On September 25, 2025, President Anastopoulo spoke at the CX Summit 2025 on her article: What’s The Risk? Client Data, Cloud Security & Your Ethical Duty.

On September 26, 2025, President Anastopoulo spoke on the podcast: Ethical-ish, discussing Ethical Duties of Lawyers regarding AI and Cloud Data.

Katie Brown

On September 2, 2025, Dean Brown spoke with the Legal Technology Class at the University of Connecticut Law School on a virtual panel with Colin Levy, General Counsel at Malbek. The topic was Legal Technology Competency Expectations from the ABA and legal practice.

Dean Brown was invited to participate in the AALS Section on Technology, Law, and Legal Education Program pedagogical panel at the January 2026 AALS Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA. This session will be aimed at introducing law professors at every stage of their careers to ways in which they can integrate technology into their existing class, create new classes, or find ways to partner their classes with technology classes being offered by others. This will be an extended session—three hours—in which panelists will talk about tools they have integrated into a class and the new classes they have created.

Margaret Lawton

Dean Lawton is a member of the SC Access to Justice Commission. She attended a retreat hosted by the Commission that “brought together a broad range of legal system stakeholders—including court leaders, private attorneys, law schools, pro bono advocates, and legal aid providers—and encouraged them to engage meaningfully with the findings of the Legal Needs Assessment, collaborate with each other, and collectively create a plan of action for addressing gaps in access to justice in South Carolina.” The report from that retreat is now available here.

Dean Lawton was appointed as an ex officio member of the Chief Justice’s Commission on the Profession (SC).

Dylan Malagrinò

Dean Malagrinò’s law review article Reevaluating Kaplan & Katzenbach: A Look at Their Skepticism Toward Restricting the Preemptive Use of Force Through the Lens of the Trump Doctrine will be published in Volume 48 Issue 2 of the Houston Journal of International Law.

Abstract:

This article revisits Morton A. Kaplan and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach’s 1959 conclusion that international law’s restrictions on the preemptive use of force would never meaningfully constrain state behavior. Writing in the context of a Cold War “loose bipolar” system, Kaplan and Katzenbach doubted the U.N. Charter’s force prohibitions could endure in the face of geopolitical realities. More than six decades later, their skepticism invites renewed scrutiny considering the Trump Doctrine and recent U.S. military actions. This article situates their argument historically and doctrinally, tracing the evolution of anticipatory self-defense from the nineteenth-century Caroline Doctrine to the Bush Doctrine’s embrace of preventive war and, ultimately, to the Trump administration’s informal “America First” unilateralism.

Drawing on case studies—including the April 2017 U.S. strikes in Syria, the Trump-era engagement with North Korea, and the June 2025 joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities—the article explores how contemporary practice both affirms and undermines Kaplan and Katzenbach’s conclusion. On one hand, powerful states continue to treat law as an obstacle to navigate rather than an absolute constraint; on the other, the widespread condemnation of the Iran strikes suggests that normative commitments to the Charter remain stronger than Kaplan and Katzenbach envisioned. The analysis argues that if they were writing today, Kaplan and Katzenbach would likely temper their pessimism, acknowledging both the progress in codifying and enforcing legal restraints and the persistent tension between legal norms and strategic necessity. Ultimately, this article contends that the future of the U.N. Charter regime depends not only on reaffirming the centrality of legal standards but also on confronting the realities of great power politics—a challenge that underscores the enduring relevance of their inquiry for contemporary international law. This debate matters now because the credibility of the international legal order—and the viability of the Charter system itself—hangs in the balance as states increasingly justify force on grounds that strain or sidestep existing norms.

Dean Malagrinò’s law review article “Equitable Takings” and the Limits to Their Normative Foundations will be published in Volume 59 of the Akron Law Review

Abstract:

This article constructs the concept of “equitable takings”—a new term-of-art to describe judicially crafted doctrines or decisions that result in a de facto redistribution of property interests without formal legislative authorization or compensation. It argues that the normative foundations of these “equitable takings” are insufficient to justify their growing influence in property law. This article examines key judicial decisions, surveys scholarly perspectives, and offers a critical evaluation of the principles that courts invoke to justify these takings. It ultimately contends that these “equitable takings” risk undermining both the rule of law and the stability of property doctrine. Equitable remedies that reallocate property rights should follow standards that answer the questions “why?” and “what for?”—standards that are clear, predictable, and consistent, and that are the result of democratic process. In three appendices, this paper offers proposed legislative language to clarify when civil courts may redistribute property rights for equity reasons. Courts may still resolve disputes in equity, but if an equitable remedy is without legislative authorization, then it would be an “equitable taking.” Recognizing equitable takings as judicial overreach allows us to have the conversation about when we should allow equitable remedies to reallocate property rights, and when instead these equitable remedies “go too far.”

Melanie Regis

Professor Regis’s article, The Fox’s Disguise, will be published in the November 2025 edition of SC Lawyer magazine. The title of the article is taken from a quote by Justice D. Garrison Hill who wrote the state Supreme Court’s opinion in State v. Rowell, 444 S.C. 109, 906 S.E.2d 554 (2024). The opinion changed the standard for an evidentiary hearing based on an allegation of juror concealment, eliminating the distinction between intentional and unintentional concealment of information. Professor Regis’s article argues that the use of attorney-conducted voir dire during the jury selection process would have lessened, if not obviated the need for a post-trial hearing due to the structure of the voir dire process in the trial court. In the same edition, Evan Slavitt, has written a “Counterpoint” to Professor Regis’s article with critiques of the practice of attorney-conducted voir dire.