April 2010 Archives
 | An initiative that would transform Philadelphia’s neglected, tax delinquent properties into the city’s greatest asset in the battle to stabilize and grow thriving neighborhoods was chosen as the winner of the inaugural Public Policy Challenge, presented by the Fels Institute of Government. A distinguished panel of judges selected the Land Philadelphia team at the March 20 Challenge Finals as having crafted the best of the five proposals presented by interdisciplinary student teams from schools throughout the University of Pennsylvania. Each team had chosen its own issue area and developed a policy proposal and a political strategy for change in the Philadelphia area. A panel of regional government, business, and community leaders - including Pennsylvania’s First Lady, Judge Marjorie O. Rendell – were judges for the Finals, which was held at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (see full list of judges below). The winning Land Philadelphia team is comprised of students from five of Penn’s academic schools: - Daniel Gershwin - Penn Law;
- Katie Milgrim - Penn Design;
- Timothy Potens - School of Engineering and Applied Science;
- Matthew Rader - Wharton; and
- Evan Barret Smith - Fels Institute of Government / Temple Law.
In addition to a $2500 cash award to individual members, the winning team was given $2500 to contribute to an organization or cause that reflects their chosen issue. Land Philadelphia’s winning proposal calls for a transformation of Philadelphia’s neglected, tax delinquent properties into the city’s greatest asset in the battle to stabilize and grow thriving neighborhoods. In a radical departure from the current sheriff’s sale process, Land Philadelphia's proposal calls for tax delinquency as an opportunity to move at properties into responsible, stable ownership in a way that aligns with the city’s homeownership and community planning policies. The new system would form a meaningful partnership between City Council, the Redevelopment Authority, and neighborhoods to break the cycle of disinvestment and decline that undermines stable neighborhoods citywide. Read the team’s full proposal and view the accompanying presentation. The Public Policy Challenge is the only competition of its kind in the country, and is led by a team of students under the direction of staff at Fels. The selection of Land Philadelphia’s proposal concluded a five month program which involved 100 students from eight schools from throughout Penn. After a competitive application process, ten teams were chosen to work on issue areas of their own choosing. Workshops with nationally-recognized experts in public management complemented the proposal development process. A “Round Robin” competition judged by community leaders from throughout the region resulted in the choice of the five final teams which participated in the Finals. The Public Policy Challenge was directed by the Fels Institute of Government, and made possible through the sponsorship and support of: Penn’s Office of the University Provost and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly (GAPSA); the PFM Group; and the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. Judges for the Finals of The Public Policy Challenge included: - Donna Cooper - Secretary, Governor’s Office of Policy & Planning;
- Jeffrey Cooper - Vice President, Penn’s Office of Government & Community Affairs;
- Dean Kaplan - Managing Director, Public Financial Management;
- Paul R. Levy - President & CEO, Center City District;
- Jeremy Nowak - President & CEO, The Reinvestment Fund; and
- Marjorie O. Rendell - Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Excerpted from fels.upenn.edu.
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Individuals who can’t access the legal system are rarely the focus of discussion at law schools. But the 29th Annual Edward V. Sparer Symposium was devoted to their plight, and to expanding the legal services available to people too poor or disenfranchised to hire a lawyer. One of the most prominent public symposia in the country, the University of Pennsylvania Law School hosts the Sparer Symposium each year to commemorate the life and work of the late Edward V. Sparer, who was a Professor of Law and Social Policy at the Law School. At this year’s event, which was organized by the Toll Public Interest Scholars, lawyers and law professors discussed the current landscape of legal aid organizations and the biggest obstacles that still prevent so many people from accessing justice. Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, was the symposium’s special guest. In a rousing speech at the end of the day, Perez informed the audience that many of the cases he sees at his current job feature pro bono counsel from large private firms: “That’s the only way some of these cases would have been brought.” Perez urged law students to search their souls before deciding against a career in legal services. “Keep in mind, life is a team sport and this isn’t a dress rehearsal,” he said. “Too many lawyers don’t follow their heart and gut.” In his keynote address, Peter Edelman, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, also encouraged law school graduates to directly expand access to justice for the needy: “Whether you do indigent defense on the criminal side or work with poor defendants on the civil side, whether you do it full-time or part-time at a firm, we need you,” he said. Edelman also noted that the U.S. poverty rate today is approximately the same as it was in the 1960s, and called for impact litigation to promote more progressive economic policies. In the second panel of the day, which was chaired by Yolanda Vazquez, one speaker described the “iceberg” of cases in the United States that never even get heard because the parties involved cannot hire legal representation. “We’re looking at the few who get into the system, and stopping there,” said Jeanne Charn, a professor at Harvard Law School. Charn also criticized law schools’ “much-commented-on disposition of amorality,” pointing out that law students learn how to reason well by their second year and should have more opportunities to gain practical lawyering experience. At Harvard in the 1970s, for instance, Charn helped set up a poverty law clinic to which 3Ls could devote their entire year. Another panelist, Laura Abel, called for controlled, randomized tests to evaluate the effectiveness of existing legal services programs, such as “lawyer for a day” initiatives where lawyers spend one day representing clients pro bono. “We can’t merely ensure that litigants leave courts feeling satisfied,” she said. “We need to know that these programs are actually make the proceedings fairer.”
Articles by Penn Law Professors Tom Baker, William W. Bratton, Jill E. Fisch, Edward B. Rock and Michael L. Wachter are among the Top Ten corporate and securities articles for 2009, as listed by the Corporate Practice Commentator. The articles were selected by teachers in corporate and securities law from a list of articles published and indexed in legal journals during 2009. From among the more than 500 corporate and securities articles published last year, the journal named the following, written by Penn Law faculty, as Top Ten:
Students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School routinely devote their summers to public interest work, from advocating for human rights in Botswana to defending indigent clients in Philadelphia. But obtaining funding for such work can be a challenge, especially this year as organizations that typically fund summer pro bono and legal services internships face unprecedented budget shortfalls. To help students bridge the funding gap, Penn Law has substantially expanded its financial support for students who engage in summer public interest work, including government internships, policy advocacy, direct representation of indigent and underserved clients, and work with criminal tribunals and non-governmental organizations around the world. The increased funding means that all Penn Law students who applied for internal funding for public interest internships will receive support from the Law School. “The Law School understands how vital this funding is, both to the underserved populations who will directly benefit from our students’ work, and to the students themselves, who will have an opportunity to build their legal skills and gain firsthand experience in the public interest sector,” said Penn Law Dean Michael A. Fitts. The funding builds on several sources of support that the Law School already administers to students pursuing public interest internships. These include Sparer Fellowships, which are administered through Penn Law’s Toll Public Interest Center to support summer work at Pennsylvania public interest organizations; work study funding with Law School support through the Financial Aid office; Equal Justice Foundation grants, which are funded through a student-run organization with support from the Law School and its alumni community; and International Human Rights Fellowships, which the Law School created to support students who devote their summers to promoting and protecting human rights abroad. Penn Law’s established public interest funding programs are typically available for all students who apply for summer funding. But this year, “the number of students applying for internal support rose dramatically and depleted the available funds, leaving many students who had obtained public interest internships with no source of revenue,” explained Eric McKinley, associate director of public interest and government careers at Penn Law. “The expanded funding allows us to support students who will be doing important work with vital organizations,” including NY Lawyers for the Arts, the National Youth Law Center, Maryland Health Care for All, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, and other government and non-profit organizations. “Public interest internships are a fantastic opportunity to develop practical lawyering skills and experience how rewarding public interest and pro bono work can be,” said Arlene Rivera Finkelstein, director of the Toll Public Interest Center. “Our commitment to summer funding really allows students to take advantage of these highly competitive opportunities by minimizing the financial burden of taking what would otherwise be unpaid jobs.”
 | President Barack Obama has appointed University of Pennsylvania Deputy Dean and Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy Anita L. Allen to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. According to the White House press announcement on the appointment of Professor Allen and other Commission members: The Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will advise the President on bioethical issues that may emerge from advances in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology. It will work with the goal of identifying and promoting policies and practices that ensure scientific research, health care delivery, and technological innovation are conducted in an ethically responsible manner. These candidates will join the current Chair, Amy Gutmann, and Vice-Chair, James Wagner, as Members on the Commission. President Obama said, “I am grateful that these impressive individuals have decided to dedicate their talent and experience to this important Commission. I look forward to their recommendations in the coming months and years.” The White House announcement continues:
Anita L. Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She also serves as Deputy Dean for Academic Affairs of the school, and is Senior Fellow in the Bioethics Department, School of Medicine. A distinguished scholar of privacy law and practical ethics, Ms. Allen is recognized for her work on confidentiality in medicine, genetics and research, racial justice, and women’s health. She recently sat on the Executive Committee of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. In Philadelphia, Ms. Allen serves on the boards of the Maternity Care Coalition and the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children. Allen served on the original National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and its Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Working Group in the 1990s. She is presently on the Board of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health, collaborates with Penn’s Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Mental Health, and has written about how American families cope with addiction and mental disorders. Ms. Allen began her academic career an Assistant Professor at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, and was the Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship at Georgetown Law Center. Ms. Allen holds both a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. Her B.A. is from New College, Florida.
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 Lawyers routinely lend their expertise to charitable organizations without charge. So do law students—witness the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s myriad clinical courses and pro-bono projects, ranging from workers’ rights litigation to criminal defense to environmental advocacy. But outside the context of clinical courses, it’s rare that students get a chance to do coursework and in the process provide a valuable service to a not-for-profit organization. Yet that’s what students in Ken Adams’s contract-drafting course got to do last fall. Adams, a Penn Law alumnus, is a transactional lawyer who has morphed into a consultant and speaker on contract drafting. According to The Lawyers Weekly, “In the world of contract drafting, Ken Adams is the guru.” And as part of its “Legal Rebels” project, in September 2009 The ABA Journal named Adams one of fifty leading innovators in the legal profession. As a lecturer at Penn Law, Adams teaches a seminar on the fundamentals of clear and efficient contract language. The course is built around Adams’s book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, a groundbreaking work that has become a standard reference throughout the profession. In previous semesters, the final assignment of the class has consisted of a redraft of a portion of a contract submitted by a major company to Adams for that purpose; the class would then discuss the redraft with company representatives in a conference call. But last fall, Adams realized that the seminar could provide a valuable service to the not-for-profit sector. So he contacted The Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF), an independent not-for-profit organization that provides critical funding for innovative research at leading medical centers worldwide and aims to increase public awareness about good breast health. BCRF welcomed the opportunity to work with Adams and his students and asked the class to review the trademark license agreement it enters into with each of its “Corporate Alliance Partners.” After discussing in class the issues raised, each of Adams’s students submitted a redraft of the contract. Adams then produced and submitted to BCRF a version that incorporated ideas from the student versions. During the last class of the semester, Adams and the students discussed their redraft with Robbie Franklin, BCRF’s director of marketing. The aim of the project was to redraft BCRF’s contract to make it significantly clearer and easier to read and to reinforce in Adams’s students the value of doing so. Judging by what the students had to say, the project was a success. One student, William Bruno, says, “Working on the BCRF project was a challenging collaborative effort. And it was eye-opening to see Professor Adams’s less-is-more approach to contract drafting applied in the real world.” An LLM student in the class, Louis-Hubert Pacco, says, “This project showed us that it’s not enough to redraft a contract so that it’s much clearer and more concise. You also have to explain to your client why you got rid of language that they had grown used to and how the efficiencies gained more than outweigh the inconvenience that comes with change.” And BCRF’s Franklin was pleased with the results. “I’ve long wondered whether we could make our trademark license agreement clearer and shorter and remove some of the deadly legalese. But I’m not a lawyer, so I’ve felt helpless to make suggestions. It was great to have Ken and his students swoop in and give it a makeover. The process was enlightening for me, particularly the give-and-take with the students. Their version has given us a great starting point for discussions with our outside counsel.” Will this sort of project become a regular feature of Adams’s class? “I think so,” says Adams. “Rather than treat a redrafting project as a purely academic exercise, it makes it much more meaningful if you take the opportunity to assist an organization. And if that organization is a philanthropic one that isn’t willing or able to throw money at lawyers, so much the better.”
University of Pennsylvania Law School graduates will join the cadre of leading public interest and government attorneys this fall as they embark on fellowship, scholarship and honors program opportunities throughout the U.S. and abroad. They will include five Department of Justice Honors Program attorneys, two Equal Justice Works Fellows, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, an Independence Fellow and a Skadden Fellow. In addition, several Penn Law graduates will be selected for public interest fellowships that the Law School itself has developed. The recipients of these career-launching Penn Law fellowships will be announced later this month. “For new lawyers, these fellowship and honors program opportunities provide unparalleled entry into the world of public interest and government lawyering,” said Penn Law Dean Michael A. Fitts. “Our students’ success in obtaining these highly selective positions speaks not only to their remarkable talent and potential, but also to their deep dedication to increasing access to justice and using the law to improve people’s lives.” As DOJ Honors Program attorneys, Frank Qi L’10 and Kevin Yeh L’10 will join the Department’s Antitrust Division, Erin Flynn L'08 will join the Civil Rights Division, and Daniel Schwei L’09 and Alexander Sverdlov L’10 will join the Civil Division. The highly selective DOJ Honors Program is the only way an entry level attorney can join the Department of Justice. Each year, thousands of applicants compete for about 150 positions. As Equal Justice Works Fellows, Charlotte Whitmore L’08 will join the Innocence Project of Pennsylvania, where she will work to exonerate wrongly convicted people and improve the effectiveness of the criminal justice system; and Eliana Kaimowitz L’07 will join the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, where she will focus on immigrants’ rights issues. The Equal Justice Works Fellowship Program is the largest postgraduate legal fellowship program in the country. The two-year fellowship offers salary and benefits and a national training and leadership development program to fellows. According to the program’s website, the fellowships were launched in 1992 to address the shortage of attorneys working on behalf of traditionally underserved populations and causes. As a Gates Scholar, Amanda Marzullo L’08 will pursue an LLM in Law at the University of Cambridge. Marzullo, who holds a masters degree in criminology from Penn in addition to her JD, says her goal is to study the intersection between criminal law and the application of human rights in order to help those who are not served by the justice system. The Gates Scholarship provides full funding for graduate students from outside the United Kingdom to study at the University of Cambridge. The scholarship is highly selective; this year, 800 American students applied, of whom 104 were interviewed and 29 selected. According to the Gates Foundation website, the scholarship is awarded on the basis of a person’s intellectual ability, leadership capacity and desire to use his or her knowledge to make contributions to society worldwide by providing service to communities and applying individual talents and knowledge to improve the lives of others. As an Independence Fellow, Maisha Elonai L’10 will join Philadelphia Volunteers for the Indigent Program (VIP), where she will represent homeowners in litigation and develop a pro bono referral network for low-income clients facing foreclosure. According to the Independence Foundation’s website, the fellowship was created to enable some of the best and brightest law school graduates to come to the Philadelphia area and obtain employment with an organization based in the region that provides free legal services to poor and disadvantaged people. The fellowship provides salary, benefits and loan forgiveness to attorneys who represent people who cannot otherwise obtain the professional assistance they need to navigate the complicated judicial and administrative systems that affect their lives on a daily basis. As a Skadden Fellow, Amy Retsinas L’09 will work at Rhode Island Legal Services providing direct representation, community outreach and education to enforce employment rights of low-wage workers state-wide. The Skadden Fellowship program, described as a “a legal Peace Corps” by The Los Angeles Times, supports recent law school graduates who work for two years at a sponsoring organization of their choice to provide legal services to underserved members of society. The fellowship is highly selective; each year, the Skadden Fellowship Foundation receives hundreds of applications for approximately twenty-five fellowship openings. Over the past three years, Penn Law has created three fellowships to support graduates beginning their public interest careers: the Langer, Grogan & Diver Fellowship in Social Justice, which supports a recent graduate launching a public interest career representing low-income, underrepresented communities in the Delaware Valley; the Toll Public Interest Center Philadelphia Fellowship, which acts as a bridge between the Center and Philadelphia’s public interest community by supporting a recent graduate who splits his or her time between serving clients at a public interest organization and working with Penn Law students at the Center; and the Penn Law Public Interest Fellowship, which supports a recent graduate launching a career at a national or international public interest organization. Recipients of these Penn Law funded public interest fellowships will be announced later this month.
With the help of the President, Democrats in Congress were able to pass historic health care reform legislation in spite of—and thanks to—the significant structural obstacles presented by the Senate’s arcane parliamentary rules. After the passage of the bill, the current political climate appears to require sixty votes for the passage of any major legislation, which many argue is unsustainable. The potential for more vacancies on the Supreme Court has only added to the sense that a confrontation is inevitable. In Is The Filibuster Constitutional?, Professors Josh Chafetz and Michael J. Gerhardt debate the constitutionality of the Senate’s cloture rules by looking to the history of those rules in the United States and elsewhere. Opening the debate, Professor Chafetz argues that the cloture rules represent an unconstitutional principle of entrenchment and highlights the absurdity by analogy to a hypothetical law requiring a supermajority to unseat an incumbent senator, which would surely not be tolerated. He finds the filibuster to be “strikingly similar” to such a rule and therefore unconstitutional. Chafetz concludes that historical practice fails to justify dilatory tactics and that any constitutionally conscientious senator has a duty to reject the filibuster as it currently operates. Professor Gerhardt shares Chafetz’s frustration with the glacial pace of most congressional business, but attributes that behavior to the lack of a majority committed to curtailing abuses of Senate procedure. Gerhardt raises the two traditional arguments against the filibuster—namely, the lack of explicit constitutional authorization and the hand-tying that results from its supermajoritarian requirements—and argues that the weaknesses of these arguments underscore the filibuster’s inherent constitutionality. Gerhardt points out that a majority of Senate seats is never subject to election at any given time, and that the Constitution does not forbid, but instead expressly permits, the Senate to draft internal procedures. Failing to find an anti-entrenchment principle implied in the constitutional scheme, Gerhardt groups the filibuster with other Senate traditions—such as holds and bitter partisanship—and finds that the solution to unsatisfactory behavior in the legislature is, and has always been, accountability at the ballot box.
Of the more than 130,000 comments submitted on the greenhouse gas auto emissions rule, the University of Pennsylvania Law School Environmental Law Project’s* comment was singled out and discussed several times in yesterday’s final rule document, issued jointly by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the EPA. The rule sets the first-ever national greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards for all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. It is a key piece of the Obama Administration’s climate and energy agenda. The Environmental Law Project’s comment explained the proposed rule and evaluated its relative costs and benefits, concluding: It is critically important that the United States adopt policies that address global climate change and reduce its oil consumption. These proposed rules constitute a strong and coordinated federal fuel economy and GHG program for passenger cars and light trucks. Since the proposed rules will provide regulatory certainty and consistency for the automobile industry while reducing greenhouse gas emissions based on technologies that can be incorporated at reasonable cost, the proposal represents an important effort to improve fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the proposal is not without its flaws. Namely, the proposal fails to gradually reduce the disparity between efficiency requirements for 2012 and 2016 MYs. Additionally, the policy does not create mechanisms whereby minimum reductions are ensured, nor does it address the fiction of “zero emissions” electric vehicles. Finally, the proposal fails to make a complete lifecycle impact analysis, and therefore may overlook deleterious consequences of its implementation. Thus, the proposal, while timely, would benefit from an enhanced discussion of these among other potentially problematic omissions.
Read the entire comment at regulations.gov. *The Environmental Law Project is a voluntary group of law students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The views expressed in the Project’s comment are neither endorsed by nor submitted on behalf of Penn Law or the University of Pennsylvania.
   | Excerpted from Penn: Office of the President University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann visited China March 8-12, 2010, joined by Penn deans and faculty members from across the university to initiate and reaffirm Penn’s academic partnerships and agreements with universities in Beijing. … T.C. Chan co-director Ali Malkawi convened an academic panel, “Towards a Sustainable Future: Cross-Cultural Research and Technological Innovation,” joined by John Bassani of SEAS and Eric Orts of the Law School and Tsinghua colleagues. Dean of the Law School Michael Fitts gave the day’s keynote address: “Action on the Environment: The Role of Law in the U.S. Experience.” In addition to the morning events, Penn Law Professor Jacques deLisle and Associate Dean for International Programs Amy Gadsden joined Penn and Tsinghua colleagues in a panel on law, business and sustainability in the afternoon which was moderated by Dean Fitts. Continue Excerpted from Knowledge at Wharton Among the many harsh truths that the failed Copenhagen summit in December drove home was that international consensus is not the easiest way to tackle a problem like climate change. From competing national interests to shortages of technological know-how to cross-border disagreements about who should pay for environmental degradation, the challenges of solving this problem at a global level are endless. But in the absence of an international climate change agreement, what can be done? Faculty members from the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. and Tsinghua University of China debated myriad solutions at a symposium they co-hosted in early March at Tsinghua's campus in Beijing titled, "Toward a Sustainable Future: Cross-Cultural Research and Technological Innovation." While hailing from different areas of expertise, they all agreed that the onus is on the world's two largest carbon emission producers -- China and the U.S. -- to set an example for other countries to follow. That will be easier said than done. Continue Excerpted from Dean Michael A. Fitts’s Keynote Address at Tsinghua University A successful strategy for improving the environment will require a global strategy, a deeply interdisciplinary analysis, and a long term time horizon. As environmentalist John Muir said long ago, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Success will thus depend far more than before on the fundamental quality of our science, on our policy analysis, and on our regulatory strategy. For in the end, we will need to illuminate on a global level the dangers and solutions in a way which educates and galvanizes an even more divided public and regulatory system. Continue |
 “If I have raised more problems than I have settled, that is the prerogative of a judge giving a lecture,” Judge Henry Friendly unapologetically concluded during his 1975 Owen J. Roberts Lecture in Constitutional Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Thirty-five years later, Judge Friendly’s onetime clerk, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boudin, will have his own opportunity to raise more questions than answers. During the 2010 Roberts Lecture, titled “Judge Friendly and the Craft of Deciding Cases,” Judge Boudin will discuss his former mentor’s judicial philosophy and scholarship and describe how judges decide cases and craft opinions. Now an eminent jurist in his own right, Michael Boudin has been a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit since 1992, and from 2001 to 2008 was the Court’s chief judge. From 1990-1992, Judge Boudin served on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. He previously was deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division of the justice department from 1987-1990. From 1965-1987, Judge Boudin practiced law at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. He has taught part time at Harvard Law School since 1982 and taught at Penn Law during the 1984-85 term. Judge Boudin began his legal career as a clerk for Judge Friendly and, subsequently, Justice Harlan. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. The Owen J. Roberts Lecture is the oldest and among the most distinguished of the endowed lectureships at Penn Law. This year’s lecture will be held at the Law School on Monday, April 12 at 5p.m., and will be followed by a reception in the Great Hall. The lecture is open to the public and attendees are eligible to receive CLE credit. Seating is limited, and registration is required. To register or for further information, contact Dori Pavel at dpavel@law.upenn.edu.
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