S.J. Quinney College of Law Events and Webinars ULaw

College of Law to host FTC Commissioner and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust for discussion on consumer welfare

This event will take place on Monday, April 10 between 12:00-2:30 pm and is titled Do Consumers Still Reign Supreme in the Antitrust Hierarchy? How Antitrust Can Promote the Interests of Workers and Other Stakeholders in the Economy. The keynote speakers are FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter.

Since the embrace of antitrust’s consumer welfare standard in the 1980s, the welfare of workers has been neglected, and the focus of antitrust policy has been solely the welfare of consumers. As a result, antitrust policy has tolerated wage-fixing conspiracies that should be per se illegal based on weak procompetitive assertions. Promised layoffs following mergers have often been considered “efficiencies.” Moreover, up until recently, antitrust agencies have not addressed employment non-compete agreements. These agreements have proliferated, and challenges to non-competes have had unpredictable outcomes under conflicting state laws.

But things are starting to change. In 2022, the Department of Justice (DOJ) blocked a merger in the book publishing industry based entirely around a theory of writer (worker) harm. The DOJ also pursued and secured criminal charges against a manager of a company for entering a no-poach agreement with a rival to not raise the wages of nurses working in the Clark County School District and to not hire nurses from each other. Not to be left out, in January 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposed a rule that would ban all post-employment non-compete agreements.

The University of Utah has been at the vanguard of this burgeoning movement to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement. In 2019, the University of Utah Department of Economics, led by Professors Mark Glick and Marshall Steinbaum, organized a conference entitled “A New Future for Antitrust.” The conference developed a set of principles for the reform and refocusing of antitrust law in the era of “big tech” entitled “The Utah Statement.”

Building from that foundation, in October 2022, the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, working in conjunction with the University of Utah Department of Economics and the Antitrust Section of the Utah Bar, held a symposium titled “The New Roaring Twenties: The Progressive Agenda for Antitrust and Consumer Protection Law.” FTC Chair Lina Khan was the keynote speaker. A new interdisciplinary center was hatched, called the Utah Project, dedicated to the study of antitrust and consumer protection law in the College of Social and Behavioral Science.

And to inaugurate its annual Spring Forum, the Utah Project welcomes two antitrust leaders to deliver keynotes: FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter. Both speakers will address important topics at the intersection of labor and antitrust. A panel of economic and legal experts will follow, and will be joined by the two keynotes.

For more details or the register for the event please visit the event webpage. This event is free and open to the public.

This event is co-sponsored by the Utah Project, the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, the University of Utah Department of Economics, and the Antitrust Section of the Utah Bar. 

Financial support for the Utah Project has been provided by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Economic Security Project.



This episode was originally recorded and broadcast April 11, 2023

A Stegner Center and Tanner Humanities Center PresentationEVENT DESCRIPTION:

Author Anne E. Palmer unearths a treasure-trove of Wallace Stegner’s unseen letters, revealing how our Center’s prolific namesake dealt with being broke and lonely, building comradery and a sense of purpose at the U of U.

Free lunch for attendees who RSVP for in-person attendance.

 

Anne E. Palmer, Ed.D. is author of Years of Promise, the University of Utah’s A. Ray Olpin Years (1946-1964) and founding director of the University of Utah Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.  At Stanford University, she directs the Aspen Rising Presidential Fellowship at the Graduate School of Education and conducts academic oral histories.  She holds a master’s of public administration from the University of Utah and a doctorate in education from the University College London.  Her doctoral thesis on academic foundations of the United States Peace Corps was written at the University of Utah American West Center.  Wallace Stegner lived with her great-grandparents in Salt Lake City while he attended East High School and the University of Utah.

    

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:



Anne E. Palmer, Ed.D. is author of Years of Promise, the University of Utah’s A. Ray Olpin Years (1946-1964) and founding director of the University of Utah Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.  At Stanford University, she directs the Aspen Rising Presidential Fellowship at the Graduate School of Education and conducts academic oral histories.  She holds a master’s of public administration from the University of Utah and a doctorate in education from the University College London.  Her doctoral thesis on academic foundations of the United States Peace Corps was written at the University of Utah American West Center.  Wallace Stegner lived with her great-grandparents in Salt Lake City while he attended East High School and the University of Utah.

    

This event is sponsored by the Wallace Stegner Center, the Tanner Humanities Center, and the Cultural Vision Fund.



This episode was originally broadcast and recorded April 11, 2023

A Wallace Stegner Center Green BagEVENT DESCRIPTION:

Designated in 2016 by President Obama and reduced to 85 percent of its original size one year later by President Trump, Bears Ears National Monument continues to be a flash point of conflict between ranchers, miners, environmental groups, states’ rights advocates, and Native American activists. In this volume, Andrew Gulliford synthesizes 11,000 years of the region’s history to illuminate what’s truly at stake in this conflict and distills this geography as a place of refuge and resistance for Native Americans who seek to preserve their ancestral homes, and for the descendants of Mormon families who arrived by wagon train in 1880.

Gulliford’s engaging narrative explains prehistoric Pueblo villages and cliff dwellings, Navajo and Ute history, impacts of the Atomic Age, uranium mining, and the pothunting and looting of Native graves that inspired the passage of the Antiquities Act over a century ago. The book describes how the national monument came about and its deep significance to five native tribes.

Bears Ears National Monument is a bellwether for public land issues in the American West. Its recognition will be a relevant topic for years to come.

The University of Utah Press will join us in person to sell Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance and Andrew Guilliford will be happy to sign books after his presentation. Bears Ears is also available for purchase online at the University of Utah press.

Andrew Gulliford is a professor of history and Environmental Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado where he has been awarded the Roger Peters Distinguished Faculty Award for teaching, research and service. Gulliford teaches popular courses on wilderness, national parks, Western history, and environmental history. He is the author of America’s Country Schools, Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions, and Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale, which won the Colorado Book Award.  He edited Preserving Western History, which was voted one of the best books on the Southwest by the Tucson-Pima County Library. His book Outdoors in the Southwest: An Adventure Anthology won the Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in the category of nature/ environment and Best Book on Arizona, as well as the Colorado Book Award for best anthology. Gulliford edited The Last Stand of the Pack: A Critical Edition, about wolves in Colorado, which was published by the University Press of Colorado.

His book The Woolly West: Colorado’s Hidden History of Sheepscapes, published by Texas A&M University Press, was chosen the Outstanding Nonfiction winner for the 2019 Wrangler Western Heritage Awards sponsored by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. It also won the Colorado Book Award for history. His latest book is Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance from the University of Utah Press.



Dr. Gulliford has received the National Individual Volunteer Award from the U.S. Forest Service for wilderness education, and a certificate of recognition from the Secretary of Agriculture for “outstanding contributions to America’s natural and cultural resources.” For a decade he held a federal appointment to the Southwest Colorado Resources Advisory Council of the Bureau of Land Management.

Gulliford writes columns about the Southwest for the Durango Herald, the Cortez Journal, and the San Juan Record (Monticello, Utah) and he appears in history programs for “The Colorado Experience” television series produced by Rocky Mountain PBS.



This episode was originally broadcast and recorded on April 6, 2023.

A Wallace Stegner Center Event
EVENT DESCRIPTION:
Understanding the foundational principles of Western Water Law is critical to solving today’s complicated and nuanced water questions. This presentation will go over the basic functions of Western Water Law, highlight means and ways the Prior Appropriation Doctrine can be manipulated to address contemporary conditions, and emphasize that working within the doctrine is the most effective way to solve pressing and acute water problems.

Free lunch for attendees who RSVP for in-person attendance.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
ctor and Shareholder, Co-Chair of Natural Resources & Water Law Practice Group with Clyde Snow & Sessions
Ms. Lewis assists clients in navigating complex water problems. She advises individual water right owners, water conservancy districts, municipalities, mining companies, and mutual shareholder irrigation companies. Her strategic projects practice extends to innovative policy work and specialty project management. She presently acts as the Utah Water Banking Project Manager and hosts Ripple Effect – A Podcast Putting Water in Context.

Utah Water Lecture Series
With support from the National Audubon Society, the Wallace Stegner Center is hosting a four-part Utah Water Lecture Series, which will include  presentations on Utah water law, Colorado River system management and diversions, measuring water use, and water and wildlife. The lectures will be held during the noon hour at the College of Law and streamed online on January 19, February 2, February 16, and March 2. If you miss a lecture, you can watch online on the S.J. Quinney College of Law YouTube channel.

This Utah Water Lecture series is co-sponsored by the National Audubon Society.

For questions about this event email events@law.utah.edu.



This episode was originally recorded and broadcast January 19, 2023

Jedediah Purdy, an internationally renowned scholar of legal and political theory and an expert on constitutional law, will join Utah Law on Friday, January 20 for the college’s annual William H. Leary Lecture. Purdy is the Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke Law School. His talk, “The Possible Futures of American Democracy,” marks the 57th annual Leary Lecture—a College of Law tradition that brings great legal scholars to our community to speak on pressing contemporary issues. The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

There is plenty of doubt about American democracy: Whether it will survive, whether it can overcome our problems if it does, and whether it deserves to be called a democracy (or even to survive) in the first place. Too often, these urgent questions come at us as fast as the news cycle, and our responses, like a Twitter feed, reinforce what we already thought, amplified with fight-or-flight adrenaline. But if we slow down and think through some possible futures for the country, we can see more clearly what democracy means, and how law, politics, and culture can interact to uphold democracy or to erode it.

Purdy is the author of seven books, most recently Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening and Our Best Hope. He has written extensively in forums including the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the New York Times. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children.

The Leary Lecture is named in honor of William H. Leary, Dean of the University of Utah College of Law from 1915 to 1950, who was renowned for his intellectual rigor and love of teaching. The Leary Lecture has been an annual event since 1965.



This episode was originally recorded and broadcast January 20, 2023

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

The hashtag #LivingWhileBlack first appeared as a social media hashtag to mobilize attention to incidents where white people called the police on Black people for engaging in non-criminal, everyday activities.  The explosive combination of high-quality cell phone video and ubiquitous social media platforms revealed to the public several incidents where the police were called to report Black people in spaces that the callers believed they ought not be. In each of these cases, the Black men, women, and children were occupying spaces in which they had rights to be and undertaking activities they had a right to undertake.  The ability of social media to make these incidents go viral has not revealed a new phenomenon.  Rather, it has simply highlighted the modern incarnation of a much older one phenomenon: Attempts to use the basis of nuisance and trespass from property law as a way to exclude Black Americans from what the callers believe to be “white” spaces.

Professor Jefferson-Jones examines both the historical and modern incarnations of this “Blackness as Nuisance” doctrine, and how this attempt to distort property law norms arises from a sense of racial entitlement and discomfort with racial integration. Professor Jefferson-Jones will discuss her research which highlighted language that either explicitly called for exclusion of the victim based on his or her race or that employed racially coded language (“dog whistles”) to call for police force to be used to remove Black people from shared spaces.

Finally, she will discuss why policymakers need to consider the intersections of property law and criminal law, and the historical origins of these types of incidents, in order to craft effective responses.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
mila Jeffrson-Jones writes about the property rights of communities and groups on the margins of society.  In line with her interest in property rights on the margins of society, she uses critical race methodologies to interrogate the ways in which members of favored racialized groups seek to exclude racial and ethnic minorities from public and private spaces, including through the use of or threat of police action to enforce both the racial segregation of space and racist notions of supremacy.  Her recent article on this subject, #LivingWhileBlack: Blackness As Nuisance, was published in the American University Law Review and featured in the New York Times.  In addition to this work, Professor Jefferson-Jones has written a number of law review articles and book chapters on the sharing economy and is a recognized expert on the housing segment of the sharing economy, particularly on discrimination in that sector.   She has also studied the property rights of those with ex-offender status to reveal the intersection of property and criminal justice theory.

Professor Jefferson-Jones is the Earl B. Shurtz Research Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging at the University of Kansas School of Law.

Jamila Jefferson-Jones is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard College.



For questions about this event email events@law.utah.edu.



This episode was originally recorded and broadcast January 19, 2023