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26.05 - 02.06.2020 – American Law and the Difficult Time: lecture series

The American Law Program [Szkoła Prawa Amerykańskiego] run by the Columbus School of Law, The Catholic University of American, Washington D.C., and the Faculty of Law and Administration, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, as well as the American Law Student Society [Koło Naukowe Prawa Amerykańskiego] at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, in May and June 2020 invited CUA professors to provide students with short online lectures followed by discussions.


The lectures were devoted to a variety of legal issues mainly relating to COVID-19 difficulties facing people and institutions, for which legal solutions may be useful.

Paul Kurth: The American Low-Income Taxpayer: Legal Framework and Roles Law Students Play

May 12, 18:00

The speech referred to the parts of the U.S. tax code that have been designed to assist low-income taxpayers including how the Earned Income Tax Credit is a major part of the United States’ social safety net, how Congress has used the tax code to assist taxpayers through the COVID-19 pandemic, and ways the United States Government has imbedded social policy in the tax system.  The presentation also included information on the CUA’s Low Income Taxpayer clinic, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program, and how law students play a critical role in both of those programs.

Paul Kurth (The Catholic University of America; J.D. from the Catholic University of America, B.Ed. from the University of Toledo, an M.S. in Administration and Supervision from Johns Hopkins University); Vice-Director of the International Trade and Summer Law Program; Managing Director of Columbus Community Legal Services, the umbrella for Catholic University of America’s in-house law school clinical program; and Director and Supervising Attorney of The Low Income Taxpayer Clinic.  With his tax clinic expertise, he also is a site coordinator and trainer for the national Internal Revenue Service’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program. 

Richard Peltz-Steele: “Nuisance” in American Common Law Tort. COVID-19 as a Public Nuisance?

May 19, 18:00

Nuisance is one of the oldest civil actions in Anglo-American law, dating to the earliest written common law of the late middle ages.  Nuisance for centuries referred to an offense against property rights, like trespass, interfering with a neighbor’s enjoyment of land.  But a nuisance need not be physical, and colorful cases has addressed nuisance achieved by forces such as sound, light, and smell.  In recent decades, nuisance has undergone a radical transformation and generated a new theory of civil liability that has become untethered from private property.  State and local officials have litigated a broad new theory of “public nuisance” to attack problems on which the federal government has been apathetic, if not willfully resistant to resolution, such as climate change and the opioid epidemic.  Just in April 2020, the State of Missouri sued the People’s Republic of China, asserting that COVID-19 constitutes a public nuisance.  Emerging from understandable frustration, public nuisance nevertheless threatens to destabilize the fragile equilibrium of state and federal power that holds the United States together.

Richard Peltz-Steele (University of Massachusetts; J.D. from the Duke University, B.A. from the Washington & Lee University); author or co-author of qualitative and quantitative research publications in law and mass communication. He teaches tort law, comparative law, and media law. His current research focuses on comparative access to information law, especially in developing nations. Professor Peltz-Steele serves in various capacities for the American Bar Association, including the legal education committee of the Section of International Law.

Susanna Fischer: Art Museums in Financial Crisis: Legal and Ethical Issues Related to Deaccessioning

May 26, 18:00

This talk will examine the legality and ethics of deaccessioning, which is the permanent removal of artworks or other objects from museum collections.  As art museums, many already struggling financially, confront the economic consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic, some may seek to raise money by deaccessioning.  Traditional museum policies frowned upon deaccessioning as a means to do anything other than improve the quality of museum collections.  But the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic raise new questions about the future of museums and the extent to which old assumptions about deaccessioning should be laid aside. 

Susanna Fischer (Associate Professor and Director of the International Human Rights Law Summer Program in Rome, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law; LL.M. from University of Virginia, B.A. from University of Oxford (Merton College), A.B. from Princeton University).  She has practiced law on both sides of the Atlantic, as a New York attorney and an English barrister.  In London, she worked as a Night Lawyer providing pre-publication legal advice for News International plc, the publishers of The Times, The Sunday Times, and the Sun.  Her primary areas of practice and her main research interests are copyright law, art law, media law, cyberlaw, and constitutional law, from a comparative law perspective. Her courses include copyright law, art law, entertainment law, international intellectual property law, comparative law, and constitutional law.  

Cecily Baskir: American Criminal Justice Reform in the Time of COVID-19

June 2, 18:00

The current coronavirus pandemic is forcing people around the world to rethink much that has been taken for granted, including approaches to criminal justice.  Crowded prisons and jails are often hotspots for the spread of disease, and in the United States, the need to protect public health and reduce burdens on hospitals is accelerating criminal justice reform in multiple ways. Judges, prosecutors, and the public are being forced to rethink long-held assumptions and practices about who should be incarcerated and for how long. This lecture will focus in particular on efforts to reduce jail and prison populations through the increased use of pretrial release (of people charged but not yet convicted of crimes) and compassionate release (of older prison inmates with health conditions).  It will also examine the role that lawyers and law students are playing in criminal justice reform advocacy efforts.

Cecily Baskir (J.D. from Yale University;  LL.M. from Georgetown University; A.B. from Princeton University); attorney-at-law with significant experience in indigent criminal defense, immigration, and civil rights law; vice-mayor and mayor-elect of Chevy Chase. She was an Assistant Professor of Clinical Law and the founding director of the Center for Cross-Border Advocacy at Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen.