Category Archives: U.Miami

The Bench Brief: Miami bankrupts competition at Duberstein

The University of Miami School of Law topped 45 other teams at the 17th Annual Conrad B. Duberstein National Bankruptcy Memorial Moot Court Competition this past weekend.

Congrats!

I am particularly pleased to announce that Prof. Kunal Madhukar Parker, the James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, has accepted an offer to join the UM Faculty next year.

Prof. Parker's official web biography says,

Professor Parker was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Prior to joining the Cleveland-Marshall faculty in 1996, he was an associate at the New York law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, where he practiced in the area of bankruptcy law with respect to complex financial transactions. Professor Parker has written extensively in the area of colonial Indian legal history and U.S. citizenship and immigration history and theory. He is currently at work on a book-length project on the emergence of historical context in late nineteenth century American jurisprudential thought. Teaching Areas and Interests: Bankruptcy, Conflict of Laws, Immigration and Nationality Law, Legal History, Property, Race and American Law, Trusts and Estates.

(There's also an online c.v. which reveals, among other things, that he speaks six languages. I can testify that his French is impeccable.)

Prof. Parker has a terrific book (based on his dissertation) coming out soon from Cambridge University Press called “Custom And History: Common Law Thought And The Historical Imagination In Nineteenth Century America.” All indications are that it will be a major book in the field.

When Kunal visited here in the Fall, students loved his classes, and he was a very thoughtful participant in faculty seminars. Given his erudition he is also amazingly modest and generous in conversation.

UM has not historically done a vast amount of lateral hiring, but now that we have a large number of new lines I think we'll be doing more in the future. This is the second major lateral appointment of the year. (Cf. Jan Paulsson to Join UM Law Faculty.) There might even yet be more.

I'm guessing Prof. Parker will teach some combination of T&E, Immigration and Legal History.

The UM Law student newspaper, the Res Ipsa Loquitor, has launched a blog version of itself.

So say hello to The Res Ipsa Loquitur Online: A University of Miami School of Law blog.

Among the first stories, First group of Dean candidates announced; Visits begin this week.

Email received:

With Miami still one of the poorest cities in the nation, the University of Miami is set to host a free one-day conference on its Coral Gables campus that will inform students from UM and other colleges and universities in South Florida about the economic despair in their own backyard. The Miami Poverty Conference, a student-led initiative that will be held Saturday, February 21 from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Whitten University Center, will create awareness about poverty-related issues in Miami through interactive workshops that address poverty's relationship to immigration, race, health, politics, and other areas. Several UM faculty members will lead the workshops and breakout sessions, and local community agencies will take part in discussions on how to create plans of action to better the community.

Registered attendees will not only receive breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the daylong event but will also take part in a “hunger banquet,” a symbolic activity aimed at demonstrating the realities of food distribution throughout the world's regions and economic groups. Live band performances and a spoken-word presentation will close out the event with a benefit concert at The Rock from 8 to 10 p.m. Conference check-in starts at 8 a.m. at the UC lower lounge area. To preregister online, visit www.miami.edu/leadandserve.

“Hunger banquet”?

Update: My colleague Marnie Mahoney was kind enough to point me to Oxfam America's web site where they explain the 'Hunger Banquet' concept:

An Oxfam America Hunger Banquet event provides opportunities to educate your school, group, or the public on hunger issues; raise funds to support Oxfam's poverty-fighting work; and recruit new volunteers for your Oxfam group.

How it works

Guests draw tickets at random that assign them each to either a high-, middle-, or low-income tier and receive a corresponding meal. The 15 percent in the high-income tier are served a sumptuous meal. The 35 percent in the middle-income section eat a simple meal of rice and beans. The 50 percent in the low-income tier help themselves to small portions of rice and water. (High-, middle-, and low-income statistics used in the Oxfam America Hunger Banquet event are based on the World Bank Development Indicators 2007.) Guests can also assume characterizations that describe the situation of a specific person at the income level to which they've been assigned. Finally, all guests are invited to share their thoughts after the meal.

So now we know.

Forgive me for one more post about the Miami School of Law's hiring plans, but a comment on one of my earlier posts revealed that I had failed to be clear about one of the more remarkable aspects of the proposed faculty-growth strategy: If we stick to the plan, we're going to add a lot of faculty, but we're not going to grow the JD student body at all.

This is not a plan to suck in more tuition dollars and graduate more folks who will add to the competition for a fairly fixed pool of jobs. Rather it is a plan to do more for the students we get. Some of the jobs will be funded by doing more with less — and might mean that while my job satisfaction might increase from happier students and an ever more vibrant intellectual atmosphere, my salary future isn't inevitably as rosy as it might otherwise have been (especially if we buy expensive laterals). Some of the jobs are being paid for with new money that the central administration is going to make available to us.

The bottom line — again, assuming that we're not all selling apples on street corners — is that students should benefit enormously from smaller classes, from an even more diverse and exciting curriculum, and from a significantly improved student/faculty ratio.

By any analysis, this is a student-centered proposal.

Brian Leiter was was kind enough to link to my previous post (Yes, We're Hiring) with the headline University of Miami President Committed to 40% Expansion of Size of Law Faculty.

Brian got that idea from the following artful line of our Dean Search committee's artfully written sales pitch:

The current faculty contains 45 tenure or tenure track faculty members. In the near future, and in the tenure of the next Dean, the Law School will hire 17 new faculty, roughly 40% of the existing faculty.

This is a true statement. But it doesn't mean we're growing 40% over our current full size of 45 — the plan is “only” for twelve new lines, as the other five represent currently empty lines that need filling. So in fact our growth over current size were we at full staffing will be a mere 26.7%; our growth over current actual staffing (since we're short-handed) will be about 42%.