Nachman N. Gutowski, Director of Academic Success Program, Assistant Professor-in-Residence recently published an article in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. STOP THE COUNT; The Historically Discriminatory Nature of the Bar Exam Requires Adjustments in How Bar Passage Rates are Reported offers a critical examination of the bar exam and its reporting practices, highlighting the need for adjustment to address the historically discriminatory nature of the exam and its impact on marginalized groups. He also recently published a research summary on how bar exam results are reported called How Are Bar Exam Results Reported?: Raising the Bar.

Professor Gutowski will be one of the Keynote Speakers for the symposium at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law in January 2024. This event will focus on risk-taking and reform in legal education. The basis for Professor Gutowski’s talk will be his forthcoming article entitled NextGen Licensure and Accreditation , which the University of New Hampshire Law Review is publishing in the Spring. This piece will examine the coming changes to the bar exam, particularly with the NextGen Bar Exam replacing the Uniform Bar Exam.

He will also present at the Association of Academic Support Educators’ Diversity Conference next month in Washington D.C. Professor Gutowski’s topic is “Leveraging Partnerships to Maximize Student Support.” Lastly, in November, he will speak at  AccessLex, LexCon in Chicago on “Measuring Success: Evolving Approaches to Data Collection and Reporting” and moderate a session on ChatGPT in the Classroom. The GPT session will support his current research into generative AI policies in law schools nationally for future scholarship agendas. 

Professor Kagan recently co-authored a first-edition casebook on legal ethics. With Michael P. Maslanka and Nancy Ann Dao, Experiencing Professional Responsibility is a traditional legal casebook that takes on new, modern ethical issues. Of his first casebook, Professor Kagan said he was glad to be a part of it “as students struggle more with legal ethics than one would expect.” He also states that even licensed attorneys and judges sometimes labor on the topic.

“We think of legal ethics coming from bad intentions—although most times, it is from good intentions—and as a result, both students and lawyers forget some of the rules and obligations.” Professor Kagan points to the inclusion of newer issues like marketing and social media influencers in the casebook that did not exist when he was in law school. “Legal ethics is covered by the news media daily, and we selected colorful, although not the most well-known cases for the casebook for an updated approach.”

He is also publishing a new UC Irvine Law Journal article entitled Mass Surrender in Immigration Court. “This work was a study of something that has puzzled and bothered me ever since I was a law student in the late 1990s.” After going to immigration court in Detroit, Professor Kagan questioned why attorneys defending people against deportation typically concede to the government and deport people. This prompted research and study, to which Professor Kagan concludes, “ The standard of practice should change where lawyers by default should make the prosecution prove its case.”

Ann C. McGinley, Co-Director of the UNLV Workplace Law Program and William S. Boyd Professor of Law, has three scholarship initiatives in the works, beginning with a new casebook. Co-authored by Laura Rothstein and D’Andra Millsap Shu, the upcoming seventh edition of  Disability Law: Cases, Materials, Problems is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the major laws relating to discrimination against individuals with disabilities. Professor McGinley says, “Disability law has gotten more attention lately; students are becoming more interested in studying disability law because it affects many of them personally. Most interesting to me are the changes since the last edition because Covid has had many effects on the law.”

Professor McGinley has recently completed Religious Accommodations in the Dobbs Era for a symposium to be published this year about how the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion has affected the workplace. Her research deals with how the anti-discrimination rights—including an employee’s right to religious accommodations—in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees’ anti-abortion speech at work and their refusal to do portions of their jobs that they consider objectionable. She cites, for example, recent cases at CVS’s Minute Clinics and Southwest Airlines. At CVS, nurse practitioners have been fired for refusing to counsel patients about contraceptives that are contrary to the employees’ religious beliefs, while a flight attendant at Southwest was fired for harassing another employee for her pro-abortion political activity. Professor McGinley’s research offers insights into the difficult balance that employers and courts must achieve to protect employers’ and their customers’ interests while respecting employees’ rights.

Her third project is entitled Intersectionality on The Ground, The “Neutral Norm” and Remedying The Gap In Success of Intersectional Claims. This multi-year project analyzes how the law creates barriers to protection against employment discrimination for the most vulnerable individuals who belong to two or more protected classes, and/or whose disfavored working identities are related to protected traits. She plans to suggest changes to how Title VII is interpreted as well as amendments to the statute that would create greater protection for workers who currently suffer from intersectional discrimination.

Professor Leslie C. Griffin, William S. Boyd Professor of Law, is in the process of completing the first edition of a Learning Constitutional Law casebook with coauthor Marci A. Hamilton. She notes the writing process, "It is really fun to have an almost-complete casebook, and students really liked the draft we used during the fall."

Professor Kathryn M. Stanchi, E.L. Cord Professor of Law, was recently amongst an incredibly diverse group of rhetoric scholars in a new book: The Rhetoric of Judging Well: The Conflicted Legacy of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Stewart Chang, William S. Boyd Professor of Law, recently published an essay entitled Stopping Anti-Asian Hate: Local Solutions to a National Problem in 2022.

Mary LaFrance, IGT Professor of Intellectual Property Law, recently published the 6^th Edition of Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials with West Academic Publishing. We sat down with Professor LaFrance to discuss what is new in this updated edition.

David S. Tanenhaus, James E. Rogers Professor of History and Law, whose writing has been described as combining the "storytelling skills of a historian and the clear-headedness of a law scholar," has a forthcoming essay about the intersection of legal history and juvenile justice to be published in Law and History Review's digital imprint, The Docket.

Addie C. Rolnick, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Professor of Law, Faculty Director, Indian Nations Gaming & Governance Program, and Associate Director, Program on Race, Gender & Policing, has recently published two articles.