The Faculty Lounge

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

First released in 1962, "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" became Neil Sedaka's signature song. Co-written with Howard Greenfield, his frequent composing partner, the original had a teenage pop tempo, introduced by nonsense lyrics and backed by The Cookies. Lenny Welch released it as a torch balled in 1970, also arranged by Sedaka and Greenfield, with a very different intro. Sedaka himself released the slow tempo version in 1975. It was only the second time an artist had two Billboard top-ten hits -- number 1 for the original and number 8 for the second release -- with two different renditions of the same song.

Born in Brooklyn to a Sephardic family -- his last name is a slight transliteration of tzedaka, which means charity in Hebrew -- Sedaka was classically trained at the Julliard prep division, but he gave it up, breaking his mother's heart, to pitch songs at the Brill Building. He was the original lead singer of The Tokens, but he quit before they recorded The Lion Sleeps Tonight. His first solo hit was "Oh Carol," named after Carol King, whom he had dated in high school. King released a less successful answer song, "Oh Neil," written with her then-husband Gerry Goffin, who was in on the joke.

There are two surprises and a question at the bottom of the post.

 

Michael Sant'Ambrogio (Essentially) Named Dean of MSU Law

MSU College of Law has announced that Interim Dean Michael Sant'Ambrogio has been recommended to become the law school's permanent dean effective October 25.  Sant'Ambrogio, who holds a JD from NYU, joined the school in 2011 and was appointed interim dean in January.  Presumably it becomes official upon sign off of the MSU Board.

Penn State Submits Plan for Reunification of its Two Law Schools to ABA

Penn State University has officially submitted a plan to reunify its two law schools to the Council of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions.  The proposed single law school will be called Penn State Dickinson Law and will have a primary location in Carlisle PA - keeping University Park as a secondary location. It will be led by Penn State Dickinson Law's current dean, Danielle Conway.  According to the announcement:

The applications do not anticipate a change in the current size of the faculty. They note the anticipated unified law school will aim for a J.D. in-residence class of 200 students per year, with 125 in Carlisle and 75 in University Park. The LL.M. program will be administered using the framework developed at University Park to support LL.M. students at both locations.

 

New Book Announcement - Critical Trusts Law: Reading Roger Cotterrell (Nick Piška & Hayley Gibson eds. 2024))

I've just picked up an exciting new book that contributes significantly to the Trusts & Estates field. Critical Trusts Law: Reading Roger Cotterrell (Nick Piška & Hayley Gibson eds., 2024) is worth a read for anyone writing in this area.

Here is a description of the book, written by its editors, who are both faculty members at Kent Law School in the UK:

In May 2016 a group of trust lawyers and activists met at The Shard, London, to discuss the relationship between pension trusts and global corporate capitalism. During a break, standing at the large glass windows looking down at the City of London, Nick Piška and Adam Gearey reflected on the paucity of critical trusts scholarship given the role of trusts in the global financial crisis and rising wealth inequality. The conversation naturally turned to the work of Roger Cotterrell on trusts,[1] one of the few theoretical-doctrinal interventions to have linked trusts to questions of power and inequality, and the seed of an idea for a symposium revisiting themes in Cotterrell’s work on trusts was sown. In 2017, 30 years since the publication of his first in a trilogy of articles on trusts law, we hosted that symposium in Canterbury.

This edited collection brings together a number of the papers presented at that symposium. Themes explored in the chapters include ideology and the (in)visibility of power; the abuse of trusts; the gendering of trusts; and the implications of trusts regimes for tax, finance and banking. Some set out new agendas for trusts scholarship. Many turn to developments in trusts practice since the publication of Cotterrell’s articles (for example developments in asset protection trusts) attest to the continued prescience of Cotterrell’s critique.

The collection will be of interest to trusts students and researchers looking for critical reflections on trusts law, theory and practice. At Kent Law School we have been setting Cotterrell’s articles on trusts as ‘core reading’ on our undergraduate Equity & Trusts module for many years. Introducing trusts to undergraduate students might appear daunting enough, but introducing the trust idea, trust doctrine, and a critique of the trust form simultaneously has been challenging and exhilarating in (almost) equal measure. Each year we find different nuances and different points to emphasize in Cotterrell’s works as the legal, social, economic and theoretical milieu has shifted—and each year our students bring different questions and ideas to the seminars and assessments.

The collection consists of 13 chapters, including an introduction to and overview of critical trusts scholarship by Nick Piška and an afterword from Roger Cotterrell.

B & W 229 x 152 mm | Perfect Bound on White w/Matte Laminate | 242 pages | Paperback ISBN 978-1-910761-23-6 | E-book (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-910761-24-3 | 10 September 2024

The book is available for download for free, here.

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[1] See Roger Cotterrell, ‘Power, Property and the Law of Trusts: A Partial Agenda for Critical Legal Scholarship,’ Journal of Law and Society 14 (1987); Roger Cotterrell, ‘Some Sociological Aspects of the Controversy Around the Legal Validity of Private Purpose Trusts,’ in Equity and Contemporary Legal Developments ed. Stephen Goldstein (1992); Roger Cotterrell, ‘Trusting in Law: Legal and Moral Concepts of Trust,’ Current Law Problems 46 (1993).

My Interview with UVA Law on WHO organ and blood policies

I recently sat down for a Q&A with UVA Law for my recent paper with Al Roth, WHO Says Countries Should Be Self-Sufficient In (Unremunerated) Organs And Blood. The full interview “WHO Stifles International Blood and Organ Donations, Argue Professors” is available in full here.

 

Here are some excerpts:

Krawiec and co-author Alvin E. Roth explain the drawbacks of current WHO standards in their paper “WHO Says Countries Should Be Self-Sufficient In (Unremunerated) Organs and Blood.” Roth is an affiliated scholar on the National Bureau of Economic Research and a professor of economics at Stanford University. He is the 2012 Nobel Prize winner in economics for his work on market design. Krawiec is the Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law at UVA; much of her work focuses on “taboo trades” — also the name of her podcast — such as blood and plasma, transplantable organs, and egg and sperm markets. . . .

How do current WHO policies on organ and blood donation contribute to this problem?

WHO policy mandates both national (or sometimes only regional) self-sufficiency and an absence of remuneration for both blood products and transplantable organs — what we refer to in the paper as “the twin principles.” These twin principles are unhelpful separately and unworkable together. Their effect on blood products is particularly stark — no country that fails to compensate donors is self-sufficient in plasma collection and few LMIC collect sufficient supplies of whole blood.

 

The self-sufficiency mandate presents a real hurdle to progress in transplantation, especially for smaller countries and LMIC. This is especially the case because some of the most exciting and promising developments for increasing the availability of transplants have been in kidney exchange, a mechanism that leverages in-kind exchange, rather than financial compensation, to encourage and facilitate donation among those with willing but incompatible partners. But kidney exchange works best when a large pool of patient-donor pairs can engage with one another. So, requiring that transplantation be contained within national boundaries unnecessarily limits access to transplants that could be achieved only by cross-border exchange.

. . .

How could countries and the WHO balance the need for increased organ and blood donations with the ethical concerns surrounding paying for them?

First and foremost, WHO and the world health community should be realistic and transparent about what is possible and, in particular, about the tension between self-sufficiency and nonremuneration. No country that fails to pay donors is self-sufficient in plasma. In fact, nonpaying countries are becoming increasingly dependent on paying countries for their plasma supply, and this trend is likely to accelerate in the coming years as new medical uses for PDMPs are discovered.

 

Second, countries should engage in, and WHO should encourage, international cooperation, rather than national self-sufficiency. Current WHO policy denies to health care many of the benefits that trade has brought to so many other human endeavors. Substances of human origin are special, but they are not so special that we prohibit plasma or organ donation. We should be open to exploring and experimenting with ways to bring to health care some of the benefits that trade has brought to so many other areas, including the production and distribution of food and lifesaving vaccines and other medicines.

 

Third, we must rely on evidence-based policies, rather than on decades-old assumptions and understandings. Modern testing capabilities and stringent regulations have ensured that the plasma supply is safe, whether collected from paid or unpaid donors. Despite protestations to the contrary, wealthy countries around the world that prohibit remuneration for plasma must know this, given that they import large quantities from the United States, which pays donors.

 

While the case for remuneration to providers of whole blood for transfusion (which undergoes less processing than plasma that is used for PDMPs) is less straightforward, nonetheless WHO should (cautiously) shift its approach here as well. Much of the research prompting concerns with paid blood donation is dated or relies on surveys and uncontrolled studies. More recent research on incentivizing blood donation finds that incentives increase blood donations, are cost-effective and do not compromise blood safety. Indeed, wealthy countries, including the United States, already compensate whole blood donors through non-cash incentives, such as gift cards and paid work leave, and have for some time.

 

Finally, the provision of incentives for organ donation is the most complicated and most ethically fraught. Clearly, caution is warranted. Nonetheless, countries, with WHO support, should use pilot studies and trials to test the ethics, safety and efficacy of incentives in various settings. Indeed, many countries, including the United States, already provide such incentives.

 

Read the whole thing here!