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As some of you know (and as I noted in a prior post), I have taught from time to time in the past (and will be teaching again this fall) a course focusing on nonhuman animals and the law.  The course reveals, among many other things, that business law doctrine and practice have a number of significant intersections with nonhuman animals.  Although I am likely to say more on that later, the earlier post linked in above notes a few things.

Yesterday, I received the “Call for Papers and Features” reproduced below.  Many of the suggested topics–and the overall theme of “animal welfare in the context of human development”–engage business law.  In particular, agricultural business seems to be on the ends of the editors . . . .  Accordingly, I am posting the call thinking that some of our readers would be interested in knowing about this.

[Aside: I do not subscribe to the citation policy of the journal for the “features” being sought through this call–e.g., “Almost every sentence must be cited” and “If a sentence does not have a citation, you should have a good reason (i.e., it is your concluding argument or a recommendation).”  Unless those who established these requirements are confident that “features” otherwise meeting their requirements do not contain novel legal or policy arguments or recommendations, that pair of citation “requirements” is absurd, imv.]

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CALL FOR PAPERS AND FEATURES

The Sustainable Development Law & Policy Brief (SDLP) is currently accepting submissions for its Fall 2017 edition on topics related to animal welfare in the context of human development. Development will not be sustainable if animal welfare and human-animal relationships are not included in development programs, policies, and laws. Therefore, it is important to highlight the commonality between animal welfare issues and human justice issues.

If you would like to submit an article or feature for consideration, please contact us at sdlp@wcl.american.edu immediately. We will accept submissions on a rolling basis. The deadline for submissions is Monday, September 25, 2017. We will select up to four articles and four features for publication, and we will notify the Authors by Monday, October 2, 2017. Article Requirements differ from Feature Requirements – see below.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

§ Consumption of Species Versus Ecotourism in Developing Nations
§ Exploitation of Natural Fisheries and the Associated Issue of Bycatch
§ Challenges in Regulating Offshore Aquaculture
§ The Effects of Anthropogenic Noise on Marine Life
§ Going Meatless and Securing Food Sources: Moving Away from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and Meat Consumption
§ Socio-Economic Challenges in Shifting from Animal-Based Agriculture to Plant- Based/Non-Animal Based Agriculture
§ Intersection Between Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and Environmental Justice
§ Habitat Loss and Deforestation from Agriculture
§ The Role of Financial Institutions in Animal Agriculture Projects
§ How to Move Toward a Global Animal Welfare Policy
§ Human Health Implications Associated with the Production and Consumption of Animal Products
§ Balancing Wildlife and Continued Land Exploitation in National Parks and Preserves
§ The Effects of Deep Sea Bed Mining on Marine Life

SDLP is available online at LexisNexis, Westlaw, VLex, Hein Online, and on our website at www.wcl.american.edu/org/sdlp.

It is also widely distributed at law and graduate schools, and to representatives of international organizations worldwide.

We reserve the right to reject submissions at any time or for any reason. We also reserve the right to hold all submissions on file for later publication and reserve the right to revise submissions and/or cut text. Authors will have the opportunity to accept or reject any revisions. SDLP accepts submission of timely articles that have already been published elsewhere, so long as permission of the previous publisher is received.

[Click on the “Continue reading” button below for the requirements for articles and features.]

After I published last week’s post, I heard from a few of you in person and by email.  You expressed support and sympathy.  And you had stories of your own.  Those communications motivate this post.

There are, in my view, rules of etiquette that apply to editing academic and professional work for publication.  It seems that I am not the only one who holds this view.  With articles and posts titled, e.g., Editing Etiquette and Editor Etiquette, a number of others in the writing and editing biz have ideas on how editors should behave in their interactions with writers.  And my key observations about best practices in law review, law journal, and law textbook editing echo theirs.  Here are my “Top Three” rules of editing etiquette for law publications.

  1. Always show the author where changes to the text have been made.  This typically means sending the author a blacklined version of the work.  Once the give-and-take of the editorial process is under way, the backline should indicate whether changes suggested by the author have been accepted and where new changes suggested by the editor have been implemented/added.  Recently, a law review sent me a backline that was made from

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From time to time, we at the BLPB offer our views on publishing with law reviews.  The excellent, the good, the bad, the ugly–apparently, we have seen it all (or at least close to it).  See, e.g., Marcia’s post from last year that includes links to many of these prior posts.  This post carries forward that tradition.  

Two-and-a-half years ago, I published a post entitled Nightmare in Law Review Land . . . . That post included the two standard instructions that I routinely give to law reviews when I submit stack-check drafts.

The first is to leave in the automatic footnote cross-referencing that I have used in the draft until we finalize the article.  The second is to notify me if the staff believes that new footnote citations or citation parentheticals need to be added (specifically noting that I will handle those additions myself).

For the most part, this has worked well for me.  Recently, however, I received the following response to the second instruction:

Thank you for your notes. As part of our editing process, we add any needed citations and parentheticals. We build in time to do this and tend to be fairly thorough.

The Belmont Health Law Journal is hosting its first symposium tomorrow, January 27th.

The theme of the symposium will be What’s Next? The Movement from Volume to Value-based Healthcare Delivery, and will feature Congressman Jim Cooper as keynote speaker. 

Information is available here.

Registration is from 8:30am to 9:00am. Speakers will present from 9:00 am until noon. CLE credit and lunch provided.

The University of Akron Law Review recently published its Symposium on Law and SocioEconomics.  You can find a full list of the contributions here (Volume 49, Issue 2).  As one of the organizers of the symposium, I had the honor of writing a conclusion to the issue, titled Socio-Economics: Challenging Mainstream Economic Models and Policies.  I provide the abstract below, and you can read the entire piece here.

At a time when many people are questioning the ability of our current system to provide economic justice, the Socio-Economic perspective is particularly relevant to finding new solutions and ways forward. In this relatively short conclusion to the Akron Law Review’s publication, Law and Socio-Economics: A Symposium, I have separated the Symposium articles into three groups for review: (1) those that can be read as challenging mainstream economic models, (2) those that can be read as challenging mainstream policy conclusions, and (3) those that provide a good example of both. My reviews essentially take the form of providing a short excerpt from the relevant article that will give the reader a sense of what the piece is about and hopefully encourage those who have not yet done so

My latest article on Cuba and the US is out. Here I explore corporate governance and compliance issues for US companies. In May, I made my third trip to Cuba in a year to do further research on rule of law and investor concerns for my current work in progress.

In the meantime, please feel free to email me your comments or thoughts at mnarine@stu.edu on my latest piece
Download Here

The abstract is below:

The list of companies exploring business opportunities in Cuba reads like a who’s who of household names- Starwood Hotels, Netflix, Jet Blue, Carnival, Google, and AirBnB are either conducting business or have publicly announced plans to do so now that the Obama administration has normalized relations with Cuba. The 1962 embargo and the 1996 Helm-Burton Act remain in place, but companies are preparing for or have already been taking advantage of the new legal exemptions that ban business with Cuba. Many firms, however, may not be focusing on the corporate governance and compliance challenges of doing business in Cuba. This Essay will briefly discuss the pitfalls related to doing business with state-owned enterprises like those in Cuba; the particular complexity of doing business in Cuba…

Today I hit “submit” on an article I was asked to review for an international law journal. Because the process required blind peer review, I won’t be any more specific other than to say that the article related to a topic that I have written and spoken about extensively over the past few years. Unfortunately, the author did not cite any of the main (or even ancillary) articles on the topic and instead focused on a number of disparate theories that barely related to the title or topic of the piece. In short, the article had a few good pages and might make a few decent articles, but only after major revisions. I knew what the article was missing because I have read almost every other piece written on the topic.

As a junior academic, I admit that the most frustrating part of the law review process is the lack of peer review, at least in the United States. My colleagues in the EU review articles of 10-12,000 words on average and generally have 1-2 other reviewers deciding on publication of a scholar’s piece. The review period tends to be 6-8 weeks (or so I have been told) and generally…

Business and Human Rights Scholars Conference

University of Washington School of Law, Seattle, Washington

September 16-17, 2016 

The University of Washington School of Law, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the Rutgers Business School, the Rutgers Center for Corporate Law and Governance, and the Business and Human Rights Journal announce the second Business and Human Rights Scholars Conference, to be held September 16-17, 2016 at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle.  Conference participants will present and discuss scholarship at the intersection of business and human rights issues. 

Upon request, participants’ papers may be considered for publication in the Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ), published by Cambridge University Press. The Conference is interdisciplinary; scholars from all global regions and all disciplines are invited to apply, including law, business, business ethics, human rights, and global affairs. 

To apply, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to BHRConference@kinoy.rutgers.edu with the subject line Business & Human Rights Conference Proposal.  Papers must be unpublished at the time of presentation. Please include your name, affiliation, contact information, and curriculum vitae. 

The deadline for submission is May 15, 2016.  Scholars whose submissions are selected for the…

A year ago today, President Obama shocked the world and enraged many in Congress by announcing normalization of relations with Cuba. A lot of the rest of the United States didn’t see this as much of a big deal, but here in Miami, ground zero for the Cuban exile community, this was a cataclysmic event. Now Miami is one of the biggest sources of microfinance for the island.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been writing about the ethical and governance issues of doing business with the island since my 10-day visit last summer. I return to Cuba today on a second research trip to validate some of my findings for my second article on governance and compliance risks and to begin work on my third article related to rule of law issues, the realities of foreign direct investment and arbitration, what a potential bilateral or multilateral investment agreement might look like, and the role that human rights requirements in these agreements could play.

This is an interesting time to be visiting Cuba. The Venezuelan government, a large source of income for Cuba has suffered a humiliating defeat. Will this lead to another “special period” for the…

This week I thanked the law review editors at the West Virginia Law Review for their hard work on my forthcoming article. They seemed truly grateful for the thanks, which was well deserved, and it made me think that I should thank law review editors more often.

Law review editors put in a tremendous amount of time working on our articles, often well after-hours given all of their other commitments. Even when the process is frustrating, I think we need to be thankful and professional. Also, given that I have had a few rough editing experiences, I now state my preferences up front, which (at least this time) led to better results. 

Somewhat related, over at PrawfsBlawg, Andrew Chongseh Kim has a couple posts on the law review process: one on exploding offers and one on peer review of law review articles.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with exploding offers, and I actually think more law reviews should use them. The submission game incentivizes submission to many journals and trading up multiple times. This process wastes an incredible amount of student editor time and they have every right to effectively shut down the expedite process.

As I have…