Category Archives: U.Miami

The Padilla Event Monday night will be followed on Tuesday by a debate on “The Future of the Supreme Court” sponsored by People For the American Way and the Miami Chapter of the Federalist Society, in coordination with the University of Miami School of Law and the President’s Office of the University of Miami. Here are the details:

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2005
12:30-2:00 P.M.
LIMITED LUNCH WILL BE SERVED FREE OF CHARGE

University of Miami Law School,
1311 Miller Drive, Room 352

Welcome Speaker: Donna Shalala, President, University of Miami
Panelists Include:

• Ralph Neas, President, People For the American Way
• Edward Whelan III, President, Ethics and Public Policy Center
• Karen Pearl, Interim President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America
• Wendy Long, Legal Counsel, Judicial Confirmation Network
• Moderator: Maria Elena Salinas, Univision

For questions and RSVPs please contact Raquel Simon at rsimon@pfaw.org, 850-877-0307, or Clayton Hackney at CH8640@students.law.miami.edu, 305-491-1062.

I suspect the name “Miers” may get mentioned.

And no, I’m not going to turn this blog into a local calendar, it’s just coincidence.

There’s going to be a particularly interesting event Monday night at our law school. LAFAC and the American Constitution Society have invited Andy Patel, who is Jose Padilla’s lawyer, to speak on “Lawyering Terrorism After September 11th: Litigation Strategy in the Jose Padilla Case”. He’ll be joined by Prof. Stephen Vladeck who is also a member of the Padilla defense team. Prof. Mario Barnes will act as Moderator.

The event will be held Monday, October 10, 5:00 p.m., Room F209 here at UM Law, and there will be a reception afterwards, at 6:30 p.m., in the Faculty Meeting Room.

Just in case you are trying to e-mail a member of the UM Law faculty, all UM faculty (and most staff but not student) email accounts have been down all day, and intermittently down yesterday. If someone knows when it will be fixed, they are not telling. We are told it is a hardware issue, but no more than that.

You can still reach me via my law.tm address, but mail to me at law.miami.edu is in cyber-purgatory somewhere.

Maybe we should outsource?

Update (8:30pm) It is showing signs of life now. Grrrr.

Googling for a phone number to call to ask for help with a balking online journal collection (the last page of EVERY article was missing!), I stumbled on Richter Library Web Services Dream Design, a blog with this great mission statement:

This weblog focuses on the University of Miami Richter Library’s website and strategies for thinking about ‘visionary’ possibilities for web services. It encourages ‘dreaming’ about ‘academic library’ information architectures so that dreams become reality and Richter sets the model for a next generation of academic library web services.

It’s a real pity it hasn’t been updated since last April, because I think this is the sort of thinking-out-loud that user-centered service-oriented institutions like libraries (and law schools!) should be doing.

I’ve just received an e-mail announcing that,

UM’s Coral Gables Campus Closed Monday
Medical Campus and Rosenstiel Campus Open for Business

The University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus will remain closed on
Monday, August 29, to continue campus clean-up, and all classes,
activities, and events are canceled for Monday.

May as well go ahead and finish writing the lecture….

Incidentally, the law library will be open tomorrow, as will Subway. So there will be air conditioning and food of a sort.

[Readers, forgive me, but this item is primarily directed at UM law students, although of course I welcome comments from all and sundry.]

Students sometimes ask me whether I would supervise them for an independent writing project. If it’s something I know about, I’m willing. And, in the rare case it’s something no one the faculty knows about or the more common case where people who know about it are already maxed out, I’m probably willing. You see, students don’t often want me as their supervisor: I’m pretty demanding. I see our goal as to write something publishable, not just another term paper.

If you are interested in writing a paper please turn in a two page memo (on paper or in the body — not an attachment — of an email) on your proposed paper topic, listing the issues you intend to address and (perhaps) your first guess as to what you will say about them. I need this memo no later than the end of the second week of classes. Based on this memo I will either approve the topic or propose modifications. We will meet from time to time, on a schedule we’ll set up and you are also welcome to contact me at any time with questions. I will expect you to turn in a rough draft at a date to be agreed (some time around midterm), and I will return the rough draft with comments as soon as I can, on a first-come, first-served basis. You will not be graded on your rough draft — the comments are entirely for your benefit with no strings attached. The final draft is due the last day of classes unless we agree otherwise. In addition to giving me a hard copy of your paper, please turn in a floppy disk containing the full project to my secretary, Rosalia Lliraldi, who sits near room 382 in the library.

In picking a topic — by far the hardest part of the project — I advise you to consult Eugene Volokh, Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, Seminar Papers, and Getting on Law Review (2d ed.) [on reserve in the library] for a wealth of useful tips on picking a topic and writing the paper. I’ve also got a few idiosyncratic writing tips that I hold very dear.