Dr. Charles W Penrod

Except from article: This article attempts to explain why administrators and faculty should consistently refer to JD colleagues as “doctor” in both formal and informal settings. Part I of this article explores the background and origins of the JD and how it relates to tenure-track positions in academia, including specific reference to undergraduate legal studies and business law professors. Part II discusses why terminology matters and how its impact influences the perceived value of both faculty and the programs in which they teach. Part III rebuts the arguments against the use of “doctor” for JDs and illustrates why JDs, who do the same teaching, research, and service as any other doctorally qualified professor, should demand the identical level of respect as their peers. Part IV concludes with a discussion of how others outside academia view JDs, including reasonable limitations of the use of the title “doctor,” and recommends that law school professors lead the movement to insist on the use of the “doctor” title.

Excerpt - For thirty-five years, Robert DuBoise awaited his death sentence on death row for a crime he did not commit-a form of psychological torture if ever there was one, especially for an innocent man whose charges were ultimately dropped by the State of Florida when he was exonerated in 2020.1 It took all those years to determine that a single piece of evidence-a misidentified bite mark-was used to sentence Mr. DuBoise to death wrongfully.2 Nor was such an outcome unique to Mr. DuBoise. Given the many improvements in forensic science over the recent past, including the development of DNA sequencing, since 1973 there have been 185 individuals in the United States and its territories that were initially sentenced to death but later exonerated.3 This means that one out of every eight people sentenced to death over that period was later exonerated!4 This is a staggering statistic and calls current approaches to the imposition of the death penalty into serious question, regardless of whether the penalty is considered "cruel and unusual" per se.5

Governments have a history of intervention in the market to aid small, minority, and women-owned businesses. This research explores women-owned business development programs across the United States. The paper begins with a discussion of programs to serve women-owned businesses, noting barriers that exist for women business owners to access markets and capital. Analysis considers program offerings and how they are communicated to the public and client businesses via government websites. Policy approaches may reinforce patterns of suppression, rather than opening maximum opportunities for women business owners.

The history of various the oaths of Admission and rules of professional conduct, the changes in the legal profession, and the legal needs of a large portion of our society dictate that immediate changes should be made by members of the Bar in order to adequately provide legal services to those who lack access to justice. "10 In a speech to the American Bar Association (ABA), Chief Justice Warren Burger stated, "A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe the law - in the larger sense - cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets. "16 Some states also note a specific obligation to act for the betterment of society, to improve the administration of justice, and to support professionalism among lawyers.17 Rules of Professional Responsibility Although the oath of admission in some states may not specifically mention an obligation to provide legal services to those without meaningful access to justice, all states encourage attorneys to provide voluntary pro bono services via the state rules of professional responsibility or professional conduct.18 Unlike some oaths of admission, however, the Rules of Professional Conduct merely encourage rather than mandate pro bono representation. The most recent report issued by the ABA's Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service reported that almost 20% of attorneys provided at least 50 hours of pro bono service in 2016, providing an average of 36.9 hours of pro bono services.

Scholars have theorized that resource-rich litigants known as the “haves” tend to succeed disproportionately in litigation when the adverse party is a “have-not.” The traditional theory suggests that haves are able to use their wealth to secure better attorney representation and can use their frequent experience in litigation to tip the scales of justice in their favor, particularly when faced with “one-shotters” whose involvement in litigation is infrequent. A remaining question, however, is whether some haves fare better than other similarly situated haves. Specifically, this article posits that the litigation strategy used by the defendant may also play a role in litigation outcomes. Companies that tenaciously fight claims that, in the short term, would be cheaper to settle might discourage otherwise valid claims in the future from being filed out of fear that the litigation will be a protracted battle. This article examines Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Wal-Mart)—the largest revenue-generating company in the United States—to explore whether it fares better than other resource-rich defendants. Wal-Mart in particular has a reputation against settling cases and thus is an excellent vehicle to investigate this hypothesis. Appellate cases in an eleven-year period involving slip-and-fall litigation were compiled, and the results show that Wal-Mart did win at a higher rate than other defendants. Although more research is needed to explore fully the effect of litigation strategy on win–loss rates, this sample of cases demonstrates that Wal-Mart is a more effective and victorious litigant.

Experiential learning is at the forefront of pedagogical best practices in undergraduate education. Business schools, which are an increasingly popular choice for future law school applicants, should take steps to enrich the learning experience for these students. Many pre-law
programs already implement and utilize successful experiential assignments which should be adopted by business schools. The skills learned in these assignments, which include contract simulations, mock trials, and client interviews, contain components that can benefit both the traditional business student and the law school applicant. By providing opportunities for experiential learning similar to their real-world counterparts, business schools can better position themselves to accommodate the needs of these students.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the quality and online availability of policies for employee sexual harassment prevention. The availability and characteristics of employee sexual harassment policies were compared across the following types of colleges and universities: (a) government sponsored state nonprofit, (b) private nonprofit, and (c) private for-profit. Web sites of 496 U.S. colleges and universities were searched. Available policies were collected and coded for whether they included the following: (a) mandatory supervisory reporting of harassment, (b) availability of informal and formal complaint procedures, and (c) availability of multiple reporting options to ensure harassing supervisors can be bypassed. Each school web site was also searched for discussion of the availability of sexual harassment training for employees. Results suggested that only 23% of for-profit universities made their policies publicly available on their web sites versus 99 % of state universities. Seventy percent of available university harassment policies/web sites were deficient on one or more of the characteristics studied. Based on these findings, it appears that universities should increase both the quality and accessibility of their sexual harassment policies as well as the availability of anti-harassment training.

Fair use analyses are overly vague and abstract. While the Copyright Act established four factors for courts to consider when determining if an alleged infringer's use of copyrighted work is "fair", these factors are not susceptible to easy interpretation. More importantly, once these factors have been interpreted, a trier of fact is instructed to balance these factors against each other. No effective method currently exists in guiding courts as to how to balance inherently disparate factors against each other, either in terms of intensity of the factors or how one factor might balance against another totally different factor. This article proposes a framework that would allow courts to interpret each of the four factors and then assign a grade of 1-4 for each factor. After each factor is graded, the values are inserted into the framework, which then performs the balancing and reaches a conclusion on fair use. Having an objective basis for reaching a fair use determination helps to eliminate result-oriented decisions and provides a firm ground of support for a court's decision.