Professor Barton guest taught a class on "AI and Law Schools” at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in course on Generative AI and the Law. He covered the history and nature of American law schools as an explanation for why law schools will likely be very slow adopters of AI (or other new technology).

Barton was a speaker on a panel hosted by the Section on Pro Bono & Access to Justice at the AALS Annual Meeting. Panelists explored the state of the right to counsel in criminal cases, whether and how that right ought to be extended to certain civil contexts, and what role right to counsel plays or ought to play in the broader access to justice movement.

Barton debated John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation on the topic of judicial ethics and the Supreme Court in a federalist society event at the UT law school.

Barton served as a peer evaluator for the State Department in granting Fulbright Awards for the 2024-25 academic year, reading dozens of applications and meeting with other professors and State Department officials to evaluate them.

Dean Lonnie Brown participated as a panelist in a program titled “2023 National Conversation on Civility: Civility and Free Speech,” with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Berkeley School of Law and Judge Consuelo M. Callahan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The virtual event was sponsored by the American Inns of Court.

Brown was a speaker on a panel co-sponsored by the Professional Responsibility and Pro-Bono & Access to Justice Sections at the AALS Annual Meeting. Panelists discussed the duties of lawyers who are in government service or who advise government officials, and considered whether the rules of professional conduct need to be clarified to address issues that arise in these contexts.

Professor Zack Buck presented The Future of the False Claims Act as part of The Impact of Fraud and Abuse Law on Health Equity Symposium hosted by the Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy at Loyola University School of Law in Chicago. In the presentation, he highlighted recent Supreme Court jurisprudence and its impact on the regulation of health care fraud and abuse, with a particular focus on private equity activity within health care.

Buck presented The Introduction to the U.S. Health Care System as part of the Tennessee Bar Association Health Law Section’s 23rd Annual Health Law Primer at Bass Berry and Sims law firm in Nashville. The program was designed for newer health law practitioners in the state of Tennessee.

On November 8, 2023, Buck presented Harm Reduction: Safe Injection Sites as part of the Hurt and Harm Reduction and Narcan Training meeting organized by the Public Interest Collective at the UT College of Law. The talk provided an overview of the history and regulation of safe injection sites in the United States.

Buck presented Hot Topics in Health Law as part of the Tennessee Society of Certified Public Accountants’ Health Care Conference in Nashville. The talk was intended to provide an overview of important regulatory and legal developments within health law over the last year.

At the 2024 AALS Annual Conference, Professor Sherley Cruz moderated a panel, Whistling a Different Tune: Shifts in Retaliation & Whistleblower Law, which included College of Law Professor Alex Long as one of the esteemed panelists. Cruz was also a discussant for Discussing Polarizing Topics in a Polarizing Time: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? – a discussion group that explored best practices for facilitating difficult conversations in law school classrooms. 

In addition, Cruz accepted a nomination to serve on the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) Board of Governors. The three-year appointment began in January 2024. She is also the incoming (2024) Secretary-Treasurer of the AALS Employment Discrimination Law Section.

Professor Joan Heminway was quoted in “Big Law's Flood Into Boomtown Nashville Tests Client Loyalties” by The American Lawyer on Law.com.

Heminway presented her work on ESG and Insider Trading: Legal and Practical Considerations, at the ILEP/Penn Carey Law symposium on “The Future of ESG” in Philadelphia on November 10, 2023. Her related paper will be published in a forthcoming issue of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law.

Heminway participated in a session at AALS Annual Meeting sponsored by the Transactional Law and Skills Section. She and other presenters shared experiential exercises they have used in business/transactional courses.

Heminway also was featured on the Legal Tenzer podcast discussing her spring 2024 course offering Governance, Finance, and HBO Max’s Succession. The episode can be found here. In addition, Heminway was quoted in an article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press on the difference between primary and secondary sales of securities. The article, “Amid Croft & Frost accounting firm woes, owner pitched ‘extremely exciting’ hydrogen plant, admitted it was volatile,” reported on (among other things) securities fraud questions relating to the sale of membership interests in a purported green energy firm organized as a limited liability company.

The American Law Institute Council elected Associate Dean Michael Higdon as new member of The American Law Institute (ALI). The ALI is “the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law. ALI drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes, and Principles of Law that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.”

Higdon’s article, Constitutional Parenthood, 103 Iowa L Rev 1483 (2018), was cited by the Oregon Supreme Court (in a dissenting opinion) in Matter of S.D.S., 371 Or. 573, 643 (2023), a case dealing with the parentage determination of a child born via gestational surrogacy.

Higdon moderated a panel sponsored by the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues at the AALS Annual Meeting. In the session, panelists examined and discussed various topics relating to legislation aimed at erasing the identity of members of the LGBTQ community and denying them essential civil rights and protections.

Professor Lucy Jewel led a workshop at the inaugural Critical Legal Collective (CLC) convening at Duke Law School. Along with her co-facilitator, Professor Pedro Malavet from the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Jewel guided participants toward new strategies for protecting academic freedom in states that have enacted legislation restricting the teaching of divisive concepts. Jewel is a founding member of the CLC coordinating committee and played a central role in planning and organizing the convening. 

Jewel spoke on a panel at the AALS Annual Meeting sponsored by the Critical Theories Section. She and other panelists addressed the resources available for those whose teaching includes knowledge, skills and values from the critical schools of legal knowledge.

Professor Kristina Kersey’s article “Massachusetts Reminds Youth Defense Attorneys to Consider State Constitutions” was published in State Court Report, which a nonpartisan news outlet that covers state constitutional developments in all 50 states. The article was part of a series on Commonwealth v. Mattis.

Professor Nick Nugent presented a work-in-progress at the AALS Annual Meeting as part of the Law and Technology Workshop sponsored by the Internet and Computer Law Section.

Professor Glenn Reynolds’ book, Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy (coauthored with U.C. Berkeley law professor Robert P. Merges) has been republished by Routledge Academic Press.

Reynolds’ article, Retconning Heller: Five Takes on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen has been published in the William & Mary Law Review.

For his Images of the Law seminar, Reynolds filmed a 45 minute interview with Dale Launer, the producer/screenwriter of the courtroom classic, “My Cousin Vinny.”

Professor Tomer Stein presented a work-in-progress at the AALS Annual Meeting as part of a program sponsored by the Business Associations Section.

Professor Maurice Stucke was interviewed by a Knoxville TV station on Tennessee’s antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA regarding its name, image, and likeness (NIL) rules.

In January 2024, Stucke was a speaker on algorithmic collusion at the New York State Bar Association's Annual Meeting on the panel “Are Algorithms the New Smoke-Filled Rooms?” 

Stucke also spoke at the White House in a meeting with senior Biden administration officials on competition policy and artificial intelligence. A press release of that meeting is available here.

In Fall 2023, Stucke testified before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights on its Hearing, “Examining Competition and Consumer Rights in Housing Markets.” His written statement about algorithmic collusion in the housing industry and beyond and the video of the Senate hearing are available here.

Stucke was featured on The Indicator from Planet Money podcast on NPR. The episode is titled “The Lawsuit That Could Shake Up the Rental Market” and discusses a lawsuit against RealPage, which is “accused of facilitating a cartel between major property managers that results in higher prices for renters and increased profits for landlords who use RealPage's software.” ProPublica, which broke the story on RealPage’s algorithmic collusion with the nation’s leading rental property owners, discussed Stucke’s recent Senate testimony on how Congress must update the antitrust laws in the article “DOJ Backs Tenants in Case Alleging Price-Fixing by Big Landlords and a Real Estate Tech Company.” Business Insider quoted Stucke in its article, “Tenants and a top prosecutor have accused major landlords and a popular apartment-pricing site of colluding to inflate rents. A legal expert says it shows algorithmic collusion is no longer ‘science fiction.’” and Bloomberg quoted Stucke in its article, “RealPage Antitrust Case Poses AI Price-Setting Collusion Test.”

In October 2023, Stucke presented at the conference, “The New Merger Guidelines: Controlling Case Law and New Economics,” hosted by the University of Utah’s Utah Project on Antitrust & Consumer Protection. The conference, which included the chief economist of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, examined the DOJ and FTC’s proposed new Merger Guidelines in light of modern economics and relevant controlling caselaw, inviting experts in the field to weigh in for the benefit of improving antitrust merger enforcement.

The New York Times’s DealBook quoted Stucke on AI, OpenAI and Microsoft in its article “The Heat Rises at COP28.”

Professor Rachelle Ketchum West has been appointed as co-chair of the Association of Legal Writing Directors’ (ALWD) Scholarship Grants Committee.