Parchment

Facilitating Faculty Scholarship and Research

The Parchment is updated monthly with articles, books, and publications that have been accepted or published, as well as presentations that are scheduled or have been delivered by our College of Law faculty.

December 2025

Zsea Bowmani presented his work at the virtual Ecological Justice workshop hosted by the University of Birmingham, Newcastle University, and the University of St. Andrews, which brought together scholars and practitioners across disciplines to advance our thinking about multispecies planetary crisis, governance, and justice; build a global network; and work toward publication of workshop contributions.

Paul Finkelman had a presentation on Birthright Citizenship at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. He was recently cited in the USA Today article "Ohio's 'Black Laws' stripped free Black residents of rights in a so-called free state In 1804," and "The Dred Scott decision denied Black citizenship and deepened slavery’s hold on America," both part of their "Injustices" series. He was also cited in this case in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Greg Gilchrist led a two-day civil discourse practicum for undergraduates and law students in which the students were asked to discuss immigration. The event encouraged engagement with a contentious issue between people who disagree and taught methods for more successful discussions in the civic arena. He also participated in a fireside chat on the subject of civil discourse at the UT Foundation with Provost Mitchell McKinney and Professor Nasser Hussain on civil discourse. Judge James K. Knepp presented to Gilchrist’s Civil Procedure students, some of whom also went on a “field trip” to the U.S. District Court to observe a hearing and meet with Judge Darrell Clay, a federal prosecutor, and a U.S. Pretrial Services Officer.

Joseph Slater gave a presentation on Nov. 14 at the ABA Annual Labor and Employment Law Conference in Denver. The panel was “Public Sector Labor Law Primer,” and the paper was "How and Why Private-Sector Labor Laws Should Practice Public-Sector Labor Law.” On November 18, he gave the annual William R. Stewart Endowed Lecture at the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University, in Bloomington. The topic was “Recent and Continuing Attacks on Collective Bargaining in the Federal Sector.”

Jason Steed will be speaking to Indiana appellate judges about "Better Judicial Writing" (CLE presentation) at their annual Winter Workshop in December.

Kelly Tomlinson spoke at a November 13^th Toledo Women's Bar Association CLE program, Anatomy of a Murder: Exploring Ethical Professionalism in Trial Practice. She presented on current Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct and disciplinary cases evoked by situations in Otto Preminger's 1959 film, Anatomy of a Murder, and moderated a discussion panel of judges and attorneys.

Rebecca Zietlow presented her paper, Fugitives From Slavery, Free Black Activists, and the Origins of Birthright Citizenship at the Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium in Chicago. At the same conference, she also appeared on a panel discussing David Sloss's new book, People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law.

November 2025

Paul Finkelman presented a paper on "Race and the Territories" at the Lat Crit 30th Anniversary Conference in Denver. The paper examines how Congress structured the admission of new states to the Union from 1800 to 1952 to favor the migration of White settlers, and in many ways explicitly discriminated against non-White migrants. The paper will be submitted for publication later this academic year.

Candice Kline presented two CLE programs at the Toledo Bar Association's Legal Perspectives for Nonprofits: Boards, Fiscal Responsibility, Conflict Resolution, and More, featuring a presentation on Conflict Resolution for Nonprofits and participation as a panelist in the "Ask a Nonprofit Lawyer" session. She presented her law review article draft, Channeling Fairness, at the Central States Law Schools Association 2025 Scholarship Conference hosted by the University of Kansas Law School. (Central States Law Schools Association 2025 Scholarship Conference). She also joined an amicus brief filed at the U.S. Supreme Court in the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy case, Brief of Amici Curiae the Hon. Eugene Wedoff (Ret.) et al. in Support of Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Lujan Claimants v. Boy Scouts of America, No. 25-490 (U.S. filed 2025).

Rebecca Zietlow spoke on a panel discussing Professor Mark Graber’s recent book, Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform, at a day-long conference on the book at New York Law School on October 10.

Evan Zoldan was invited to present The Unitary Interpreter at the Legislation Roundtable, Yale Law School.

October 2025

Paul Finkelman gave the Constitution Day talk at Louisiana State University School of Law on Birthright Citizenship on September 15. He gave a Constitution Day talk on September 17 (via Zoom) for Touro Law School on Long Island in New York State on Baseball, Constitutionalism, and the Rule of Law. On September 22, he gave the Dean's Democracy Series Lecture at Santa Clara University School of Law on birthright citizenship and was also the guest teacher in the school's Sports Law Class, discussing the case of Popov v. Hayashi, which focused on the ownership of Barry Bonds' 73rd Home Run Ball. Professor Finkelman was the lead expert witness in that case, which is currently found in most Property Law casebooks, including the one co-authored by Professor Cavalieri.

Greg Gilchrist is coordinating three speaker events this term. First, on October 7, our own Professor Nathan Goetting will be joined by two Innocence Project lawyers and an exoneree who spent 32 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, to discuss Goetting’s new book, The Supreme Court’s Actual Innocence Problem. On October 23, Professor Alan Rozenshtein from the University of Minnesota will give the Stranahan Lecture, titled The Unitary AI Executive. On November 13, Professor Nasser Hussain from Duke will give a talk entitled Teaching Taboo Subjects.

Candice Kline had two articles published for the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges (NCBJ) in September 2025: Breaking Barriers: Advocating for State AGs in Chapter 11 Proceedings, 44 Am. Bankr. Inst. J. 9 (Sept. 2025) and Summering Issues in Chapter 11: The Future of Nondebtor Releases, Injunctions, and Consent in Bankruptcy Reorganization after Purdue Pharma, Com. L. World (Sept. 2025).

Joseph Slater presented the paper, The Current Crisis in Federal-Sector Labor Relations at the 20^th Annual Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law at Seton Hall University Law School on Sept. 20.

Glenys Spence will be presenting at the AALS Section on Race and Private Law Junior Faculty Workshop during the 2026 annual meeting in New Orleans. The title of her paper is Poseidon's Enduring Legacy: Historical Injustices, Deep Seabed Mining, Private Law, and Racial Justice in the Global South. Additionally, she has been invited to speak on May 19, 2026, at the Washington and Lee University School of Law International Business Roundtable. The title of her presentation will be Exploiting the Deep: Incomplete Contracts, Agency Failure, and Corporate Behavior in Deep Seabed Mining. Furthermore, she will participate in the Private Law and Multicultural Identities Conference, hosted by the Section in Italy, which will take place from July 13 to 16, 2026, in Arona, Italy. Professor Spence has also been selected as a member of the 2025-2026 Working Group on International Contracting & Theory of the Firm, which consists of a series of virtual webinars hosted by Washington and Lee University School of Law. Lastly, she published an article titled Combating Maritime Perils in the Global Supply Chain: An Analysis of Force Majeure Clauses and the Doctrine of Commercial Impracticability in the Wake of State-Sponsored Piracy, 15 J. Nat'l Security L. & Pol'y 267 (2025).

Evan Zoldan agreed to publish The Enduring Value of the Right to a Hearing with the Memphis Law Review.

September 2025

Zsea Bowmani's chapter on the climate crisis (presented in 2023 at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) will be published in the volume Climate Justice: Resisting Marginalisation by Cambridge University Press, available in print and open access September 2025. Bowmani was also part of a law professor amicus brief submitted to the California Court of Appeals, 1st District in the animal rights defense case People v. Hsiung (submitted August 5, 2025).

Candice Kline was a panelist at the Commercial Law League's National Convention on May 15, 2025, presenting on Chapter 11 developments. Kline has two articles being published for the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges (NCBJ) in September 2025: Breaking Barriers: Advocating for State AGs in Chapter 11 Proceedings, 44 Am. Bankr. Inst. J. 9 (Sept. 2025) and Simmering Issues in Chapter 11: The Future of Nondebtor Releases, Injunctions, and Consent in Bankruptcy Reorganization after Purdue Pharma, Com. L. World (Sept. 2025).

Paul Finkelman published Defeating Antisemitism in the World’s First Democratic Republic: The American Revolution and Jewish Legal and Political Equality (co-authored with Lance J. Sussman), 40 Touro Law Review 121-71 (2025); Save Me Out at the Ball Game: Is Being a Baseball Fan a Contact Sport? Home Run Balls, Abandoned Property, and Violence in the Stadium, 43 California Real Property Journal 28-34 (2025); Why Trump Evaded the Key Question of His Citizenship Order at the Supreme Court, Slate, July 2, 2025; Listen MAGA: Presidents Rarely Defy the Courts, Washington Monthly, June 23, 2025. Finkelman was the lead named amici in “Brief for Professors Paul Finkelman, Gabriel J. Chin, and Erika Lee as amici curiae in support of plaintiffs-appellees and affirmance” in Casa Inc., et al. v. Donald J. Trump, et al.” in United State Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, filed June 4, 2025. He is a named amici in two other briefs to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and in one brief to the Supreme Court.

Jessica Knouse presented Erasing/Inverting Equal Protection: The Debate over Gender-Affirming Names and Pronouns at the Law & Society Association Annual Meeting held in summer 2025 as part of the Feminist Legal Theory CRN's programming.

Debbie Machalow’s piece, Terminating Democracy: The Antiabortion Movement's Attempted Subversion of Direct Democracy draft on SSRN was cited in the Religion Clause Blog in December. The final draft is slated to be published in the Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal early next year. A shorter, narrow piece (Undemocratic: Antiabortion Politicians' Attacks on Direct Democracy) was accepted by the Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She presented her Terminating Democracy research in March at the Eastern Sociological Society's Mini-Conference on Reproduction (in Boston); in April at the Democracy Works-in-Progress Conference at Michigan State University College of Law; and in May at the Law & Society Annual Conference (in Chicago). Machalow presented related work, Miscarriage of Democracy: What Happened in Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota to Defeat Abortion-Related Ballot Measures in 2024, at the University of Baltimore Law Review Symposium on States and the Battle to Secure Reproductive Freedoms Post-Dobbs in March. The related article's publication is anticipated in January 2026. In March, she also presented a project titled Actively Doing Harm: Restrictive Abortion Laws Make Pregnancy More Dangerous and Increase Obstacles to Reproductive Care at Touro's Institute for Health Law, Bioethics, and Policy's Annual Symposium. She also presented similar work to the Toledo Women's Bar Association in March. In May, she presented her summer project idea (Involuntarily Unsterilized: Needed Changes to the Medicaid Sterilization Consent Process Post-Dobbs) at the Politics of Reproduction Workshop, the University of Kentucky Developing Ideas Conference, and the Midwest Legal Scholars Roundtable. She also presented it at the monthly Reproductive Rights / Reproductive Justice Roundtable in June.

Glenys Spence published Combating Maritime Perils in the Global Supply Chain: An Analysis of Force Majeure Clauses and the Doctrine of Commercial Impracticability in the Wake of “State-Sponsored Piracy, 15 J. Nat'l Security L. & Pol'y 267 (2025).

Evan Zoldan presented The Major Questions Doctrine in the States to the Federation of Association of Regulatory Boards in April. He also presented Measuring Judicial Ideology at the Michigan State University Democracy Roundtable in April. In May, he presented The Unitary Interpreter at the inaugural Midwest Legal Scholars Roundtable at Wayne State. In July, he presented The Shifting Regulatory Landscape at the Federation of Association of Regulatory Boards Annual Summit.