Nurturing a More Just and Sustainable Food System: The First Year of Pace Law\u27s Food and Beverage Law Clinic

This article looks back at the Clinic\u27s first year and explores lessons learned in putting the theory behind the Clinic\u27s model into practice. Launching the Clinic required a leap of faith. Was there in fact a client demand for its services? Was there sufficient interest from law students in the intersection of transactional law and food systems? Was the scope of legal matters too broad? Was the client focus too narrow? The early returns from the first year have given us valuable insights and experience from which to draw. First, this article discusses the unmet legal need the Clinic seeks to address and the choices that went into the Clinic\u27s approach to client selection. Second, it discusses student interest in food law practice and describes the Clinic\u27s pedagogical approach. Third, it assesses the value of direct transactional legal services for food and beverage businesses as an organizing principle for a law school clinic and a legal practice

Representation theory of rectangular finite WW-algebras

We classify the finite dimensional irreducible representations of rectangular finite $W$-algebras, i.e., the finite $W$-algebras $U(\mathfrak{g}, e)$ where $\mathfrak{g}$ is a symplectic or orthogonal Lie algebra and $e \in \mathfrak{g}$ is a nilpotent element with Jordan blocks all the same size.Comment: 34 page

Beyond Corporate Form: A Response to Dan Depasquale, Surbhi Sarang, and Natalie Bump Vena’s Forging Food Justice Through Cooperatives in New York City

In their article, Forging Food Justice Through Cooperatives in New York City, Dan DePasquale, Surbhi Sarang, and Natalie Bump Vena (the “Authors”) argue that consumer-owned and worker-owned cooperatives hold promise as a means for advancing policy objectives associated with “food justice,” namely building community wealth and power and providing more affordable access to healthy food in low-income and minority communities. Looking to examples of legislation and policies in other jurisdictions, they advocate for a wide range of policies to promote the viability of cooperatives in New York City, including reforms to cooperative corporation laws and strategies for better allocating funding and technical assistance to cooperatives. I largely agree with the Authors’ argument and support their effort to identify practical policy solutions that would help food cooperatives in New York City overcome barriers to success. This Response makes three observations about their proposals. First, this Response observes that food access and economic development are distinct objectives and that consumer and worker cooperatives may have different roles to play in food justice strategies depending on how these objectives are defined and prioritized. Second, the significance of cooperative corporation statutes may be overstated, both because a variety of legal entity forms are available to cooperative organizations (mitigating the impact of potential reforms to New York’s cooperative corporation law) and because the legal form itself does not guarantee adoption of many of the values and principles commonly associated with cooperatives. Third, this Response argues that the role of other, non-cooperative organizational models should not be overlooked in shaping policy in this area. This Response advocates for a more comprehensive strategy that promotes a wide range of community-based businesses and organizations, including but not limited to cooperatives, and that allocates resources according to the identity of organizations’ stakeholders and the degree of their community impact, rather than relying on their legal form

Can UT Austin Play a Role in Cuba's Academic Future? And Vice Versa?

Latin American Studie

Selection of Marine Conservation Zones

Marine Conservation Zones may contribute to the protection and recovery of the marine environment. This POSTnote examines the process and approach used to select and designate zones, and difficulties in identifying and managing suitable areas

Elementary invariants for centralizers of nilpotent matrices

We construct an explicit set of algebraically independent generators for the center of the universal enveloping algebra of the centralizer of a nilpotent matrix in the Lie algebra gl_N(C). In particular, this gives a new proof of the freeness of the center, a result first proved by Panyushev, Premet and Yakimova (math.RT/0610049).Comment: 12 page