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Joan Heminway

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Professor Heminway brought nearly 15 years of corporate practice experience to the University of Tennessee College of Law when she joined the faculty in 2000. She practiced transactional business law (working in the areas of public offerings, private placements, mergers, acquisitions, dispositions, and restructurings) in the Boston office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP from 1985 through 2000.

She has served as an expert witness and consultant on business entity and finance and federal and state securities law matters and is a frequent academic and continuing legal education presenter on business law issues. Professor Heminway also has represented pro bono clients on political asylum applications, landlord/tenant appeals, social security/disability cases, and not-for-profit incorporations and related business law issues. Read More

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As I earlier noted, I have planned to write on meal delivery kits.  What is a meal delivery kit, you ask?  It is a delivered-to-your-door box of ingredients and recipes for meals.  All of the ingredients (except pantry essentials) needed to produce the meals shown and described in the recipe cards are included in the box.  All the recipient has to do is follow the recipe instructions and produce the meals.  Reviews of meal kits that describe additional features can be found here (July 2017), here (October 2016), here (May 2016), and here (May 2015).

My husband ordered us our first meal kit (from Blue Apron) last year as an anniversary present to me.  The idea (which has worked exceedingly well) was that we would be able to more easily prepare meals together, since I often design meals on the fly and cook based on what I sense is needed.  It’s pretty hard to assign tasks consistently and continuously using my natural method of meal preparation.  The meal kits solved this problem neatly.  So, having found success with Blue Apron, we decided to try a few other brands.  Specifically, we also have ordered meal kits from Plated and…

The twelfth annual meeting of the Law and Entrepreneurship Association (LEA) will occur on February 9, 2018 at the University of Alabama School of Law

The LEA is a group of legal scholars interested in the topic of entrepreneurship—broadly construed. Scholars include those who write about corporate law and finance, securities, intellectual property, labor and employment law, tax, and other fields related to entrepreneurship and innovation policy.

Our annual conference is an intimate gathering where each participant is expected to read and actively engage with all of the pieces under discussion. We call for papers and proposals relating to the general topic of entrepreneurship and the law.

Proposals should be comprehensive enough to allow the LEA board to evaluate the aims and likely content of papers they propose. Papers may be accepted for publication but must not be published prior to the meeting. Works in progress, even those at a relatively early stage, are welcome. Junior scholars and those considering entering the legal academy are especially encouraged to participate.

To submit a presentation, email Professor Mirit Eyal-Cohen at meyalcohen@law.ua.edu with a proposal or paper by December 31, 2017. Please title the email “LEA Submission – {Name}.”

For additional information,

While I was in France last week touring and attending an academic conference, a French music legend died and was mourned.  Johnny Hallyday, the King of French rock ‘n’ roll (known widely as the “French Elvis”), died earlier this month at the age of 74 after a battle with lung cancer.  I learned of this in a circuitous way–because one of his songs, Quelque Choses de Tennessee (Something of Tennessee), was playing on the radio in a hotel shuttle van and caught my attention (for obvious reasons, although the song refers to Tennessee Williams, not the state, as it turns out).  Also, I happened to be in Paris the day of his funeral, when many roads (including the Avenue des Champs-Élysées) were blocked off for the related activities.

Curiosity about the song and the singer led me to the Internet.  My Internet searching revealed Hallyday as the singer and described an interesting life.  This guy loved the United States–not only adopting rock ‘n’ roll, but also writing lyrics about this country based on his U.S. travels.  Perhaps most famous is Mon Amérique à Moi (My America and Me), which includes the following lyrics near and dear…

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Because I am having significant Internet access issues through the Wi-Fi in Terminal A at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport (where I am waiting to board a flight to France to present a crowdfunding paper later in the week), I am writing a short “preview” post this week. I am typing this on my cell phone. Please forgive typos, etc.

I have promised a number of folks that I would write a post about the food delivery services I have been using for a bit more than a year now–Blue Apron, Plated, and Hello Fresh. My idea is to write about the business model, comparative attributes, legal aspects, and anything else that might make sense. So, I post today to ask you what you want to know. You can suggest a business, legal, or personal topic. Have at it! And if you’d rather PM me, just send an email. I will keep a folder and use your ideas to plan my post.  Or maybe I will end up with enough for more than one post. Who knows?

Anyway, thanks in advance for your ideas. And I apologize for the short post. But this proves to be a…

Friend-of-the-BLPB Ben Edwards penned a nifty op ed that was published yesterday (Sunday, November 26) in The Wall Street Journal.  (Sorry.  It’s behind a firewall, available only to subscribers.)  It covers a subject near and dear to my heart and does so in a novel way.  Specifically, in the WSJ piece (entitled “Immigrants Need Better Protection—From Their Lawyers”) Ben deftly describes the extremely low quality representation that immigrants receive in the United States, notes the market’s inability to self-correct to remedy the situation, shares his view that “the best solution–a right to immigration counsel similar to the right to a criminal defense lawyer–” is unlikely to attract and sustain the necessary legislative support, and proposes a novel second-best solution to the problem.

In a forthcoming article in the Washington and Lee Law Review, I argue that requiring disclosure of immigration lawyers’ track records could improve the market for representation. It almost certainly would drive some of the worst out of business. Who wouldn’t shop around after discovering a lawyer ranked in the bottom 10% by client outcomes? Although no lawyer should be expected to win them all, immigrants should get nervous if their lawyer always loses.

Ben uses the concept…