy reorganization, setting up a potentially precedent-setting opinion from the Supreme Court.
In his decision this week, Judge Philip Bentley of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan ruled a bankrupt Holiday Inn in downtown Manhattan can’t use chapter 11 to maintain its low-rate mortgage without paying penalty interest linked to its default. The case arose after the owner failed to make payments on its loan after the hotel closed during the pandemic; lenders began charging default interest in response, leading the owner to file for bankruptcy in order to avoid a seizure. The decision cited two articles by Professor Ralph Brubaker from Bankruptcy Law Letter: “Default Rates of Interest and Cure of a Defaulted Debt in a Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization (Part I): Entz-White’s Overlooked Choice of Law Dimension” (December 2016, Vol. 36, Issue 12) and “Default Rates of Interest and Cure of a Defaulted Debt in a Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization (Part II): Entz-White and the ‘Penalty Rate’ Amendments” (January 2017, Vol. 37, Issue 1). Writing about the decision, the Wall Street Journal quoted Brubaker, who explained that this ruling could increase the costs for companies that were hoping to reinstate their cheap debt.