August 2010 Archives
 Jean Galbraith, a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, has won the 2010 American Inns of Court Warren E. Burger Prize. Ms. Galbraith receives a cash prize of $5,000 and her winning essay will be published in the South Carolina Law Review. The award will be presented on October 23, 2010, at the American Inns of Court’s Celebration of Excellence, hosted by Justice Clarence Thomas, at the Supreme Court of the United States. The Warren E. Burger Prize is a writing competition designed to encourage outstanding scholarship that “promotes the ideals of excellence, civility, ethics, and professionalism within the legal profession,” the core mission of the American Inns of Court. The American Inns of Court invites judges, lawyers, professors, students, scholars, and other authors to participate in the competition by submitting an original, unpublished essay of 10,000 to 25,000 words on a topic of their choice addressing issues of legal excellence, civility, ethics, and professionalism. Prior to her fellowship, Ms. Galbraith practiced law at Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin in Philadelphia. Ms. Galbraith has also served as an associate legal officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and held clerkships for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was also one of four young lawyers selected as American Inns of Court Temple Bar Scholars in 2007.
Ms. Galbraith earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her Juris Doctor from University of California, Berkeley Law School, where she served as editor-in-chief of the California Law Review. She is a member of the bars of California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Her Burger Prize-winning essay, entitled “The Ethic of High Expectations,” examined the delicate balance that lawyers must strike between ethical behavior and their duties to their clients.
“I argue that, under certain circumstances, lawyers can best serve both their clients and the broader good by practicing what I call the ethic of high expectations. A lawyer acting from the ethic of high expectations gives advice that will be fully effective only if both the lawyer’s client and the other party voluntarily and independently relinquish legal rights in order to further the broader good. The lawyer succeeds by shifting the conversation from being about legal rights to being about right outcomes,” Ms. Galbraith wrote. The judges for the competition were Professor Stephen Gillers, Chair; Emily Kempin Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law; Professor Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., Trustee Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School; Professor Nancy J. Moore, Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law; and, Professor Robert M. Wilcox, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Excerpted from the American Inns of Court website.
  | To prepare students for the increasing internationalization of the legal profession, the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have established a new JD/LLM double degree student exchange program. The program will allow up to three students from each of the universities to spend their third year of law school at the partner institution and complete a Master of Laws program. “This program offers students at Penn Law and HKU a unique opportunity to pursue a truly international legal education, and will serve as a model for years to come,” said Professor Eric A. Feldman, deputy dean for International Affairs at Penn Law. “Penn is delighted to be collaborating with HKU on this new endeavor, which is the culmination of Penn’s steady effort to offer students a global legal education at the finest academic institutions around the world.” “In the last decade, we have seen a rise in the number of joint legal education programs, particularly between US institutions on the East Coast and Europe. The new program with Penn Law is an acknowledgement of the globalization of the practice of law,” said Professor Johannes Chan, SC (Hon), dean of Law at HKU. “Under this program, students will benefit from both institutions, which distinguish themselves as some of the oldest and most academically vibrant law schools in their regions.” Students can begin submitting study abroad applications during the fall 2010 semester for the 2011-2012 academic year. Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong The Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong is the oldest law school in Hong Kong and one of the most prestigious law schools internationally. It has been training graduates who are today distinguished legal professionals and leaders of the Hong Kong community. Building upon its unique position as the only common law jurisdiction in China, capitalizing on the “one country, two systems” principle, the Faculty has a unique and irreplaceable role to play in scholarship, research and education on common law and comparative law as well as the development of the rule of law in China and Asia. In 2009, HKU launched its JD program, which has been attracting top graduates from universities in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Mainland China. University of Pennsylvania Law School The University of Pennsylvania Law School has as distinguished a history as any law school in the United States. James Wilson, signer of the Declaration of Independence and a justice of the United States’ first Supreme Court, delivered the University’s first lectures in law in 1790. Following this auspicious beginning, the University began offering a full-time program in law in 1850. Since that time, Penn Law has been at the forefront of legal education in the United States. |
University of Pennsylvania Law School student Bobby Ochoa L’12 has been selected to serve as lieutenant governor of regional affairs in Pennsylvania for the American Bar Association (ABA) Law Student Division, Third Circuit, for the 2010-11 academic year. He describes his new role as part outreach – letting the law school community know what the ABA Law Student Division offers – and part facilitator – helping match students with ABA resources and making sure their voices are heard by the group’s leaders. “The ABA is a great resource, whether you’re a student looking for a job or just looking to take the first step into your professional life as a lawyer,” says Ochoa. “I hope that I can help increase awareness so students are familiar with the ABA and what it can do for them,” from providing funding for student activities, to discounts for members, to networking opportunities and insight about the range of career options for lawyers. On October 1-2, for example, the group will host a regional leadership conference with opportunities for social networking and resume review, as well as roundtable and panel discussions and keynote speakers including Justice Eakin of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. One of Ochoa’s first tasks as lieutenant governor has been to help make the Circuit’s website more accessible, informative and current. But he says it’s equally important to let students know that there is an actual person behind the website. “The Internet can get a little impersonal. We’ve been trying to break through that,” explains Ochoa. “I try to tell people, ‘I’m on your campus, if you need anything , if you’re looking for funding, if you want to connect with other people in our Circuit, I’m here to help.'” Ochoa is also helping to implement a new town hall system so that all students in the Circuit can come together and share ideas and complaints. “We’re trying to open doors of accountability and openness,” he says.
 | By Tanya Barrientos In mid-September, the University of Pennsylvania will host the second meeting of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, chaired by Penn President Amy Gutmann. James W. Wagner, president of Emory University, serves as the panel’s vice chair. The 13-member Commission, formed by President Barack Obama by Executive Order in November 2009, is charged with “identifying and promoting policies that ensure scientific research, healthcare delivery, and technical innovation are conducted in an ethically responsible manner.” The advisory body is comprised of some of the nation’s leading experts in medicine, law, nursing, ethics, religion and engineering. It also includes three representatives of the federal government and members from two branches of the military. Penn is additionally represented on the Commission by Law professor Anita L Allen. At its inaugural meeting, held in July in Washington, D.C., the Commission tackled its first assignment from President Obama: to study the scientific and ethical ramifications of synthetic biology. During a two-day session, which was open to the public, the Commission heard from a wide field of experts, including bioengineer Craig Venter, who announced last May that his research team had created the world’s first self-replicating genome in a bacterial cell of a different species. “Breakthroughs can help humanity, but they typically also carry risks,” Gutmann stated at the onset of the meeting. “This is why it is key for this commission to be an inclusive and deliberative body, encouraging the exchange of well-reasoned perspectives with the goal of making recommendations that will serve the public well and will serve the public good.”
The Commission will hold its second meeting on campus, Sept. 13 and 14. The sessions will be open to the public, and a webcast of the proceedings also will be available at bioethics.gov. The panel’s third meeting will be held at Emory University in Atlanta, Nov. 16 and 17. For more information visit bioethics.gov. Excerpted from the Penn Current. |
 Noyes E. Leech, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a leading scholar of international and corporate law, died July 1. He was 88. “The Penn community lost one of its post-war academic luminaries,” said Dean Michael A. Fitts. “Noyes was a brilliant scholar and a pioneer in international law who helped launch Penn Law into the then-emergent field. He was also a deeply devoted citizen of the Law School and the University.” Robert Gorman, Kenneth W. Gemmill professor emeritus, recalled Leech as “a wonderful friend, who was warm and amiable; a devoted, and extremely well-regarded teacher, who cared about his students and his classroom interactions; and an institutional citizen” who went “beyond scholarship and teaching” to improve the Law School as a community. Leech was “the embodiment of the view that the law was an instrument that served a larger societal purpose,” said Curtis Reitz, Algernon Sydney Biddle professor emeritus. Leech began his career at Penn Law in 1949 as an instructor in law, later becoming a full professor in 1958, the Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell professor of law in 1978, and the William A. Schnader professor of law in 1985. He received his BA from Penn in 1943 and his JD in 1948, graduating first in his class. After earning his law degree, he worked at Dechert, Price & Rhoads in Philadelphia. From 1943 to 1945, he served in the U.S. Army as a staff sergeant with the 619th Army Air Force Band. Professor Leech spent the early part of his academic career developing a wide expertise in commercial and corporate law. He became a distinguished teacher and a master of the Socratic method, known for his rigorous standards of thinking and scholarship. When the opportunity came to work in the nascent field of international legal studies, Leech jumped at the chance, becoming editor of the Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States (1965), an entirely new arrangement of legal subject matter as it related to U.S. foreign affairs. Leech had long “wanted to work in the area that encompassed problems of war-peace, security-survival, international organization, and (then emerging) human rights,” wrote Covey Oliver, the late Hubbell professor of international law emeritus, who joined Leech in a partnership to move public international law to a new level of sophistication. Leech collaborated closely with Robert Mundheim, emeritus professor and former dean, on a new program in international corporate law. He co-founded the International Faculty for Corporate and Capital Market Law, a group of seventeen academics from nine countries who met for a week each year to teach one another about the relevant law in their respective countries. Leech’s work with the group led him to recognize the need for a journal specializing in international law, and consequently to co-found The Journal of Comparative Business and Capital Market Law, the precursor to today’s University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law. Leech’s major contributions to scholarship include two casebooks, The International Legal System and Corporations; the classic article on the sale of control, Transactions in Corporate Control; and the article International Banking: Effects of Nationalization and Exchange Controls, which Mundheim described in The Penn Law Review as “a beautiful example of a mature scholar’s ability to both articulate complex issues so that they may be understood and to develop arguments that are fair, precise, and balanced.” Leech was a leader in the Law School and in University affairs. He served as president of the University Faculty Senate in 1959-60, “a turbulent period when that body was the conscience of the University,” according to Rietz. He chaired the Appointments Committee of the Law School in 1959-60, 1961-62, 1963-64, 1976-77, and 1981-82, and also led an effort to reshape the Law School curriculum. When he served under Dean Jefferson Fordham in the 1950s and 60s, Leech was asked to chair so many committees that Fordham simply called him “Mr. Chairman.” While a student, Leech helped form the first law club at Penn to admit students without regard to race, color, or religion, and became the club’s president – a decade before Brown v. Board of Education. Leech was also actively engaged in the life of the Law School, especially through his musical talents. “His love of music and the arts was manifested in festive holiday concerts in the Law School, which featured Noyes singing with John Honnold and Bob Gorman,” recalled Reitz. Leech went on to participate in and help found annual spring concerts, and eventually full-scale musicals, a tradition that continues to this day with a wide ranging selection of musicals performed at the Law School each spring. He also played trombone, performing “with brilliant abandon … in a hilarious never-to-be-forgotten brass quintet in the Great Hall of the Law School,” -- a display of warmth and unconventionality that contrasted with Leech’s rectitude and serious academic side, wrote Louis Schwartz, the late Benjamin Franklin professor of law emeritus. Leech retired in 1986 to devote himself to his music, his family, and traveling. He became an accomplished cellist, an instrument that he took up after playing trombone throughout most of his life because he was “losing his wind” and the cello was in the same key as the trombone, according to his daughter Katherine Leech. In an issue of The Penn Law Review devoted to Leech upon his retirement, Leech’s colleagues noted the unusual career decision of a scholar still in his prime. “He could have been dean almost anywhere he wanted to be,” wrote Oliver. “And what are we to say of his ultimate decision to take early retirement to devote himself to cello?” asked Schwartz. “We shall say, ‘Here is a complete human being, rich in contrasts, true to himself and thus never false to another, reliably and nobly serving his community.’” Professor Leech is survived by his wife, Louise; children, Katharine (“Kitty”) and Gwyneth; grandchildren, Megan Louise Wilson and Grace Elizabeth Wilson; and brother, William David Leech. Leech’s daughters will hold a concert in memory of their father on Thursday, September 23, at 2pm in Philadelphia. For details contact Dori Pavel at dpavel@law.upenn.edu.
|
