The Faculty Lounge

How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)

"How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)" was written by Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland in 1964 and recorded at the Hitsville studio by Marvin Gaye in early 1965. The release was on Tamla Records, a Motown subsidiary, for reasons I have not discovered. Backed by the Funk Brothers, it was a huge hit for Gaye. James Taylor later had a hit with "How Sweet It Is" in 1975. The title was taken from Jackie Gleason's tag line, "how sweet it is," and I am pretty sure it is the only Motown or R&B title ever inspired by an Irish comedian (see clip at the bottom of the post).

Congratulations, Natan and Ismene. (And happy anniversary, Sarah and Willard.)

Nora Demleitner Steps Down as St. John's College President

St John's College has announced that Nora Demleitner stepped down as president at the end of the academic year.  She became president in 2022 and previously served as the dean of Hofstra Law and Washington & Lee Law.  J. Walter Sterling, president of the Santa Fe campus, has assumed the role of collegewide president.

AI Gets Its First Law School A+

A group of authors from University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law has posted AI Gets Its First Law School A+s to SSRN.

From the abstract:

We had o3, OpenAI's new reasoning model, take our Spring 2025 law school final exams with the "reasoning effort" parameter set to high. We graded o3's answers on the same curve as our students. Three semesters ago, we found the older model GPT-4-turbo's outputs would have received grades ranging between B+ and D. This semester, we find o3 got three A+s, one A, one A-, two B+s, and a B. We find clear, fixable explanations for two of o3's lowest grades.

 

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— Kim Krawiec (@kimkrawiec.bsky.social) May 30, 2025 at 4:01 PM

CFP: Immigration Law in Kentucky and the U.S

This just in:

The Kentucky Law Journal (KLJ) is pleased to invite proposals for its annual symposium, which will be held in the Fall of 2025.  The symposium, entitled Immigration Law in Kentucky and the United States: A Discussion on Current Changes in Immigrants’ Legal Landscape, will focus on the changing aspects of immigration law.

Specifically, KLJ would like to address how the current administration’s emphasis on immigration reform affects the practice and study of immigration law nationwide. The symposium will explore topics including the continued issuing of executive orders, litigation such as J.G.G. v. Trump, and policy changes like the expansion of expedited removal. We also encourage Kentucky-specific discussion that stems from broader topics, like how recent executive orders impact Louisville, Kentucky’s status as a sanctuary city. This symposium aims to bring together practitioners, policy researchers, and scholars to discuss the changing landscape of immigration law. Potential discussion topics include crimmigration law, sanctuary jurisdictions, immigrant rights litigation, and issues related to the rapidly evolving changes from the current administration. KLJ encourages diverse viewpoints on upcoming issues that federal and state executives face.

KLJ expects to host this symposium in beautiful Lexington, Kentucky, on November 7, 2025.  In addition to presentations at the symposium, presenters will have the opportunity to publish pieces in Volume 114 of the Kentucky Law Journal, or via the Kentucky Law Journal Online.  The editors are particularly interested in publications in the range of 8,000–12,000 words, or shorter pieces for the online edition.  To apply for the symposium, please submit a current CV and an abstract of no more than 1,000 words, including your interest in being considered for publication.  Submissions are due by August 1, 2025, at [email protected]. Please see https://www.kentuckylawjournal.org/symposium for more information, and send any questions to [email protected]. Thank you, and we look forward to working with you!

Telman on Mistake in Contract

Over at ContractsProf Blog, Jeremy Telman has been running a series of posts on the contract doctrine of mistake. Worth reading if you teach or write about mistake and are looking for some new cases as examples. 

Online auction site withdrew a painting just before bidding closed. The last bidder had offered “Very Well Done Painting of Ships in Port - Signed ‘Vincent’ - Circa 1880-90 (painting). Did seller breach a duty to sell her a Van Gogh for $215? lawprofessors.typepad.com/contractspro...

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— KProfsBlog (@kprofsblog.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 8:08 AM

MAID In France

Via Al Roth's Market Design Blog comes news of a proposed French law that "has some familiar and some novel features." Reuters has the story: 

PARIS, May 27 (Reuters) - French lower house lawmakers approved a bill on Tuesday to legalise assisted dying, paving the way for France to become the latest European nation to allow terminally ill people to end their lives. . . the legislation is expected to pass, with polls showing more than 90% of French people in favour of laws that give people with terminal diseases or interminable suffering the right to die.

The proposed bill:

provides the right to assisted dying to any French person over the age of 18 suffering from a serious or incurable condition that is life-threatening, advanced or terminal. The person . . . must also have constant physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated. Lawmakers stipulated that psychological suffering alone would not be enough to end one's life.

The patient can administer the lethal dose themselves or by an accredited medical professional if they are physically unable. Healthcare workers who object to doing so are free to opt out. Anyone found to have obstructed someone's right to die can face a two-year prison sentence and a 30,000 euro fine.

Read the full story here. 

Fair Compensation For Research Participants

I was very happy to see this guest editorial: Pursuing Fair and Just Compensation for Research Participants: An Open Letter to the Research Ethics Community. From the paper:

Concerns over undue influence often arise in discussions of payment to research participants, and many research ethics oversight bodies default to “payment conservatism,” preferring minimal compensation to participants (or none at all) out of an abundance of caution (Largent and Fernandez Lynch Citation2017). This practice, however, is unfair and does not convincingly protect against harm or undue influence. . . .

Research participation generates immense social value, and generous compensation can reflect this value and serve as an important sign of respect and appreciation for participants

Read the whole thing here. I hope that more researchers in this area begin to see the errors of attempts to maintain compensation to medical research subjects at low rates. I have long maintained, both in this setting and in the case of compensation to egg donors, that the ability of any sum to "coerce" or "induce" participation is a function of individual financial need. As I argued in Sunny Samaritans and Egomaniacs: Price Fixing In The Gamete Market:

Ironically, the most likely effect of the ASRM price cap is to drive from the market the most highly desired egg donors, who tend to be better-educated and of a higher socioeconomic status. These donors are arguably in a better position to evaluate the risks of egg donation against the monetary benefits and should be less susceptible to the "coercive" effects of monetary compensation because they are more likely to have other income opportunities to choose from.

I directly address medical research subjects in the recently-posted "Repugnant Work": 

Phase I subjects thus can, and do, register for multiple trials each year and many consider Phase I trial participation their profession. Though pharmaceutical researchers refer to Phase I research subjects as “paid volunteers,” Phase I test subjects themselves reject that term, embracing instead the label “professional guinea pig.”14 This contrasts with the articulated views of researchers, IRB boards, and ethicists, who worry that financial compensation undermines judgement or voluntariness. These parties thus urge limitations on the amounts paid to guinea pigs and frame their efforts in non-commercial terms—as subjects or volunteers, for example, rather than as workers or contractors.

Finally, one of the letter's primary authors, Holly Fernandez Lynch, Associate Professor of Medical Ethics in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM), University of Pennsylvania, was a guest on the Taboo Trades podcast, where she discussed this and other issues with seminar students. 

 

Related Posts: 

Egg Donor Antitrust Suit In Today’s WSJ

• Sunny Samaritans’ Suit Survives
• ASRM Seeks Dismissal of Egg Donor Suit
• Kamakahi v. ASRM et al. — Updates
• Politics And Profits in The Egg Business (When Sunny Samaritans Sue, IV)
• When Sunny Samaritans Sue, Part III
• When Sunny Samaritans Sue, Continued
• When Sunny Samaritans Sue
• The Value of Smart Eggs

Zachary D. Clopton Named Interim Dean of Northwestern Pritzker Law

Via Northwestern Law:

Professor Zachary D. Clopton has been appointed interim dean of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law for two years beginning July 22, 2025. The announcement was made by Northwestern Provost Kathleen Hagerty, who praised Clopton as “a thoughtful and distinguished legal scholar” with deep institutional knowledge and national recognition in civil litigation. 

 

Leticia Diaz Stepping Down as Dean of Barry Law

Leticia Diaz has announced that she is stepping down as dean of Barry Law on December 31, 2025.  Diaz became dean in 2007.  She will return to the faculty after a sabbatical.

AI Is Bad At Bluebooking (Part 988) (Updated 6/1)

As reported by Reuters here: 

An attorney defending artificial-intelligence company Anthropic in a copyright lawsuit over music lyrics told a California federal judge on Thursday that her law firm Latham & Watkins was responsible for an incorrect footnote in an expert report caused by an AI "hallucination."

Ivana Dukanovic said in a court filing that the expert had relied on a legitimate academic journal article, but Dukanovic created a citation for it using Anthropic's chatbot Claude, which made up a fake title and authors in what the attorney called "an embarrassing and unintentional mistake."

Although not about AI hallucinations, Matthew Dahl in this recent paper, shows that LLMs are not very good even at technical conformance with bluebook rules: 

Bye-bye, Bluebook? Automating Legal Procedure with Large Language Models

Legal practice requires careful adherence to procedural rules. In the United States, few are more complex than those found in The Blue-book: A Uniform System of Citation. Compliance with this system’s 500+ pages of byzantine formatting instructions is the raison d’être of thousands of student law review editors and the bête noire of lawyers everywhere. To evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) are able to adhere to the procedures of such a complicated system, we construct an original dataset of 866 Bluebook tasks and test flagship LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek. We show (1) that these models produce fully compliant Bluebook citations only 69%-74% of the time and (2) that in-context learning on the Bluebook’s underlying system of rules raises accuracy only to 77%. These results caution against using off-the-shelf LLMs to automate aspects of the law where fidelity to procedure is paramount.

Can confirm that it makes similar mistakes with less byzantine citation styles as well. 

Update 6/1: Here is a database that tracks legal decisions in cases "where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments." As of today it includes 129 decisions.

 

Call for Speakers and Papers: Access to Justice in Indian Country

Please see attached:  Download South Dakota Law Review - Indian Country Call for Papers 2025 rev. The symposium is co-organized by South Dakota Law Review and USD's Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) chapter. Abstracts are due 6/27, and the symposium will be September 29th in Vermillion, SD.