Virtual Commencement Features

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice

Anne M. Burke as Keynote Speaker

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne M. Burke ’83 delivered the keynote address for Chicago-Kent College of Law’s 2020 virtual commencement, which was streamed on the law school’s website on Sunday, May 17. In her address, she spoke about the uncertainty that comes with graduation as new graduates look to take the first steps in their careers and acknowledged the added stress that the pandemic has brought to everyone. Burke said the future is unpredictable, and that she hopes as new attorneys they will follow their hearts and carve their own unique paths. President Abraham Lincoln understood that our lives are judged not by one single decision, she said, but rather “our responses to thousands of moments of risk and truth we face.”

“Lincoln said it this way: ‘The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.’ It is my hope that his words will strengthen and inspire you as you look to your future, no matter how uncertain it may be at this moment,” Burke said. “Embrace each new challenge that comes your way with gratitude and appreciation. Help others and I think you will find that when you give your best for others, you receive tenfold in return.”

Chicago-Kent Launches New Equity Talks Series

Chicago-Kent College of Law kicked off its new Equity Talks Series on June 30 with a panel discussion on race, law, and policing issues. The June 30 event featured David A. Harris, a nationally recognized expert on police, race, and criminal justice, who discussed his book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations in context of recent events. Other panelists included Jeanette Samuels, a civil rights attorney, activist, and a partner at Shiller, Preyar, Jarard & Samuels, and Karen Sheley, director of the Police Practices Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

Organized by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Office of Continuing Legal Education, the Equity Talks Series brings together law students, lawyers, and the community to discuss ways to dismantle systemic racism created by the law. Since its launch, the Equity Talks Series has held three additional events—The Impact of Systemic Racism on the Health and Well-Being of Communities of Color, Systemic Racism and the Disproportionate Impact of Environmental Risks and Harms on Communities of Color, and The Impact of Racial Inequities in Housing on Communities of Color. Recordings of the events may be available at a later date.

COVID-19 Collective Brings

Together Faculty and Students to Research Coronavirus Legal Issues

As Chicago shut down in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, more calls started coming into the C-K Law Group from people seeking legal help. Meanwhile, Chicago-Kent College of Law students and soon-to-be graduates were watching their summer internships, summer associate positions, clerkships, and job offers disappear as the legal industry braced itself for the pandemic.

Chicago-Kent faculty and staff quickly mobilized to give underemployed students the opportunity to develop legal skills and expertise in emerging legal issues related to COVID-19 through the COVID-19 Collective. The C-K Law Group’s Entrepreneurial Law, Immigration Law, and Plaintiffs’ Employment clinics were also included in this effort and handled cases and projects related to COVID-19.

Twenty-four faculty members and 65 students on 15 research teams were involved in COVID-19 Collective research projects this past summer. The projects covered a variety of legal topics such as privacy implications for contact tracing and potential antibody testing, courts and jury trials, constitutional rights and mandatory lockdown restrictions, corporate governance, and the history of quarantines and epidemics in the United States including governmental authority to establish quarantines. Research groups also looked into criminal justice issues, such as compassionate release, world trade and global value chains, school district obligations and compensatory education for special education students, enforcement authority under international law for public health organizations such as the World Health Organization, and property law issues.

Students had the option to volunteer to be part of the collective or to earn a single pass/fail credit for their work over the summer.

“We could have instead put together a summer class to provide a broad overview of the legal landscape in light of COVID19. This dynamic partnership between our faculty and students to take a deep dive into an array of topics allows us to do more— to be conversation and policy leaders on emerging issues,” says Chicago-Kent Dean Anita K. Krug. “I anticipate that many of these projects will yield scholarship and other guidance that will be helpful to legal practitioners and help us all better understand the impact of the pandemic on our laws and rights.”

Heather Harper, clinical professor of law and chair of the Vocational/Career Services Committee that spearheaded the COVID-19 Collective, says COVID-19 has unleashed countless legal questions and is a burgeoning area of the law that will need newly trained lawyers for years to come. When the law changes, everyone is learning together from the same spot, Harper says. The faculty and students were learning alongside each other.

“It’s a collaboration,” she says. “It’s an exciting environment to learn and work together for good, and an opportunity for students to do something that is impactful and meaningful to their careers.”

The research teams gave presentations on their research in August, and some of the teams continued to meet in the fall to finalize papers, guides, law review articles, and other materials. A handful of the projects are highlighted here.

Historical Parallels in Polio Response

Major outbreaks of polio first became routine in the early twentieth century in the United States. Professor Felice Batlan and students Amanda Mehr, Mary Goers, Monica Vizconde, Rogelio Delatorre, Scott Simpson, and William Tyler Dallas researched this time period, with a focus on primary source accounts of U.S. residents, to look for parallels to COVID-19 response. The team found that the federal government was unresponsive to addressing the polio crisis, which led to a patchwork of state and local measures. Cities closed or restricted access to schools, places of worship, public places, and businesses such as movie theaters and pools to try to limit disease spread.

Political rhetoric and media outlets emphasized individual responsibility in preventing the spread of the illness, and Black, immigrant, and poor families were often blamed for causing outbreaks. When it came to life-saving treatments such as the iron lung, the team found rampant inequalities based on race, class, and immigration status. Communities often had to fundraise to buy iron lungs for their local hospitals, and those who could not afford the equipment resorted to building their own with alcohol barrels and vacuum cleaner parts.

In April 1955 the first successful polio vaccine was announced. A shortage led to calls for congressional action, and it took until August of that year for Congress to provide $35 million to states to get the vaccines on their own. Every plan discussed on the federal level for vaccine distribution became ensnared in ideological debates over whether it was socialized medicine. Despite these issues, polio declined rapidly in the years that followed for middle- and upper-class households that had access to quality health care and the vaccine. Vaccination rates for urban and poor communities lagged drastically, which changed public perception of polio from a disease that affected everyone to only certain social groups and communities. During the 1960s the federal government passed laws that laid the foundation for modern-day vaccine policies. The team is working on a law review article on their findings.

Jury Trials in a Pandemic

How will juries proceed in the time of the pandemic? Professor Nancy Marder and students Harleen Saroya, Natalie Holman, and Sarah Albert found that courts are using a range of approaches, including in-person proceedings with masks and social distancing, virtual jury trials, hybrid trials with virtual jury selection and socially distanced courtroom trials, and in some places no jury trials at all. The Idaho Supreme Court created daily preliminary health status questionnaires for jurors and installed plexiglass around witness boxes and judges. Jury boxes were expanded, and in some cases jurors were moved to the public seating area. In the San Francisco Superior Court, jurors and witnesses were given transparent plastic face masks to keep their facial expressions clear for attorneys. In Florida, Zoom was used for jury selection but the trials took place in person. Some jurisdictions in Texas went fully remote and used technology such as Dropbox and Google documents for jurors to access evidence.

While virtual juries have opened up the courts to innovation and technology that may make jury trials more efficient, virtual juries raise constitutional and fairness issues, particularly with criminal trials. For example, research shows that body language or other nonverbal cues play a significant role in how jurors analyze what is being presented to them. With social distancing in courtrooms or a virtual trial environment, attorneys and their clients cannot easily confide in each other during the course of a trial, and a party could claim they didn’t have access to effective counsel. Socioeconomic factors such as lack of access to technology could mean jury pools will not be an accurate representation of the community. The team created a bibliography of its research and shared this information with the Illinois Supreme Court’s Court Operations During COVID19 Task Force, the Illinois Supreme Court Committee on Jury Instructions in Civil Cases, and the Law and Society Association’s International Research Collaborative on Lay Participation.

Compensatory Education with School Disruptions

The closure of schools and move to online learning due to the pandemic disrupted the lives of countless families, particularly those with children who are disabled or require special-needs education. Students covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education (IDEA) Act are entitled to compensatory services when the school district fails to provide appropriate services and students don’t make expected progress.

Nancy Krent, adjunct faculty member, and students Gabe Kahn, James O’Brien, and Shaista Sharf researched what compensatory services relief could look like given the circumstances of a pandemic. The team researched previous circuit court decisions and found that there wasn’t a uniform approach to compensatory education cases. It did find a qualitative trend among the courts, where courts were trying to place students in the same educational position if not for the IDEA violation, rather than a quantitative approach such as an hour-forhour substitution to make up for the loss of education time. In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the U.S. Supreme Court held that an educational program must be reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress relative to the child’s circumstances.

With pandemic IDEA violations, the team suggests that one potential approach that courts could take with individual cases is to examine how other students with disabilities are faring or how the general population is doing compared to the same population in a hybrid or online-learning setting. This means that students would be compensated only for losses that are greater than would be expected for all students in the school district due to the pandemic. The team is finalizing a compilation of the court cases that it hopes will help students and parents navigate these challenging IDEA issues.

Labor and Employment COVID-19 Guides

Institute for Law and the Workplace faculty members Martin H. Malin, Marsha Ross-Jackson, and Emily Aleisa, and clinical professors Richard Gonzalez and Heather Harper led teams that researched federal, state, and local laws and other agency-recommended guidance on labor and employment issues. Students Tyler Sprague, Rawan Hishmeh, Katherine Hanson, and Laura Bradley-Hufford spoke with business owners and workers about their challenges and concerns related to work and COVID-19, which led to the creation of comprehensive employer and employee rights handbooks. Harper’s team from the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic— Emily Shanley-Roberts, Aries Druckenbrod, Shelby Thordarson, Artur Moskala, and Nicholas Agate—also developed infographics to provide easy-to-use visual guides to help small business owners. The infographics cover the Paycheck Protection Program and Families First Coronavirus Response Act, and how to safely reopen businesses. The teams anticipate that state and federal regulatory guidance will continue to evolve. One thing they noted is that the Illinois Human Rights Act and Chicago Human Rights Ordinance offer worker protections that are often overlooked, including broader definitions of disability and parental status discrimination. —Jamie Loo

Lori Andrews and Institute for Science, Law, and Technology Students Examine Gender Gap in COVID-19 Clinical Trials

Until 1995 most medical research was conducted on men, leading, in some cases, to the development of diagnostics and treatments that were harmful to women. Harm often occurred because men and women differ in their immune systems and hormones. In 1995 the United States Congress enacted a statute requiring the director of the National Institutes of Health to ensure that women are included in medical research and that research studies analyze the differences between men and women in their reactions to both diseases and treatments. When discrimination persisted, the NIH promulgated its 2016 guidelines, underscoring the need to disaggregate research data by sex.

Research on COVID-19 provided Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita Lori Andrews and students Bora Ndregjoni, Monica Pechous, Andrew White, and Kelby Roth with the opportunity to determine whether the policy guidelines for analyzing sex differences in response to diseases and treatments have been met. By May 13,