Charleston School of Law has released its final Faculty Scholarly Update for the 2025−26 academic year.
Associate Dean Katie Brown presented several times in the month of April:
Also, on April 24, AALL drops the first episode of the AALLin podcast:
Episode 1: Gen AI: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
In the debut episode of AALLIn Podcast, hosts Katie Brown and Andre Davison welcome Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert of The Geek in Review for an open, candid conversation on generative AI (GenAI)
Prof. Suzanne Chapman accepted an invitation to return as a Guest Lecturer at Oxford University this summer as part of its collaborative Comparative Trial Advocacy Skills intensive, a two-week international study abroad program with Stetson Law. The program teaches trial advocacy skills and explores differences and similarities across legal systems through guest lectures by faculty and practitioners from England, Ireland, Scotland, and the United States.
Adjunct faculty member Richard Hricik, who teaches Civil Rights Litigation, successfully obtained a grant of certiorari, vacatur, and remand from the U.S. Supreme Court in Williams v. Charleston Cnty. Sheriff’s Office, No. 25-640, 2026 U.S. LEXIS 1486 (Mar. 23, 2026). The case concerns the applicability of Eleventh Amendment immunity to the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office and was remanded back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for further proceedings.
Adjunct faculty member Justin Kahn, who teaches Depositions among other experiential learning courses at Charleston Law, recently published South Carolina Rules of Evidence Annotated (18th Edition 2026), a practical, authoritative companion for litigators, judges, and anyone else who addresses evidentiary issues in South Carolina courts or tribunals.
Prof. Paul Lund’s article Procedural Removal After Thirty Years: Closing the Door on a Failed Removal Doctrine has been published as the lead article in Volume 45 of the Review of Litigation. The article addresses a controversial removal doctrine, known as either procedural misjoinder or fraudulent misjoinder. That doctrine, if recognized, allows defendants to remove a lawsuit to federal court despite the absence of complete diversity of citizenship if they show that the claims against the nondiverse party are not sufficiently related to the claims against other parties and therefore have been misjoined in violation of Federal Rule 20 or the comparable state joinder rule. The article traces the doctrine’s origins in the Eleventh Circuit and discusses its uncertain status in other circuits, with particular focus on Fourth Circuit cases. I then present arguments for why the federal courts should refuse to recognize the doctrine.
Also, the Second Circuit recently cited and partially relied upon a prior article by Prof. Lund, “Federally Chartered Corporations and Federal Jurisdiction,” which appeared in the Florida State University Law Review. The issue before the Second Circuit was whether corporations chartered by the federal government (as opposed to state-chartered corporations) have citizenship in the state of their “principal place of business” under the diversity jurisdiction statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1332. The Second Circuit held—consistent with the argument Prof. Lund had made in this article—that the statute does not apply to federally-chartered corporations. In reaching that result, the Second Circuit created a conflict with an earlier decision from the Fourth Circuit. The Second Circuit’s opinion is Schneiderman v. American Chemical Society, 2026 WL 923274 (2d Cir. Apr. 6, 2026).
In April, Asst. Dean Jessica Moeller was elected to the Board of the Non-Resident Lawyers’ Division for the Wisconsin State Bar to serve a 2-year term.
Also in April, Dean Moeller presented at the University of Idaho’s Law Review Symposium titled: Justice for All: Systemic Transformation to Public Defense Symposium. Dean Moeller served as a panelist on the Rural Advocacy Panel, and her article, titled “The Geographic Imperative: Ensuring Competent Public Defense for Every Child and Family,” connected to this symposium, has been accepted for publication later this year. Here is the abstract:
The constitutional right to counsel in juvenile delinquency and termination of parental rights proceedings is formally robust yet practically hollow for the rural clients who need it most. This article argues that geography has become the determinative variable in whether indigent defendants in the highest-stakes child proceedings receive constitutionally adequate representation. The constitutional baseline governing these proceedings is well-established; however, the doctrine has consistently outpaced the structural conditions within which it must be realized. Competent representation in juvenile delinquency and TPR proceedings demands specialized mastery of adolescent brain science, ICWA compliance, trauma-informed client communication, dependency court procedure, and a full understanding of collateral consequences. Rural generalists managing hundreds of mixed-category cases cannot be expected to develop or sustain these competencies.
Idaho’s experience with Tucker v. State and the October 2024 transition to a centralized Office of the State Public Defender provides the article’s central case study. The transition, celebrated as a constitutional breakthrough, produced mass withdrawals by attorneys, weeks-long communication blackouts, and judicial dismissals for want of counsel. This demonstrated that the reorganization of a system’s financial structure does not, by itself, produce competent representation. This article proposes a three-pillar structural response: mandatory statewide, tiered certification for juvenile and TPR appointments; regional specialization hubs that provide embedded expertise and mentorship to rural generalists; and secure remote consultation technology that extends that expertise across geographic distances. These pillars are mutually reinforcing, fiscally justifiable, and grounded in the evidence that quality of representation, not mere presence of counsel, is the variable that determines whether families are preserved, whether children receive just dispositions, and whether the constitutional promise of counsel is realized. Geography should not determine whether this promise is kept.
Dean Moeller will be teaching in Madrid this summer, through Stetson University’s summer abroad program, teaching The Comparative Laws of Dissent: A Comparative Study of the Right to Protest in the United States and Europe
