The Catholic University Law Review

News and Updates

July 16, 2010: Law Review Announces its Volume 60 Staff.
Based on their outstanding academic and write-on competition performances, fifty students have been selected to serve as staff members of the Law Review during its sixtieth year of production.  These staff members will help to edit, Bluebook, and produce four issues of legal scholarship over the course of the next year.  Further, each staff member will participate in the Law Review’s extensive writing program, which culminates in each staffer authoring his or her own piece of substantive legal scholarship.
 
The Law Review is proud to announce its newest members: David Baker, Sudeb Basu, Steve Begg, Ellen Berndtson, Chanelle Blackie, Katrina Budnick, Debbie Carfora, Lauren Clarke, Sarah Conkright, Laura Crawford, Christopher Curran, Justin D’Aniello, Kelsey Darnell, Anand Das, Tim Davis, Matthew Dawson, Julia Fisher, Sean Flaim, Jessica Forton, Craig Gaver, Ellen Gehris, Katherine Giblin, Scott Goldschmidt, Jessica Grunberg, Will Haun, Melissa Hendricks, Thomas Heywood, Caroline Johnson, Teddy Kranis, Kaelin Kuhn, David Leege, Katharine Mason, Michael McCloskey, Bryan McDermott, Dan McGraw, Kevin Ohlhausen, Adreanna Orlang, Richard Otzel, David Owens, Tracy Phillips, Tziporah Schuartz, John Setter, Carroll Skehan, Hilary Temme, Marta Thompson, Sarah Turkel, Julya Vekstein, Casey Wallace, Chris Young, and Sara Zabihi.
 
June 14, 2010: David Brewer Honored with the 2010 Burton Award for Legal Achievement.
David Brewer, Law Review Alumnus and Former Editor-in-Chief (Volume 59), was one of only fifteen law students across the country to receive a Burton Award for his outstanding legal scholarship.  David won the award for his Comment, A Cross in the Road: Salazar v. Buono and the Circuit Divide on the Establishment Clause Remedial Question, 58 Cath. U. L. Rev. 813 (2009).  The Burton Awards Program was established in 1999 to honor students “who use plain, clear and concise language and avoid archaic, stilted legalese.”  He is the second member of the Catholic University Law Review to be honored with this distinction.  John Skees was also named a Burton Award recipient in 2007 for his Comment, The Resurrection of Historic Usury Principles for Consumption Loans in a Federal Banking System, 55 Cath. U. L. Rev. 1131 (2006).

February, 2010: Law Review Cited by the Tenth Circuit.
The Law Review is pleased to announce that the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in Reinhardt v. Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education, --- F.3d ----, 2010 WL 522328 (10th Cir. Feb. 16, 2010), cited an article recently published by the Law Review in Fall 2009.  The cited article is Robert J. Tepper & Craig G. White, Speak No Evil: Academic Freedom and the Application of Garcetti v. Ceballos to Public University Faculty, 59 Cath. U. L. Rev. 125 (2009).  The Law Review is very proud to have made this contribution to legal discourse and to expand the influence of the Columbus School of Law in the national legal community.

October, 2009: Professor Stephen Goldman Discusses the Anti-False Testimony Principle.
On October 29, Professor Stephen Goldman regaled a crowd of CUA students with tales about his days litigating complex commercial cases. In his talk entitled "Coaching Deposition Witnesses: Sometimes Yes, Sometimes No," Professor Goldman recalled his experiences deposing witnesses and the ethical abuses he witnessed from other attorneys in coaching their clients. From these experiences Professor Goldman developed an axiom of ethical behavior in deposition testimony: "The Anti-False Testimony Principle." The Anti-False Testimony Principle prevents an attorney from soliciting false testimony or suffering the introduction of false testimony by his or her client. It is a mechanism that balances an attorney's duty to zealously represent his or her client with the duty to present accurate information to the court. In articulating the Principle, Professor Goldman distinguished between two types of testimony, historical record testimony and witness understanding testimony, and posited that the Anti-False Testimony Principle works differently in each setting. Professor Goldman argued that an attorney is limited with historical record testimony by what the witness saw or heard, but that an attorney is allowed to coach a witness with present understanding testimony--provided that the testimony remains truthful. At all times, Professor Goldman argued, the testimony must remain the witness's own story. Professor Goldman presented his Anti-False Testimony Principle as part of a paper presentation sponsored by the Catholic University Law Review. Professor Goldman's article elaborating on the Principle, entitled "The Anti-False Testimony Principle and the Fundamentals of Ethical Preparation of Deposition Witnesses," will be published in the Fall 2009 issue of the Law Review, due out in December.

February, 2009: Professor Mary Jean Dolan Offers Comments on the Supreme Court's 9-0 decision in Pleasant Grove v. Summum.
It was very exciting to see that the Supreme Court's 9-0 decision in Pleasant Grove v. Summum used a significant portion of the reasoning and empirical research set forth in the Catholic University Law Review's current issue, Why Monuments are Government Speech: The Hard Case of Pleasant Grove v. Summum, 58 Cath. U. L. Rev. 7 (2008). The Article seems to have had a significant impact on the decision in at least two ways. First, Justice Alito’s opinion made frequent reference to Professor Dolan’s IMLA amicus brief, quoting both from the "municipal practice examples" and her summary of nation-wide municipal content control methods. One important contribution of the Article is its in-depth explanation of the methodology used to obtain and analyze the municipal attorneys' survey data; that new material provided the necessary assurances for the Supreme Court's reliance. Second, the Article includes substantial new material on the limits of government speech, including the impact on Establishment Clause analysis of calling monuments "government speech" and the potential Equal Protection Clause safeguards. This analysis, not provided by the parties, may have contributed in some small way to the decision’s unanimity, and now provides a starting point for future scholarship on the opinion’s ramifications. It is, of course, unusual to write a law review article on a Supreme Court case before the decision, but here, doing so played a unique role. The Article's in-depth explanation of the public-private interaction regarding monuments made a valuable contribution to this decision on an important, developing First Amendment doctrine. Congratulations and thank you to all of the Law Review staff and editors who worked so hard and well on this worthwhile, effective project.

October, 2008: Student Author Cited
Matthew Yanovitch, a 2007 graduate of the Columbus School of Law whose Comment was published in Volume 57.1 of the Catholic University Law Review, had his article cited by the Minnesota Court of Appeals. In October 2008 the court held that an autopsy report is testimonial in nature for the purposes of a defendant's Sixth Amendment confrontation rights. State v. Johnson, 756 N.W.2d 883, 891–92 (Minn. Ct. App. 2008). The court recognized a number of courts that have held an autopsy report not to be testimonial, but rather a business record, and therefore a hearsay exception. Id. at 890–91. However, the court noted that that line of cases had been "criticized as 'strain[ed],' and as reintroducing through the 'back-door' of the business-records exception the Roberts reliability factor rejected in Crawford." Id. at 891 (quoting Matthew Yanovitch, Dissecting the Constitutionality of Autopsy Reports after Crawford, 57 Cath. U. L. Rev. 269, 288 (2007)).