October 2009 | LSU Law

Heather Hamilton is the newest member of the Law Library staff, as the Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Librarian. Heather comes to the Law Library after graduating from William & Mary School of Law in the class of 2009.
The New Hampshire Bar Association News published Professor Baier’s essay, “Classic Traits”: Souter/Sotomayor, which weighs President Obama’s nominee against her predecessor David Souter, Vol. 20, no. 3, August 20, 2009, written before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings. The essay is online
Professor Christine Corcos presented a talk on broadcast indecency in the UK as part of a program on “Broadcast Indecency: Much Ado About Nothing? Or Still Much to Do?” in August during the SEALS (Southeastern Association of Law Schools) Conference in Palm Beach, Florida.
Professor Corcos published the essay Damages: The Truth is Out There,” in Lawyers in Your Living Room (Michael Asimow, ed.; Chicago: ABA, 2009), a collection specially commissioned and published by the American Bar Association. The book is available for purchase from the ABA, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com.

She is also one of the twelve experts the ABA consulted to create its “Top Twenty-Five Legal Shows”, discussed in a special story in the August issue of the ABA Journal. Ed Adams, editor and publisher of the Journal, discusses the story with NPR’s Madeline Brand, here.
Professor Ray Diamond gave a paper, “The Inner City, the Democracy of Arms, and the Revival of the Militia at Large” at Florida A&M University College of Law on April 27, 2009, under the auspices of the FAMU Federalist Society.
On May 30, at the annual meeting of the Law & Society Association, Professor Diamond was a participant in a roundtable, “On Law and Society: From a Literary Perspective.”

In August, he gave a paper, “Not Your Father’s ‘Funny Books’: Race, Law, and Society in Comic Book Literature,” at the annual meeting of the Southeast Association of Law Schools.

On September 16, 2009, with William Merkel of Washburn University School of Law, Professor Diamond was the Dorothy L. Thompson Civil Rights Lecturer at Kansas State University. The 2009 lecture was guised as a debate entitled “The New Understanding of the Right to Bear Arms.” This debate took place in light of a local movement to allow students with licenses to carry concealed weapons on college campuses in Kansas.
Professor Christina Sautter presented a work-in-progress, tentatively titled “Contractual Limitations on Merger Recommendation Fiduciary Outs,” on August 4, 2009 during the New Scholars Colloquia on Business Law at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.
Professor Melissa Lonegrass presented a work-in-progress, tentatively titled “Convergence in Contort: Landlord Liability for Defective Premises in Comparative Perspective,” on August 4, 2009 during the New Scholars Colloquia on Commercial and Land Use Law at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.
On September 10-11, Professor Alain Levasseur attended a conference on “Going Beyond the Mixed Jurisdiction: the Emergence of Hybrid Legal Systems and their implications for the Comparative Lawyer” in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the invitation of the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law. He presented a paper titled: “Two hundred years (200) of civil law in English: Louisiana’s lonely destiny.” There were participants from Scotland, Ireland, Cyprus, Malta, Macau, and Nigeria.
On October 14-16, at the invitation of JURISCOPE, the CNRS and the University of Poitiers, Professor Levasseur will take part in a conference on the topic “Traduction du Droit et Droit de la Traduction” (Translation of Law and Law of Translation). He will deliver a paper on the many obstacles that stand in the way of translating precisely into English many concepts of the civil law of contract. He will give many examples of such obstacles.

In both of the above conferences, the papers will be published in book form.
Attorney General James D. “Buddy” Caldwell joined Professor Paul R. Baier’s Advanced Appellate Advocacy Seminar, along with Chancellor Weiss, to observe Kyle Duncan, an LSU Law alumnus and DOJ’s Appellate Chief, moot a case pending in the U.S. Fifth Circuit against one of Baier’s students. The “Triple A” seminar is an appellate litigation clinic that brings real lawyers to moot pending appeals against students in the seminar. General Caldwell said the seminar afforded Duncan invaluable practice. He commended the student advocate, Adam Huddleston, and the student judges Ashley Coco and Kilburn Landry for their preparation and tough questioning of counsel. Whether the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution requires issuance of a new Louisiana birth certificate following a gay couple’s adoption in New York of a baby boy born in Shreveport is the question presented. Judge Jay Zainey, another LSU Law alumnus, so held in the U.S. Eastern District. He joined the seminar earlier to discuss the case. After Kyle Duncan’s moot, the seminar convenes in the Fifth Circuit when the case is actually argued.