FACULTY In September, Cynthia R. Farina, the William G. McRoberts Research Professor in Administration of the Law, addressed Canadian regulators and lawmakers at the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice’s national conference, “Nudging Regulations Designing and Drafting Regulatory Instruments for the 21st Century.” Her presentation, “Leveling the Playing Field: Using the Internet to Get Broader, Better Public Participation in Rulemaking,” built on the work of CeRI’s RegulationRoom project to explore when, and how, technology can be used to overcome obstacles to effective public commenting. Throughout the fall semester, Farina and students in the e-Government Clinic worked with researchers from Cornell’s ILR School to help a large teacher’s union engage its members in online deliberation on the challenges and possible solutions facing public schools. With coauthors Dima Epstein and Josiah Heidt ‘11, Farina published an article analyzing the use and value of storytelling by new rulemaking participants, “The Value of Words: Narrative as Evidence in Policymaking,” in the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal Evidence & Policy.
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Spring 2015
Farina was reappointed to a third term as one of forty public members of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a federal agency that makes research-based recommendations to Congress and the president for improving regulation. She also served as one of the civil society evaluators of the Obama administration’s compliance with commitments in the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan.
Clinical professor of law Lara Gelbwasser Freed, along with Joel Atlas, clinical professor of law and director of the Lawyering Program, presented a workshop at the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s December 2014 conference, “Innovations in Legal Writing.” The workshop, entitled “A Model for Teaching Fact Application,” provided a structured method and examples for teaching law students how to employ rule-based and analogical reasoning.
Stephen P. Garvey published several pieces during the spring semester. Among them were two articles: “Reading Rosemond” (12 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 233 [2014]) and “Authority, Ignorance, and the Guilty Mind” (67 SMU L. Rev. 545 (2014)). Garvey also contributed a chapter titled “Injustice, Authority, and the Criminal Law” in the recently published book The Punitive Imagination: Law, Justice, and Responsibility, edited by Austin Sarat.
conference focused on the world’s newest jury systems, introduced during the past year in two Argentine provinces. A book including Spanish translations of some of her jury research, El juicio por jurados: Investigaciones sobre la deliberacíon, el veredicto y la democracia, was formally presented at the conference. The translation was supervised by University of Buenos Aires professor Andrés Harfuch, a visitor to Cornell Law School in spring 2014. While in Argentina, Hans also had the chance to talk with judges, lawyers, legislators, and public interest advocates about jury practices in other countries and their relevance for the new systems in Argentina. She hopes to begin research on the Argentine jury in 2015. Hans was thrilled to be elected president of the Law and Society Association, an interdisciplinary scholarly group. She begins her two-year term in June.
Valerie Hans, professor of law, visited Taipei, Taiwan, on two occasions: first, to advise judges about a proposal for an advisory jury system that would complement judicial decision making, and second, to meet with jury scholars from around the world to exchange and discuss recent research. The jury conference, held at Academia Sinica, was organized by K. C. Huang, who received an LL.M. from Cornell Law School. In November, Hans traveled to Buenos Aires to address a
In the fall, she completed a new coauthored book, The Psychology of Tort Law (with Jennifer K. Robbennolt), which will be published by NYU Press. Several years in the making, the book explores multiple dimensions of tort law and tort litigation from the perspective of psychological science. Drawing on both authors’ experiences teaching and researching tort law, The Psychology of Tort Law examines psychological assumptions underlying tort doctrine, describes empirical research