SWLAW Blog | Faculty Features
December 19, 2024
Faculty Accomplishments, Winter 2024-2025
In Winter 2024-2025, Southwestern Law School faculty and scholars made significant contributions across a wide range of academic and professional platforms.
Catherine Carpenter served as Chief Justice in a semifinal round of the City of Angels Moot Court Competition on November 3, 2024. Sponsored by the American Moot Court program, the competition brought together 64 undergraduate teams to debate complex issues related to the First and Fifth Amendments.
Meera Deo received the Judith Welch Wegner Award for outstanding contributions to the empirical study of legal education at the 2025 AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The award session honoring Meera was held at 11:40 a.m. on Friday, January 10, 2025.
On November 1, 2024, Paul Caron, Publisher and Editor of TaxProfBlog, featured Meera's article, Equity in Legal Education, 63 Santa Clara Law Review 95 (2023).
Michael Epstein presented his forthcoming article, Artificial Intelligence and Music Mash-Ups: Monetizing a Closed Universe Database Framework to Preserve Royalty and Credit for Composer and Sound Recording Rights Holders, 108 Marquette Law Review ___ (2025), as an invited speaker at Brooklyn Law School on November 21. He discussed his proposal for a closed-universe AI database to ensure fair royalty payments and credit for music creators while providing safe harbor protections for users of the platform.
On November 6, 2024, Michael attended the ninth annual international IMODEV Conference at the University of Paris - Sorbonne. He spoke on the panel Taking the 'Content' out of Content Moderation: A Time, Place and Manner Approach to Social Media Regulation, exploring comparative media law.
On November 15, Andrea Freeman attended the Third Annual Conference on Food Law and Policy at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She was the featured speaker on the panel From Concept to Cover: An Author’s Experience in Publishing.
On November 14, Andrea launched the Canadian edition of her book Ruin Their Crops on the Ground with a recorded in-person conversation at Another Story Bookshop in Toronto, Canada. The conversation was featured on the Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast with Host and Executive Producer Vinita Srivastava.
On November 19, Kevin Greene delivered a lecture for Southwestern's SBA and the Intellectual Property Law Society. He shared insights and reflections on his career in entertainment law and academia, offering guidance to aspiring legal professionals.
On November 14, Kevin attended the 44th Annual Conference of the Black Entertainment and Sports Lawyers Association (BESLA) in San José del Cabo, Mexico. He presented on the panel Practical Implications of Generative AI in Entertainment and Sports, sponsored by the Walt Disney Company. The panel explored union-artist agreements, legal stances of record labels in lawsuits, and the viability of generative AI fair use as a defense against copyright infringement.
On November 5, KJ presented at the California Copyright Conference event Anxiety or Too Much Coffee: What Keeps Indie Publishers Up at Night? Spoiler: It's A Lot! The event brought together indie music publishing executives to discuss challenges in music distribution during the streaming era.
On November 15, 2024, Hila Keren attended the Hope in Law Workshop at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was invited to participate based on her expertise in the field, highlighted by her co-authored article Law in the Cultivation of Hope (95 California Law Review 319, 2007) with Professor Kathryn Abrams. As part of the opening panel, "Hope and the Role of Law," Hila and Abrams presented their new work-in-progress, Law in the Destruction and Reconstruction of Hope, in which they identify two emerging ways in which law impacts hope: in the contexts of legal bans on abortions and gender-affirming care.
On November 1, 2024, Faisal Kutty was featured in the annual publication, The Muslim 500: The World's Most Influential Muslims, published by The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre. The Centre is an independent research entity affiliated with the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought—an international Islamic non-governmental, independent institute headquartered in Amman (the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). The publication recognizes individuals contributing to the betterment of the Muslim community in North America. This marks Faisal's fifteenth consecutive inclusion in the list.
On October 29, 2024, Faisal moderated a panel as part of a lecture series hosted by the Rutgers Law School Center for Security, Race and Rights. The lecture focused on a recently published book, One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?, and Faisal moderated the discussion with the book's editors: Professors Nathan J. Brown (Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University) and Shibley Telhami (Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland).
On November 30, 2024, Jyoti Nanda participated in the national ABA-AALS CJS Roundtables Workshop. During the Workshop, Jyoti presented and solicited feedback on her current work-in-progress, Unchecked Power of Youth Probation. In her new piece, Jyoti will shine a light on the vast reaches of the criminalization of children by mapping the contours of the unchecked power of youth probation in California. She will specifically focus on Los Angeles, examining the safety issues that plague LA County juvenile detention centers under Probation's oversight.
On November 8, 2024, Jyoti was an invited speaker at a Parents Helping Parents ("PHP") event held at the Santa Clara County Office of Education (open free to registrants). At the event, Disability, Race & Equity: Exploring Intersectionality, Advancing Justice, Jyoti shared insights from her research and scholarship with advocates and parents on the ground who seek to achieve justice for their communities and children impacted by disabilities.
On November 2, 2024, Jyoti was the invited lunchtime speaker at Southwestern's 2024 Law Day, during which she spoke on the topic of Youth & (In)Justice. During her remarks, Jyoti aimed to inspire potential students about the power of the law, racial justice lawyering, and the importance of simultaneously working within and outside the system. It was a festive day in which Jyoti played a key role in demonstrating to prospective students what makes Southwestern special.
On November 7, 2024, Andrea Ramos co-organized and co-moderated (in conjunction with the LA VAWA Network) the 4th Annual U Visa Certifiers Roundtable: Bringing Law Enforcement and Non-Profits Together to Streamline the U Visa Certification Process. Law enforcement attendees included representatives from the L.A. Police Department, L.A. County District Attorney’s office, L.A. City Attorney’s office, L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services, California Labor Commissioner’s Office, U.S. EEOC, and U.S. Department of Labor. During the Roundtable, Andrea's former client spoke about her experience as a survivor of a violent crime and its impact on her family, highlighting how the Immigration Law Clinic helped her family obtain stability. Andrea and her co-facilitators then discussed each law enforcement agency’s U certification protocols and procedures, updates to California law (AB 1261), and the California Attorney General’s Information Bulletin notifying law enforcement agencies about the new law. Andrea also moderated a general Q&A with audience members.
On September 29, 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 2224, otherwise known as "The Immigrant Juvenile Justice Act," after it received bipartisan support in the state legislature. Andrea worked behind the scenes helping draft this important piece of legislation, which will assist immigrant survivors under the age of eighteen gain access to essential social services by ensuring clarity and expediency in filing a Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) petition. To combat delays in obtaining a juvenile court order, the legislation establishes (among other things) a new process for requesting an expedited SIJS order and requires courts to provide the order within three court days.
On November 25, 2024, Rachel VanLandingham was featured in Vox in an article by Li Zhou, Trump says he wants to get rid of "woke" generals. He can. Rachel was one of the national security experts who explained, “forcing military leaders to ascribe to a certain view on diversity could be seen as a personal loyalty test for Trump, given his stated positions.” Rachel was directly quoted and identified as a Professor at Southwestern and a former active duty judge advocate in the Air Force, closing out the piece with this observation: "There's the fear that these processes will be perverted by an administration that’s bent on revenge, retaliation, and on vetting officers based on loyalty tests to the president versus loyalty to the Constitution . . . That’s how we become an authoritarian state when you have the most powerful military in the world that’s swearing an oath . . . not to their Constitution and to the American people, but to a person.”
In mid-November, Rachel traveled to Tbilisi and Batumi, Georgia as a human rights expert to assist with human rights training for Georgian military commanders and personnel from the newly established recruitment agency in western Georgia. This agency will work with conscripts in 2025 under the new Georgian Defence Code. This project, sponsored by the intergovernmental think tank, DCAF – Geneva Center for Security Sector Governance, aimed to strengthen the capacity of personnel in the Ministry of Defence of Georgia and the General Staff of the Georgian Defence Forces to identify, prevent, and respond to violations of the rights of conscripts. Rachel's contributions emphasized that protecting the rights of conscripts as an especially vulnerable group in the armed forces continues to be extremely important--not only for the reputation of armed forces, but also for their recruitment and retention rates.
