Highlights of Recent Scholarship

Books in Print

• Professor Scott Dodson’s student guide “Civil Procedure: Model Problems and Outstanding Answers” is now out in its second edition.

Articles in Print

• Professor Hadar Aviram has published “Perceiving and Reporting Domestic Violence Incidents in Unconventional Settings: A Vignette Survey Study,” in the Hastings Women’s Law Journal. The article uses a vignette survey design to examine the tendencies to report domestic violence incidents to the police, by controlling for the type of relationship, the existence of outing threats, and the presence of mutual violence. Compared to the typical scenario involving a male batterer and female victim, the article finds significantly more unwillingness to contact the police in situations where women abuse men and in same-sex abuse scenarios.
• Professor Scott Dodson’s article “Presuit Discovery in a Comparative Context” has been published in the Journal of Comparative Law. The article explores mechanisms for presuit investigative discovery in other countries. It also suggests that the U.S. federal system, as its pleading system moves closer to the fact-pleading regime typical of the rest of the world, ought to look to foreign mechanisms of presuit investigative discovery as a model for its own reform.
• Professor Richard Marcus has published “The Impact of Digital Information on American Evidence-Gathering and Trial—The Straw That Breaks the Camel’s Back?” in Electronic Technology and Civil Procedure: New Paths to Justice from Around the World (Springer Publications, Miklos Kengyel & Zoltan Nemessanyi  eds. 2012).
• Professor Susan Morse published a book review in the Journal of the American Taxation Association. It reviews Nigel Feetham’s book Tax Arbitrage: The Trawling of the International Tax System.
• Professor Dorit Reiss’s article “The Benefits of Capture” has appeared in the Wake Forest Law Review. The article suggests that the term “capture”, applied to a close relationship between industry and regulator, is not useful—by stigmatizing that relationship, judging it as problematic from the start, it hides its potential benefits. Industry usually has information no one else has, voluntary compliance is cheaper and can be more effective than enforced compliance, and industry can help regulators minimize negative unintended consequences.

Accepted for Publication

• Professor Scott Dodson’s paper “A New Look at Dismissal Rates in Federal Civil Cases” is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journal Judicature.

Speaking

• On November 8, Professor Jaime King spoke on a panel entitled “Should NIPT augment or replace current prenatal screening and diagnosis programs? Legal and Ethical Issues” at the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
• On November 9, Professor Reuel Schiller chaired and commented on a panel about California legal history at the American Society for Legal History’s annual meeting in Saint Louis.   
• Also on November 9, Professor Richard Marcus spoke about “Cooperation and Litigation—Thoughts on the American Experience” at a conference at the University of Kansas on Advocacy Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure After 75 Years.
• On November 18, Professor George Bisharat chaired and served as a discussant for a panel on “The Palestinians: Representation and Accountability” at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Denver.
• Also on November 18, Professor Reuel Schiller gave a presentation on the legal aspects of the relationship between civil rights groups and labor unions in California during the 1950s and 1960s to the Bay Area Labor History Workshop.
• On November 30, Professor Richard Marcus spoke about “Feasibility of Rules Amendments, Legislation, International Treaties, and Conventions to Address Conflicting Data Secrecy and Discovery Demands” at the Duke Law School Data Privacy Conference.

Other Evidence of Engaged Scholarship

• Professor David Faigman’s article “Evidence Code Section 802: The Neglected Key to Rationalizing the California Law of Expert Testimony,” 42 Loyola L.A. L. Rev. 427 (2009), was extensively relied upon by the California Supreme Court in Sargon Enterprises, Inc. v. University of Southern California.
• Professor Rory Little has been appointed by the California Supreme Court to serve on the Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Criminal Jury Instructions.
• Professor Reuel Schiller has been elected to the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History.