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Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia who prosecuted dictator Pinochet arrives at Penn this month

In October the University of Pennsylvania Law School welcomes Juan Guzmán Tapia, the distinguished Chilean judge who led the investigation and prosecution of dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, as one of six Penn Law Bok Visiting International Professors who will teach during the 2011-12 academic year. Guzman Tapia joins in residence fellow Bok professor Arie Reich, Dean of the Law Faculty of Bar-Ilan University and Bok Professor who arrived earlier in September.  In total, Penn Law will host six Bok VIPs during the 2011-12 academic year.

Each year Penn Law brings to Philadelphia several internationally recognized experts in international and comparative law from around the world to serve as Bok Visiting International Professors. In recent years, senior academics, jurists or professionals across a wide range of disciplines and specialties, from China, Germany, India, Japan, and Nigeria have participated in the program.

Bok professors spend several weeks at Penn Law to teach a short course to upper-level students, host a faculty seminar, and participate in Penn Law and Penn-wide activities in connection with their field of expertise. The Bok VIP program gives students access to top international experts and offers new perspectives on cutting edge issues in international and comparative law.

The 2011-2012 Bok Professors are:

Arie Reich (September 2011) Arie Reich is the Dean of the Law Faculty at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and a world renowned expert on international trade law. He pioneered the field in Israeli academia and has published some thirty academic books and articles in Israel, Europe, and North America. The University of Pennsylvania  Journal of International Law has published his work and also invited him to write the foreword (with Oren Perez) for its Winter 2005 issue. The Israeli government has appointed him as its representative to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law and as one of its arbitrators under the Washington Treaty for the Settlement of Investment Disputes and under the Mexico-Israel Free Trade Agreement. He received his LL.B. from Bar Ilan University and his LL.M. and S.J.D. degrees from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Gideon Parchomovsky, the Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law, will serve as Reich’s faculty host while at Penn Law.

Juan Guzmán Tapia (October 2011) Juan Guzmán Tapia is a distinguished Chilean law professor who gained international prominence as the judge who led the investigation and prosecution of dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Judge Guzmán’s efforts to bring Pinochet to trial formed the basis for the 2008 feature-length documentary The Judge and the General. Guzmán retired from the Santiago appeals court in 2005 and is now a Professor of Procedural Law at the School of Law of the Catholic University of Santiago. He has also served as Dean at the School of Law at the Central University of Chile, where he now directs the center for human rights studies. Judge Guzmán has been honored with the Oscar Romero Award for Leadership in Service to Human Rights and the Letelier-Moffit Human Rights Award. Practice Associate Professor of Law Sarah Paoletti will serve as Guzmán’s faculty host.

Henrik Lando (January 2012) Henrik Lando is Professor of Law and Economics and the Director of the Center for Law, Economics, and Financial Institutions at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). He is one of the leading law-and-economics scholars in Europe, writing about a wide variety of areas of the law, including contracts, torts, criminal law, and evidence, and has published extensively in interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals. He has visited numerous universities in the United States, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where was a visiting scholar in the economics department. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Copenhagen. Howard Chang, the Earle Hepburn Professor of Law, will serve as Lando’s faculty host.

Joshua Getzler (January or February 2012) Joshua Getzler is a senior member of the law faculty of Oxford University, where he is a University Lecturer in Law and a Reader in Legal History as well as a Fellow at St. Hugh’s College. Since 2007, he has also been a Conjoint Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He studied both law and history at the Australian National University, then earned a doctorate degree in legal history at Oxford University. His research and scholarship covers a wide range of topics: modern legal history, law and economics, contracts, equity and trusts, property theory, capital markets, and Roman law. His 2004 book, A History of Water Rights at Common Law is considered one of the leading theoretical contributions to the area of riparian rights. In 2005, Getzler won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, awarded by the U.K. Society of Legal Scholars (SLS), for his book. Assistant Professor of Law Shyam Balganesh will serve as Getzler’s faculty host.

Hideki Kanda (Co-teaching course with Eric Feldman in March 2012) Hideki Kanda is Professor of Law at the University of Tokyo. His main areas of specialization include commercial law, corporate law, banking regulation, and securities regulation. He taught as a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School in 1989, 1991 and 1993, and as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in 1996. His corporate law book is the standard text on the subject in Japanese universities. He has written many articles in English as well as Japanese in his areas of specialization. He is widely regarded as the top corporate and securities academic in Japan. Both Edward Rock, the Saul A. Fox Distinguished Professor of Business Law, and Charles Mooney, the Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. Professor of Law, will serve as his faculty hosts.

Pratap Mehta (March 2012) Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s core research interests include political theory, constitutional law, society and politics in India, governance and political economy, and international affairs.  He has taught, studied and conducted research at many peer institutions including Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton.  Dr. Mehta also serves on many government and policy bodies in India, including the Prime Minister of India’s National Knowledge Commission and the Supreme Court appointed Committee on Regulating Indian Universities.  In addition to serving on committees Mehta has developed policy reports for organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, and the U.K. Department for International Development.  His work is widely published in both academic journals and media outlets. Shyam Balganesh will serve as Mehta’s faculty host.

Previous Bok Visiting International Professors have included Okko Behrends, Göttingen University (Germany); Armin von Bogdandy, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law(Germany); Hauwa Ibrahim, Aries Law Firm (Nigeria); KP Krishnan, Secretary of the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister (India); Zhaojie Li, Leading PRC scholar on China and the international legal system; Michael Stolleis, University of Frankfurt (Germany); Chenguang Wang, Tsinghua University, (China), China; Setsuo Miyazawa, Aoyama Gakuin University, ( Japan); Jean-Bernard Auby, Sciences Po (France); Michael Faure, Maastricht University (Netherlands; Gunther Frankenberg, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Akio Shimizu, Waseda Law School (Japan); and Michael Trebilcok, University of Toronto (Canada). 
 

By Dana Vogel
Excerpt from Penn Law Journal Fall 2011 Volume 46, Number 2

Regulations affect everything from health care to the economy and the environment to food, but it’s not always easy for lawyers and interested members of the public to find careful yet accessible analysis of regulatory issues.

RegBlog is an innovative addition to legal education, too. Building on Penn Law’s cross-disciplinary strengths, RegBlog brings together more than 30 students from the Law School and other Penn graduate programs to write, edit, and operate the blog under Coglianese’s tutelage. Students gain an opportunity to see how what they are learning in the classroom applies to live regulatory issues.

Professor Regina Austin

By Jenny Chung C’12

On Monday evening, an audience of Penn Law students, faculty and local patrons of the arts filed into International House Philadelphia’s Ibrahim Theater for a screening of the documentary Hot Coffee, followed by a panel discussion on the film and the questions it raises.

The event inaugurated the Alan Lerner Social Justice Series, which — in the spirit of social justice advocate and former Penn Law professor Alan Lerner — aims to raise awareness of critical social justice topics through the medium of film. Organized in collaboration with nonprofit First Person Arts and cosponsored by Penn Law and the American Civil Liberties Union, the series will “capture the drama of real life through art” in the interest of provoking discussion about contemporary social issues, according to First Person Arts President Vicki Solot. 

In accord with the series’ commitment to fostering public awareness of social justice concerns, Hot Coffee exposes and examines the mechanisms by which corporations seek to deny consumers access to the courtroom and perpetuate inequities within the civil justice system.

The film opens by reconstructing the infamous “McDonald’s coffee case,” in which a woman who sustained extensive third-degree burns after spilling said beverage into her lap was awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages. The case then became a rallying point for tort reform, in large part due to the perceived frivolity of the lawsuit.

Through a series of interviews featuring the jurors who had ruled in favor of the plaintiff along with her physician, attorney, and family members, the film dispels a number of popular misconceptions surrounding the case. Contrary to general assumption, the plaintiff had requested compensation only to finance medical expenses, and McDonald’s had previously faced—and ignored—over 700 complaints about burns from hot beverages.

The film proceeds to document the tort reform campaign launched in the wake of the “coffee case” by corporate interests with political clout, which succeeded both in limiting the amount plaintiffs could receive in damages and electing conservative pro-business judges to state courts. It likewise reveals the extent to which corporate contributions can influence judicial campaigns, citing the election of former Mississippi state justice Oliver Diaz as a recent example.

Following the “coffee case,” two other court cases are invoked to illustrate the shortcomings of the civil justice system: the film goes on to depict a medical malpractice case wherein the plaintiffs could not fully recover the compensation awarded in court due to state caps on damages, and concludes with a case involving a woman who had unknowingly forfeited her right to seek redress in court for sexual assault as a result of a mandatory arbitration clause in her employment contract.

Penn Law Professor Tom Baker appears in the documentary

The screening was followed by a panel discussion in which Professor Mark Rahdert of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law and Penn Law professors Regina Austin and Tom Baker expressed their views on the content and presentation of the documentary.

Rahdert characterized the film’s treatment of the McDonald’s case as an “important corrective to some serious distortion about the case put forward in the ‘90s as part of the campaign for tort reform.”

“It’s useful for us to see the complexities and realities behind it,” he said, adding that such “poster child” cases generally tend to invite oversimplification and exaggeration.

Austin’s critique of the documentary centered primarily on its failure to “leave room for the audience to own its material and conclusions,” articulating the need for audiences “to think about what these stories mean and what should follow.”

“The ‘hot coffee case’ represents the idea that personal responsibility is an important value in society,” she said. “The question is, what story goes along with ideas about personal responsibility?”

According to Baker, statistics indicate that the vast majority of those who may be entitled to a civil lawsuit opt not to sue. “Decades of social psychology research have proven that the primary way people deal with harm in our society is to lump it,” he said. He further explained that “from the legal system’s perspective, there are not many frivolous lawsuits.”

Rahdert, who affirmed this view, attributes the legitimacy of most lawsuits to the “structure of the practice of law, especially in the tort arena.”

As most plaintiffs’ cases are brought by lawyers who earn contingent fees dependent on their outcomes, he said, “the business model of the sensible attorney sifts out all but the most meritorious cases because there’s too much risk of spending time and effort and getting nothing in return.”

In Why the Law Is So Perverse, Leo Katz, Frank Carano Professor of Law, examines four fundamental features of the legal system, all of which seem to not make sense on some level and to demand explanation. Katz asserts that these perversions arise out of a cluster of logical difficulties related to multicriterial decision making. Professor Katz sat down with Penn Law's Communications Department to talk more about his book.

• Why the Law Is So Perverse: Introduction
• Why the Law Is So Perverse: Question 1
• Why the Law Is So Perverse: Question 2
• Why the Law Is So Perverse: Question 3
• Why the Law Is So Perverse: Question 4

Tara Grigg Garlinghouse L'13 was selected for the first Alan Lerner Fellowship in Child Welfare Policy, awarded by Penn’s Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice & Research at its inaugural “Field of Dreams” luncheon.

Garlinghouse grew up in a home with parents who cared for more than 80 foster children. As an undergraduate at Rice University, she researched how the parenting practices of teenage mothers have an impact on child development and how socioeconomic status serves as a mitigating factor.

She has worked on systemic changes for the Houston municipal courts, volunteered with Penn Law’s Custody and Support Assistance Clinic and is the recipient of two earlier child welfare fellowships. Garlinghouse is also pursuing a master’s in public policy with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University while working on her law degree from Penn.

She hopes to spend her career working on large-scale policy changes that address both the child-welfare system and the underlying issues that result in children being placed in foster care.

 “Alan Lerner truly believed in training the next generation of leaders. He established Penn Law School’s Child Advocacy Clinic and taught students of law, medicine and social work together – sharing with them the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in addressing child welfare and thus improving the lives of victims of child abuse and neglect,” Debra Schilling Wolfe, the executive director of the Field Center, said. “Each fellow will complete a full academic year with the Field Center by continuing the interdisciplinary work started by Professor Lerner.”

The Field Center also announced that Cindy Christian is this year’s recipient of the Alan Lerner Child Advocacy Award. Christian is a professor of pediatrics at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. She holds the Chair in Child Abuse Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and is the first medical director of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.

The inaugural “Field of Dreams” luncheon was dedicated to the legacy of the late Alan M. Lerner, Field Center faculty director and professor at Penn Law. WPVI-TV anchor Monica Malpass served as the event’s master of ceremonies, and Benjamin Lerner from the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas was the featured speaker.

The Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice & Research is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Social Policy & Practice, Law School and Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. It works to improve the lives of victims of child abuse and neglect by reforming the systems that are responsible for protecting them through innovative and critical change.

By Nicole Greenstein C’14

Four distinguished panelists gathered in Penn Law’s Levy Conference Room on September 22 to discuss and answer questions about the previous and upcoming Supreme Court terms. Sponsored by the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy, this Supreme Court Preview and Review Panel addressed a wide array of issues ranging from health care, gun regulation and the freedom of the press.

L-R: Thomas Goldstein, Linda Greenhouse, Randy Barnett, Monica Youn, and Tobias Barrington Wolff

Speaking to a room filled with faculty, students, attorneys and community members, moderator Penn Law Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff opened the evening’s event by introducing the four panelists: Randy Barnett, Thomas Goldstein, Linda Greenhouse and Monica Youn. Each panelist started by offering a summary of their background before explaining what issues in the Supreme Court interest and concern them.

Barnett, a Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory from Georgetown Law Center as well as a visiting professor to Penn Law, spoke about the heated debate surrounding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Barnett has written extensively about the healthcare act in Op-Ed pieces featured in newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, but he formally became involved in the case when he joined a legal team representing the National Federation of Independent Business. As a strong disbeliever in the act’s constitutionality, Barnett presented his reasons as to why he believes the act might not survive the Supreme Court’s scrutiny.

“In this case, Congress is not regulating activity. Congress is actually reaching out to mandate activity,” Barnett explained.

Barnett argued that the scope of President Obama’s health care plan extends “outside the line that the Supreme Court has previously drawn” in cases such U.S v. Lopez, which limited the power of Congress to reach inside intrastate activity, he said.

 “It’s high time for the high court to hear this case,” Barnett added.

Linda Greenhouse, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, took a different stance on the issue of healthcare. She said that Barnett’s assertions should be “taken with a grain of salt,” particularly his argument that the Supreme Court might rule Obama’s healthcare act as unconstitutional due to its unprecedented nature.

“Maybe we should have done this a long time ago, and then it wouldn’t be unprecedented,” Greenhouse countered.

Randy Barnett, Monica Youn, and Tobias Barrington Wolff

Greenhouse agreed, stating that to take someone’s private medical information and use it for marking purposes is “a pretty pressing” issue that could have sweeping effects in terms of setting a precedent on the issue of personal privacy.

Thomas Goldstein, a renowned Supreme Court advocate and founding partner of Goldstein & Russell, P.C, also spoke about the importance of future Supreme Court appointments.

“The amount of socially and politically infused cases is awesome in its scope,” Goldstein explained, citing cases involving abortion, gay rights, and other issues that polarize the American public. As a result, Supreme Court appointments have become more consequential than ever before, he said.

As the event neared its conclusion, Wolff picked a handful of questions from the audience to ask the four expert panelists. One audience member asked about the political dimension of the Court, and was wondering whether cases near a presidential race can affect the election’s outcome.

Wolff offered his own opinion to the question, stating that with the pressing issues of our current economic climate, the Court’s decisions are unlikely to alter the upcoming election. However, Wolff explained that in other elections the Supreme Court often plays a significant role.

“It is I think true, not in this election cycle but in others, that the issue of the Supreme Court and the composition of the Court moving forward with possible appointments can be a powerful issue,” Wolff explained.

For audience member Noel León L’14, the panel offered some very intriguing and insightful discussions.

“They were incredible,” she said. “They had differing opinions on the huge issues, and it was just amazing to watch these great minds speak about these important questions.”

One of the event’s organizers, Aaron Safane L’12, also thought the evening was a success.

“I thought it was tremendous, and I especially liked the debate between the panelists about healthcare,” he said. “It really shows how we can talk about events in law school that affect real life.”

On October 6, 2011 five University of Pennsylvania Law School graduates – with expertise ranging from human rights law to sex discrimination to judicial reform – were honored for their career achievements, pro bono work, service to the legal profession and service to the Law School.

They are:

Chandra Bhatnagar L’01
James J. Sandman L’76
Lynn A. Marks L’79
Professor Regina Austin L’73, HOM’83
Marcia Greenberger CW’67, L’70

The Young Alumni Award, honoring professional achievement of an alumnus/a who graduated within the past 10 years, was awarded to Chandra Bhatnagar L’01.

Bhatnagar is a senior staff attorney with the Human Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). His practice centers on the intersection of racial justice and immigration with specific focus on the rights of low-wage immigrant workers, undocumented workers, and guestworkers. He is also involved in advocacy regarding the use of international and foreign law in U.S. courts and the domestic implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). He is the principal author of The Persistence of Racial and Ethnic Profiling in the United States (2009), a report submitted to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Prior to joining the ACLU, Bhatnagar was a staff attorney and Skadden fellow with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he directed the South Asian Workers' Project for Human Rights, a community-based project providing legal services to low-wage workers from South Asia. Previously, he was the assistant director of Columbia University's "Bringing Human Rights Home Project," where he worked to improve conditions affecting post 9-11 detainees and efforts to organize a coalition of human rights defenders in the United States. Bhatnagar has also worked internationally, partnering with a leading NGO in India in applying human rights standards to their anti-child labor/bonded labor campaigns, and domestically with the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he did immigrants' rights and anti-police brutality organizing, and served as the interim director of the Ella Baker Summer Intern Program. He received a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and an LLM with a focus in international human rights from Columbia Law School.

The Howard Lesnick Pro Bono Award, honoring an alumnus/a who has embodied the spirit of the Public Service Program through a sustained commitment to pro bono and/or public service throughout a private sector career, was awarded to James J. Sandman L’76.

James Sandman was appointed President of the Legal Services Corporation, effective January, 2011. He was with Arnold & Porter LLP from 1977 to 2007 and served as the firm’s managing partner from 1995 to 2005. From 2007 to 2011, he was general counsel for the District of Columbia Public Schools. Sandman is the co-chair of the District of Columbia Circuit Judicial Conference Committee on Pro Bono Legal Services and is a member of the Pro Bono Institute’s Law Firm Pro Bono Project Advisory Committee. From 2007-2008, he served on the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service. He is a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s District of Columbia State Advisory Committee. Sandman also is vice chairman of the Washington Performing Arts Society and on the boards of the International Senior Lawyers Project, the Meyer Foundation, and the Women’s Bar Association. He was elected president of the D.C. Bar from 2006-2007 and served on the Bar’s Board of Governors from 2003-2008. He is currently the chair of the Bar’s Pro Bono Committee and formerly chaired the Bar’s Pro Bono Initiative Working Group. Sandman previously served on the boards of the Neighborhood Legal Services Program of the District of Columbia, the NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education, Wilkes University, the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Whitman-Walker Clinic. He also has served on the scholarship selection committee of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association. Sandman received the University of Pennsylvania Law School Alumni Award of Merit in 2007 and was named one of the “90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years” by the Legal Times in 2008. He also was recognized as a “Star of the Bar” by the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia in 2006. In 2011, he received the first annual Celebration of Service Award from D.C. Law Students in Court and the Tahirih Justice Center’s Wings of Justice Award. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Boston College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received his law degree cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Executive Editor of the Law Review. He clerked for Judge Max Rosenn of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

The Alumni Award of Merit, honoring professional achievement and service to the Law School, was awarded to Lynn A. Marks L’79.

Marks is the executive director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, a statewide nonpartisan organization working to reform Pennsylvania’s courts, particularly in the areas of judicial selection, judicial discipline, jury service, court funding, and increasing racial, gender and ethnic fairness. Marks serves on the Pennsylvania Interbranch Commission for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness, the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s House of Delegates, the Advisory Board of PA Coalition Against Rape and the ABA’s Commission on the American Jury. She was a member of the PA Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias and co-chaired its gender fairness work. Marks is the author of a legal treatise on the rights of victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. She has chaired the Boards of the Women’s Law Project, Living Beyond Breast Cancer and the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women. Marks was named one of 25 “Women of the Year” in 2008 by American Lawyer Media. She has received numerous awards, including the Philadelphia Bar Association’s “Sandra Day O’Connor Award” and “Alexander Hamilton Award” as well as a Philadelphia City Council Proclamation “in tribute to her life’s work.” She currently serves on the Law Alumni Society’s Board of Managers.

The Distinguished Service Award, honoring service to the Law School, was awarded to Professor Regina Austin L’73, HOM’83.

Austin, the William A. Schnader Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is a leading authority on economic discrimination and minority legal feminism. Her work on the overlapping burdens of race, gender, and class oppression, recognized for its insight and creativity, has been widely reprinted. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Documentaries & the Law, which holds an annual Visual Legal Advocacy Roundtable for public interest lawyers, hosts screenings of law-genre documentary films throughout the year, and maintains a national repository of dozens of clemency videos as a resource for attorneys representing defendants facing the death penalty or a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. In addition to making extensive use of documentaries in her traditional courses, Austin teaches a visual legal advocacy seminar in which students make short videos on behalf of actual public interest clients and causes. The videos can be found on the Law School’s website or on its You Tube channel. Austin received her JD, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and was elected to the Order of the Coif. She has a BA from the University of Rochester. She has been teaching at the Law School for 34 years. Prior to joining the Penn Law faculty, she was a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund B. Spaeth of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, and an associate with the law firm of Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis. She has been a visiting professor at Brooklyn, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford Law Schools.

The James Wilson Award, honoring service to the legal profession, was awarded to Marcia Greenberger CW’67, L’70.

Described as "guiding the battles of the women's rights movement" by the New York Times, Marcia Greenberger is the founder and co-president of the National Women's Law Center. The creation of the Center almost 40 years ago established her as the first full-time women's rights legal advocate in Washington, D.C. A recognized expert on sex discrimination and the law, Greenberger has participated in the development of key legislative initiatives and landmark litigation protecting and advancing women's rights, particularly in the areas of education, employment, family economic security, health and reproductive rights. She is the author of numerous published articles. Examples include the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which provides key protections against discrimination and sexual harassment on the job, the Athletics Disclosure Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and Supreme Court victories strengthening protections for students, teachers, and employees against sex discrimination. Greenberger’s leadership and contributions are reflected in the professional honors she has received and the numerous boards on which she serves. Recognized by Working Woman Magazine as one of the 25 heroines whose activities over 25 years have helped women in the workplace, and Washingtonian Magazine as one of Washington, D.C.'s most powerful women and as one of Washington, D.C.'s top lawyers, she received such awards as the Alumni Award of Merit from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Lafayette College, and is a member of the American Law Institute. Greenberger received her BA with honors and JD cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School and The Wharton School developed an integrated JD/MBA program to address the needs of students interested in the intersection of business & law.

Penn Law is the leader in cross-disciplinary legal education. Seventy percent of the Law School’s standing faculty hold advanced degrees beyond the JD, with nearly half having PhDs or the equivalent. Wharton is the world’s leader in business, especially finance, accounting, real estate and health care. It is the world’s largest business school with more than 200 standing faculty in 11 departments. The strengths of the faculties and the proximity of Penn Law and Wharton, which are within a few blocks of each other on the same campus, make Penn the leading choice for an accelerated JD/MBA.

Michael Martinez L'11 shares some of his experiences with the JD/MBA program with Penn Law's Communications.

Transcript

By Mark Eyerly
Excerpt from Penn Law Journal Fall 2011 Volume 46, Number 2 

Peter Detkin EE’82, L’85

When the public radio program “This American Life” makes your company the focus of an hour-long story that was five months in the making, you’ve arrived.

Say hello to Peter Detkin EE’82, L’85, founder and vice chairman of Intellectual Ventures.

In that radio story, “When Patents Attack,” a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Twitter compared Detkin’s Intellectual Ventures to a “mafia shake-down,” a characterization Detkin found “ridiculous and offensive.” After the story aired nationwide on July 22, a blogger at Prawfs Blawg complained: “The reporters begin and end from an unapologetic stance that patent litigation is destructive…. They are entirely dismissive of the idea that patents in the high-tech world promote and protect innovation.”

Detkin is accustomed to being at the epicenter of heated claims and counter-claims about patent law — he’s a former head of litigation at Intel, after all — and he’s argued both sides of the debate about whether patent law protects or impedes technological innovation. The thing that still takes some getting used to, he says, is that he’s a patent attorney to begin with.

As an engineering major at Penn his ambition was to design antennas, but many middle-age engineers he met complained their careers had reached dead ends. Convinced by his father that law school was better than getting an MBA (lawyers, his father argued, can do anything; MBAs can’t practice law), Detkin EE’82, L’85 applied to law schools as a “back up” plan. The Long Island, N.Y., native turned down Stanford to enroll at Penn Law because, he thought, “I’m never going to practice in California, so why go to school out there?” Two years after earning his J.D., Detkin joined the Palo Alto, Calif., firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati. What did he see when looking out his office window? Stanford Law School.

As a Penn Law student with an undergraduate degree in engineering, he found himself courted by patent attorneys. But to Detkin, patent law “seemed too narrow in its outlook and the prevailing belief was that you had to be a high priest to really understand it.” That job in Palo Alto? Detkin was the firm’s first patent attorney.

Having built his patent work into a highly successful intellectual property practice at Wilson Sonsini, one day Detkin deflected a telephone call from a head hunter by saying: “Lady, you’d have to make me the head of litigation at Intel for me to be interested.” Can do. (Detkin had been litigating a number of cases on behalf of small companies against Intel at the time; he later learned an Intel executive suggested “let’s get this guy Detkin off our back and hire him.”)

At Intel, Detkin was the lead attorney responsible for managing the defense and eventual settlement of antitrust action by the Federal Trade Commission. He also managed Intel’s patent portfolio and led efforts to fight off what the company considered meritless patent infringement challenges against its technological innovations. Intel gave Detkin a bully pulpit when it came to all things IP, and he used it to lash out at what he called “patent trolls — somebody who asserts a patent broadly, for nuisance value with a meritless claim.” The term stuck; one day the second paragraph (if not the first) of Detkin’s obituary will cite him as the creator of the pejorative “patent troll.” (Detkin, by the way, still has the original troll doll — a toy of his then-6-year-old daughter — that inspired the phrase, which he coined after his first descriptive attempt, “patent extortionist,” led to a libel suit against Intel.)

The critics say that Intellectual Ventures is a patent troll, buying and licensing patents with no intention of ever making anything. Others, to quote a blogger at Intellectual Asset Management magazine, say Intellectual Ventures “has probably done more than almost any other organization to kick-start the marketplace for patents.”

“The term ‘patent troll’ has taken on a life of its own,” Detkin says. “It’s used now for any patent-holder you don’t like, whether their cases have merit or not. And Intellectual Ventures is a patent-holder companies don’t like. We’re disruptive. We’re working with folks who otherwise had no way to get value for their assets.”

In a nutshell, here’s what Intellectual Ventures does: it files patents on its own inventions (from agriculture and life sciences to nanotechnology and software); it buys patents from companies and individuals who might not otherwise convert their ideas into monetary gain; and it collaborates with universities and research institutions around the world, such as California Institute of Technology and the University of British Columbia, to develop inventions. It also licenses its patent portfolio to companies such as Samsung, SAP and Research in Motion, who are looking for access to ideas that can enhance their own work and to protect themselves from infringement suits. And in a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Intellectual Ventures is working on technologies that could diagnose and treat malaria, as well as neutralize the mosquitoes that cause the disease.

The firm has some 800 employees, $5 billion under management for investment, and has aggregated more than 35,000 invention rights. As the self-described “global leader in the business of invention and owner of one of the world’s largest and  fastest-growing patent portfolios,” Intellectual Ventures proclaims that it is bridging the Invention Gap — a term it has trademarked — by “significantly reducing a company’s liabilities and providing access to valuable invention rights.”

To the critic in that NPR story, “reducing a company’s liabilities” for patent infringement reminds him of “a mafia-style shakedown, where someone comes in the front door of your building and says, ‘It would be a shame if this place burnt down. I know the neighborhood really well and I can make sure that doesn’t happen.’”

But Detkin points out that 30 to 40 percent of U.S. patent holders are individual inventors without the resources to discover theft of their ideas by a large company, or to do anything about it even if they do. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of revenues derived from patents goes to large companies. By aggregating the patent rights of small players, Intellectual Ventures levels the playing field.

“We are a game changer,” he says. “We are making the market place more efficient and transparent by bringing together creators of invention and users of invention. Someday we’ll be able to trade rights to inventions the way we trade pork belly futures, over an open exchange.”

It will come as no surprise that someone who has spent his entire career at the intersection of law and technology believes that “all business and technology professionals need a solid understanding of intellectual property. Inventors need to understand how to secure their rights, and business people, who may or may not be the inventors, need to know what to do with those rights.”

A gift from Detkin to Penn Law will help promote such cross-discipline understanding through the new Detkin Intellectual Property and Technology Legal Clinic. “I’m not aware of any other clinic at another institution that can provide this kind of practical, hands-on experience for when students enter the workplace or start their own companies,” Detkin says. In addition to training future lawyers, the clinic will also work closely with undergraduates at Penn to provide them an education on intellectual property. “It probably helps that the Law School and School of Engineering and Applied Science are across the street from each other, and that I am an alumnus of both!” says Detkin.

The mid-June announcement of the Detkin Clinic led Joff Wild, a blogger for Intellectual Asset Management magazine, to call on others to make a similar effort. “You cannot expect universities just to set up this kind of thing of their own accord,” he wrote. “They need help to understand why such courses/clinics are important, as well as support in providing students with accurate, relevant teaching and hands-on experiences. That’s where the IP community, especially on the corporate and transactional side, could come into play.

“Of course, there is a cost involved. But it is one that will pay itself back many times over if it helps to create a more IP-savvy environment in the years to come,” he added. “If Peter Detkin can do it, why can’t others … do it too?”

What’s next for Detkin? Unless the same headhunter who recruited him to Intel offers him one of his dream jobs – managing director of the U.S. Ski Team or commissioner of the National Basketball Association - he plans to continue his work with Intellectual Ventures for the foreseeable future.

He once wrote: “My career has spanned every aspect of the patent spectrum: I have prosecuted patents before the PTO, I have had lead responsibility for litigating and licensing scores of patents (both as licensee and licensor) and I am now a principal in an entity whose primary asset is its patent portfolio.”

While sometimes still amazed that he specialized in patent law, Detkin is not surprised that he is energized by embracing new challenges. That may be a genetic trait. Detkin had a solidly middle class childhood on the south side of Long Island in Rockville Centre, “a bedroom community whose biggest industry was the local archdiocese,” but both of his grandfathers lived classic immigrant stories. “One came to the U.S. from Russia, circuitously through most of Europe, to escape the Cossacks, and the other from Latvia via London as a stowaway on a U.S. merchant marine vessel,” he says. “Both came to this country without knowing anyone here and without knowing a word of English.”

Detkin’s Latvian grandfather became a furrier in Brooklyn, a job he proudly held for more than 60 years. His Russian grandfather settled in Philadelphia where he sold buttons and beads from a pushcart, and later moved to New York. “That eventually became the family business of importing and wholesaling costume jewelry. Mood rings paid for my two Ivy League degrees!” Detkin says.

“I don’t give much thought to the questions, ‘What if I had become an engineer?’ or “Why patent law?” he adds. “I just remember getting on that plane to California with a one-way ticket in my hand and thinking about my grandfathers. They focused on the future and never looked back. I can only aspire to be half the men they were.”

By Dana Vogel
Excerpt from Penn Law Journal Fall 2011 Volume 46, Number 2 

Lisa Scottoline C’77, L’81

When Lisa Scottoline C’77, L’81 sold her first novel to a publishing house, she was a single mother trying to feed herself and her young daughter. Twenty years later, Scottoline, a best-selling author, has published two nonfiction books, writes a weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is president of the Mystery Writers of America, and just released her 18th novel. With more than 25 million books in print in over 25 countries, she has earned the title of the “female John Grisham.”

Save Me, her most recent novel, tells the story of Rose McKenna, who volunteers in the lunchroom of her daughter’s school. She is motivated by a desire to watch over her daughter, Melly, whose birthmark on her face makes her a target of lunchroom bullies. When an explosion rocks the school, Rose must decide whether to save the bullies or abandon them to rescue her own child. Her decision ultimately leaves Rose with both civil and criminal charges against her.

Although Save Me is different from many of her other novels which tend to be classified as legal thrillers and feature female lawyers in the role of protagonist, Scottoline said the novel is not that different at all. “I write stories about really strong and interesting women. Because many of them have been lawyers, they got pitched as legal thrillers. I write about women who are interested in the difference between right and wrong,” says Scottoline, explaining that her main characters don’t have to be lawyers to be interesting.

Personal experience has always played an important role in Scottoline’s works. “All of my novels are really personal. To be successful, you need to reach the readers on a personal level. The most compelling stories are those with an emotional truth,” she says.

Scottoline explains that in recent years, she has returned to her “mom roots” as her now-grown daughter has moved out of the house. This change put into perspective the relationship between mother and child, which, in part, inspired Save Me. “You love your child and would do anything for that child. The question in Save Me is ‘Do you love your child enough to sacrifice someone else’s child?’”

As it turns out, Penn Law School has also served as an inspiration to Scottoline. “I thought law school was a gas. I loved it,” she says.

Scottoline has featured Penn Law in her works a number of times, whether a character was a fellow alumni or wearing a Penn Law sweatshirt. In her 2007 novel, Daddy’s Girl, she took the influence further, featuring a main character who was also a Penn Law professor.

Scottoline, herself, developed and taught a class at Penn Law titled “Justice and Fiction.” Part of her motivation to teach, she says, came from a desire to give back to the Law School. “Life is long — giving back gives it more depth,” she says.

This desire to give back is also what motivated Scottoline to accept the position of president of the Mystery Writers of America. She said early in her writing career she was nominated for two Edgar awards — an award given by the Mystery Writers of America to recognize the best of the genre — and won once. That recognition helped propel her career, she says. Serving as president is a “way of helping new young writers get into print,” says Scottoline.

Scottoline’s literary interest, however, extends well beyond the mystery and legal thriller genre. She says she opposes the classification of literature into genres because she feels that they are limiting. She doesn’t even like to place a label on her two nonfiction works. Like her novels, she says, “They’re the story of a woman’s life, and that happens to be me.”

Both books are based on her column “Chick Wit,” which appears in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer and which she coauthors with her daughter Francesca Serritella.

“Chick Wit” was born of Scottoline’s love of newspapers and her belief that there are not enough female voices or humor in the paper. Scottoline pitched the idea for her column to the Inquirer, promising that it would be funny and appeal to her local fan base. The column yielded two books, Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog and My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space. Her third nonfiction book, Best Friends and Occasional Enemies, written with her daughter is set for release this fall. She also has a new novel, Come Home, slated for release in April 2012.

Scottoline left a successful career as a trial lawyer to raise her daughter. She turned to writing as a way to balance a career and single-motherhood. Scottoline admits that she still doesn’t “have it down 100 percent of the time,” although it’s easier now that her daughter is grown and out of the house.

“I don’t take this job lightly. I like to put a lot of time in,” Scottoline says. “I feel lucky to have this as a job.”

A report by the representatives of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, including University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Anita Allen and University of Pennsylvania’s President Amy Gutman, was sent to the President in conclusion to its investigation into the U.S. Public Health Service (U.S. PHS) studies done in Guatemala in the 1940s.

According to the President’s Bioethics Commission, the revelation last fall that the U.S. Public Health Service (the precursor agency to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) supported research on sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948, President Obama tasked the Bioethics Commission with two assignments: first, to oversee an investigation into the research in Guatemala that took place in the 1940s; and to seek assurances that current rules for research subjects are sufficient to protect people from harm or unethical treatment, both in the U.S. and in other countries.

Professor Anita Allen sat down with Penn Law’s Office of Communications to talk about this report and the Commission’s findings.

Transcript

Sarah Paoletti Practice Associate Professor of Law

A new study by a human rights delegation, including University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Sarah Paoletti, is recommending that the U.S. Department of State conduct a more thorough investigation into the alleged abuses of over 400 J-1 student workers by the Hershey Company and several of its contractors.

The report was created by a delegation of human-rights and labor-law experts that includes, in addition to Professor Paoletti, Fran Ansley of the University of Tennessee College of Law; Colleen P. Breslin of Villanova University School of Law; Stephanie Luce of the City University of New York; Tsedeye Gebreselassie, staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project; Beth Lyon of Villanova University School of Law; and William Quigley of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. The delegation found little oversight of the J-1 program by state and federal agencies, leaving space for abuse at multiple levels.

"We are extremely concerned by students’ accounts of deception, coercion, and threats from the State Department-certified sponsoring agency CETUSA (the Council for Educational Travel, USA), as well as supervisors from SHS Onsite Solutions, Inc., the employment agency that contracted with CETUSA to provide the J-1 student workers, and Exel North American Logistics, Inc., contracted by Hershey to run operations at the Hershey packing plant,” said Professor Paoletti, who directs the Transnational Legal Clinic at Penn Law. “These accounts are consistent with accounts of abuses experienced by other categories of guestworkers, compounded by the layers of contracting and subcontracting used here by the Hershey Company."

The delegation visited the seasonal workers who traveled to the United States on the J-1 Visa Summer Student Travel/Work Program at the Hershey packing plant, conducting a preliminary investigation into the workers’ claims that their living and working conditions violated international human rights standards. The workers, who launched a massive complaint and protest against the packing factory, claim their treatment not only fell short of the program’s promise as a cultural exchange opportunity, but that they were subjected to working under abusive conditions, taking home well below minimum wage after mandatory company deductions.

The report identifies a series of recommendations needed to ensure the protection and promotion of the student workers’ human rights moving forward, including suspension of all CETUSA J-1 contracts pending release of the results of the investigations; individualized assessments of the students’ claims; and ongoing monitoring. In addition, the report concludes that a larger investigation is needed for the J-1 visa program.

"The State Department, which has within its mandate to oversee the J-1 cultural and education exchange program, is not equipped to ensure student workers' conditions meet basic human rights standards under U.S. law, as well as under international law,” Paoletti said. “Those failures have contributed to the apparent violations, as alleged by the students."

To read the report in its entirety, please go to: http://www.guestworkeralliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Human-Rights-Delegation-Report-on-Hersheys-J-1-Workers.pdf.

Excerpts from Penn Law Journal Fall 2011 Volume 46, Number 2 

The response to 9/11 produced a brief period of national unity. We focused on our common humanity rather than our differences — a way of life that prevails at Penn Law School. Many of our students experienced the worst national tragedy of their lives on 9/11. On that day, we remembered the virtues of community. It has guided us every day since.

Anita A. Allen Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy After the events of September 11, 2001, there was a lot of talk in the ethics community about America having been “remade” as a nation more conscious of the need for security and less smug about our moral stature in the world. In the wake of 9/11 we could better see the importance of personal values and character: for not only had a handful of men lacking a moral compass taken down major businesses and employers like Enron and WorldCom, a handful of such men took down hubs of America’s economic prowess and military might — the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet the heroism on board the aircraft that crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside on 9/11, thwarting another vicious attack on Washington bespoke America’s moral core. 9/11 pulled us together, created a sense of common purpose, recommitted us to fair, open, sacrificial democracy. The tenor of our involvement in Iraq, both some of how we got there and some of what we did when we arrived, was cause for concern about American values. The election of an idealistic, young African American president in 2008 symbolized the “Yes We Can!” character and freedom to which we aspire. Ten years after 9/11, some might say we seem to be losing our way, individually and collectively. Nothing like a major anniversary to renew flagging optimism.

William Burke-White Professor of Law Former Member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State September 11 shifted the fundamental assumption on which U.S. policy had rested since the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s, the U.S. enjoyed relative security from external threats; our security could be guaranteed at our own borders. On September 11, America’s vulnerability became all too clear. Yet, unlike the threats of the Twentieth Century, new threats stemmed not from states but from amorphous, often invisible terrorist networks rooted overseas but potentially operating anywhere. In this new environment, U.S. security came to depend on the stability, effectiveness, and cooperation of other states — whether enforcing their own domestic laws, preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or apprehending terrorist suspects. In the decade since 9/11, the U.S. has tested two very different models of this external assurance of American security. To oversimplify, one model has sought to transform foreign governments — forcibly if necessary — to ensure both their capacity and willingness to participate in these efforts. The second model has sought to build a global architecture of cooperation to achieve the same goal. Both models have proved to have their limitations; the decade ahead will likely see continued shifts and experimentation. But, the real danger is that while orienting our foreign policy to address the threats of 9/11, we will overlook the challenges presented by rising powers, economic statecraft, and energy security.

Howard Chang Earle Hepburn Professor of Law In the summer of 2001, ambitious plans to address the problem of illegal immigration by liberalizing access to employment-based visas appeared to be a priority on the national political agenda. With the support of both labor unions and business interests, President George W. Bush seemed poised to guide these liberalizing reforms through Congress as essential elements of comprehensive immigration reform. The terrorist attacks of September 11, however, placed these plans on hold as the public suddenly came to view immigration policy through the lens of national security concerns. Congress quickly adopted a series of restrictive amendments to our immigration laws, including expansions in the exclusion and deportation grounds related to terrorism, designed to make it more difficult for terrorists to enter and remain in the United States. Restrictionists, however, now invoke the threat of international terrorism as a reason to oppose any liberalizing reforms, and when efforts at comprehensive immigration reform resumed in 2006 and 2007, legislation that would have liberalized access to visas died in Congress. The irony is that the September 11 attacks themselves illustrate how comprehensive immigration reform would not undermine national security. Each of the hijackers who struck on September 11 entered the United States legally on non-immigrant visas; most of them used tourist visas. None of them needed or used an immigrant visa, nor did they need or use any visas for temporary workers. Thus, liberalized access to either immigration visas or visas for guest workers would not make it easier for terrorists to enter and attack, given the availability of tourist visas and other visas for temporary visitors, including those actually used by the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks. Yet the pall that those attacks cast over the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform lingers to this day as an unfortunate legacy of September 11.

Cary Coglianese Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science Director, Penn Program on Regulation The United States responded to the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001, by making numerous changes to its airline security regulation. Anyone who travels regularly knows of these changes, including the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the federalization of screening personnel, and requirements for cabin door locks — not to mention new procedures for photo identification, body scans and pat-downs, and checked bag screening. For those who follow regulation, the challenges the government faced implementing these legal and administrative changes have also been familiar. It took several years before all checked baggage could be screened and still longer before domestic cargo could be inspected; to this day, cargo on international flights entering the U.S. is still not fully inspected. Despite the fact that weapons still do slip past screeners and other security vulnerabilities remain, the TSA’s screening efforts have generated lawsuits and public resistance about privacy invasions and discrimination. Ten years ago, late night comedians temporarily suspended their broadcasts following September 11th; today TSA screeners find themselves the butt of television comedy. In the immediate wake of September 11, 2001, many Americans wondered why their government had failed to guarantee their safety; the intervening decade has provided at least a partial answer by revealing the profound challenges that regulators confront when dealing with complex, dynamic problems. Regulating well is seldom easy, and although airplanes may well be safer today than ever before, the United States’ experience with security regulation in the last ten years has only revealed more clearly how challenging the regulatory task can be.

Joe Daniels L’98 President/CEO, National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center On the day of the 9/11 attacks I lived in lower Manhattan with my family, and I still do today. Nearly 10 years ago I witnessed an unprecedented horror as well as unequaled courage and heroism. I’m proud my neighborhood, city and nation remained resilient in the weeks, months and years that followed. After all we experienced and endured, to see how far we have come, and to be given the opportunity to play a major role, not only in the reconstruction effort, but also in honoring and remembering the nearly 3,000 victims, brings this full circle for me.

Jacques deLisle Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law In a narrow and immediate sense, the aftermath of 9/11 was good for U.S.-China relations. In an effort to secure Beijing’s cooperation on United Nations Security Council resolutions and in anti-terrorism efforts more generally and as a consequence of the U.S.’ focus on international terrorist threats and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington put less emphasis on issues that had been perennial sources of friction in relations with Beijing, ranging from trade to human rights. But a positive tone in U.S.- China relations is not necessarily good for the U.S.’ China-related interests, especially in the long run. Although we have become accustomed to thinking of 9/11 and terrorism emanating from strains of radical Islam as the major change in international affairs in the last decade, the rise of China is more important. The dominance of anti-terrorism in U.S. foreign policy — including the wars it spawned — since 9/11 has weakened the U.S.’ ability to address the rise of China in several ways. First, it has distracted U.S. policymakers from focusing on the consequences of China’s ascension and China’s foreign policy agenda — something which has been greatly welcomed among those in Chinese policymaking circles who see the U.S. as a potential adversary or imagine a U.S. plot to contain China’s rise. Second, the U.S.’ post-9/11 wars and other anti-terrorism expenditures have reduced the resources the U.S. has available — and, perhaps more importantly, the resources China thinks the U.S. will have available — to address and engage China’s rising military and economic clout. Third, throughout much of the decade, American military intervention in Islamic countries and the dominance of anti-terrorism agendas in U.S. engagement with Southeast Asian states diminished U.S. soft power, relative to China’s, among China’s near-neighbors — although this situation recently has improved with shifts in U.S. policy and China’s shift to a more assertive, even aggressive, stance on the South China Sea and other regional issues. Finally, the U.S.’ response to 9/11 has diminished the U.S.’ ability to press American goals to change China’s behavior. American critiques of the Chinese regime’s human rights behavior face rebuttals that invoke Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the erosion of civil liberties in U.S. law, and so on. And Beijing invokes U.S.-driven U.N. resolutions and the “global war on terror” to defend its measures targeting alleged “terrorists” in China’s restless Muslim northwest and even in Tibet.

Azizah al-Hibri GR’75, L’85 Professor of Law, University of Richmond Founder and President, KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights Member, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom We were full of hope and inspiration. You could say these were “the Sixties” of interfaith activism. We crossed political lines. We crossed ethnic lines. We crossed social lines. We stood together and promoted religious virtues of cooperation, civility and understanding. We did this together in churches, mosques and synagogues. Nothing seemed to stop us from fulfilling the American ideal of a harmonious interfaith society… until the planes hit the skyscrapers, and everything fell apart, even our interfaith dreams. In the aftermath, the fact was lost that many Muslims died at Ground Zero along with other victims. Islam became a dirty word and all Muslims became suspect. I remember the traumatized Muslim women who sought counseling after sudden law enforcement raids on their homes in Virginia. In an art class, one of them painted a blurred red, white and blue flag. When the counselor asked why was it blurred, the woman answered: “Because of my tears.” Her friend began using paper cups and plates because she did not know when “they would come back and take us.” The raids did not uncover any troubling information, but scores of Muslims were scarred forever. Others were deeply touched by acts of kindness, like the human chain formed by their non-Muslim neighbors who surrounded a mosque to protect it from vandalism. Now that the clouds may be slowly parting, might we not reconstruct our dream of a happy and harmonious interfaith world, one that truly honors the First Amendment of our Constitution?

Howard Lesnick Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law Most of the economic, cultural, and political changes that have occurred in this country in the last decade - the legitimation of endless rapacity in economic life and the resulting insulation of its consequences from political redress, the pervasive militarization of foreign policy and the growing ordinariness of “wars of choice,” the largest patronage boondoggle in American history (aka the War in Iraq) , the near-total annihilation of independent journalism, disastrous turns in policy toward public education and immigration — probably would have occurred in some form had September 11, 2001, been just another day. Yet it seems hard to discount its tragic significances. Like historic assassinations, it seems a defining moment, a critical turning- point, burned into our national consciousness. Shooting an archduke, or a President may set in motion terrible things, but the act itself is all too ordinary; incinerating over 3,000 people who just happened to go to work that day is of a different order of thing. Pearl Harbor, after all, was a naval base. Speculations about causation seem beside the point. My daughter was walking across Washington Square that morning, and saw one of the towers fall. For an American, happily, that is a different order of things.

David A. Skeel S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law The morning the Twin Towers were destroyed, I was on my way to the law school to teach (I thought) my bankruptcy class. There hadn’t been many noteworthy bankruptcies that year, but this would soon change. Enron collapsed a few weeks later, and its scandal-riddled collapse would be followed by Global Crossing, WorldCom and other companies. No one would have imagined those scandals on that unnervingly brilliant September morning, and still less would they have imagined the even greater collapses of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG and others seven years later. In retrospect, 9/11 stands like a line of demarcation between the old business and financial order that dated back to the 1930s, and a new order that is still emerging, even after two major pieces of legislation: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. It would be nice to say that 9/11 was the day that the “greed is good” ethos of the 1980s and 1990s ended, and was replaced by sensible regulation and a more nuanced perspective on markets and finance. But that wouldn’t be accurate. We aren’t there yet.

On the eve of a historic vote in Congress that will fundamentally change U.S. patent law, a new study authored by professors David Abrams and R. Polk Wagner of the University of Pennsylvania Law School finds that a rule change moving away from the current “first-to-invent” system used in America for generations to the “first-to-file” system, universally used by foreign countries, is likely to result in a drop in patents requested by and issued to small and individual inventors.

While the upcoming vote on the Hill may see the broadest set of changes to American patent Law in two generations, perhaps surprisingly virtually no empirical analysis has been conducted on the impact of the primary components of the proposed reforms, which are deeply controversial. On the one hand, opponents of the “first-to-file” system, who favor how the current U.S. law operates, argue that proposed reforms disadvantage small inventors and will lead to lower quality patents. Those in favor of moving away from “first-to-invent” – notably the Obama administration – emphasize administrative simplicity and the cost savings of “first-to-file.”

With their groundbreaking new study, Abrams and Wagner investigate the expected effects on patenting behavior of the major change in the so-called “America Invents Act of 2011” on which Congress will vote next week. The study authors looked to the experience of the last industrialized nation to switch from “first-to-invent” to “first-to-file” – Canada, which changed its law in 1989 – as a natural experiment to shed the first empirical light on the question.

Their analysis uses a “difference-in-difference framework” to estimate the impact of the change in Canadian law on that country’s small inventors. A “difference-in-difference” analysis is a research design that controls for effects other than the priority rule change. In Abrams and Wagner’s study, by comparing the observed differences in individual patenting behavior in Canada across the 1989 change in the law to differences in individual patenting behavior in the U.S. during the same time period, the authors were able to isolate the effect of the law change on individual patenting behavior in Canada.

Using data on all patents granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Abrams and Wagner find a significant drop in the fraction of patents granted to small inventors in Canada coincident with the implementation of the change over to the “first-to-file” law.

Abrams and Wagner note, however, that they found no measurable changes in patent quality. Moreover, they write, while “the net welfare impact that can be expected from a shift to first-to-file is unclear, our results do reveal that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the rule change is not free – it is likely to result in reduced patenting behavior by individual inventors.”

As background, patent priority rules establish who among competing inventors has the right to receive a patent on an invention. At first blush, Abrams and Wagner point out, this seems a remarkably simple question: the first inventor should receive the patent grant. But the situation becomes much more complex when there are multiple inventors independently working in the same area of technology; only one can receive the patent grant. And while it is simple to establish a rule wherein the first  inventor gets the patent rights, the question is, what act triggers the establishment of the rights? This, then, is the basic difference between the U.S. “first‐to‐invent” system and the “first-to-file” system used everywhere else in the world. According to current U.S. law, the first “inventor” is given the patent rights, while elsewhere the inventor who first files an application at the patent office will receive the rights.

The paper is available for download at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1919730.

Related Links:
Wall Street Journal (subscription required), "Patent Overhaul Nears"

This week the University of Pennsylvania Law School welcomed 266 first-year JD students with a series of tours, panels, service projects, social events, and lectures as part of Orientation.

This year’s 1Ls earned a median 170 on the LSAT and posted a record high median GPA of 3.86. The class is comprised equally of men and women, and 37 percent identify as people of color.

“Beyond the statistics, the Class of 2014 is filled with incredibly accomplished, talented and dedicated students,” said Michael A. Fitts, dean of the Law School.  “The vast majority of the class has work experience after college, includes several Fulbright scholars, and join us from a wide range of law-related fields, from business to biotechnology, from international economics to public policy.”

Members of the Class of 2014 hail from 33 states, the District of Columbia, U.S .Virgin Islands, and from countries across the globe, including Canada, China, Germany, Hong Kong, South Korea, Nigeria, and Trinidad and Tobago. One hundred and twelve undergraduate institutions are represented in the class.

States with the highest representation for the Class of 2014 are: New York; Pennsylvania; California; New Jersey; Florida; Texas; Illinois and Massachusetts (tied.)

View student and alumni profiles.

Additional photos on Flickr:
2011 JD Orientation
LLM BBQ

Farah Jimenez C’90, L’96, president and CEO of the People's Emergency Center (PEC), sat down with Penn Law’s Office of Communications to discuss her career in the field of community development and her current role at PEC, a social services agency that serves homeless families through a range of housing, case management and counseling services.