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2003 Harold C. Schott Scholarship Award

Michael Solimine, Donald P. Klekamp Professor of Law. For his scholarship in Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, and related areas.

Professor Solimine was recently honored for the Ohio State Bar Association Law Teacher A ward for Outstanding Contributions to Ohio Law and to the Ohio State Bar Association.

In addition, Professor Solimine's contributions extend far beyond Ohio as he has entered into conversations with the best minds in legal education and made significant contributions in a variety of legal fields. His work contains both doctrinal as well as empirical analysis and his voice is an important one for any person interested in understanding better the courts and the judiciary of our system of jurisprudence.

Professor Solimine's outstanding publication history demonstrates that he is a prolific, consistent, and continuously developing scholar of national and international significance. He enjoys recognition by the bench, the bar, and the academic community, and he is considered one of our country's most outstanding legal scholars.

Academic Background

Professor Michael Solimine earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wright State University in 1978, enjoying summa cum laude honors in Political Science. Professor Solimine received his law degree from Northwestern University where he was on the Dean's List and Editor of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Professor Solimine is the author of three books on law as well numerous law review articles and essays. In addition, he has been actively involved in the academic side of the bar, serving as academic advisor to the Ohio Courts Futures Commission (1997-1999); counsel in important litigation involving courts; consultant to Anderson Publishing Company; counsel to the Civil Rules Committee of the Rules Advisory Committee of the Ohio Supreme Court; and a contributor and editor to Litigation News published by the Ohio State Bar Association. In addition, Michael Solimine has been central to the success of the College of Law, particularly its program on judicial and non-judicial externships and for the continued success of its Law Review, serving as its faculty advisor.

Scholarship

Professor Solimine has published articles in the leading law journals in the country, including the North Carolina Law Review, the Georgia Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, and the Boston University Law Review, among others. One way to measure the significance of Professor Solimine's work is to judge its influence by how it has been used and cited by other scholars.

Professor Solimine's scholarship has been cited hundreds of times in truly the most important joumals in our country. Such joumals as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Texas Lcrw Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review have cited Professor Solimine. Additionally, his work has been cited in numerous law school casebooks, including Hart & Wechsler's The Federal Courts and The Federal System, generally recognized as preeminent in the field and such other reference sources such as the multi-volume treatise on Federal Practice and Procedure by Professors Charles Alan Wright and Arthur Miller. He has also been cited in monographs such as Laura Kalman's The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism, Judge Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of Law and by numerous other authors. In addition to having been influential on other scholars, Professor Solimine's work has been cited by federal appellate courts and Ohio Supreme Court.

In Respecting State Courts: The Inevitability of Judicial Federalism, co-authored with political science professor, James L. Walker, and published in 1999, Professor Solimine addresses problems and issues of state courts, such as how state courts adjudicate rights, especially federal constitutional rights, which is an issue that has long been the subject of debate among judges and scholars in the field of federal courts. In their work, Professors Solimine and Walker use social science evidence through their own data that we culled from federal and state court decisions. In his 1995 article entitled, "Rethinking Feminist Judging," with Susan Wheatley that appeared in the Indiana Law Journal, Professor Solimine again applied social science evidence by collecting and analyzing data from court decisions, exploring both empirical and normative perspectives regarding whether female judges do or should decide cases differently from male judges. Again in a 1996 article in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Professor Solimine collected data and discussed the use of the unusual institution of three federal judge panels sitting as a trial court to decide cases involving reapportionment and certain voting rights. In a 1998 article in the Tulane Law Review, he examined nearly 1000 cases decided by federal and state courts on personal jurisdiction, which was the first empirical examination of the topic and he focused particularly on the differences between federal and state court decision-making on those cases.

From Professor Solimine's distinguished colleagues, we hear the following:

• "Professor Solimine's distinguished himself within the group of scholars addressing parity by conducting empirical research. His 'Constitutional Litigation in Federal and State Courts' has become one of the most familiar citations in the field.. . . His continuing work in the empirical mode has yielded an integrated body of scholarship. Clearly, Professor Solimine is a productive scholar, with wide-ranging interests. For example, his piece 'Rethinking Feminist Judging,' responded to the theoretical speculation about the special qualities women might bring to the bench. . . ." —Ann Althouse, Arthur-Bascom Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• "In brief, and unarguably, Michael Solimine is highly qualified for renewal. He is prolific and his work is of uniformly admirable quality. His work has established his stature as among the top figures in American studies of procedure." —Kevin M. Clermont, Flanagan Professor of Law, Cornell Law School.
• "I consider Michael Solimine to be among the scholarly elite in the fields of federal jurisdiction and civil procedure. His work on state courts early in his career was truly path breaking, and I have cited it often in my own scholarly works. His more recent writings on personal jurisdiction and interlocutory appeals I consider to be extremely important contributions to the scholarly literature. . . . Michael's scholarly accomplishments are even more impressive when one realizes how relatively young he is. I have no doubt that he will continue to make valuable contributions for many, many years to come." —Martin H. Redish, Louis and Harriet Angel Professor of Law and Public Policy, Northwestern University School of Law.
• "Although Professor Solimine has been teaching and writing at Cincinnati for less than fifteen years, his productivity throughout that period has been extraordinary. The range of his scholarship has been wide and deep, focusing on (but certainly not limited to) the fields of American federalism, state-federal judicial relations, and constitutional law. . . . his work has been of interest not only to academics but to judges and lawyers as well, since he often concentrates on topics that have a direct bearing on present-day problems in the operation of the law. And in both his works of sole authorship and his works of joint authorship, he has made a valuable contribution because of his careful attention to what courts do in fact as a predicate to his consideration of normative and policy questions." —David Shapiro, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and currently Visiting Professor of Law, New York University.
• "I feel that Michael's reputation and stature in the community of legal scholars, as well as in the larger academic community, strongly identifies him as a person well deserving of such an honor. . . . Next month I will have the honor of seeing Michael give the keynote address at a national conference of legal scholars and political scientists on the topic of federalism and the courts." —James L. Walker, Professor of Political Science, Wright State University.
• "The quantity and quality of Professor Solimine's scholarship is indisputably superb and reflects both on him and on the College of Law." —Professor Bradford Mank, University of Cincinnati College of Law.

Conclusion

Professor Michael Solimine exemplifies scholarship at the University of Cincinnati. His excellent publication history demonstrates that he is a prolific, consistent, and continuously developing scholar of national and international significance. He is recognized by the bench, the bar, and the academic community, and he is considered one of our country's most outstanding legal scholars.