Faculty News

Capital University Law School Professer Margaret Cordray has published a law review article entitled The Calendar of the Justices: How the Supreme Court's Timing Affects its Decisionmaking. It appears at 36 Arizona State Law Journal 183 (2004).

In researching and writing the article, Professor Cordray, and co-author Richard Cordray, collected and analyzed new data on how the distribution of the U.S. Supreme Court's workload over the course of a typical term affects the Court's performance in evaluating petitions for certiorari and in resolving cases on the merits.

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, the data on the relationship between the Court's work production and its calendar demonstrates a remarkable consistency in the Court's treatment of cases heard on the merits, regardless of whether they were heard early or late in the term," said Professor Cordray. "The data, however, does reveal striking fluctuations in the Court's rate of granting petitions for certiorari."

The article contends that the Court could largely eliminate these fluctuations, which recur systematically but are unrelated to the merits of the petitions, by making certain changes to its calendar and other aspects of its internal administration.

Professor Cordray was a judicial clerk for the Honorable Kenneth W. Starr on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Before coming to Capital in 1992, she practiced with the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C., and worked in the Office of Legal Affairs at The Ohio State University. She teaches Contracts, Evidence, Remedies, and a seminar on the Supreme Court. Professor Cordray is a graduate of the University of the Pacific, Balt Hall School of Law at the University of California Berkeley and Oxford University.

Professor Cordray's other articles on the Supreme Court include, "The Supreme Court's Plenary Docket," 58 Washington & Lee Law Review 737 (2001) with Richard A. Cordray; and "Settlement Agreements and the Supreme Court," 48 Hastings Law Journal 9 (1996).

June 27, 2004, Professor Daniel T. Kobil published his editorial Solid rationale for clemency in Williams case in the Indianapolis Star .

Professor Rachel Janutis  presented her paper, A Fair Apportionment Approach to Multiple Punitive Damages, at the Ohio Legal  Scholarship Workshop

on June 24, 2004.  The Workshop was held at the University of Akron.

Professor Dennis Hirsch

has published an article entitled "Lean and Green: Environmental Law and Policy and the Flexible Production Economy." It appears at 79 Indiana Law Journal 611 (2004).

"Driven by global competition, American manufacturing is undergoing a fundamental transformation from mass production to "flexible" or "lean" production," said Hirsch. "Mass production is premised on the stable, high volume manufacture of identical goods. Flexible production engages all workers in a system wide search for continuous improvement and is characterized by constant innovation and rapid change to products and processes. For example, Intel Corporation, a flexible producer, averages forty five process changes per year."

remained within the limit. These programs set the cap at a level more stringent than that which traditional permitting would have required, thereby both providing flexible producers with regulatory speed and pushing them to achieve better performance. Recent Bush Administration rules also offer plant-wide caps. However, they do not require more stringent performance and may, in fact, allow pollution increases. They fail to capitalize on flexible production's green potential.

"While the Clinton Administration initiatives represent a better approach, they are far from perfect," Hirsch explains. "In the article, I spell out specific legal and policy recommendations that would strengthen this approach and point the way towards an effective regulatory strategy for the coming era of flexible production."

Hirsch's article identifies two implications of this industrial shift for environmental law and policy, particularly the Clean Air Act (CAA). First, flexible production's continuous improvement culture provides an ideal platform for pollution prevention and should enable facilities adopting it to achieve improved environmental performance. Second, the rapid change that characterizes the new production method is in tension with Clean Air Act provisions, originally designed for mass production plants, that require facilities to complete a months-long permitting process prior to undertaking each individual change.

The article argues that major recent environmental policy initiatives can be understood, in part, as early attempts to adapt the regulatory system to the new conditions of flexible production. Experimental Clinton Administration programs replaced traditional permitting with plant-wide emission caps. These innovative permits allowed flexible production facilities to make changes without delay, so long as their overall air emissions

Hirsch has been a member of the Capital University Law School Faculty since 1998. He teaches Environmental Law, Advanced Environmental Law

and Property. Hirsch is co-author of the environmental law text book Environmental Law Practice: Problems and Exercises for Skills Development (2nd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2003). He also is Chair of the American Bar Association, Section of Environment, Energy and Resources, Committee on Innovation, Management Systems and Trading. The Committee is a 120-member group of government, private, NGO and academic lawyers that focuses on alternative approaches to environmental regulation. The Committee examines the legal and policy issues that these innovative programs raise and seeks to educate the environmental, energy and resources law bars on these subjects.

Adjunct Professor and Center for Dispute Resolution Co-Director Terrence Wheeler presented at Ohio Forums on the Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators. [more]

June 4, 2004, Professor Mike Distelhorst hosted a program of the Council for Ethics in Economics entitled "Ethical Decision-Making:  Maintaining Personal and Organizational Integrity". The featured speaker was Dr. Michael Rion, of Resources for Ethics and Management.  The program was co-sponsored by several local corporations and universities, including the Capital University School of Management.