Law Faculty Conduct Important Research Over the Summer 2026

By Joshua Douglas
Associate Dean for Research and J. David Rosenberg Professor of Law

University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law faculty had productive summers, making significant progress on important research. From presenting overseas to publishing books and articles, faculty members were busy in their scholarly pursuits.

Here are some of the projects that faculty worked on:

Laken Albrink finished edits on her book chapter in Opioid Misuse in Appalachia: A Fire on the Mountain.

This summer, Tiffany D. Atkins presented her human rights research on abolition and non-recurrence at three academic conferences: The Lutie A. Lytle Scholarship Workshop in Chicago, Illinois; the Slavery Past, Present, and Future Global Conference in Dublin, Ireland; and the Southeastern Association of Law Schools Annual Conference in Amelia Island, Florida. She also finalized plans to lead a study abroad program to The Hague in 2027 and began writing a new law review article. 

Matthew Boaz presented papers at the Immigration Law Teachers and Scholars Workshop at Duke Law School and the CINETS Border Criminologies Conference at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Those articles are forthcoming with the Northeastern University Law Review and the Tulane Law Review, respectively. 

Shavonnie Carthens presented at the Southeastern Association of American Law Schools’ Annual Conference on a recently completed study, conducted in collaboration with the College of Medicine and the College of Nursing, examining ADA violations and the treatment of incarcerated people with opioid use disorder. She also worked on her upcoming article, which centers on procedural barriers to community participation under the Clean Air Act. 

This summer, Ronald J. Coleman presented at scholarly conferences, had his article relating to automation and confrontation rights published, and moved forward with his coauthored book project on burdens of proof and evidentiary presumptions.

Josh Douglas served as a Fulbright Specialist at Korea University, spending three weeks giving presentations and learning about South Korea's democracy. His article, History, Tradition, and Voter Registration was published in the Wisconsin Law Review. He also worked on several chapters of his upcoming book about nonvoters. 

This summer, Ilana Friedman presented The Architecture of Police Impunity, forthcoming in the American Criminal Law Review, at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association. She also began revisions to her co-authored article, “Prosecutorial Localism, Expertise, and Institutional Capacity,” and finalized her chapter, “The Politics of Civilian Oversight of Police,” forthcoming in the edited volume Policing and Politics: Power, Accountability, and Democratic Governance.

Joel Heller’s article Voting at Work was published in the Illinois Law Review.  The article critiques the policy of having employees vote at their workplace on whether to have union representation, arguing that the practice is both problematic for employee choice (given the power dynamics in that space and the undemocratic nature of work) and also symptomatic of a larger problem in labor law of analogizing union-representation elections to political elections (here, by importing the latter’s default of in-person, manual voting) without recognizing the differences between the two contexts.

Guion Johnstone was awarded a grant from the Association of Academic Support Educators and AccessLex to research the evaluation of disability accommodations on the bar exam.

Ellen Arvin Kennedy completed an article on the need for enhanced financial literacy resources for student athletes in the aftermath of the House settlement, slated for publication next year. 

Kathy Moore worked on her forthcoming book, Advanced Introduction to US Employee Benefits Law.

Michael D. Murray published two more books on AI over the summer, Legal Issues of Generative and Agentic Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence for Researchers, adding to the one he published in January 2026, Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of Law. Murray contracted to publish two articles, GenAI, Damned Lies, and Stochastics: Lawyering the Litigation Landmines of AI, ___ WYO. L. REV. ___ (forthcoming, 2027); Persona Ex Machina—False Association and the Synthetic Commercial Identity, ___ W. VA. L. REV. ___ (forthcoming, 2027); and a bar journal piece, When the Tools Begin to Act: Agentic Artificial Intelligence and the New Risk Surface of Legal Practice, ___ J. MO. B.___ (forthcoming, 2026), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=7201719. Murray also agreed to update his three legal research and writing texts, Legal Writing and Analysis, Legal Research Methods, and Advanced Legal Writing and Oral Argument, all published by Foundation Press. All three will have a new theme of legal method "in a World of Artificial Intelligence."

Shannon Price concluded her term as a co-director of the Hamilton County Help Center's Same-Day Eviction-Defense Program, where she ultimately logged more than 1,000 municipal court appearances defending families facing eviction. She worked on her upcoming Remedies course and outlining a new article on the role of state court judges and court administrators in addressing facially deficient assembly-line filings. 

In July, Jonathan Shaub's article proposing a new model for presidential accountability came out in print in the Washington University Law Review. He also entered into a book contract with Cambridge University Press for a forthcoming book on executive privilege and presidential transparency. Over the summer, he published two pieces of legal commentary for Lawfare, one on the Trump administration's rejection of the Presidential Records Act and a second on a Senate committee's vote to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. 

Kirk Sripinyo presented a draft of his article, Algorithmic Conscription, at the AALS National Security Law Section’s virtual workshop in June. The article examines how artificial intelligence and anomaly-detection techniques could be used to promote fairness and accountability in the administration of a future military draft. Following the workshop, he completed the article and submitted it for publication.