Katie Brown

• Dean Katie Brown co-authored a short, practical article titled Fostering Collaboration Between Law Librarians & Technology Professionals. The article was reposted to the Blog On Firmer Ground with permission from AALL Spectrum, Volume 30, Number 2 (November/December 2025), pgs. 14−16.
• On November 4^th, Dean Brown also presented The Fundamentals of ChatGPT for Paralegals during IPE CLE Training.

Michelle Condon

Prof. Michelle Condon published the article titled The West Virginia Constitution: Mountaineers Are Always Free, documenting that an early West Virginia constitution emancipated enslaved people in 1863, more than a year before the U.S. Constitution.

Michelle Condon & Bill Merkel

On November 5^th, Profs. Bill Merkel and Michelle Condon presented a one-hour CLE titled Enduring Independence: The Declaration of Independence, the Legal Profession, and the Inns of Court Mission, for the James L. Petigru Inn of Court.  Prof. Merkel spoke about the Declaration and the future of democracy.  Prof. Condon spoke about the Declaration as a precursor to the First Amendment and modern issues involving freedom of speech, press, petition, and assembly.

Jessica Moeller

Dean Jessica Moeller’s law review article titled The Mortal Cost of Racial Inequity in Reproductive Healthcare Post-Dobbs, has been accepted for publication in the Touro Law Center Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity and for presentation at the upcoming Institute for Health Law, Bioethics, and Policy symposium – “Vital Signs: Law, Ethics, and the Future of Healthcare Justice” to be presented in March 2026.

The article’s abstract is:

This paper examines the enduring (and in many regions widening) racial disparities in access to reproductive healthcare following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.  While the legal focus post-Dobbs has primarily been on abortion legality, the practical consequences extend into foundational issues of health equity, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color who already face profound systemic barriers. The paper argues that the dismantling of federal abortion protections has exacerbated existing inequalities, transforming geography, socioeconomic status, and race into determinative factors for reproductive autonomy and health outcomes.  The analysis proceeds in three parts:

1. Establishing the pre-Dobbs baseline, using concrete data to illustrate disparities in maternal mortality (where Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women), access to contraception, and quality of prenatal and postpartum care.
2. The paper analyzes how state-level restrictions, such as clinic closures, mandatory waiting periods, and limitations on medical abortions, disproportionately burden communities of color, who often lack the resources to travel or take time off from work.
3. The paper proposes a framework for advancing reproductive justice, a concept that goes beyond the “right to choose” to encompass the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments.

This framework will suggest legislative and ethical interventions at the state and federal levels to secure equitable access to the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare, from comprehensive family planning services to high-quality maternal care.  The goal of this paper is to illuminate how law can either reinforce or dismantle structures of racialized health injustice in the domain of reproductive health.