University Law School Research Articles

What Role Should Governments Play in Setting Rewards for Medical Innovation?

On March 10, 2021, our journal partnered with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy to host a symposium addressing the role and impact of U.S. innovation policy on access to medicine. Our 2021 Symposium Issue—Volume 11, Issue 1—captures that event.This article represents the first of four panels. This panel considered what role governments should play in setting rewards for medical innovation. It was moderated by Professor Lisa Ouellette of Stanford Law School. The panelists included Professor Michael Abramowicz of George Washington University Law School, Professor Daniel Hemel of the University of Chicago Law School, and Professor Bhaven Sampat of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

The Open University Law School’s Public Legal Education in Prisons: Contributing to Rehabilitative Prison Culture

There is a massive unmet need for legal knowledge in prisons. The Open University Law School, through its Open Justice Centre, has trialled various ways in which to meet this unmet need. Most prison-university partnerships in England and Wales follow a model of prisoners and university students being taught together as one group in a traditional higher education learning format. The Open University Law School’s public legal education in prisons follows instead the Street Law model to disseminate knowledge of the law throughout a prison, either through prison radio or through the work of the charity St Giles Trust. While this article confirms other research findings which evidence the personal benefit law students derive in researching and delivering audience-appropriate public legal education, it also considers the benefit for those imprisoned in the context of rehabilitative prison culture.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Observing Data-Driven Approaches to Covid-19: Reflections from a Distributed, Remote, Interdisciplinary Research Project

The Observatory for Monitoring Data-Driven Approaches to Covid-19 (OMDDAC) is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project investigating data-driven approaches to Covid-19, focused upon legal, ethical, policy and operational challenges. The project is a collaboration between Northumbria University (Law School, Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Department of Mathematics) and the Royal United Services Institute, a defence and security think-tank, and aims to carry out integrated interdisciplinary research, regarded as the most challenging type of interdisciplinarity but where the outputs can be the most impactful. Due to the constraints of the pandemic, the project has been carried out in a fully distributed and remote manner, with some team members never having met in person. The subject of the research is continually changing and developing, creating unique project management issues, with the impact of the pandemic pervasive in the lives of the researchers. This article takes the form of a series of reflections from the points of view of individual project researchers – the specialist legal researcher, the think-tank Co-Investigator, the post-doctoral researcher, statistical and data science researchers, and the Principal Investigator – and organised under two main themes - project management and internal communication; and methodologies/interdisciplinary research. We thus draw out lessons for future remote and distributed research, focused upon interdisciplinarity, the benefits and challenges of remote research methodologies, and issues of collegiality. Finally, we warn that it will be a false economy for universities and funders to assume that research projects can continue to be conducted in a mainly remote manner and therefore, that budgetary savings can be made by reducing time allocations, travel and academic networking.

Students as researchers: the effects of employing law students on an empirical research project

ABSTRACT Given the increasingly competitive higher education (HE) marketplace, it is becoming progressively more important for university law schools to distinguish their offer. In England and Wales, it is commonplace for non-law undergraduate degree programmes to incorporate compulsory empirical research training within discrete modules or as part of a broader research skills package. Yet this element is typically missing from traditional LLB programmes. Addressing the gap in the literature around HE students’ perceptions of conducting empirical research, in this paper we explore insights into the benefits of or barriers to undertaking such research and the extent to which students believe that it should form part of their undergraduate experience. This paper is based on findings from a small-scale, pilot case study at a post-1992 higher education institution (HEI) involving students who participated in an extracurricular empirical research evaluation project. The findings reveal perceived benefits for three key stakeholder groups: students as researchers, the host HEI and the local community where the research took place. Drawing on these themes, we conclude by offering recommendations for law schools to learn from their counterparts in other disciplines and explore potential opportunities for incorporating empirically based research training within law undergraduate degree programmes.

Big data applications in industry fields

Abstract Big data is not just another buzzword, write Alexandros Gazis, PhD candidate at the Democritus University of Thrace, School of Engineering and Theodora Gazi, PhD candidate at Athens University Law School. So, which industry fi elds can benefi t from its use?

Blackstone’s Tower Revisited

The years since the publication of Blackstone’s Tower have witnessed an explosion of international scholarship on university law schools and legal academics. More recently, the UK, as elsewhere, has seen the emergence of a distinct interdisciplinary body of work termed ‘critical university studies’ seeking to explore multifarious dimensions of what has been widely termed the marketization of universities and their law schools; a process well under way by the time Blackstone’s Tower first appeared but which has since gathered pace. This article will explore the nature of these changes and, more specifically, assess their impact on a subject that has itself become the focus of increasing political and policy debate across the higher education sector over the past decade; the wellbeing and mental health of those who inhabit the contemporary university.
 Focusing specifically on legal academics, the subject of a growing body of recent research, the article will chart both changes and continuities that have occurred within understandings of legal academic wellbeing since Blackstone’s Tower was published; and, interweaving a discussion of the impact of the global pandemic of 2020 on wellbeing in university law schools, taking place at the time of writing, consider how Covid-19 is reshaping our understandings both of the ‘private life’ of the law school, as discussed by Fiona Cownie, and of legal academic wellbeing as a focus of socio-legal study.
 Keywords: legal academics; wellbeing; mental health; UK universities; legal profession; marketization; critical university studies.

Blackstone’s Tower in Context

This article contextualizes the contribution of Blackstone’s Tower within the discipline of law, arguing that its publication was both significant and radical at a time when research into legal education was much less well-developed within the legal academy than it is today. Twining’s approach, acting as a ‘tour guide’, was also important in a period when the ‘private life’ of the English university law school was virtually unexamined. This article also highlights the ways in which the other contributions to this special edition demonstrate the continuities and changes that have occurred within legal education since Blackstone’s Tower was published.
 Keywords: legal education. law schools; legal scholarship; legal research; William Twining.

Building Access Routes into Blackstone’s Tower

Disability, and its relationship to and relative absence within the English university law school permeates Blackstone’s Tower, from Rutland’s rickety lift and law library filled with inaccessible print texts to the recognition that minority perspectives and ‘real-life’ applications of law are missing from the curriculum. This article explores the importance of mainstreaming disability within curriculum content and design, to ensure that staff and students receive the inclusive experience they are entitled to. It will also explore the need to support staff, both in understanding their roles in providing access and enabling staff and students with disabilities to disclose their disability status and access any support that they might need.
 Keywords: disability law; liberal education; proactive critical citizenship; inclusive teaching.

Contracting for Sex? “True Story” of the so-called “Comfort Women” during World War II

Criticism has erupted around the world over the paper “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War” written by Mark Ramseyer, a Mitsubishi professor at Harvard University Law School. Ramseyer insists tha “comfort women” by Japanese imperial military made “credible contracts” with recruiters regardless of the Japanese government or the Japanese military. Ramseyer further insists that the “comfort women” were certified prostitutes. However, the Japanese government selected recruiters secretly and provided them with convenience in mobilizing women. Recruiters have deceived women, mainly by job fraud, into kidnapping them to military brothels. The recruiters signed with Japanese women as barmaids (shakuhu), meaning women who served drinks. However, the Japanese military brothels were prohibited from drinking. Almost Korean women were illiterate in 1940’s, so recruiters did not make contract papers with them. It was very easy to deceive Korean women to make sexual slaves of Japanese military. The surviving Japanese military’s surgeon or soldiers testified that Korean “comfort women” had been sexual slaves.

Can Multiple Choice Exams Be Used to Assess Legal Reasoning? An Empirical Study of Law Student Performance and Attitudes

The purpose of this article is to examine whether legal reasoning skills can be appropriately assessed in a law degree, using multiple-choice question assessment. The use of multiple-choice assessment in university law schools is common, although not universally accepted as an effective pedagogical tool. In this article, both quantitative and qualitative empirical research methods have been adopted to examine whether the unique skill of legal reasoning is amenable to being tested through multiple-choice assessment. The position argued is that multiple-choice assessment, when properly constructed using identified guiding principles, is an efficient and effective way to assess legal reasoning abilities.

Improving Access To Justice Through Legal Aid: Exploring The Possibilities Of ‘Exceptional Case Funding’ Clinics In University Law Schools

This article focuses on the role of universities in establishing law clinics to assist individuals to make Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) applications. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) removed many categories of civil matters from the scope of legal aid, reducing the number of people entitled to state-funded legal advice and assistance. To replace provision for the categories removed from scope, LASPO introduced ECF to provide a ‘safety net’ for cases where human rights would be breached if legal assistance was not available. To obtain legal aid through the ECF scheme, legal aid providers or individuals must apply to the Legal Aid Agency, the department of government within the Ministry of Justice that deals with the administration of legal aid. The article considers how analysis of ECF clinics can contribute to knowledge about the work of universities in facilitating access to justice through clinical legal education, particularly in the context of cuts to legal aid expenditure. It argues that ECF clinics present an opportunity to involve students while engaging — rather than replacing — the responsibility of the British state to provide legal aid.

Law Undergraduates’ Understanding and Appropriation of Arguments in Online Essay Writing Tutorials

The art of constructing an assertive argument is a crucial lifelong skill for law students to master. The English language teachers at Bennett University Law School introduce the topic of argumentative essay writing to its first-year law undergraduates and teach the basic structure of an argument in a standard five paragraph argumentative essay and then gradually elaborate on the content. The pedagogy makes use of the online platforms of i-Learn learning management and Clarity English programs (customised English language teaching software) to engage students in essay writing tutorials. The study analyses how the students develop the understanding of framing a strong argument and move towards attaining appropriation in it. This was done by comparing pre-test and post-test results of the control and experimental groups and by content analysis of the transcripts. The target group in the study included 120 students of BA LLB (Hons) who are divided into control and experimental groups. The study also tries to figure out the comparative advantage of classroom teaching in physical settings, online group discussions on i-Learn forums, and individual practice sessions on Study Skills Success and the Practical Writing program offered by Clarity English. This was done through student survey analysis. The overall data involved pre-test and post-test essay writing transcripts, online discussion forum transcripts on i-Learn, and student surveys. This educational intervention is an attempt to assess and design the best teaching practice with available resources for teaching argumentative essay writing to law undergraduates.

Ester Herlin‐Karnell and Nicholas Ryder, Market Manipulation and Insider Trading: Regulatory Challenges in the United States of America, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2019, xiv + 148 pp, hb £60.00.

The Modern Law ReviewVolume 84, Issue 5 p. 1163-1167 REVIEW Herlin-Karnell, Ester and Ryder, Nicholas, Market Manipulation and Insider Trading: Regulatory Challenges in the United States of America, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2019, xiv + 148 pp, hb £60.00. Bohan Liu, Corresponding Author Bohan Liu liubohan137@163.com PhD Candidate, Xiamen University Law School, China. email: liubohan137@163.comSearch for more papers by this author Bohan Liu, Corresponding Author Bohan Liu liubohan137@163.com PhD Candidate, Xiamen University Law School, China. email: liubohan137@163.comSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 February 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12620 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume84, Issue5September 2021Pages 1163-1167 RelatedInformation

Donald Trump, the Christian Right and COVID-19: The Politics of Religious Freedom

This paper examines the issue of religious freedom in the USA during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020–2021, during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021). It contends that the ability of state governors to close religious places of worship illustrates both the limits on the power of the president and that public health can take supremacy over religious freedom in today’s America. The paper is organised as follows: first, we identify the importance of religious freedom for the more than 20 million Americans who self-classify as Christian evangelicals. Second, we assess the transactional importance that President Trump placed on Christian evangelicals’ religious freedom. Third, we look at one kind of Christian evangelicals—that is, Christian nationalists—to see how they regarded restrictions on their religious behaviour caused by COVID-19. Fourth, we briefly examine several recent legal cases brought against the governors of California and Illinois by the Liberty Counsel, the leading Christian evangelical legal firm in the USA. Led by Matthew Staver, Dean of the Liberty University Law School, Liberty Counsel regularly represents Christian nationalists who challenge state-imposed restrictions on religious gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.

РОЗВИТОК ШКОЛИ ДЕЛІКТНОГО ПРАВА В УНІВЕРСИТЕТІ СВЯТОГО ВОЛОДИМИРА – КИЇВСЬКОМУ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОМУ УНІВЕРСИТЕТІ ІМЕНІ ТАРАСА ШЕВЧЕНКА

The paper deals with a research of Tort law school development in St. Volodymyr's University – Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The purpose of the research is to analyse the development of the Tort law school and to study the main trends and key directions of the development. The author applied lots of different research methods, among which were historical and legal method (for the analysis of the works from the past), analysis and synthesis (for stating the peculiarities of the research approaches in different studies' periods). Also, such methods as philosophy methods (dialectic and hermeneutic), general research methods (systemic and structural-functional), general logic methods (induction and deduction, analogy, abstraction, generalization, formalization, and modelling) were used. The topic of civil torts was interesting for the researchers from Kyiv University law school any time while the depth of interest and research approaches differed depending on the historical period. Before the revolution of 1917 the researchers mostly looked on the torts as on the type of civil obligation and the reward for damage caused. No one treated the torts from the standpoint of a type of civil liability at that time. The Soviet period of the Tort law School development was characterized by a change of the research vector. The researchers started focusing on civil torts as liability rather than civil obligations. Tort liability is a type of civil liability and the latter is a type of legal liability. That causes a regime when the researchers (some well-known names of that time are: Gennadiy Matveev, Yuriy Matveev, Dina Bobrova, Yaroslavna Shevchenko etc.) mostly analyse civil tort as a civil liability. They focused their attention on the foundations and the conditions of tort liability. Precisely at that time, the theory of "civil wrong compound" as the main foundation of civil liability appeared. Independent Ukraine spawned a new pleiad of researchers whose research interest was civil torts. Modern civil law doctrine started refusing the understanding of civil tort as a type of civil liability. It comes back to the tort as a type of obligation. Moreover, modern researchers look on the tort's issues much wider – through the prism of legal regulation mechanism. Constantly, modern researchers of Taras Shevchenko National University Law School pay great attention to the new topical spheres of torts, particularly to non-pecuniary damage compensation, damage compensation caused by the State and State agencies and product liability together with digital product liability. Keywords: tort, civil liability, damage compensation, history of legal research, scientific school.

COVID-19 and Restrictions on Religious Worship: From Nondiscrimination to Church Autonomy

Religious litigants challenging COVID-19 restrictions on in-person worship services typically argue that these restrictions discriminate against religion in violation of the Free Exercise Clause. Demands for equal treatment have intuitive appeal, and they also fit with the Supreme Court’s current religion clause jurisprudence. However, there are a number of drawbacks to approaches that focus on equal treatment. It can be difficult to identify the appropriate secular benchmarks for determining whether discrimination has taken place, and religious congregations are usually not actually asking for equal treatment. What they really want is to maximize their ability to gather together safely in person.In Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Cuomo, the Supreme Court granted applications for emergency injunctive relief in two cases challenging 10- and 25-person limits on houses of worship in COVID-19 hotspots in New York. The Court found that New York’s rules favored secular activities over religious practice and failed to satisfy the strict scrutiny required of discriminatory action under the Free Exercise Clause. However, many of the examples of discrimination given by those in the majority seemed strained, and the justices appeared less interested in the threshold showing of discriminatory treatment than in applying heightened scrutiny to significant restrictions on religious worship. The Court’s shift in focus from discrimination to close scrutiny of worship restrictions is the right one, but those in the majority neither acknowledged this shift nor signaled a new framework or approach that would explain or guide it. In this short essay, I argue that the appropriate framework for analyzing restrictions on religious worship is the doctrine of church autonomy that has been emerging in the Court’s recent religion clause jurisprudence. Viewing conflicts over COVID-19 restrictions through this lens can better clarify what is at stake when clashes occur as well as better inform the scope and limits of institutional freedom in this context.This essay is based on a presentation for the International Conference on COVID-19 Pandemic & Religious Freedom: Reports from North America and Europe sponsored by Andrews University, Brigham Young University Law School Center for Law and Religion Studies, and University of Portsmouth (December 2-3, 2020) and a shorter presentation for the blog webinar Law, Religion, and Coronavirus in the United States: A Six-Month Assessment organized by Brigham Young University Law School, Emory University Law School, Notre Dame Law School, St. John’s University School of Law, and the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law (October 2, 2020).

Introductory Remarks by Catherine Amirfar

It is now my pleasure to introduce a very special roundtable that brings together four of my distinguished predecessors as president of the Society. Taken together, their terms of office span the last twenty-five years. Edith Brown Weiss is University Professor and former Francis Cabell Brown Professor of International Law at Georgetown Law. José Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at New York University School of Law. Lucinda A. Low is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, where she heads the Compliance, Investigations, Trade, and Enforcement Department, and Sean D. Murphy is the Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law at George Washington University Law School and a member of the UN International Law Commission. Welcome, welcome.

Lessons from Quality Shareholders on Corporate Governance Practice, Research and Scholarship

Special Note: This Publication is part of The Quality Shareholder Initiative at the Center for Law, Economics and Finance (C-LEAF), at The George Washington University Law School, Prof. Lawrence A. Cunningham, Faculty Director. This Article presents original data and analysis addressing an understudied force in corporate America: the most patient and focused shareholders. Great attention has been devoted to short-term trading on the one hand and diversified index funds on the other, but scant attention has been focused on long-term concentrated investors. The George Washington University has been redressing this problem through a research initiative focused on such buy-and-hold stock pickers, whom Warren Buffett long ago dubbed 'quality shareholders'. GW’s Quality Shareholders Initiative ('QSI') is pleased to present highlights of the initial installment of this work in this Article in the Business and Finance Law Review at the George Washington University’s Center for Law, Economics, and Finance.

Hands-Off Religion in the Early Months of COVID-19

For decades, scholars have documented the United States Supreme Court’s “hands-off approach” to questions of religious practice and belief, pursuant to which the Court has repeatedly declared that judges are precluded from making decisions that require evaluating and determining the substance of religious doctrine. At the same time, many scholars have criticized this approach, for a variety of reasons. The early months of the COVID-19 outbreak brought these issues to the forefront, both directly, in disputes over limitations on religious gatherings due to the virus, and indirectly, as the Supreme Court decided important cases turning on religious doctrine. Taken together, judicial rulings and rhetoric in these cases illustrate ways in which the hand-off approach remains, at once, both vibrant and vulnerable to critique.This paper was presented as part of the Blog Webinar: Law, Religion, and Coronavirus in the United States: A Six-Month Assessment, Co-organized by: International Center for Law and Religion Studies, Brigham Young University; Law School Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University Law School; Notre Dame Program on Church, State & Society, Notre Dame Law School Center for Law and Religion; St. Johns University School of Law; and Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law.