Editor’s Message

With a longer edition we can better fulfill three purposes: publicize upcoming events and recent occasions and honors, disseminate ABA information such as Bylaw changes or nominations for awards, and provide a quarterly review with substantive content.

In this issue we honor David Callies; focus on our Diversity Reception with photos of ABA President Elect Paulette Brown and Elizabeth A. Campbell, who addressed us; shout out to Michael Kamprath; publicize the Spring Section Meeting, which will include the launch of Urban Agriculture with a panel and book-signing, and preview activities at the Annual Meeting in Chicago; fulfill a member request to list meeting venues and dates; and introduce the Nominating Committee for 2015-2016.

Our Supreme Court Report serves a crucial function for staying up to date. We applaud Sophia Stadnyk for her continuing enthusiasm and excellent reporting on the Court. She is taking a brief time-out from this issue but will be back in the Summer Issue with a roundup of this year’s cases of consequence.

Substantive matters in this issue focus on student debt, RLUIPA, immigration, and hot topics in diversity, including human trafficking. Often a panel becomes a dry run for a book, like Beyond the Fracking Wars or School Bullying. We hope that the outstanding student debt panel by the Attorneys General and Department of Justice Issues Committee will head toward publication. Dan Dalton, author of Litigating Religious Land Use Cases, led a panel on the background of RLUIPA.

Our annual “Hot Topics in Diversity” panel covered human trafficking, immigration issues of unaccompanied minors, voting rights litigation, and election protection initiatives. All the presentations were in great depth—and the topics were diverse! Starting with this issue and panelist Ruben R. Perez’s Curbing Human Trafficking and Protecting its Victims, it is our pleasure to introduce a regular article on a diversity hot topic.

We also thank Thomas Webb and Terry Welch for their articles on immigration, initially presented as papers at the International Municipal Lawyers Association in 2014. If you have a paper to publish or are interested in writing an article—or if there is a topic you hope someone will explore—please contact us.

Erica Levine Powers