Faculty Blogs

Faculty Blogs

UDM Faculty Blogs.

  • David Koelsch
    David Koelsch
    David C. Koelsch is an Associate Professor and Director of the Immigration Law C
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  • Julia Belian
    Julia Belian
    Associate Professor Julia Belian, although less than a century old herself, find
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  • Langvardt, Kyle
    Langvardt, Kyle
    Professor Langvardt joined the UDM faculty in Fall 2012. Before UDM Law, he was
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Faculty Blogs David Koelsch

David Koelsch's Blog

Posted by David Koelsch
David Koelsch
David C. Koelsch is an Associate Professor and Director of the Immigration Law C
User is currently offline
on Wednesday, 13 March 2013 in Faculty Blogs
"Life's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get."  This is a somewhat dated reference but the immortal lines uttered by Forrest Gump could equally be applied to work in the Immigration Law Clinic.  At least once each week, students leave the Law School to go out into the community to meet with real people and try to see if we can fix their legal issues.  Last night, we were out in Southwest Detroit at a lo...
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Faculty Blogs Langvardt, Kyle

The a priori use of the consumer confidence argument

Posted by Langvardt, Kyle
Langvardt, Kyle
Professor Langvardt joined the UDM faculty in Fall 2012. Before UDM Law, he was
User is currently offline
on Tuesday, 12 March 2013 in Faculty Blogs
I was listening to yesterday's Diane Rehm show and heard the following exchange between a caller named Tina and an economist named Ed Conard.  I've attached Tina's question and Conard's response below so that you can check my characterization of what was said. Basically, Tina's family is well-to-do but frugal.  Tina asked whether her family's low level of consumer spending is the sort of thing that affects the economy in one way or ano...
Tags: logic, critical thinking, economics, confirmation bias
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Faculty Blogs Langvardt, Kyle

Is anti-pitbull bias wrong?

Posted by Langvardt, Kyle
Langvardt, Kyle
Professor Langvardt joined the UDM faculty in Fall 2012. Before UDM Law, he was
User is currently offline
on Wednesday, 06 February 2013 in Faculty Blogs
A piece in Salon argues against the perception that pitbulls are unusually aggressive dogs.  I’m well-enough convinced (or sufficiently uninterested) to end my investigation here. That being said, if I were inclined to get a dog, I still wouldn’t get a pitbull.  If my neighbor gets a dog, I hope it’s not a pitbull.  If the city of Detroit wants to require the spaying and neutering of pitbulls, I’m all for it.  Pitbulls scare ...
Tags: ethics, animal rights, fallacy, racism, dogs
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Faculty Blogs David Koelsch

Blog Entry 19

Posted by David Koelsch
David Koelsch
David C. Koelsch is an Associate Professor and Director of the Immigration Law C
User is currently offline
on Monday, 05 November 2012 in Faculty Blogs
Good things are happening at the Immigration Law Clinic.  We had a pretty active term with seven individual hearings, fifteen master calendar hearings, eighteen applications for relief filed (including four extensive asylum claims, a T visa petition, and three citizenship applications, as well as other petitions).  We also researched and wrote six briefs to the Board of Immigration Appeals or Sixth Circuit.  And, last but not least...
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Faculty Blogs David Koelsch

Blog Entry 18

Posted by David Koelsch
David Koelsch
David C. Koelsch is an Associate Professor and Director of the Immigration Law C
User is currently offline
on Monday, 29 October 2012 in Faculty Blogs
One of the more interesting activities my students and I do is go to jail – on behalf of our clients.  Currently, we represent two detainees in the Calhoun County Jail in Battle Creek, Michigan.  Each client is from West Africa and both attempted to enter Canada to make a refugee claim there but were not allowed to do so because they could not establish their identity and family relationships in Canada.  One client has a pretty goo...
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Faculty Blogs Julia Belian

Networking and gingerbread

Posted by Julia Belian
Julia Belian
Associate Professor Julia Belian, although less than a century old herself, find
User is currently offline
on Friday, 05 October 2012 in Faculty Blogs
This week, my Property class and I started a new unit.  This unit focuses on the study of possessory estates and future interests, and that study requires (and teaches) a kind of legal thinking that is very different from most of what first-year students learn to do. Certainly, every area of law requires practitioners to read very carefully.  It is also true that when documents include complex language, they become more difficult to re...
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Faculty Blogs Julia Belian

Jingles and professionalism

Posted by Julia Belian
Julia Belian
Associate Professor Julia Belian, although less than a century old herself, find
User is currently offline
on Saturday, 22 September 2012 in Faculty Blogs
Many things about Michigan surprised me when I first moved here four years ago, including the fact that I could still be so surprised - the big-box stores and fast-food chains had made me think every town had become a kind of bland Everywheretown, with little variation from place to place. I had not been a resident for more than a few hours, however, before I was on the phone telling a family member that Michigan was a land in which local jingles...
Tags: jingles, advertising, professionalism
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Faculty Blogs Julia Belian

On being called on in class

Posted by Julia Belian
Julia Belian
Associate Professor Julia Belian, although less than a century old herself, find
User is currently offline
on Saturday, 08 September 2012 in Faculty Blogs
We have just wrapped up our third week of a new school year.  One of the great joys and privileges afforded to me is to teach first-year Property Law.  My students are, I hope, beginning to learn that I expect a lot of them.  In the 1973 film, "The Paper Chase," Prof. Kingsfield begins the protagonist's first day of law school by calling on him to recite the facts of the case of Hawkins v. McGee.  James Hart had not realized ...
Tags: classroom environment, Socratic method, learning, 1L
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Faculty Blogs David Koelsch

Blog Entry 17

Posted by David Koelsch
David Koelsch
David C. Koelsch is an Associate Professor and Director of the Immigration Law C
User is currently offline
on Thursday, 20 October 2011 in Faculty Blogs
Sometimes one of the hardest lessons to learn is that our clients are not our friends and, rather, we are their lawyers and not their therapists or social workers.  Clients with lawyers who treat them with kid gloves lose.  This point was brought home to students in the Immigration Law Clinic this term. Our client is a political activist who was jailed and tortured in his home country.  We had one day of testimony in Immigration C...
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Faculty Blogs David Koelsch

Blog Entry 16

Posted by David Koelsch
David Koelsch
David C. Koelsch is an Associate Professor and Director of the Immigration Law C
User is currently offline
on Thursday, 20 October 2011 in Faculty Blogs
The summer term (as it always does) flew by this year.  The students in the Immigration Law Clinic were hard at work on a number of interesting cases and the new term promises to be a great experience for our students – and hopefully for our clients.  The past term had a couple highlights in my mind, not strictly in terms of wins on behalf of our clients but how students learned to grow as lawyers and people.  Each term, I experim...
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