Washburn University School of Law and the Washburn Law Journal proudly present the
47th Foulston Siefkin Lecture
Professor Ron Hochbaum
Associate Clinical Professor of Law
Director, Buccola Family Homeless Advocacy Clinic
University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law
“Cruelty, Blame, and Survival: Homelessness in the Age of Grants Pass v. Johnson"
Thursday, March 13, 2025 • 12:15 p.m. • Room 152 & Zoom
Registration for 2025 Foulston Lecture
Housing is the solution to homelessness. However, for decades, cities, counties, and states have outlawed activities unhoused people involuntarily engage in while being forced to live outside – conduct like sleeping, sitting, and lying down.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court held that targeting unhoused people with criminal laws does not violate the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Now, jurisdictions are engaged in a race to the bottom, enacting and enforcing increasingly more punitive anti-homeless laws in the hopes of forcing unhoused people to flee to a nearby safe haven.
In his lecture, Professor Ron Hochbaum will review the history of the Grants Pass decision, its foreseeable effects, and the need for productive, rather than punitive, responses to homelessness.
Washburn University School of Law and the Washburn Law Journal proudly present the
46th Foulston Siefkin Lecture
Holly Doremus
Associate Dean, Faculty Development and Research and the James H. House and Hiram H. Hurd Professor of Environmental Regulation at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
"Reimagining a River"
Monday, March 25, 2024 • 12:30 p.m. • Room 152 & Zoom
Associate Dean Holly Doremus brings a strong background in life sciences and a commitment to interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship to her work at Berkeley Law. She earned her PhD in Plant Physiology from Cornell University and was a post-doctoral associate at the University of Missouri before making the transition to law. In addition to her law school teaching experience, she has taught in the graduate ecology program at UC Davis, in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley, and at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. She has been a principal investigator on several interdisciplinary grants; has co-authored papers with economists, sociologists, ecologists, conservation biologists and others; and has been a member of three National Research Council review committees.
Doremus received her JD and Environmental Law Certificate from Berkeley Law, where she was an articles editor for the Ecology Law Quarterly and a member of the Order of the Coif honor society. She then clerked for Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, practiced municipal and land use law with the firm of Eickelberg & Fewel in Corvallis, Ore., and taught at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University before beginning her law teaching career at UC Davis in 1995. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has served on the Board of Directors of Defenders of Wildlife and of Audubon California. She was honored as a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow for 2001-2006.
Abstract
Four dams on the Klamath River are coming down, in what reportedly is the largest dam removal operation to date in the world. The dam removal project marks an inflection point after decades of conflict over management of the Klamath. It marks the end of one set of arguments, although others continue. It’s a milestone for engineers and ecologists. It’s a time of excitement moment for advocates of freeing this river, and rivers in general, from intensive human control, and a time of concern for those who have built their social and economic expectations on the modified river. In this paper, I argue that dam removal should be seen not just as a state change for this river, but as an opportunity to reconsider our societal view of the meaning of this river, and of rivers more generally. We have long seen rivers as objects to be managed: threats to be controlled, servants to be mastered. More recently, we have seen them as a different kind of object: the foundations of ecological communities, requiring protection or restoration. But rivers are far more than their direct economic and ecosystem functions. They are not just shaped by human preferences; they shape their associated human and ecological communities. Rivers are connectors and dividers. They connect peoples through trade, and divide them as boundaries. They connect and divide ecosystems, moving soil, nutrients and some organisms, while blocking the movement of others. They can connect people to or sever them from nature. Rivers are also powerful symbols, creating and expressing human identities. Communities are of the rivers that dominate their landscapes, and they are of the worlds those rivers make possible. The legal and institutional structures through which rivers are managed should explicitly recognize the constitutive nature of rivers, expressing our aspirations for the future as well as our connections to the past. I consider what a reimagined Klamath River and its communities might look like in the near and long term, and how governance might be structured to facilitate that reimagination.
Washburn University School of Law and the Washburn Law Journal proudly present the
45th Foulston Siefkin Lecture
Judge U.W. Clemon
Retired Federal Judge
"A Dream Deferred: The Fight for Desegregation of America's Schools"
Thursday, March 23, 2023 • 12:30 p.m. • Room 114
Born in Fairfield, Alabama in 1943, U.W. Clemon graduated from the racially segregated Westfield High School as valedictorian of his 1961 class. He then attended Miles College where he participated in a boycott of segregated Birmingham stores and other civil rights demonstrations. He graduated in 1965 as SGA President and, again, as valedictorian of his class. He then received his JD from Columbia Law School, during which he clerked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
As an attorney, Clemon focused on fighting segregation through judicial action. In 1974, he was elected one of the first two Black Alabama state senators since Reconstruction. During his tenure, Clemon served as chair of the Rules Committee and often battled with notorious Governor George Wallace over racial issues. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Clemon as the first Black federal judge in Alabama history. When he became Chief Judge, Clemon changed the jury plan to make sure that more Black and poor citizens were a part of it. His most significant case as a judge was Ledbetter v. Goodyear. There, the Supreme Court overturned the jury’s ruling in his court that Ms. Ledbetter’s workplace had discriminated against her because of her sex. Congress then overruled the Supreme Court when it passed the “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” the first bill signed into law by President Obama.
When Clemon retired from the federal bench in 2009, he returned to law practice, where he handled one of the most controversial school desegregation cases in this century: Stout v. Gardendale Board of Education, in which the court blocked the mostly white City of Gardendale from setting up a separate school system to exclude many black students. Clemon and his wife, Barbara—a retired public schoolteacher—have been married for 55 years. Their daughter, Addine, followed in his footsteps as a Birmingham attorney and graduate of Columbia Law. Their son, Isaac, is a musician in New York City. Clemon has received numerous awards and honors, including the Distinguished Jurist Award from the Alabama Bar Association, the Stradford Award from the National Bar Association, the Drum Major Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, The Johnny Cochran Award of the American Association of Justice, the John Pickering Award of the American Bar Association, and the Thurgood Marshall Award of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Two streets in Birmingham are named for him, and there is an endowed U.W. Clemon Scholarship at Birmingham Southern College. Two years ago, the new U.W. Clemon Elementary School opened in the same Jefferson County School system he attended as a child. See also Judge Clemon's full bio (89 KB PDF).
He co-authored the article, "The Nation’s First Civil-Rights Law Needs to Be Fixed" which appears in the August 7, 2020, edition of The Atlantic.
Judge Clemon will present over his experience desegregating schools. He will begin by talking about his experience with segregation in the 1940s, in his early career, and the struggle to keep schools desegregated today. One of his proposed solutions to the permanent desegregation of schools is to expand the United States Supreme Court. He believes that we can't realize the goal of desegregation until we have a more representative judicial branch.
Professor Daniel Bodansky
Regents Professor, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University
"The UN Climate Change Regime Thirty Years On — A Retrospective and Assessment," 62 Washburn L.J. 1.
Professor Nadine Strossen
John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law, Emerita, New York Law School
"Why Should Hatemongers and Extremists Have Free Speech Rights?," 61 Washburn L.J. 1.
Associate Professor of Law at University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law
"The Next Wave of Fourth Amendment Challenges after Carpenter," 59 Washburn L.J. 1.
Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
"The Right to Own?: Protecting Indigenous Peoples' Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property," 58 Washburn L.J. 271.
Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School
"The Trump Administration and International Law," 56 Washburn L.J. 413.
Professor of Law at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law
"Managing Banks' Regulatory Capital," 55 Washburn L.J. 327.
Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law
"The President and Deportation: DACA, DAPA, and the Sources and Limits of Executive Authority," 55 Washburn L.J. 1.
Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law
"How Government Regulation Becomes Private Property," 54 Washburn L.J. 1.
University Distinguished Chair in Law at Wake Forest University School of Law
"Rethinking Administrative Law: The Institutions of Public Law" 53 Washburn L.J. 1.
Professor of Law at Hofstra University Maurice A. Deane School of Law
"Prosecutors' Ethics -- Fighting to Sustain Unethical and Unconscionable Conduct on Appeal," 52 Washburn L.J. 1.
Distinguished Research Professor of Law at DePaul University College of Law
"Moral Imagination in Judging," 51 Washburn L.J. 1.
John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School
"Political Powerlessness as a Requirement for Suspect Classifications?," 50 Washburn L.J. 1.
Edward S. Godfrey Professor of Law at University of Maine School of Law
"More Than Tilting at Windmills," 49 Washburn L.J. 1.
David Rines Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Industrial Innovation at Franklin Pierce Law Center
"Patent/Trade Secret Complementariness: An Unsuspected Synergism," 48 Washburn L.J. 1.
The George Washington University Law School
"The Supreme Court: Judicial Temperament and the Democratic Ideal," 47 Washburn L.J. 1.
Rupert and Lillian Radford Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law
"The Corporate Attorney as a 'Moving' Target: Liability and Ethical Dilemmas," 46 Washburn L.J. 1.
Alston & Bird Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law
"Civil Liberties and the War on Terror," 45 Washburn L.J. 1.
Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law
"Fulfilling Brown's Legacy: Bearing the Costs of Realizing Equality," 44 Washburn L.J. 1.
Dean, Villanova University School of Law
"Lawyers in the Perfect Storm: Sarbanes-Oxley §307 and Corporate Lawyering Post Enron," 43 Washburn L.J. 1.
Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley Law School
"Law and the Construction of Fear," 42 Washburn L.J. 1.
James H. House & Hiram H. Hurd Professor, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall)
"The New Age of Environmental Restoration," 41 Washburn L.J. 1.
Southmayd Professor, Yale Law School
"Becoming Lawyers in the Shadow of Brown," 40 Washburn L.J. 1.
Richard B. Russell Professor of History and Law, University of Georgia
"Tales of Death: Storytelling in the Physician-Assisted Suicide Litigation," 39 Washburn L.J. 159.
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
"Keeping Secrets: Religious Duty vs. Professional Obligation," 38 Washburn L.J. 748 (article co-authored with Leslie A. Hakala).
John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
"One Dollar-One Vote: A Preface to Debating Campaign Finance Reform," 37 Washburn L.J. 1.
Visiting Professor, New York University Law School
"Racial Libel as American Ritual," 36 Washburn L.J. 1.
Chicago-Kent College of Law
"Myths of Race and Gender in the Trials of O.J. Simpson and Susan Smith - Spectacles of Our Times," 35 Washburn L.J. 225.
Emory University School of Law
"A Tour of the Whine Country: The Challenge of Extending the Tenets of Lawyer Professionalism to Law Professors and Law Students," 34 Washburn L.J. 1.
Northwestern University School of Law
"'Imagine Her Satisfaction': The Transformative Task of Feminist Tort Work," 33 Washburn L.J. 56.
George W. Hutchison Professor of Energy Law, Southern Methodist University
"Principles of Energy Policy," 32 Washburn L.J. 1.
Harvard University School of Law
"Surrogacy Contracts - Gestational and Traditional: The Argument for Nonenforcement," 31 Washburn L.J. 1.
Missouri Attorney General
"The Emerging Role of State Attorneys General and the New Federalism," 30 Washburn L.J. 1.
Private Practice; formerly Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney
"Tactics and Techniques in the Trial of a Criminal Case," 29 Washburn L.J. 1.
Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, Shanghai, China
"China's Foreign Investment Legislation," 28 Washburn L.J. 1.
Rutgers University School of Law, Newark
"The Present Constitutional Crisis," 27 Washburn L.J. 1.
University of Virginia School of Law
"Miranda v. Arizona Revisited: Constitutional Law or Judicial Fiat," 26 Washburn L.J. 1.
University of Florida Levin College of Law
"Interpretation: Its Relevance in Courts, Criticism and Jurisprudence," 25 Washburn L.J. 1.
1984 – Professor Irving Younger
Marvin J. Sonosky Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
"Confrontation," 24 Washburn L.J. 1.
United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
"Double Jeopardy: Are the Pieces the Puzzle?" 23 Washburn L.J. 1.
University of Michigan School of Law
"Contract Law in Modern Commercial Transactions, an Artifact of Twentieth Century Business Life?," 22 Washburn L.J. 1.
Dean, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
"The Article 2 Prism: The Underlying Philosophy of Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code," 21 Washburn L.J. 1.
Dean, University of Arkansas School of Law
"Chapter 13: Its Operation, Its Statutory Requirements as to Payment to and Classification of Unsecured Claims, and Its Advantages," 20 Washburn L.J. 1.
Harvard Law School
"The Privacy Revolution: A Report From the Barricades," 19 Washburn L.J. 1.
Harvard Law School
"Consumers in Bankruptcy Cases," 18 Washburn L.J. 1.
Foulston Siefkin has sponsored this lecture series since 1978 to enrich the
quality of education at Washburn University School of Law.
Articles derived from the lectures are published by
the Washburn Law Journal.