The Faculty Lounge

Call for Submissions: Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award

Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award: Call for Submissions

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is pleased to announce the competition for its annual Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  This paper competition is open to all having with five (5) or fewer years of full-time law teaching experience as of July 1, 2024. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2024.

The purpose of the award is to encourage and recognize excellent legal scholarship related to gender and the law.  The work chosen for the Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award should make a substantial contribution to legal literature and reflect original research and/or major developments in previously reported research.

Papers will be reviewed on a blind basis by a committee comprised of members of the Haub Law faculty with expertise in this area.  The winner of the competition will be invited to present the paper to selected students and faculty at Haub Law (located in White Plains, NY) during the 2024-2025 academic year, with reasonable travel expenses from within the continental U.S. paid, or via Zoom, as circumstances permit and by mutual agreement.

ELIGIBILITY:

• All persons who have held full-time teaching positions for five (5) or fewer full academic years as of July 1, 2024 are eligible for consideration. One does not have to be on the tenure-track or tenured to be eligible. Time as a VAP or Fellow does not “count against” the five (5) year clock.
• There is no subject-matter limitation for submissions, as long as the paper relates in some way to gender and the law.
• Jointly authored papers are accepted as long as each author independently meets the eligibility requirements.

PUBLICATION COMMITMENTS/LIMITATIONS:

• There is no publication commitment associated with the competition. 
• Papers are eligible regardless of whether they were published prior to submission date, are scheduled to be published after the submission date, or are not yet under submission.
• Each applicant is limited to one (1) entry.
• Papers considered in prior years’ competitions are eligible for resubmission.
• There are no page-length or word-count limitations.
• All publications (including scholarly articles, book chapters, legal briefs and other writings) are eligible for consideration.

SUBMISSION:

• We will accept submissions for the Emerging Scholar Award from June 1, 2024, through July 1, 2024. The winner will be announced by August 30, 2024.
• To participate, please email your work, redacted as necessary to preserve anonymity (for the blind judging process), as a portable data file (PDF) to Judy Jaeger, Senior Staff Associate, at [email protected] with the subject line “Emerging Scholar Award.”

• Please include in the body of the email your name, institutional affiliation and confirmation that you meet the eligibility requirements.
• Unredacted or late papers will not be considered.

Information on Emerging Scholar Award and the Elisabeth Haub School of Law

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is pleased to host an annual paper competition for its Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  The law school at Pace University is one of a small number of schools in the United States named after a woman, and we are proud of our school’s long-standing commitment to gender justice.

Since the establishment of the Women’s Justice Center in 1991, Haub Law has made gender justice a priority.  Students have the ability to pursue a path to practice in Women, Gender & the Law, through which they develop skills and strategies for effective representation and advocacy for women and gender justice, regardless of what career they pursue.  The Haub Law faculty includes nationally recognized academic experts and advocates for women and gender justice. Our faculty teach, research and write about gender equality and justice as it relates to constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, education, environmental law, estate planning, juvenile justice, legal theory, poverty, public health, social media, and taxation, to name just a few areas.  An important hallmark of Haub Law is that in addition to our specialty classes that focus on gender, issues involving gender are also integrated into a wide range of other courses.

Prior Winners

2020 – Greer Donley, Contraceptive Equity: Curing the Sex Discrimination in the ACA’s Mandate, 71 Ala. L. Rev. 499 (2019)

2021 – Marie Amélie George, Exploring Identity, 54 Fam. L.Q. 1 (2021)

2022 – Elizabeth D. Katz, Sex, Suffrage, and State Constitutional Law: Women's Legal Right to Hold Public Office, 33 Yale J. Law & Feminism 110 (2022)

2024 – Emily J. Stolzenberg, Nonconsensual Family Obligations, 48 BYU L. Rev. 625 (2022)

Cripple Creeks

The Band's Robbie Robertson wrote "Up on Cripple Creek" in 1969 for the group's second album. Released as a single, it reached number 24 on the Hot 100. As a Canadian, Robertson evidently had more familiarity with Appalachian folk music than with U.S. geography. The old-time banjo tune "Cripple Creek" (sometimes called "Goin' Up Cripple Creek") is thought to have originated in Virginia, where there is indeed a creek by that name. There is also a better-known Cripple Creek in Colorado, but there isn't one anywhere near Lake Charles, Louisiana. Of course, Levon Helm was from Arkansas, and maybe the mountain was in Colorado . . .

CFP: Chicagoland Junior Scholars Conference

This just in:

The Northern Illinois University College of Law is now accepting proposals for the Seventh Annual Chicagoland Junior Scholars Conference on Friday, September 27, 2024. The conference will be held in person at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. This conference offers junior scholars the opportunity to present works-in-progress, to receive feedback from a senior faculty reader and other attendees, and to network with other legal scholars from the greater Chicagoland area. Preference will be given to law faculty who have been teaching for fewer than ten years in a tenure-track position, including those who expect to start such a position in Fall 2024. Papers may be presented at any stage of development.  

If you are interested in presenting, please submit a working title and abstract of 200-300 words to [email protected] no later than July 8, 2024. Selected authors will be notified by July 26, 2024. Papers will be due by September 6, 2024. There is no registration fee. Please email [email protected] with any questions. 

Using Consensus AI App to Find Scholarly Legal Literature (No Hallucinations)

Chat GPT has made available via its free version (3.5) access to a custom GPT called Consensus that I am finding useful for locating scholarly articles that can give me a quick sense of scholarly approaches to pinpoint. Unfortunately, Consensus isn't linked yet to HeinOnLine/Westlaw/Lexis, so isn't quite at its full potential for legal scholarship, but it still can get a researcher pointed in the right direction, especially for interdisciplinary questions.

How to access Consensus? Within Chat GPT, choose "Explore GPTs" from the left-hand menu. Then, choose the "Research and Analysis" category under the search bar. Then navigate to the Consensus app, which is circled in red below (it looks like a "C" made out of two blue-ish colors):

What is Consensus? It's a search engine, like the ones most researchers are familiar with (the company's description is here; I have no relationship with Consensus except as a user). What makes it more helpful than, say, a search in Google Scholar is that Consensus combines the power of a large language model and the 200 million+ research papers in the Semantic Scholar database. Semantic Scholar includes materials from Cambridge University Press, U Chicago Press, and several databases that are mostly science-oriented. It also claims links with SSRN, but so far, I have found that Consensus is not super-reliable yet for scouring legal scholarship that I know for sure is posted on SSRN. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

To test out Consensus, I asked a question to which I already knew the answer.  Because I've written about the topic, I could better evaluate the quality of the search results. Details after the fold.

CFP: Navigating the Intersection: Legal and Ethical Implications of Generative AI in Healthcare

This just in:

Call for Papers
Navigating the Intersection: Legal and Ethical Implications of Generative AI in Healthcare

Symposium Theme: Focus on Social Justice and Equity Issues in AI and Healthcare Law
Hosted by: North Carolina Central University School of Law
Symposium Date: October 10, 2024
Optional Related NCCU Law Annual Law & Technology Summit: October 11, 2024

We are pleased to invite scholars, practitioners, policymakers, technologists, and students to submit papers for an interdisciplinary conference aimed at exploring the multifaceted relationship between generative AI in healthcare and legal ethics, with a special focus on social justice and equity. This event will provide a platform for addressing the complexities of AI-driven healthcare systems and discussing policy interventions for societal disparities.

Topics of Interest:
Equity and Justice in AI-Driven Healthcare
Bias and Discrimination in AI Algorithms
Ethics and Regulation of AI
Particular Ethical Concerns of Large Language Models in Healthcare
Global Perspectives on AI and Healthcare Equity
Recent EU Regulations and the Governance of AI Use in Healthcare
Human-Centered AI in Healthcare

Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts should be no more than 500 words, detailing the paper's argument, methodology, and relevance to the conference themes.
Include the paper title, author(s) details (name, institution, email address).
Full papers must be original and not previously published.
Submissions should adhere to the Bluebook or APA citation styles.
Deadline for abstract submission: June 15, 2024.
Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2024.
Deadline for full paper submission: September 15, 2024.

Publication Opportunities:
Selected papers will be considered for publication in an edited volume.

Conference Logistics:
The symposium will take place at North Carolina Central University School of Law.

Please submit abstracts and inquiries to [email protected].

Peter "Bo" Rutledge Stepping Down as Dean of The University of Georgia School of Law

The University of Georgia School of law has announced that Bo Rutledge will step down as dean of the end of the calendar year.  Rutledge became dean in 2015.  He will return to the faculty.

Making Good Presentations at Academic Legal Conferences

As I continue to experiment with ways that artificial technology can be used to enhance legal research and writing, I've encountered several custom GPTs that purport to convert notes, paper drafts, etc. and convert them into PowerPoint presentations. Ones I've tried so far are by slidesgpt.com and studyx.ai. (I have no relationship with either, other than as an experimental user.)

I

So far, I have been impressed with the GPTs' ability to extract important information from my inputs, but the design of the slides is generic and repetitive. Perhaps with more incremental prompting, I'll get better results.

In the meantime, with a few conferences coming up soon, I've rediscovered this good advice from Philip E. Bourne (UVA, Data Science): Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations. Listed after the fold, the rules are pretty simple on paper, but not so easy for many of us law profs (myself included) to follow.

Using AI to Create Customized PowerPoint Images

The following is a guest post by Professor Rick Bales (Ohio Northern):

I use PowerPoint more than I used to. I think the visual stimulus helps keep students engaged, and the text prompts mean that I can ditch my notes without getting sidetracked. But I dislike text-heavy slides – I want the text to cover the highlights, and the rest of the slide to help engage the students. That requires some visual imagery.

Until recently, my images usually came from scouring the web. But for many abstract legal topics, nothing from the web quite fits, or sometimes it fits but the resolution is too low to look good on a projected slide. I’ve tried using PowerPoint’s drawing tools to create original material, but I’m not very good at it and it takes a lot of time to create just one good slide.

Over the last six months or so, I’ve been using DALL-E (the image creator that comes with ChatGPT4) to custom-design images for my slides. The main advantage to this approach is that I usually can customize my slide for its intended purpose. For example, here’s an image I used in my Employment Law course to illustrate a case about EMTs at Sacred Heart Hospital who thought they should be getting paid for their on-call time:

But not everything is customizable. I couldn’t get DALL-E to give me anything interesting to illustrate the “reasonable rate” for calculating overtime. And tort cases have been a challenge, since the DALL-E algorithm apparently has been instructed not to create images of people getting shot or maimed or killed.

Even when DALL-E can create the image I’m after, sometimes there are missteps. Words that appear in an image are likely to be misspelled. No amount of follow-up prompting was able to get DALL-E to understand that I wanted arrows pointed away from an object in an image rather than toward it. And sometimes, items in an image are just “off”, as in the image below, illustrating a workers’ compensation case in which an employee crashed his employer’s pickup truck into a tree while he was trying to retrieve a pack of cigarettes he had dropped on the floorboard. I too might have hit the tree too if it had been growing in the middle of the road!

On the upside, images like these keep students engaged. Students enjoy studying each of my slides to see if AI has gone rogue. I consider it a win any time my students are doing something in class other than watching cute puppy videos or shopping online.

My prompts tend to be short and descriptive. If I don’t get what I want after about 10 minutes of trying I might try scouring the web, and otherwise I’ll just go without an image on that slide. I don’t claim any expertise on creating these prompts. If you have suggestions on drafting prompts, or using other AI image-generators, or just generally on using AI to create better slides, please send them to me – I will compile and share in a follow-up post.

-Rick Bales