UofL LAW - THE CARDINAL LAWYER

People, listening and watching, nodded and wept, and, leaving the theater,
one turned to the other and said, What do you want to do now?
And the other one said, I don’t know. What do you want to do?
It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. . . .

— Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008)

From Red Lion to Red List: The Dominance and Decline of the Broadcast Medium, 60 Admin. L. Rev. 793 (2008) (as previewed in Jurisdynamics):

This essay proposes a little housecleaning in the law of communications regulation. Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 369 (1969), deserves to be transferred in its entirety from the realm of doctrine to that of history. Defenders of Red Lion and the discourse-based model of free speech jurisprudence symbolized by that decision seek to preserve one communicative niche where the public at large does absolutely nothing besides watch or listen. Appeals to civic republicanism and other lofty ideals notwithstanding, what Red Lion privileges above all else is sloth, the idea that there should be one form of mass communication that all citizens, without regard to wealth or power, can access solely by virtue of buying a receiving device and turning it on.

For four decades Congress and the FCC have imposed mandatory carriage obligations on cable and broadcast satellite operators for the benefit of conventional television stations. The emergence of intermediate constitutional scrutiny in those decisions has effectively confined Red Lion's deferential standard of review to structural regulation of the broadcast industry itself. Sustained resort to mandatory carriage schemes has reduced conventional broadcasting from a pervasive medium into the legal ward of byzantine regulatory systems designed to leverage the greater dominance of subscription-based platforms for delivering multichannel video programming.

Telecommunications Mergers, in Competition Policy and Merger Analysis in Deregulated and Newly Competitive Industries, at pp. 52-83 (Peter Carstensen & Susan Beth Farmer eds., Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008) (as previewed in Jurisdynamics):

Telecommunications mergers are at once a historical mirror and a harbinger of the legal future. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, no significant telecommunications merger has failed to receive regulatory approval in the United States.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has accelerated the trend toward consolidation and concentration. Having devoted most of its energy on issues doomed to become technologically and economically obsolete, the Act failed to anticipate the technological conditions (especially the emergence of the Internet) that drove telecommunications carriers to consolidate. Nevertheless, possible avenues for reform remain open should the federal government ever conclude that the anticompetitive potential of telecommunications mergers outweighs their salutary effects.

The Law School's holiday party and Class of 1979 Classroom dedication

A highlight of the Law School's December 12, 2008, holiday party was the dedication of the Class of 1979 Classroom. Now redesignated Room 079, the Class of 1979 Classroom is the only room in the Law School whose renovation has been funded by contributions by a single class.

Top left: Video footage of the Class of 1979 Classroom dedication, as recorded by Reggie Van Stockum. Bottom left: Alan Parsons, Reggie Van Stockum, Jim Chen, Richard Breen, and Wally Spalding. Bottom right: Connie Spalding, Bonnie Breen, and Cheryl Van Stockum.

I invite you to visit this event's full video and photo gallery.