Our News & Stories

Cynthia Dahl, an accomplished intellectual property lawyer and leader with experience as both corporate counsel and law firm litigator, is the inaugural Director of the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s new Detkin Intellectual Property and Technology Clinic.

Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Professor of History, has been appointed a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians (OAH).

The Hon. Louis Pollak

The Hon. Louis Pollak, who served as Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1975 to 1978 before being appointed to the federal bench, died Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia after a long battle with heart disease. He was 89.

Judge Pollak, who served on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, was widely regarded as one of the leading members of the judiciary in the country.

For the 11th consecutive year, a Penn Law student has been named a recipient of the Burton Distinguished Legal Writing Award.

She will be recognized at the 13^th annual Burton Awards ceremony, to take place at the Library of Congress on June 11, 2012. Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is the scheduled speaker. Bernadette Peters, the two-time Tony Award winning actress, is also on the program.

Tobias Barrington Wolff, Professor of Law

The Pennsylvanians traveling to Washington along with Wolff are:

• William Ewing, National Employment Lawyers Association
• Jodi Hirsh, Pennsylvania Coordinator, People For the American Way
• Eleanor Levie, Advocacy Chair, National Council of Jewish Women, Greater Philadelphia Section
• Christine Stone, Board Member and Pennsylvania Public Affairs Chair, National Council of Jewish Women and Chair, Pennsylvania Coalition for Constitutional Values
• Stella Tsai, Partner, Archer & Greiner, P.C.
• Twanda Turner-Hawkins, Vice President, National Bar Association

They will join 150 advocates from 27 states in a day of discussions with White House staff. A deal between Senate Republicans and Democrats to allow judicial nominations to proceed in the Senate expires May 7th, and the advocates are urging the Senate to hold final up-or-down votes on all pending nominees.

After the White House meeting, the advocates will visit the offices of key senators, including Senators Casey and Toomey, to urge them to work to end the delays that have plagued the Senate confirmation process since the beginning of the Obama presidency.

Despite the delays, the overwhelming majority of Obama’s nominees have garnered tremendous bipartisan support, such as Cathy Bissoon, Mark Hornak and Robert Mariani, who were confirmed to seats in Pennsylvania district courts by large bipartisan majorities in October.

The Pennsylvania delegation will also urge Senators Casey and Toomey to quickly recommend to the president nominees for Pennsylvania’s empty seats. They hope their conversations in Washington will help national leaders understand how harmful the confirmation delays have been to Americans who are seeking justice.

Louis S. Rulli, Practice Professor of Law and Clinical Director

Rulli was honored for his contributions not only as Practice Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs, but for serving  as an “inspiring example and mentor to others engaged in pro bono service” through his countless bar association activities and non-profit board affiliations, as well as the vast amount of pro bono legal assistance he offers in which he routinely makes it a priority to engage students.

The Recognition Event celebrated the pro bono and public interest work of the Law School’s 2012 graduating class, who collectively performed more than 30,000 hours of service. Third-year student Jaime Gullen received the C. Edwin Baker Award for performing the most pro bono hours of any student in the Class of 2012 – 638 hours over her three years at the Law School. Gullen, who co-founded two separate pro bono projects, is also the recipient of a postgraduate fellowship.

Tthe Law School’s 2012 graduating class collectively performed more than 30,000 hours of service.

For a complete list of individuals and organizations honored, see the Recognition Event program 2012.pdf.

Jonathan Ellis L’10

Jonathan Ellis L’10, who is currently wrapping up a year’s service as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice, will begin a year-long clerkship this July for Chief Justice John G. Roberts of the Supreme Court of the United States.

“I’m excited to work closely with one of the most respected jurists of his generation,” said Ellis during a recent call. “It’s a great honor to have the opportunity to work with the Chief Justice, and to get a view of the Supreme Court that isn’t available to many citizens.”

A standout student while at Penn Law, upon graduating in 2010 Ellis was awarded the Peter McCall prize, which is awarded each year to the member of the graduating class who has received the highest grades during their three years at the Law School.

Ellis, whose interest in appellate work runs deep, sought during each year of his summer employment while in law school to work for appellate lawyers, and clerked after graduation for Judge A. Raymond Randolph on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He then applied to be a Bristow Fellow, which are awarded to law school graduates with excellent academic records, typically after completion of a one-year judicial clerkship, usually with a federal appellate-court judge.

In applying for a highly coveted Supreme Court clerkship, Ellis worked with the Law School’s clerkship committee in preparing his application, including with Christine Fritton, the Associate Director for Clerkships in Penn Law’s Career Planning & Professionalism office. “She gave me good advice on how to prepare for the process,” he said, and added, “Professors Bibas, Burbank, and Yoo graciously wrote letters of recommendation for me.”

With no small amount of humility, he remarked his successful application is “thanks to some good fortune and a great deal of help from Penn and elsewhere.”

In addition to looking forward to working with Chief Justice Roberts and learning more about his working style and decision-making process, Ellis hopes his clerkship “will continue to improve my legal writing,” on which he devoted particular focus while at Penn Law, during his previous clerkship, and as a Bristow Fellow. “I also hope to enhance my research and reasoning abilities over the next year.”

Meanwhile, Ellis looks forward to working with Roberts, “often the voice of the Court,” and to “witness a wide array of oral arguments, skills, approaches, and styles,” and to garner insights into “what moves the Court to decide the cases the way it does.”

As Ellis starts his clerkship this July, he follows another recent Penn Law alumnus to the U.S. Supreme Court, Christopher DiPompeo L’09, who is in the final months of his year-long clerkship with Chief Justice Roberts.

“Chris was a year ahead of me,” Ellis explained, “and is a friend; we met during my Admitted Students Weekend and had similar experiences at Penn Law. For example, he was president of the Law School’s Christian Legal Society when he was a 2L, and then I was the following year. We both were on the Law Review board. And we worked together for a summer at Jones Day – he was a rising 3L and I was a rising 2L.”

Meanwhile, Ellis is still determining his career’s future direction. “I’m very interested in appellate work, though I’m not sure whether that will be in the government or in private practice. I suppose I have the next year-and-a-half to figure that out,” he said. “I’d certainly be excited to argue in front of the Supreme Court one day.”

-More college and university participants located in PA than anywhere else in U.S.-

Double Rainbow over Penn Park, University of Pennsylvania Photo by Scott Spitzer, Office of University Communications

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced the winners of the 2012 College University Green Power Challenge and the top winner in the Green Power Challenge is the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, more colleges and universities who are participating in the Challenge are located in Pennsylvania than any other state in the nation. Of the 73 universities participating, 17 are located in Pennsylvania and are buying green power - - power from renewable resources.

The University of Pennsylvania beat out 72 other schools across the country by purchasing more than 200 million kilowatt hours (KWh) of green power or 48 percent of its total power purchases.

Green power is generated from renewable resources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biogas, and low-impact hydropower. The University of Pennsylvania has taken first place honors in the challenge for the fifth consecutive year and its green power use is equivalent to avoiding greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 27,000 passenger vehicles each year.

“By purchasing green power from renewable sources, these 17 Pennsylvania institutions are spurring the development of the nation’s green power market and reducing harmful air pollution,” said EPA’s mid-Atlantic Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin. “Their commitment to renewable energy, especially at the University of Pennsylvania, is contributing to the growth in green jobs and a green economy.”

The other 16 Green Power Partners in Pennsylvania are: Duquesne University in Pittsburgh; Dickinson College in Carlisle; Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster; Haverford College in Bryn Mawr; Swarthmore College in Swarthmore; Gettysburg College in Gettysburg; Philadelphia University in Philadelphia; Drexel University in Philadelphia; Juniata College in Huntingdon; Eastern University in St. Davids; Allegheny College in Meadville; Bucknell University in Lewisburg; Mercyhurst College in Erie; Chatham University and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh; and Marywood University in Scranton.

For more information on the winners: www.epa.gov/greenpower/initiatives/cu_challenge.htm.

For more information on EPA’s Green Power Partnership: www.epa.gov/greenpower.

 

Ben Grunwald, C'08, L'13, PhD'13, a second-year student at University of Pennsylvania Law School who is pursuing a joint degree in law and criminology, has won the 2012 Student Paper Award from the Law and Society Association (LSA) for his study of sentencing guidelines.

Prof. Edward Rock L’83, the Saul A. Fox Distinguished Professor of Business Law.

Two articles co-authored by Penn Law’s Saul A. Fox Distinguished Professor of Business Law Edward B. Rock L’83 appear on the Corporate Practice Commentator’s latest annual list of “Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles.” The poll tabulates the top selections by teachers of corporate and securities law from a pool of more than 580 articles published in legal journals in 2011. Professor Rock’s articles have appeared in the top 10 list six years in a row.

Rock’s articles, co-authored with Marcel Kahan, are “When the Government Is the Controlling Shareholder,” from the Texas Law Review, and “The Insignificance of Proxy Access,” from the Virginia Law Review.

“When Government Is the Controlling Shareholder” deals with the recent government bailouts of major corporations, in which the U.S. Treasury invested in private firms. The article addresses how corporate law applies when the government is the controlling shareholder.

In honor of the release of “Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in and Asymmetrical World,” the University of Pennsylvania Law School will host a book celebration on Monday, April 30, 2012 at 5:30 p.m. in Silverman 245, Levy Conference Room.  

• What is targeted killing in a military context and what is the theory under which such killings may be permissible?
• Does the law of war confine lawful attacks to conventional battlefields or has the specter of terrorism transformed the entire world into a global battlefield?
• Do law and morality break down at the margins when military and civilian leaders are forced to take drastic action to stop deadly terrorist attacks?

By Jenny Chung C'12

Four films by Penn Law students premiered the evening of April 18 at the Law School's Michael A. Fitts Auditorium, marking the third annual Rough Cut Film Festival.

Professor Regina Austin welcomes the audience to the 2012 Rough Cut Film Festival.

Austin prefaced the screenings with a request for audience feedback after the show; she reminded those in attendance of the “measure of courage [required] to present ‘rough cuts’ to lawyers and other experts with years of experience.” Each film, half an hour in length, was followed by a brief question-and-answer session in which audience members communicated inquiries and suggestions directly to the filmmakers.

Disabled: SSI and Aiding Children in Need

The evening opened with Disabled, which documented the difficulties confronting families seeking federal aid to care for children with disabilities.

Featuring interviews with parents of disabled children, legal advocates and lawmakers, the film revealed the impact of revisions to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Act introduced as a result of welfare reform legislation passed in 1996. A more stringent test of eligibility, which now mandates the individual evaluation of each child’s functionality as part of her or his assessment, caused over 100,000 children to lose their benefits.  While well over 60 percent of children who apply for benefits are now denied, the film goes on to explain that the House of Representatives recently passed a resolution to cut $1.4 billion from the program in the interest of reducing spending.

Pushed Out and Forgotten: Philadelphia’s Youth and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Angela Briggs L'12, Tiffany Gelott L'12, and Ginene LewisL'12 presented "Pushed Out and Forgotten: Philadelphia’s Youth and the School-to-Prison Pipeline."

Pushed Out and Forgotten addressed aspects of the disciplinary practices of the Philadelphia public school system that contribute to high dropout and incarceration rates.

Tsedey Bogale L'13, Tarun Sridharan L'13, and Shikha Bhattacharjee L'13, and Lauren O'Garro-Moore L'12 present "Between Worlds: The Path to Independence for Immigrant Survivors of Domestic Violence."

Yiyang Wu L'12, Samuel Saylor L'12, and Thomas Isler L'12 present "Pay Up! Criminal Justice Debt in Philadelphia."

16 Penn Law and Wharton students traveled to NYC to learn more about the investment industry.

A group of 16 Penn Law and Wharton students recently traveled to New York City to meet with several prominent private equity firms and hedge funds and learn more about careers in the investment industry. The trek was organized by the JD/MBA Student Association, and sought to give students an opportunity to learn more about the different roles within investment firms, and the opportunities available to law school graduates within the investment industry. 

Linda Wang, C’12
 

Randall Kennedy, Raymond and Sadie Alexander Visiting Professor of Law

Randall Kennedy on Thurgood Marshall's career as "Mr. Civil Rights"

Kennedy did not pass judgment on Marshall for making these controversial decisions, but he did believe in having debates about them. “I think Thurgood Marshall’s career and stature can stand disagreement. We shouldn’t engage in hagiography. We should engage in a critical examination of this great man’s career.”

The University of Pennsylvania Law School’s graduation ceremony was held at the Academy of Music on Monday, May 14, 2012 at 3:00 p.m. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has had a varied career as a lawyer, prosecutor, Mayor of New York City, Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and a 2008 presidential candidate delivered the Law School's commencement address.

- Roberts to be inaugural Sadie T.M. Alexander Professor of Civil Rights -

President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price  announced the appointment of Dorothy Roberts as the University of Pennsylvania’s fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, effective July 1, 2012.

The Penn Integrates Knowledge program was launched by President Gutmann in 2005 as a University-wide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines, and who are jointly appointed between two schools at Penn.

Joanna Visser L’10, joined the Toll Public Interest Center and Juvenile Law Center as the 2011 Toll Public Interest Center Philadelphia Fellow, where she supports efforts to end the practice of sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole, and counsels Penn Law students on local pro bono and public interest opportunities. Before beginning her Fellowship, she served as law clerk to the Honorable Joel Schneider, Magistrate Judge, United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.

 The Legal Intelligencer has named Elizabeth McManus L’ 04, Associate Director for Professional Development of Career Planning and Professionalism at Penn Law, among its list for “Women of the Year,” which highlights the achievements of top female attorneys across the state of Pennsylvania who have made positive contributions to the legal community.

Kara Finck, most recently Managing Attorney for the public interest organization The Bronx Defenders, is the new Director of the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Child Advocacy Clinic.

Megan Rok L'11, Sara Alba L'11, and Jamie Gullen L'12 (Not pictured: Denisse Cordova, L’12, studying abroad at University of Mannheim)

As part of its commitment to supporting public interest legal careers, the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Toll Public Interest Center (TPIC) has named 2012 Postgraduate Fellowship Award recipients.

Launched in 2009, the postgraduate fellowship program has grown through the generous support of alumni like Robert L'66 and Jane Toll GSE'66, Gerald McHugh, and Penn Law alumni at the Langer, Grogan, and Diver law firm. This year, the Law School added support from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, creating a total of four full-time postgraduate fellowships. Fellows design their own public interest projects and work with partnering non-profit organizations locally, nationally, or internationally on pressing issues and advocating for clients.

“The commitment to social justice and public-interest lawyering demonstrated by this year’s Fellows is both inspiring and impressive," said Michael A. Fitts, dean of Penn Law. "They have identified a broad range of social needs to which they are responding with great passion and outstanding legal talent.”

“These students work so hard in their time at Penn Law to serve the communities they care so much about," noted Arlene Finkelstein, Assistant Dean & Executive Director of the Law School's Toll Public Interest Center. "It gives us great pride to see them develop these projects in conjunction with their partnering organizations in a way that will not only have a tremendous impact, but also launch their public interest careers.”

The 2012 TPIC Postgraduate Fellowship recipients and their projects are:
 

• Sarah Alba, L’11, awarded the Toll Public Interest Fellowship. Alba will work with Manhattan Legal Services in New York. Sarah’s project, Advocacy Project to Remedy Employment Discrimination on the Basis of Credit Checks, will create a credit discrimination clinic which will employ community education, direct services, and policy advocacy to assist unemployed members of the minority communities of upper Manhattan overcome an emerging but overlooked barrier to re-employment: the usage of credit reports by employers to deny employment opportunities to minority applicants.

• Denisse Cordova, L’12, awarded the the Penn Law Fellowship. Partnering with FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), an international network of organizations, Cordova's project, Responding to Violations of Women's Human Right to Food, will serve women and girls whose right to adequate food has been violated by developing legal strategies that respond to gender-differentiated needs and priorities as well as gender inequalities in terms of opportunities and outcomes to enable affected communities to realize this human right. This project will respond to specific cases of violations of women's right to food in Latin America and develop prototype methodologies that can be replicated in other regions.

• Jamie Gullen, L’12, awarded the Langer, Grogan & Diver Fellowship in Social Justice. With partner organization Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, Gullen's project, Empowering Youth through Work Project: Reducing Barriers to Employment for Young Adults with Criminal Records, will utilize direct representation, community education and outreach, and systemic reform to will reduce barriers to employment for young adults with criminal records.  Through her project, Jamie will work with young adults to expunge their arrest records, reduce the amount of criminal justice debt they owe to the courts, and challenge the predatory practices of for-profit educational institutions that enroll students in training for fields from which they are barred by their criminal records.

• Megan Rok, L’11, awarded the inaugural University of Pennsylvania Law Review Public Interest Fellowship. Rok will partner with the Support Center for Child Advocates in Philadelphia. Her project, Educational Advocacy for Court-Involved Youth, will enable Megan to provide services for children in the child welfare system, who are at a high risk of poor education outcomes. In Philadelphia, 75% of these children do not graduate high school. Through this project Megan will provide a critical and missing element in the effort to address the education crisis of court-involved youth: an improved process for early identification and intervention through direct representation in Family Court and school proceedings to ensure new and existing education rights.

Fellows are selected by the TPIC Advisory Board, a group of legal professionals who serve as counsel to TPIC on its public interest programs and initiatives. The Fellowships are awarded through a competitive process, and recipients are screened through written applications and interviews. Successful applicants must demonstrate both a strong commitment to public service and an effective partnership with a public interest organization that will allow them to provide a necessary legal service to an under-represented cause or community. The Fellowships are designed to launch long-term public interest careers.

In addition to the Penn Law Fellows, a number of Penn Law 3Ls and alumni have succeeded in obtaining other fellowships to engage in public interest work.

Founded in 1989, TPIC is at the center of public interest initiatives at Penn Law, helping all students to cultivate meaningful opportunities to provide pro bono legal service to under-represented communities, while mentoring students who hope to make public interest their professional focus. The Center’s pro bono program, which includes a 70-hour pro bono requirement and emphasizes students’ professional development, has been recognized with the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award.

The Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law presents the 2012 Rough Cut Video Festival at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The Video Festival will  feature a series of short films produced by members of the Visual Legal Advocacy Seminar, taught by Professor Regina Austin L’73,the William A. Schnader Professor or Law and Director of the Penn Program of Documentaries and the Law.

A central component of the Program, Austin’s seminar exposes students to the use and analysis of law-genre documentaries and how they are used within the legal academy, while they learn about legal issues that are involved in making documentaries and explore the uses of nonfiction film as a tool of legal advocacy.

• Criminal Court debt
• The school-to-prison pipeline
• SSI benefits for children with so-called "silent disabilities"
• Immigrant women and services for victims of domestic violence

From April 2-5 the University of Pennsylvania Law School celebrated the formal opening of Golkin Hall, a state-of-the-art building that completes Penn Law’s magnificent and physically integrated campus and embodies its distinctive vision for an interdisciplinary legal education. A convocation and conversation with The Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was the culmination of the week-long series of special events at the Law School.
 
Celebrations included Tee Shirt Day and a Street Fair, as well as faculty and distinguished alumni panels examining trends in the future of legal education and how law guides America’s social, political and economic future and responds to multiple global challenges. The week concluded as the Penn Law community convened at Irvine Auditorium on April 5 for Golkin Hall’s dedication event, A Conversation with U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor spoke about her thoughts on the law, legal education and life.
 
"With the completion of Golkin Hall, our complex redefines the law school campus as a connected and collaborative space that encourages the integration of people and programs,” said Michael A. Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. “Golkin Hall symbolizes and furthers our vision of the role of lawyers in society today and in the future: not only as problem solvers, but as managers and leaders who can move seamlessly across fields. Penn Law embodies this ongoing integration of the law with related disciplines, as evidenced by our partnerships with schools and departments across Penn, and with other universities and institutions around the world.”
 
Fitts added: "The formal opening of Golkin Hall is also a testament to the extraordinary generosity and dedication of our many alumni who contributed their time and resources to help make this project such a great success."
 
The building, named in honor of Perry Golkin, W'74, WG'74, L'78 and Donna Golkin, WG'77, the lead donors to the project, is located on Sansom Street in West Philadelphia. The project broke ground in May 2010 and cost approximately $33.5 million, all donor supported; Penn Law did not borrow for construction. The building is 40,000 square feet and features an inviting two-story lobby leading to a two-story west wing and a three-story east wing. Designed by architects at the Boston-based firm Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Golkin Hall features roof-top gardens and green roofs, a state-of-the-art court room, and 350-seat auditorium.
 
Faculty, students, staff, and visitors enter from Sansom Street into Golkin’s lobby to spectacular views of the Penn Law courtyard, an essential element in the social and intellectual life of the Law School.
 
The completion of Golkin Hall entirely connects Penn Law’s four buildings that include Silverman Hall, Penn Law's signature, 110-year-old Georgian-style building, Tanenbaum Hall, and Gittis Hall. It does so while respecting the historical three-story row homes that make up the scenic and trendy Restaurant Row across Sansom Street. The end result is a façade that is well-situated in its neighborhood surroundings and welcomes the University community and public to Penn Law.
 
The Golkin Hall project follows a multi-year, $18 million, top-to-bottom renovation of three of Penn Law’s interconnected buildings. As a result, the Law School’s classrooms and Biddle Library are state-of-the-art, new faculty offices facilitate scholarship and student advising, collaborative-study rooms are available for teams of students, and the Gittis Center for Clinical Legal Studies and student groups benefit from improved meeting space.

The refurbishing of Penn’s Law’s campus responds to nearly 50 percent growth in Penn Law’s faculty during Fitts’ tenure as Dean, with stellar appointments in corporate law and finance, intellectual property, international law, and science and technology. In addition, since2000 Penn Law has expanded its cross-disciplinary curriculum, launching nearly 30 joint- or dual-degree and certificate programs with the preeminent schools and graduate departments at Penn, while infusing course work with the scholarship and training of its increasingly interdisciplinary faculty.
 
As a result, Penn Law graduates develop the knowledge, skills, and insights necessary to successfully navigate the fields in which they and their clients operate, in the U.S. and globally.

Click below to view images from the week-long series of events celebrating the opening of Golkin Hall: 

Dedicating Golkin Hall: A conversation with U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the media

• ABA Journal
• Associated Press
• Associated Press (News story with photos)
• Associated Press Photos
• CBS Philly
• The Daily Pennsylvanian
• The Legal Intelligencer
• The National Law Journal
• Philadelphia Inquirer
• University of Pennsylvania Law School newsroom

By Nicole Greenstein C'14

Dean Fitts and Justice Sotomayor at Irvine Auditorium.

While an onstage brass quintet played the sonorous music of Gabrieli, Bach and Handel to open the event, Sotomayor entered the auditorium alongside many other distinguished guests: Penn Law Dean Michael Fitts, University of Pennsylvania President Dr. Amy Gutmann, the Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress Dr. Daniel Hoffman, and Chairman of the Trustees David Cohen L’81, and Philadelphia City Councilman William Green L’95.

 

From left to right: David Cohen L’81, Chairman of the Trustees, Penn; Justice Sotomayor; President Amy Gutmann; and Dean Fitts.

Justice Sotomayor talks with students from the Law School's Latin American Law Students Association (LALSA.)

Dean Fitts presents a new scholarship in Sotomayor’s name for students aspiring to the judiciary.

The ribbon-cutting at Golkin Hall, with Perry Golkin, W'74, WG'74, L'78 and Donna Golkin, WG'77.

 

“Today marks the culmination of a decade-long effort to transform Penn Law,” Dean Michael Fitts said as he welcomed the audience at the convocation ceremony. “With this dedication of Golkin Hall, we have completed our vision for the finest urban law campus in America.”

 

Fitts added that the creation of Golkin Hall focused on one goal: to educate Penn’s students to become “the finest lawyers, problem solvers, and leaders they can be in service in to the society.” Whether it be through the pursuit of better access to justice, better healthcare, business entrepreneurship or human rights, Fitts said, Golkin Hall symbolizes the school’s vision for the role of lawyers in society today as well as for generations to come.

 

Sotomayor and Fitts soon sat at center stage for their conversation, where Sotomayor discussed how her childhood dream transformed into a reality.

 

Ever since she read detective novels like Nancy Drew and watched television lawyers like Perry Mason, Sotomayor knew from a young age that she wanted to be a lawyer. This passion continued from her childhood through high school, where Sotomayor joined debate teams and became active in student government.

 

However, it was not until studying the law in college that Sotomayor realized why the law was truly tailored to her personality and interests.

 

“At the end, what law is, is service to people,” she explained. “No matter what kind of law you practice, whether it’s public or private, non-profit or for profit, government or not, you are helping people and institutions manage relationships.”

 

“And it became clear to me at least, that I’m fueled by that,” Sotomayor added. “Personally, I enjoy working with people to help solve their problems.”

 

In addition to reflecting on her own past experiences, Sotomayor also cited life lessons she learned to offer firsthand advice to law students in the audience.

 

Aside from some of the more basic guidelines like earning good grades, having extensive writing experience, and finding a law professor mentor, Sotomayor stressed that perhaps the most important piece of advice she could give is to follow your passions to truly do something meaningful.

 

“Involve yourself in something that’s important to you, and make a difference,” she said. “Undertake whatever project you want — I don’t judge students’ passions by whether they’re politically correct or not…I judge the students by have they made a difference in whatever project they’ve undertaken.”

 

 After Sotomayor’s talk, Fitts announced a new scholarship named in honor of Sotomayor, for future students aspiring to follow in her footsteps.

 

Sotomayor, who in the words of Dr. Amy Gutmann “rose from a public housing project in the Bronx to the bench of the supreme court,” would not have been able to become the first Latina and third female Justice without scholarships for her education.

 

“I relied on the largess of people like the Golkins who created my American dream, and I am so grateful to this school for passing it forward to someone else,” Sotomayor said.

 

Philadelphia City Councilman William Green also joined the stage to officially declare April 5^th, 2012 as Penn Law Day. This dedication was made not only to recognize the formal opening of Golkin Hall, Green said, but also to honor “the contribution that the Penn Law School has made to the education of lawyers and the delivery of justice in our city, our country, and around the globe.”

 

Dean Fitts concluded the dedication ceremony with some thankful words to Sotomayor for being such a special part of this historic day. He explained that although one of the most intensely debated questions today is who should serve on the Supreme Court, what makes an admirable Supreme Court justice should not hinge on whether they are merely a liberal or a conservative.

 

“In the end, what we look for in a Supreme Court justice is a quality of mind, a sense of history, a sense of passion,” Fitts said. “Judge,” he added, turning to Sotomayor, “I think we’ve seen it on display in every way this afternoon.”

 

 

Stephanos Bibas, a Professor of Law and Director of the Supreme Court Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, scored a U.S. Supreme Court victory on March 28, in a complex immigration case involving a permanent resident of the United States facing deportation.

In Vartelas v. Holder, the Court ruled for the petitioner, Panagis Vartelas, whose case had been argued on January 18 by Bibas, assisted by students in Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic.

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court found that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), which strips lawful permanent residents convicted of a crime of the right to travel abroad with the guarantee of reentry, could not be applied retroactively to a green-card holder who pleaded guilty to an offense prior to 1996 and traveled abroad thereafter.

Vartelas, a citizen of Greece and a lawful permanent resident of the United States since 1989, was detained at New York’s Kennedy Airport in 2003 upon returning from a family visit overseas. Mr. Vartelas, a Queens businessman, pleaded guilty in 1994 to a U.S. court in a counterfeiting case – a crime that at the time wasn’t cause for deportation if he left the country and attempted reentry. However, when the IIRIRA was passed in 1996, it made even minor cases cause for deportation and was to be applied retroactively.

Students in Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic helped Bibas conduct research, draft the merits brief, and prepare strategy. The Clinic is the nation’s first to closely integrate practical experience on Supreme Court matters with an academic seminar on the workings of the Court. The year-long Clinic focuses on the practical side of identifying and litigating active Supreme Court cases, including participating in moot court rehearsals and attending oral arguments at One First Street, giving students intensive, hands-on experience.

“Participating in the Supreme Court Clinic has been a wonderful addition to my education here at Penn Law,” said Ellen Mossman L’12, who worked with Bibas and her fellow Clinic students preparing for arguments this semester. “The Clinic allows us as law students to participate in a unique experience in the legal profession that many lawyers never get the chance to do. My writing and analytical abilities have improved so much with the Clinic - the professors really push the students to expand their thinking, and the collaborative process allows us to reach arguments that one person could not reach alone.”

Mossman added: “Particularly with Supreme Court cases, it is sometimes easy to lose track of the real-world consequences of cases before the Court, and so it was great to be able to have a connection with the client to remember that these cases matter to the people involved. Participating in a merits case is a formative experience by itself, and winning the case really vindicates all of the time and effort that we put into the arguments.”

The Clinic is led by Bibas, Lecturer Stephen B. Kinnaird, also a former clerk to Justice Kennedy and a partner with the Paul Hastings law firm, and Lecturer Nancy Bregstein Gordon L’78, a former clerk to Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. The accompanying seminar is taught by Penn Law Professor Amy Wax and Adjunct Lecturer James Feldman, a former clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Both Wax and Feldman are former assistants to the U.S. Solicitor General, and combined have argued more than 60 cases before the Supreme Court.

Bibas litigates a wide range of Supreme Court cases, both criminal and civil. Most recently, in April 2011, Bibas argued the case of Tapia v. United States, in which the Court held that a federal court cannot impose or lengthen a prison term to foster a defendant’s rehabilitation. In March 2011, Bibas argued the case of Turner v. Rogers, which involved whether an indigent defendant has a right to court-appointed counsel when faced with being sent to jail for failing to pay child support. He and his co-counsel also won a landmark victory in Padilla v. Kentucky in 2010, persuading the Court to recognize the right of noncitizen defendants to accurate information about deportation before they plead guilty.

Professor Bibas recently discussed the uniqueness and value of the Supreme Court Clinic with Penn Law’s Office of Communications.
 

Jacques deLisle, the Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for East Asian Studies, and Associate Director of the new Center for the Study of Contemporary China at Penn, focuses his research and teaching on contemporary Chinese law and politics. This spring semester he has run an innovative new seminar, “China and International Human Rights,” drawing together Law School students, other Penn students, and members of the wider University community.

PL: Who are some of the experts you have involved in the series?

On Wednesday, April 4, the Law School will host two panels featuring Penn Law faculty and alumni, respectively, focusing on six critical areas of the law that will shape 21st century legal debates, and how legal education can prepare students for leadership in diverse fields. The panels are part of “Golkin Week ” April 2 – 5, which celebrates the formal opening of Golkin Hall.

From noon 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday the Law School community will convene in Levy Conference Center for the panel, “Future Impact: Law and Legal Scholarship,” which will feature Penn Law faculty members examining six critical areas where the law is rapidly changing and which will shape the legal debates of the 21st century. Participants will also discuss how changes in higher education and legal education will unfold over the coming decades and how a traditional law school education may change as a result.

The panel will be moderated by Ron Daniels, President of The Johns Hopkins University, and panelists include:

• Prof. Stephen Burbank on the future of American judiciary;
• Prof. William Burke-White on the future of international law;
• Prof. Jacques deLisle on the future of China;
• Prof. Jill Fisch on the future of the American corporation;
• Prof. Sally Gordon on the future of religion, politics and the law; and
• Prof. Edward Rock L’83 on the future of the financial system.

From 4:30 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. the Penn Law community will convene in the Michael A. Fitts Auditorium for the panel, “Future Impact: Leadership and a Legal Education,” which will feature six Penn Law alumni panelists who will offer their perspectives on how their time in law school prepared them for leadership in diverse fields – often, fields they could not have imagined as students – and shaped their approaches to the issues and challenges that they have addressed in their careers.

The panel will be moderated by Paul Haaga L’74, WG’74, Chairman of the Capital Research and Management Company, and panelists include:

• Pamela Johnson L’83, Founder, PSJ Advisors, and former Sr. Vice President, Fannie Mae (2002-2006);
• Osagie Imasogie GL’85, Senior Managing Partner, Phoenix IP Ventures;
• Steven Cozen C’61, L’64, Founding Partner, Cozen O’Connor;
• The Hon. Gene E.K. Pratter L’75, Judge, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania and former General Counsel to the firm of Duane Morris LLP;
• Perry Golkin W’74, WG’74, L’78, member, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts and Co.; and
• Daniel Garodnick L’00, council member of District 4, New York City Council, and former associate of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP.

For more information about the panels and for the complete schedule of events April 2 - 5 please visit the Golkin Week website.

As part of an innovative management class held recently over spring break, a group of University of Pennsylvania Law School students have raised over $36,000 for Make-A-Wish® Philadelphia and Susquehanna Valley, which will fund the wishes of local children with life-threatening medical conditions.

Prof. Adam Grant and Penn Law students present a check on behalf of their Organizational Behavior classmates to Make-A-Wish Philadelphia

A special check presentation to Dennis Heron, CEO of Make-A-Wish Philadelphia and Susquehanna Valley, by the Penn students and their professor took place on March 27 in Penn Law’s Golkin Hall.

Thirty-five Penn Law students devoted their time over spring break to take the graduate seminar “Organizational Behavior,” a unique class modeled after the hit NBC show, “The Apprentice.” As part of the course, from March 5-9 students were divided into seven teams to work every day, all day on a real-life challenge: to develop and execute a strategic fundraising plan, with all money raised going to Make-A-Wish.

The seminar, led by Adam Grant, a management professor at Penn’s Wharton School, provided students the opportunity to test, develop, hone, and reflect on their capabilities in making decisions, collaborating in teams, motivating peers and supervisors, influencing clients, and building and leveraging social networks. Students worked under the supervision of a number of experts involved in the challenge, including Penn Law alumni and practicing attorneys Rick D’Avino, Anthony Noble, Paige Pratter, and Jennifer Williams; as well as three lawyers on the Make-A-Wish board of directors, Nate Andrisani, Peter Ochroch, and Judge Felipe Restrepo.

“Make-A-Wish is honored to partner with the University of Pennsylvania Law School in support of local children’s wishes. The students represent the best in their field and are passionate advocates for the children we serve. We are deeply appreciative of their tremendous fundraising results,” said Heron.

Penn Law students with Prof. Grant on the last day of the seminar after learning the teams’ fundraising totals.

“This course was designed by Professor Grant to provide our students with an opportunity to develop and build their management, leadership, and team-building skills,” said Heather Frattone, Penn Law’s Associate Dean for Career Planning and Professionalism, who worked with Grant to organize the course. “We are thrilled to partner with Make-A-Wish, knowing that what students learned and accomplished as part of the class will have direct benefits for children in the Philadelphia area.”

Penn Law offered the course as an intense immersion experience that reflects the realities of organizational behavior in a large law firm or business. In addition to its benefits for the local community, the course complements the legal knowledge and analytical skills students develop as part of the Penn Law curriculum. Is part of the many partnerships the Law School has with other professional schools and departments at Penn, as well as with private and public sector organizations off-campus, to help further law students’ professional development and commitment to public service.

“The experience I had in this seminar is something I will not soon forget,” said Adam Katz, who is pursuing a joint law and MBA degree at Penn. “In just a week, we learned a tremendous amount about ourselves, working as a team, managing others, and perhaps most importantly, the power of a wish.”

Transcript

On Saturday, March 31 Penn Law will host the inaugural L.E.A.R.N. Education Conference, an all-day conference convening academics, politicians, entrepreneurs, educators, and other experts in public education to identify solutions to major challenges in America’s public schools. 

The conference, titled “Bridging Sectors to Rebuild Education,” aims to equip attendees with the requisite knowledge to develop personal action-items to improve public education. Keynote speakers include two political leaders at the forefront of education reform, Governor Ed Rendell C’65, HON’00, and Congressman Chaka Fattah MGA’86, who will discuss the challenges faced by the state and federal education reform initiatives they have proposed. 

Governor Ed Rendell C’65, HON’00

Congressman Chaka Fattah MGA’86

• Government: Policy-Making to a Better Educational Future
• Business Ventures: How Education Social Enterprises are Transforming Education
• Education Policy Research: Finding Data-Driven Solutions
• Law: How Legal Advocacy Can Ensure All Students Have Access to a Quality Education
• School and District Leadership: Lessons from the Trenches of Education Reform
• Non-Profits: Transforming Education

by Jenny Chung C’12

2012 Edward V. Sparer Symposium

According to Kossen, such initiatives as youth leadership councils are valuable because they provide outlets for youth to discuss issues of relevance to them. “It’s important to give youth opportunities to speak out…to reach out to marginalized youth with social media…and to [help them develop] decision-making capabilities with regard to all the programs and policies that impact them,” she said.

In addition to stressing the importance of teaching youth to “advocate for themselves,” Fosu exhorted lawyers and activists who hope to champion the interests of at-risk youth to “stay true to the cause, believe and always challenge.”

“All of us can advocate for issues, and we’re all responsible to each other to voice them,” Akallo added. “We can say ‘our Congressmen can do this,’ but individually we also have to contribute to change within our own communities.”

Keynote Address – Rachel Lloyd, GEMS

Rachel Lloyd, Founder and Executive Director of GEMS: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services

The panel was followed by a keynote address delivered by Rachel Lloyd, Founder and Executive Director of GEMS: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services. Based in New York City, GEMS is now the nation’s largest organization offering direct services and outreach to victims of sexual exploitation and trafficking. In 2008, the organization contributed to the passage of the New York Safe Harbor Act for Exploited Children, which ended the criminalization of trafficking victims.

“We’re more of a youth empowerment/gender-based violence organization than an anti-trafficking one,” Lloyd said, highlighting the need to view trafficking “as part of other systemic issues affecting youth.”

Evoking her experiences working with adult women emerging from the sex industry in 1997, Lloyd recalled “meeting 12- and 13-year-olds told to lie [about their ages] by their pimps, held in adult correctional jails.”

Underage victims of sex trafficking in the United States continued to be regarded as prostitutes rather than victims, she said, even after the Trafficking Victims Protection Act—which acknowledged the victimization of non-U.S. citizens exclusively—came into law in 2000.

“Over the years our biggest fight has been to ensure the recognition of victimization happening to girls in this country as the same thing happening to girls in Ukraine, Thailand [and] Cambodia,” Lloyd said. “13- and 14-year-old girls were arrested and charged with prostitution they couldn’t legally consent to—it doesn’t make legal or moral sense.”

Affirming the importance of “survivor leadership,” Lloyd spoke to the necessity of trafficking survivors coming to the forefront and developing expertise in the issues that concern them.

According to Lloyd, since the passage of the Safe Harbor Act in New York—designating it the first state in the country to “protect, not prosecute children for an act of prostitution they couldn’t even legally consent to”—nine other states have passed Safe Harbor legislation.

“I’m really proud of the work we did in Albany, not only because we changed state law, but because girls whose voices had been continually silenced were the ones who changed that law and are now affecting the history of the country,” she said. “I believe in the next five years we’ll see that law in every state, shifting the paradigm of seeing young people as victims, not criminals.”

In light of the fact that many GEMS clients came out of the child welfare system, Lloyd argued that system reform must be incorporated into the anti-trafficking movement.
“Histories of trauma and sexual abuse are so interwoven, only addressing criminal justice issues is insufficient,” she explained. “We must talk about systemic issues and root causes.”
Addressing the media spotlight currently trained on trafficking and the “momentum” generated as a result, Lloyd advocated the prioritization of “long-term systemic change” above immediate “rescue.” 

“We’re challenging the idea that you can rescue children—rescue is such a short-term solution,” she said. “We have to be focused on empowerment, economic independence and developing leadership and strength among youth."

By Linda Wang C’12

Khaled Abou El Fadl, UCLA School of Law

By Kai Syuen Loh C’15

This year’s Public Interest Week Honorary Fellow-in-Residence Marcia Greenberger C’67, L’70 shined a spotlight on women’s rights during her keynote address at Penn Law’s Silverman Hall on the evening of Wednesday, March 14.

In response to an audience member’s question on her biggest worry in the “entrepreneurial” aspects of advocacy, she said it was “the serious state of education decline.”

Nicole Greenstein C'14

On Wednesday, February 1, the Penn Law Women’s Association held its annual dinner at the Sheraton University City Hotel, drawing out a record-breaking crowd of over 180 students, faculty, attorneys, and alumni. In keeping with the Penn Law Women’s Association tradition, the event attracted women from across the legal spectrum — from first year students to seasoned attorneys. Participants enjoyed a cocktail reception, followed by an elegant dinner in the Ben Franklin Ballroom with a speech by the keynote speaker, Marjorie Margolies. 

Margolies shared stories from her varied and distinguished career as an Emmy Award-winning journalist, United States Congresswoman, and Founder and President of Women’s Campaign International (WCI)— a non-profit agency that works in emerging democracies to empower women to actively participate in public advocacy and political processes.

Courtesy of Penn News

Neuroscience, with its brain scans and complex molecular pathways, may seem to have little in common with the law — except perhaps a penchant for obscure Latin phrases. But a collection of students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania are bridging the gap with the Law and Brain Student Group and an accompanying lecture series.

“Neuroscience is something that can impact almost every single action of humans,” said Gabriel Lázaro L'13, the group’s organizer and a law student at Penn. “From arts to criminal acts, it’s just telling you information about how we process everything we do.”

Begun in 2009 by former law student Benjamin Bumann L'11, the group and lecture series have continued under the guidance of Lázaro, who is now in his second year of Penn's joint J.D./Master of Bioethics program. Lázaro came to Penn Law directly after finishing his Ph.D. in neuroscience, working under researcher Joseph LeDoux at New York University. There he studied how memories of traumatic events are shaped in a brain region called the amygdala and how responses to objects or events that recalled these traumas could be altered.

Partway through his science degree, however, he felt a pull to apply what he was learning in his studies in a broader contest.

“I loved the lab but wanted to go to law school,” Lázaro said. “I’ve always been interested in the law and the policy behind science, health and mental health.”

When selecting a law program, he found the resources of Penn Law, with its joint degree program and Center for Neuroscience and Society, appealing.

“Penn is a great place to integrate if you’re interested in policy and science development and neuroscience specifically,” he said.

The debates that can emerge from such integration are numerous. How the brain influences behavior could alter society’s notion of “free will” and judgment of whether and how someone should be punished for their actions. Research that uncovers what the brain looks like when a person lies could help judges and juries determine whether to trust testimonies. And as neuroscience advances, the law will need to keep pace to help society navigate quandaries that may arise with innovations such as neuromarketing, cognitive-enhancing drugs and memory-blocking techniques.

So far, there are relatively few applications of cutting-edge neuroscience research in the legal arena, Lázaro said. Those that do exist are controversial.

One example is functional MRIs, a type of brain scan that tracks blood flow in the brain and is thought to indicate areas of brain activity. Some research suggests that the scans could show whether someone is lying or even whether a criminal possesses neural deficiencies associated with being a psychopath. Still, there is much debate over whether these scientific techniques are reliable enough to serve as evidence of guilt or innocence.

That’s what makes bringing together experts in both law and science so valuable, Lázaro said.

“When you get into each of the fields, you start seeing the intricacies, concerns and doubts. As an academic, you begin to question how much you trust and how you can determine whether or not you have good data.”

The Law and Brain lectures draw a range of attendees, from law professors to medical students.

“All of this makes for a great debate,” Lázaro said. “These are scholarly discussions at their best, but what we’re talking about can impact what happens when we leave the room as well. I’m all for being practical and applying what we learn.”

In the most recent lecture, held March 15, Rita Goldstein, a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, spoke about the legal and societal implications of viewing addiction as a brain disorder.

The final talk of the lecture series for the academic year will be held on April 19 featuring Paul Glimcher, a Penn alumnus and researcher at New York University, who will discuss how neurobiological findings may influence politics and economics. The series included Owen Jones, who holds the New York Alumni Chancellor's Chair in Law at Vanderbilt Law School and is director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, speaking about the neuroscience of punishment decisions; Adam Kolber, Professor of Lawat Brooklyn Law School on the privacy of thoughts and feelings; and Oliver Goodenough, Professor of Law at Vermont Law School and Faculty Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, on neuroscience, law, and institutional design.

The talks, which are open to the public, are held Thursdays from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Each is followed by a reception, sponsored by the Law School’s Dean’s Speaker Fund. Additional information, including the location of each talk, is available at the Law and Brain Student Group Web site.

Kateryna Brezitska C’14

On February 22, the Penn Law National Security Society, the Office of International Programs, and the Student Affairs Speakers Fund co-hosted an address at the Law School by Dr. Marwan Muasher, a former Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, World Bank official, and currently a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment.

Further, Muasher made it clear that economic reform must precede political reform. “Once we put bread on the table, people will make wiser choices.” He said that in the past, the bread before freedom argument meant in many cases that neither bread nor freedom was had. One solution he proposed is education reform. Although there has been a great amount of monetary contribution towards education in the Middle East, the money has not been put in the right areas. “People talk about education as the quantity of education like putting computers to schools or talk about technical aspects of education like wanting to improve scores on international tests.”

From Monday, March 12 through Friday, March 16 the Toll Public Interest Center (TPIC) at Penn Law will host the Fourth Annual Public Interest Week, a series of workshops, conferences, and events which will explore pressing issues in pro bono and public interest lawyering. This year’s theme is: “Abundant Justice: Leveraging Our Collective Resources for Maximum Impact.”

• A public interest practice area fair and reception;
• A panel discussion on access to counsel in PA death penalty cases;
• A discussion on civil rights in prisons;
• A screening of the film A Question of Integrity: Politics, Ethics, and the Supreme Court and discussion immediately following on issues of conflict of interest and impartiality of SCOTUS judges;
• A workshop for students on how to thrive as a public interest lawyer;
• A discussion on minority youth in the juvenile justice system;
• A panel discussion on advocating for consumers in the regulatory context;
• A workshop on the nuts-and-bolts of post-graduate public interest fellowships;
• The week will end with the fourth annual Penn Law Public Interest Alumni Dinner, bringing current students together with the legal professionals in whose footsteps they hope to follow.

From April 2-5 the University of Pennsylvania Law School will celebrate the formal opening of Golkin Hall, a state-of-the-art building that completes Penn Law’s magnificent and physically integrated campus and embodies its distinctive vision for an interdisciplinary legal education. The Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, will participate in the Dedication Convocation on April 5, which includes a conversation on the law with the Law School and wider Penn communities.

High resolution images for media:
Golkin Hall Sansom Street Exterior
Golkin Hall Sansom Street with Center City skyline
Golkin Hall Berylson Family Lobby
Photo from green roof overlooking Courtyard

The convocation and conversation with Justice Sotomayor is the culmination of a week-long series of special events at the Law School. These will include celebrations as well as faculty and distinguished alumni panels examining trends in the future of legal education and how law guides America’s social, political and economic future and responds to multiple global challenges.

Perry Golkin, W'74, WG'74, L'78 and Donna Golkin, WG'77 accept Dean Fitts' (far left) appreciation for their lead gift and inspiring support for Golkin Hall project.

"With the completion of Golkin Hall, our complex redefines the law school campus as a connected and collaborative space that encourages the integration of people and programs,” said Michael A. Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. “Golkin Hall symbolizes and furthers our vision of the role of lawyers in society today and in the future: not only as problem solvers, but as managers and leaders who can move seamlessly across fields. Penn Law embodies this ongoing integration of the law with related disciplines, as evidenced by our partnerships with schools and departments across Penn, and with other universities and institutions around the world.”

Fitts added: "The formal opening of Golkin Hall is also a testament to the extraordinary generosity and dedication of our many alumni who contributed their time and resources to help make this project such a great success."

The building, named in honor of Perry Golkin, W'74, WG'74, L'78 and Donna Golkin, WG'77, the lead donors to the project, is located on Sansom Street in West Philadelphia. The project broke ground in May 2010 and cost approximately $33.5 million, all donor supported; Penn Law did not borrow for construction. The building is 40,000 square feet and features an inviting two-story lobby leading to a two-story west wing and a three-story east wing. Designed by architects at the Boston-based firm Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Golkin Hall features roof-top gardens and green roofs, a state-of-the-art court room, and 350-seat auditorium.

Faculty, students, staff, and visitors enter from Sansom Street into Golkin’s lobby to spectacular views of the Penn Law courtyard, an essential element in the social and intellectual life of the Law School.

The Berylson Family Lobby facing the Courtyard.

The completion of Golkin Hall entirely connects Penn Law’s four buildings that include Silverman Hall, Penn Law's signature, 110-year-old Georgian-style building, Tanenbaum Hall, and Gittis Hall. It does so while respecting the historical three-story row homes that make up the scenic and trendy Restaurant Row across Sansom Street. The end result is a façade that is well-situated in its neighborhood surroundings and welcomes the University community and public to Penn Law.

The refurbishing of Penn’s Law’s campus responds to nearly 50 percent growth in Penn Law’s faculty during Fitts’ tenure as Dean, with stellar appointments in corporate law and finance, intellectual property, international law, and science and technology. In addition, since 2000 Penn Law has expanded its cross-disciplinary curriculum, launching nearly 30 joint- or dual-degree and certificate programs with the preeminent schools and graduate departments at Penn, while infusing course work with the scholarship and training of its increasingly interdisciplinary faculty.

As a result, Penn Law graduates develop the knowledge, skills, and insights necessary to successfully navigate the fields in which they and their clients operate, in the U.S. and globally.

For more information about the Golkin Hall celebrations and the event with Justice Sotomayor, please visit the Golkin Hall Dedication Week website. Additional details about the event with Justice Sotomayor will be announced in the coming days.

 Click below to take a virtual tour of Golkin Hall!

In Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew Adler (Oxford University Press), Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at Penn Law, systematically examines how to integrate considerations of equality and fair distribution into government policy analysis. In the book provides a rigorous and comprehensive defense of the “social welfare function” arguing particularly for a “prioritarian” social welfare function: one that gives greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse-off individuals. In doing so, the book draws on many literatures: in theoretical economics, applied economics, philosophy, and law.

Professor Adler sat down with Penn Law's Communications Department to talk more about his book. 

Transcript:

I’m Matthew Adler, the Leon Meltzer Professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School. The book, which just came out is Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis. Basically, what it tries to talk about in a systematic way is how to do policy analysis in a manner that is sensitive not just to total costs and benefits but to fair distribution - to equality.

Cost-benefit analysis is a technique that has been used a lot. It is used by the U.S. government, it’s used increasingly by other governments, to think about policies and regulations. But cost-benefit analysis itself is not sensitive to distribution; it simply looks at total costs and benefits as opposed to looking at how those are distributed across the population.

So, what the book is trying to do is to think systematically about how incorporate these considerations of distribution into cost benefit analysis. And it does that using something called the social welfare function. Which is an idea has been around for a while in scholarship, various bodies of scholarship, which talk about talk about this idea of the social welfare function. But what this book tries to do is to bring together economics, philosophy, and the law… to try to provide sort of a synthetic, comprehensive, elaboration of this idea of the social welfare function as a way to think about policy making so as to be sensitive to distribution.

This transcript was edited for length.

By Cordelia Meserow C’14

On February 14 students and faculty members gathered in the Law School’s Gittis Hall for a symposium focusing on the latest book by Penn Law Professor Stephanos Bibas, The Machinery of Criminal Justice. Symposium participants included Richard A. Bierschbach, an associate law professor at the Cardozo School at Yeshiva University; Paul Robinson, the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at Penn Law; Stephen P. Garvey, a law professor from Cornell University; and Matthew Adler, the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at Penn Law, who served as moderator.   

The Machinery of Criminal Justice analyzes key problems with the American criminal justice system, and in the book Bibas explores the difficulties in meting out effective punishment, and how to re-integrate victims, defendants, and local community back into the overall process.

 By Anna Pan C’14

On February 15, an alumnus of Penn Law, Leo E. Strine, Jr. L’88, Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, addressed students, faculty, and jurists in Penn Law’s Levy Conference Center to take on the issue of judicial restraint versus judicial activism. His speech, titled “Regular Order as Equity,” was hosted by the Law School’s Institute for Law & Economics (ILE) as part of their annual Distinguished Jurist lecture series.

Chancellor Strine, an adjunct professor at the Law School, Harvard and Vanderbilt Law, joined the Court as Vice Chancellor in 1998 at the age of 34, and was named Chancellor last June. The Delaware Court of Chancery is recognized as the world’s preeminent forum for business and corporate law and dispute resolution.

Strine began his address with a wry explanation of why he believed ILE should change its name.

Strine then shifted topics, speaking in favor of the “judicial mindset that favors regular order over the episodic judicial grant of exemptions from required procedural expectations and the need to secure contractual runs at the bargaining table,” he said.

Strine noted that while judges use “imperfect tools,” he asserted “we have to try to provide justice equitably” by using such methods as standards of review and principles of interpretation “consistently in like cases, and to avoid deviating from them when political pressures or other factors create a temptation for one-off situational departures.”

By adhering to regular order, Strine said, “the judiciary does the most equity, because it upholds the reasonable expectations of citizens in a society governed under law that accords a high level of procedural due process, and that now enables all its citizens a fair opportunity” to participate in a democracy.

Equity emerged in the law, he explained, “as a gap-filler to do justice in a world of unevolved institutions, and where not all people were treated the same way in similar circumstances.” And it continues to play “a vital role as a gap-filler and as a key default protection in relationships where one party is given broad discretionary authority over the property and rights of others,” Strine said.

Chancellor Leo E. Strine, Jr. L'88

But, he argued, an “equitable impulse” is not license for judges to impose personal views of what the “right” outcome in cases should be, “thereby [enabling] litigants who have failed to follow procedural rules or to obtain the contract they wanted at the bargaining table, to get a result from a court that is at odds with what regular order would have produced.”

Moving into the realm of civil procedure, Strine noted, “I do not grasp the equity of excusing litigants from compliance with the rules.”

Prof. Randall Kennedy

Randall Kennedy, a leading scholar of civil liberties and race relations law and an award-winning author, has been appointed Penn Law’s inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander ED’18, GR’21, L’27 Visiting Professor of Civil Rights for the 2012 spring semester. Kennedy currently holds the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches courses on contracts, freedom of expression, and the regulation of race relations. 

Kennedy writes for a wide range of scholarly and general interest publications, and his recent books include Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011); Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008), and Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption (2003). His book Race, Crime and the Law was the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1998.

"We are delighted to welcome Randall, a celebrated scholar and gifted teacher, to the Law School as the first incumbent of this important professorship,” said Michael A. Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. “The Chair serves as a critical means by which we can educate the next generation of lawyers about civil rights law in America. In addition, it will serve to contribute within and outside the legal academy to the comprehensive study and discussion about ways we can combat discrimination in any form.”

"I am deeply honored to contribute to the legacy of the Alexanders, activist jurists whom I have long admired,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy sits on the editorial boards of The Nation, Dissent, and The American Prospect, and is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association.   

Kennedy earned his A.B. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Prior to joining Harvard’s law faculty in 1984, he served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sadie T.M. Alexander ED'18, GR'21, L'27 and Raymond Pace Alexander W'20

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was the first African American in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in economics and, in 1927, the first African American woman to graduate from Penn Law. Her exceptional career included service to President Harry Truman as a member of his President's Committee on Civil Rights, as well as her active role in the creation of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Rights and her work as its first commissioner.   

Her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, was appointed the first African-American judge on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas; one of his decisions led to the establishment of Community Legal Services. He and his wife played key roles in Pennsylvania's 1935 Equal Rights Law, making it illegal to deny African-Americans access to public schools, restaurants and hotels.

The Chair was established at Penn Law through an initial gift from the Alexander estate in 1993, and through the involvement of the Alexanders' daughters, Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter GR’81, who played a pivotal role over the years in leading fundraising efforts, and Mary B. Cannaday. The Chair has been co-funded by the Law School, Penn, and through a grant by the Pennsylvania Department of Education and a gift from the law firm Duane Morris. In addition, in 1994 Penn Law’s Black Law Students Association (BLSA) established a Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Committee and each year since then has hosted an annual dinner and conference to support fundraising for the Chair as well as celebrate the Alexanders’ lives and legacy. In total, more than 350 donors, including individual alumni, students, and faculty, as well as alumni groups, student groups, law firms, and corporations, have contributed to the establishment of the professorship.

Penn Law is actively seeking a permanent incumbent for the Chair.

By Jenny Chung C’12

On Feb. 16 renowned, author, academic, and political leader Michael Ignatieff was the speaker for Penn Law’s annual Owen J. Roberts Memorial Lecture series, delivering an address in Levy Conference Center titled “Standing in Law and Standing in Politics: The Rules That Determine Who Gets Heard.”

In his opening remarks, the Law School’s Dean Michael A. Fitts ranked the Roberts lecture series, now in its 50^th year, among the “grandest traditions” of Penn Law. The series had initially been launched in honor of the memory of alumnus and former Dean Owen J. Roberts, who served as a Depression-era Supreme Court Justice before returning to the Law School in the capacity of a professor.

Naming Roberts an “epitome” of the Penn Law ideal on account of his dual commitment to academia and public service, Fitts commended Ignatieff—author, professor and former leader of Canada’s Liberal party—for his contributions to liberal thought as a public intellectual and humanist, noting Ignatieff’s “[embodiment of] the virtues of Owen J. Roberts.”

Ignatieff started his lecture with a discussion of “standing” in the domains of both law and politics. Within the former, he noted, standing determines whether an individual has the right to be heard in a court of law. Political standing, by contrast, governs the right to vote and the right to seek public office.

“The enduring point of contention in standing cases is whether an individual’s or group’s right of access to the law is to be sacrificed on the altar of legal restraint, or whether judicial restraint is to be sacrificed in the name of equal protection,” Ignatieff explained, adding that “when we move from law into politics, a similar conflict emerges between using law to ensure that elections are free and using it to ensure that standing is equal.”

To Ignatieff, the ongoing debate over whether legal mechanisms should be deployed to ensure parity of standing between parties is reflective of broader disagreement surrounding “the balance between democracy’s conflicting principles.” 

Identifying the establishment of standing as the “critical condition for electability,” Ignatieff proceeded to examine how, due to the erosion of political allegiances among voters, candidates are now compelled to “battle for standing in a profession that has more power but less authority, legitimacy and respect than ever.”

He attributed the modern voter’s mistrust of political candidates to the “decay of institutions” that had once equipped candidates with “validation, testimonials, endorsements and other ritual conferrals of standing.”

Moreover, because voters now support candidates strictly on the basis of individual preference rather than along ethnic, gender or occupational lines, Ignatieff said, they have begun to “value their common identity as citizens less” and to vote less frequently as a result.

The ascendancy of the individualistic electorate has also led to the substitution of “micro-targeting to individuals” for “policy, platform and vision for the country’s future”—which, according to Ignatieff, once formed “an essential element” of politics.

He further explained that in order to conduct an effective campaign and acquire standing in the eyes of voters, candidates must rely on “paid professionals who wage campaigns against each other for commercial gain,” resulting in the professionalization of politics and the conversion of wealth into political clout. 

However, Ignatieff pointed out that a well-financed campaign alone may not be enough to gain voter approval. The principal determinant of standing remains, in fact, the candidate’s ability to affirm his “belonging” to the community he seeks to represent.

For this reason, he said, standing is not an “entitlement” reserved for the highest bidder, but remains “a privilege to be accorded by citizens”—in keeping with the founding principles of democracy, which posit that “the right to rule must be earned in the trust and confidence of ordinary citizens.”
 
Shifting his focus to a related issue in the political arena, Ignatieff observed that the battle for standing has rendered competition for public office a “war” based on the vilification of one’s opponent rather than a “debate” centered on “vision, platform and ideas.”

Ignatieff concluded by advocating the restoration of a “politics of adversaries” in place of the prevailing “politics of enemies” and the substitution of a “politics of program” for the current “politics of standing.”

“If standing becomes the only question in politics, none of the essential questions a society has to solve will get decided in elections,” he said. “Elections will become plebiscites of standing while the real questions—who do we want to be as a people, what challenges must we solve together—will not be decided by the people.”

Well known for his work as a human rights advocate of Western intervention in the prevention of genocide, Ignatieff had earlier served as Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government before his entry into Canadian politics as a member of the House of Commons, Liberal party leader, and as a candidate for Prime Minister. He is now Senior Resident at Massey College, University of Toronto, where he teaches courses in political science as well as law.

According to Dean Fitts, Ignatieff’s return to academia signaled his having “come full circle” in much the same way Roberts had decades prior. “Michael resembles Roberts in his commitment to scholarship, to legal education and to civic leadership,” he said as part of his introduction. “His fascinating career has redefined what it means to be a public citizen.”

By Jenny Chung C'12

Members of the Penn Law community convened this month for the Latin American Law Students Association’s (LALSA) annual conference, titled “Beyond the 2010 Census: Harnessing the Power of the Latino Community.” Inspired by the national dialogue in the wake of the 2010 census on the influence and potential of the growing Latino population, this year’s conference examined how the expansion of the Hispanic community can be converted into a political and economic force. 

The keynote address was delivered by Raul A. Reyes, an attorney and columnist who writes on issues relevant to the Latino community. A third-generation Mexican-American, Reyes’ work has explored—among countless other topics—how the question of racial and ethnic identity has impacted Latinos in the U.S. and the harsh realities faced by Latino youth. 

Reyes opened by extending his condolences to Thomas A. Saenz, President and General Counsel of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who was unable to deliver the keynote due to a death in the family. “Saenz is a role model of mine—he was involved in some of the most important civil rights legislation over the years and numerous cases in immigrants’ rights, education, employment and voting rights,” Reyes said, naming Saenz a “true Hispanic hero.”

He proceeded to enumerate and evaluate the challenges Latinos continue to confront within the current political system. “Due to demographics and the digital age, the Latino electorate have matured faster than the parties and candidates realize,” Reyes said. “But they’re still using moves from old playbooks because they don’t get us.”

According to Reyes, the prevailing conception of the Latino constituency as a “sleeping giant” is wildly inaccurate. “Pundits would wonder when we were going to ‘wake up’…my parents have been voting all their lives,” Reyes observed. He added that one of the “first” and “proudest” acts performed by recent immigrants is that of registering to vote. “We’ve never been ‘sleeping’—just overlooked until the numbers finally made that impossible.”

Due to the relative youth of the Latino population and its inclusion of a body of undocumented residents, Reyes said, many would-be members of the Latino electorate are ineligible to vote. Nevertheless, he maintained, demographics have heightened the importance of Latino voters in each successive election.

According to Reyes, twelve million Latinos will vote in the 2012 election, marking a twenty-five percent increase since 2008. Further, because swing states often have sizeable Latino populations, he said, “Latino voters could well determine who is the next occupant of the White House.”

In spite of such incentives to engage Hispanic voters, however, politicians have not yet begun to practice effective methods of “Hispanic outreach.” Such attempts, Reyes said, currently entail little more than translating campaign websites into Spanish—“overlooking the fact that Latinos are statistically the least likely group to have a home computer”—and airing commercials on Univision and Telemundo. Because the core viewers of both channels tend to be recent immigrants who cannot vote, he explained, the advertisements are unsuccessful.

Reyes emphasized the necessity for politicians to acknowledge the existence of two distinct Hispanic communities: the immigrant community, consisting of new arrivals and first-generation Americans, and the “more assimilated” community. “The latter group is the target for political parties, but they’re sending messages and resources to the immigrant market,” he said. “Until this distinction is recognized they’re going to continue to struggle to reach Latino voters.”

In Reyes’ view, it is likewise imperative that politicians cease to view illegal immigration as the issue of foremost concern to Latino voters, who—like other Americans—are most invested in jobs, the economy and education.

“What concerns Latinos most is our 11 percent unemployment rate, higher than the national average,” Reyes said. “Latinos were disproportionately affected by the foreclosure crisis, hardest hit in the recession and slowest to recover, and have dropout rates triple those of whites and double those of African-Americans…but the major political parties still think a major Latino issue is immigration.”

He also pointed out that, contrary to beliefs held by the political establishment, Latinos are no longer ethnic voters who invariably gravitate toward Latino candidates.

Reyes named Latina magazine as a compelling model of how best to engage a broad cross-section of the Latino community. With three million subscribers to its print edition and over one million monthly page views, Reyes said, Latina offers “a case study political parties should examine because it shows it is indeed possible to address and engage with Hispanics on a national level.”

He further identified social media as a necessary but as yet absent component of the Latino community’s relation to the political structure and an optimal way to reach young Latino voters. “Only when we’ve made voting an integral part of our civic lives—that’s when we’re truly going to advance,” Reyes said, concluding the keynote by challenging his audience to register non-voters.

The first of the day’s two panels, Growing Tomorrow’s Economy: Understanding the Latino Impact on the Marketplace, featured authorities in fields ranging from commerce to consumer advocacy. The next panel, 2012: Capturing the Latino Vote, followed with a discussion between experts in marketing, politics and political science concerning potential approaches by which the influence of the Latino constituency can be mobilized in the upcoming presidential election. 

By Jenny Chung C'12

Panelists at the Journal of Constitutional Law Symposium convened Jan. 20 explored constitutional law lessons derived from the New Deal and their relevance to the Obama administration.

According to JCL Editor-in-Chief Vivian Lee L’12, who delivered opening remarks, the Symposium aimed not only to advance dialogue within the discipline of constitutional law scholarship but also to showcase the “best work from the brightest scholars” in the field.

Penn Law Dean Michael A. Fitts further characterized the New Deal as a “transformative Constitutional moment,” reflective of an “obvious connection” between doctrinal issues of Supreme Court decision-making and events occurring beyond the Court’s chambers. The Symposium, Fitts said, addressed a topic both “amazingly timely” and “academically important.”

The first of the day’s panels centered on the court-packing plan proposed by President Franklin Roosevelt and its influence on present-day perceptions of the three branches of government and the separation of powers they collectively enforce.

Texas Southern University School of Law Professor Craig Jackson, who acted as panel moderator, opened discussion by remarking on the significant theoretical development occurring within the period in question, which—like the present—had confronted a range of economic and social pressures.

The panel commenced with University of Virginia School of Law Professor Barry Cushman’s critique of Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court, authored by historian Jeff Shesol and named a 2010 New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Cushman explained that any history of the court-packing controversy intends to answer three questions: how to understand the “political story,” or trajectory of the plan; how to understand the “legal story,” or constitutional landscape that confronted New Deal reformers; and how to articulate the relation between both narratives.

While Cushman commended Shesol’s rendering of the “political story,” in his view the author’s attempts to answer the second and third questions were less successful.
Shesol’s treatment of the topic, according to Cushman, overlooks the fact that doctrine was frequently employed by Justices to fulfill ideological and class ends.

Additionally, Cushman said, Shesol’s misunderstanding of legal doctrine resulted in his misconstruing certain court decisions and contributed to his failure to illustrate the relationship between the legal and political narratives at hand. “Shesol does not assess the salient causal elements and possibilities […] he instead tries to place potentially relevant factors on the table but doesn’t integrate them into comprehensive accounts,” Cushman concluded. “He never finds firm middle ground on which to stand.”

Cushman was followed by Professor Laura Cisneros of the Golden Gate University School of Law, who examined the legacy of the court-packing plan and its effects on institutional power arrangements with reference to the plan’s use and significance as a rhetorical tool.

Among the plan’s effects, Cisneros asserted, were the realigned balance of power among the branches, the reassertion of Congressional power vis-à-vis the President and the formation of factions within the Democratic party.

Though the term “rhetoric” has suffered a “serious decline in popular perception”— given its suggestion of “deceit [and the] dishonest use of language”—she maintains that this perception is “incomplete,” given the value of rhetorical orientation.

“Understanding a writer’s perception of experience provides insight into their basis for knowing what they know,” she explained. “What we see as reality is shaped by the words we use, and what we say is a product of how we say it.”

To Cisneros, the court-packing plan’s sustaining significance is representational: specifically, it functions as a trope signifying “institutional hegemony and governmental hubris and excess.” Close-reading both concurring and dissenting Supreme Court opinions to bolster her claims, Cisneros establishes the role of the court-packing plan’s language as a reminder to the public that judicial independence remains a vital component of the system of government and as a confirmation of the integrity of the separation of powers.

NYU School of Law Professor Deborah Malamud concluded the panel by addressing the New Deal’s “social and cultural radicalism,” its “preservative role” with regard to existing class structures and “resonance” with the current administration’s policy decisions.

In adjudicated cases of the New Deal involving the exercise of judicial power, Malamud said, “it is convincing that it made a big difference that the legal work done by the New Deal administration and the soundness of the litigation strategy made a big difference in what was rejected or accepted.” Adding that the above constitute “powerful internalist arguments” and stressing the importance of “[taking] seriously the phenomenology of the feeling of constraint by doctrine,” she explained that the “struggle with the question of doctrinal constraint was inconsistent with a purely externalist account.”

Malamud subsequently affirmed the necessity of attending to the Court’s own perception of the political and economic exigencies of the time in which the Justices lived, as decisions made under the conditions of “perceived exigency” acquire “precedential value.”

“Justices are called upon to understand the needs of the day,” she said, inviting the audience to contemplate how this condition influences the “positions taken by key Justices.” 

After a break for lunch following the first panel, Symposium attendees and participants reconvened for an interview featuring Jeff Shesol, conducted by Jeffrey Toobin for C-SPAN’s Book TV.

When asked about the impetus governing his authorship of Supreme Power, Shesol replied that he had consistently been “drawn to stories of conflict,” and the court-packing crisis may arguably be the “greatest constitutional conflict” of the age. “Institutions and individuals [were] fighting for great stakes,” he reflected.

Shesol recounted each stage of the conflict between Roosevelt and the Supreme Court, which had “struck down the centerpieces of the New Deal […] in short succession.”

“The real question was whether FDR [could] get anything fundamental done because the Supreme Court was standing in the way of everything,” he recalled.

The oldest Court in U.S. history, Roosevelt’s Court was known popularly as the “nine old men” and, according to Shesol, still subscribed to the spirit of the 19^th century on many issues. “Justices were scrambling in favor of doctrines thought dead for decades [and] applying them with vigor to New Deal cases,” Shesol explained.

Though the prospect of amending the Constitution had greater currency than that of court-packing, FDR rejected the former notion as he was convinced that the “problem” can be traced to the group of Justices as opposed to any inherent contradiction between the Constitution and the New Deal.

Despite playing out decades ago, Shesol said, the court-packing conflict is not without relevance to present-day issues. “It raises the question of whether the Court is a political institution and whether public pressure should exercise any influence on [its practices]—the perennial question in American public life,” he explained.

“The Court had taken itself out of the mainstream of American thought and was standing in the way of what a lot of Americans felt had to be done; it had allowed itself to fall out of step, and there was a sharp public counterreaction which had an effect on the Court itself and its decisions.”

The Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law, directed by Professor Regina Austin L'73, combines the study and production of documentary videos with legal education at Penn Law. The Program exposes students to the use and analysis of law-genre documentaries and how they are used within the legal academy, while they learn about legal issues that are involved in making documentaries and explore the uses of nonfiction film as a tool of legal advocacy.

Recent student videos have included a complex and balanced account of violence against Asian immigrant students at South Philadelphia High School and the ensuing civil rights case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against the Philadelphia School District; a look into the legal and social implications of gambling in the black community; an exploration of the “Ban the Box” ordinance in Philadelphia that bars employers from inquiring about the criminal histories or doing background checks of job applicants until after the initial interview; and a documentary about the impact of incarceration on motherhood and the challenges pregnant woman face while confined in jails and prisons.
 
Professor Austin recently spoke with the Penn Law's Office of Communications to discuss the uniqueness of the Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law.

On January 18, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument for Vartelas v. Holder to decide whether the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), which strips lawful permanent residents convicted of a crime the right to travel abroad with the guarantee of reentry, should be applied retroactively to a green-card holder who pleaded guilty to an offense prior to 1996 and traveled abroad thereafter.

Stephanos Bibas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the director of Penn Law’s Supreme Court Legal Clinic, argued the case for Panagis Vartelas, a citizen of Greece and a lawful permanent resident of the United States since 1989, who was detained at New York’s Kennedy Airport in 2003 upon returning from a family visit overseas. Mr. Vartelas, a Queens businessman, pleaded guilty in 1994 to a U.S. court in a counterfeiting case – a crime that at the time wasn’t cause for deportation if he left the country and attempted reentry. However, when the IIRIRA was passed in 1996, it made even minor cases cause for deportation and was to be applied retroactively.

For more information on Vartelas v. Holder and links to opinions and briefs filed in the case, see SCOTUSblog.

In the first full year of operation RegBlog, a student-edited website sponsored by the Penn Program on Regulation (PPR) at Penn Law, has attracted leading scholars, government officials, analysts, and business executives to become the leading daily online source for news, analysis, and opinion of regulatory matters.

• Professor Anita Allen’s argument about the virtues of certain kinds of government-mandated privacy
• Professor Theodore Ruger’s analysis of preemption issues raised by recent vaccine injury litigation
• Professor David Skeel’s commentary on the challenges of implementing the Dodd Frank Act.

RegBlog posts have been cited in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Yale Law Journal, Florida Law Journal, Google Finance, Open Congress, and many other outlets and publications.

Throughout 2011 Penn Law faculty and students alike continued to engage the most critical legal issues of the day. Our research, classes and programs demonstrated vibrancy and impact by taking on issues facing the nation and the world. From cross-disciplinary scholarship to testifying on Capitol Hill to programs taking faculty and students to every corner of the globe, Penn Law’s intellectual and programmatic expansion reflected the Law School’s physical expansion into the new Golkin Hall.

·      New Allen Book explores the need for privacy protections in an overexposed world

·      JIL Symposium on Middle East democratization: "No turning back"

·      Robert and Jane Toll Give Additional $2.5 Million for Penn Law's Public Interest Programs

·      Penn Program on Regulation Hosts DC Workshop on Open Government

·      Elisabet Wenzlaff LLM'82, Volvo's General Counsel and Senior Vice President, on the LLM Experience

Recent University of Pennsylvania Law School graduates Marsha Chien L’10 and Jesse Krohn L’11 and current Penn Law student Kristin Bochicchio L’12 are the recipients of national fellowships which will support their work in public service.

Marsha Chien and Jesse Krohn are among the Class of 2012 Skadden Fellows, which are awarded each year by the Skadden Fellowship Foundation “in recognition of the dire need for greater funding for graduating law students who wish to devote their professional lives to providing legal services to the poor (including the working poor), the elderly, the homeless and the disabled, as well as those deprived of their civil or human rights,” according to the Foundation.

The 2012 Class of Skadden Fellows includes 28 graduating law students and judicial clerks from around the U.S., including Penn Law alumnae Chien and Krohn, who will be supported in creating their own projects at sponsoring public interest organizations.

In addition, Kristin Bochicchio has been named a 2012 Equal Justice Works Fellow, a two-year fellowship program wherein Fellows design “unique projects that serve and address a range of legal issues, including domestic violence, homelessness, community economic development, immigration, civil rights, juvenile justice, employment rights, health care, consumer fraud, and environmental justice,” according to the organization. Equal Justice Works matches Fellows and their sponsoring public interest organizations with funding to support their projects.

Marsha Chien L’10	Marsha Chien L’10 will serve as a Skadden Fellow at the Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center in San Francisco. Her project involves direct representation, community education and impact litigation for limited-English proficient (LEP) workers barred from equal employment opportunities. Before law school, Chien was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala. In law school, she was a Penn Law Toll Public Interest Scholar and during law school worked with Friends of Farmworkers, California Rural Legal Assistance, Penn Law’s Transnational Clinic, and co-directed both the Penn Law Immigrant Rights Project and Employment Advocacy Project. She is currently clerking for the Hon. Marsha J. Pechman in the Western District of Washington.
Jesse Krohn L’11	Jesse Krohn L’11 will serve as a Skadden Fellow at Philadelphia Legal Assistance. She will be providing direct representation to indigent teen parents on matters of child support and custody, protection from abuse, and access to public benefits, in order to enable them to reach their educational and professional goals. Krohn is a former Teach for America teacher in Philadelphia. As a law student Krohn was a Penn Law Toll Public Interest Scholar and during law school she worked with the National Women’s Law Center, the Education Law Center, and the Penn Law Custody and Support Assistance Clinic pro bono project, where she supervised other students and began her relationship with the organization that will host her project. She is currently clerking for the Hon. Ellen L. Hollander in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland.
Kristin Bochicchio L ‘12	Kristin Bochicchio L ‘12 will serve as the BP/ Arnold & Porter Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Tahirih Justice Center in Houston, Texas. She will be providing representation and outreach to African and Middle Eastern women and girls fleeing gender-based violence. While in law school, she worked as co-director of Penn Law’s Students Against Gender-Based Exploitation pro bono project, represented an Iraqi refugee living in Jordan through the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, and received an International Summer Human Rights Fellowship to intern at the Gender Research & Advocacy Project of the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia. A dual JD/MA student, Bochiccio is currently finishing a Masters in French law at Sciences Po (L'Institut d'études politiques) in Paris.

Among the Class of 2011 Skadden Fellows are Sheerine Alemzadeh L’11 and Amy Laura Cahn L’09, who are currently pursuing their Fellowship-supported public interest projects at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, and the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia, respectively.

Two Penn Law alumnae are currently completing the second year of their EJW Fellowships: Eliana Kaimowitz L’07 is working with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation; and Charlotte Whitmore L’08 is working with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

More information about the Skadden Fellowship and the Equal Justice Works Fellowship is available online.

The LLM program at Penn Law is a one-year, full-time advanced course of study designed for lawyers trained outside of the United States. The curriculum and cross-disciplinary perspective provide a superb legal education, and present opportunities for students to take law-related classes outside the Law School at Penn’s elite schools, departments and programs.

Elisabet Wenzlaff LLM'82, General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Volvo Car Corporation, shares her experience as an LLM student at Penn Law in this video feature.

Transcript

My name is Elisabet Wenzlaff. I’m an alumna of University of Pennsylvania. I graduated in 1982 and my current profession is that I am a corporate lawyer. I am general counsel of Volvo Car Corporation and I’m also the senior vice president there.

It was a wonderful year… I didn’t plan it so much. Of course I applied for a scholarship, but basically I wanted to go abroad or do something different, have an adventure. And you have to remember, this is a couple of years ago, it was almost 30 years ago. So I didn’t have a lot of expectations, but when I was there I realized how much it did to me, how much it broadened my mind, how much it helped me in my career, how many people I got to know, how much I benefited from it in all respects. So, it really changed my life.
 
I think it opened my eyes… that law is different in different countries, it opened my way of thinking, the way of legal thinking. I had a legal education from Sweden, where I come from. But, of course I got this other perspective – the U.S. perspective and also the international perspective. So, it did a lot to me as a person. And if it does a lot to you as a person, it does a lot for you as a lawyer.
 
I think Penn took very good care of their foreign students. They organized a lot of parties and adventures for us. It made us get to know each other and feel special. I think we were very well taken care of here, so I think contributed, at least for me, a very great year here.
 
[Prospective students] should definitely not hesitate to apply. I think they should be more open than thinking what can this do for me in my career, is this a good career step? I think they should go beyond that and think what can this do for me as a person, because, I think, that is the real benefit.

Transcript edited for length.

Paul G. Haaga L’74, WG'74

By Jenny Chung C'12

On the evening of Tuesday, November 15, this year’s Law and Entrepreneurship Lecture drew an audience of students, faculty, and members of the public to the Law School’s Levy Conference Room to hear Paul G. Haaga L’74, WG'74, Chairman of the Board for Capital Research and Management Company, speak on the topic of “Life in Long-Only, Objective-Based, Active Money Management.”

Haaga, a prominent spokesman for the mutual fund industry and current chairman of the Penn Law Board of Overseers, opened the lecture, which was sponsored by the Institute for Law and Economics, by dispelling “myths” central to investment practices and financial markets, encouraging his audience to remain critical of popular opinion. “The most successful people are those who ask the right questions and listen to the answers,” he said.

Invoking 2011 statistics appearing to indicate that indexing invariably yields higher returns than active management—with between half and two-thirds of active managers failing to beat their indexes—Haaga contested the prevailing view that index funds guarantee higher yields than active funds.

He maintained that factors other than the type of fund must be considered when determining yield, such as the frequency of withdrawals. “The really important thing [to selecting a fund] is what people’s timeframes and objectives are,” he explained.

To further discredit the notion of index funds beating active management funds in every instance, Haaga cited a study of the hundred largest equity mutual funds conducted from 1997 to 2002. By the end of the five-year period, it found that Vanguard’s two index funds were in the ninth and tenth deciles, having been beaten by 90 percent of active funds.

“An index fund can never have less volatility than the market, an actively managed fund can,” he explained, adding that it is also possible for actively managed funds to produce a “higher dividend yield than the market,” while index funds cannot.

Haaga then proceeded to examine the destabilizing effects of investors’ efforts toward obtaining the highest yield possible.

Because the inflationary climate of the early 1980s had permitted high yields, he said, when interest rates fell significantly investors had “developed an incredible taste for yield” and were reluctant to forgo high yields in spite of being financially better off. 

“Funds were writing covered call options to get an extra one to two percent yield—we invented a mutual fund that could go down but not up,” Haaga explained. When the market changed, he said, “investors lost 20 percent by trying to get an extra one to two percent while yields were down.”

Fund managers, who had relied primarily on models to determine the security of writing covered call options, were “caught off guard” as a result of unprecedented market conditions which modeling could not anticipate.

“Most bad things happen in the investment world when people try to get more out of investments than the investments themselves are capable of paying,” Haaga said, naming the recent mortgage crisis as a prime example.

Further, he explained, overreliance on the “myth of modeling” is ill-advised as the value of modeling rests on the flawed assumption that “market participants will always do what makes economic sense under the model.”

Haaga named “performance” as another myth surrounding the mutual fund industry.

“We aren’t allowed to use the term ‘performance’; the reason for that is that performance is inward-looking,” Haaga said. “Investing isn’t fantasy football—it’s other people’s money. Treating it like it’s all about you and what numbers you can generate is wrong.”

In answer to an audience member’s question regarding the ideal method by which to compensate those who make investment decisions, Haaga articulated support for “measuring people against the long-term, keeping bad years [relevant to compensation calculations] to discourage them from ‘shooting the moon’ and calculating bonuses based on external factors instead of performance relative to peers.”

When asked shortly thereafter to name the biggest challenges facing the industry, Haaga opted to identify the most promising opportunities first.

“The biggest opportunities in mutual funds and active management space will be for those who find a way to educate 411 investors,” he said, adding that “other winners” will include entrepreneurs who design products providing income guarantees with “long tails” that enable individuals to continue drawing funds well into old age.

According to Haaga, challenges will likely result from failing to address the above two needs and sacrificing long-term stability for short-term profit.

“If we continue to try finding more ways to make more money than there is, we’ll continue to have crashes and disappoint and lose generations of investors,” he said, emphasizing the dual necessity of encouraging investors to “manage expectations [and] accept moderate returns” and of ensuring that firms deliver the returns investors expect.

From left to right: Arlen Specter C’51, Michael A. Fitts, David Mark, the Hon. Gene E.K. Pratter.

On Tuesday, November 8 in Washington, D.C., Penn Law hosted a high-level panel attended by a standing room only audience in the National Press Club ballroom, which examined whether the branches of the federal government are able to effectively compromise to carry out the people’s business – or if instead we are headed into a state of permanent crisis, or gridlock, exacerbated by the 2012 election cycle.

Panelists included Michael A. Fitts, Dean of the Law School; Arlen Specter C’51, former U.S. Senator (D-PA) and Adjunct Professor of Law at Penn Law; and the Hon. Gene E.K. Pratter L’75, Judge for the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. David Mark, senior editor at POLITICO, served as moderator.

Participants explored whether and how in the current climate of overheated partisan rhetoric the respective branches can work effectively and compromise to solve some of the major problems facing the nation.
 

Click here to view a video and slideshow of the previous Penn Law Washington Seminar series event, "Are Superpowers Above the Law? The U.S., China, and the Future of the International Legal Order".

Anita Allen, the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Penn Law, is an expert on privacy law, bioethics, and contemporary values, and is recognized for her scholarship about legal philosophy, women’s rights, and race relations. In her most recent book, Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide, Allen offers insight into the ethical and political underpinnings of public policies mandating privacies that people may be indifferent to or even despise.

Allen recently discussed her book with the Law School’s Office of Communications for this video feature.

 Transcript:

I’m Anita Allen, professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and my new book is called Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide?

Unpopular Privacy is a book that has a very special mission. Most books about privacy explain why we need privacy or defend why the government should give people the option of privacy. My book takes the unusual stance of saying, OK, we want the government to protect privacy but also want people to want privacy. The book seeks to explain why it is important that we actually consider imposing privacy on society that may be enthralled by social media and other electronic devices that involve giving away or exposing ourselves to the general public.

The aim is to really assess the scholarly perspective that has been so resistant and hesitant to admit paternalistic laws into the picture. We tend to think that law should be paternalistic only when it comes to children. Well, my argument is that there is something about technology and the Internet, its complexity, its novelty, which justifies a more aggressive approach to protect people from their own lack of interest in privacy.

This book took a very long time to write. I began writing this book in the late 1990s and it took a long time to write because the world kept changing: 9/11 rewrote the terms of social life creating a need for more security, more monitoring. So, every time I thought I was about to finish this book, we would get a great cataclysm, it could be 9/11, it could be financial meltdown, and all of these things which may not obviously have to do with privacy, they actually resulted in changes in privacy laws... and so the world was not standing still.

I finally decided that the world was never going to stand still and I had to write the book. But I think the book now reflects thinking about what we need by way of privacy in a highly regulated context and we need... unfortunately, more regulations and also more personal ethics. One of the big points my book makes is that if a person is going to enjoy the kind of privacy he or she needs moving forward, we have to have law in place but also personal ethics in place that lead us to value our own privacy, and to value our own opportunities that stem from a world in which we can in fact control access to information.

This transcript was edited for length.

Melissa Snyder JD/MBE '09 chose to attend Penn Law because of her desire for an innovative cross-disciplinary legal education. 

The Law School offers students the ability to maximize their educational experience by participating in one of 30 joint degree or certificate programs, designed to capitalize on the strategic advantage of being connected to Penn’s other elite schools and departments and which sit closely together on the University’s campus.

The Law School's cross-disciplinary approach provides future lawyers skills and insights in the law and the fields in which lawyers must navigate for their clients. Snyder recently shared her experience at the Law School and the Bioethics department with Penn Law's Office of Communications for a video feature.

Transcript

My name is Melissa Snyder. I graduated in 2009 from Penn with a JD and a Masters in Bioethics. I am an associate at a health law practice group at the law firm Duane Morris.

As part of its globally focused, cross-disciplinary curriculum, Penn Law offers joint or dual degree programs for students interested in complementing their JD degrees with specialized study in the international arena; for example, the JD/MA International Studies integrates the Penn Law JD with an MA in International Studies from Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences; the JD/MA Global Business Law program, co-sponsored by the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po), allows Law School students to graduate with both the JD and Master's degrees after spending their 3L year studying in Paris.

Remy Nshimiyimana C'08, L' 11 recently spoke with Penn Law's Office of Communications about his experience taking the joint degree in Global Business Law and his desire to gain exposure to the global market.

Transcript

My name is Remy Nshimiyimana. I received a Juris Doctor from Penn Law and I received a Master's Degree in business law from two elite French schools.

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.”

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.”

By Miriam Hill
Excerpt from Penn Law Journal Fall 2011 Volume 46, Number 2

Charles Morris C'63, L'72

To Charles Morris C’63, L’72, the impending explosion of the financial markets seemed obvious way back in 2004. He had to wait around a few years, watching bankers and traders borrow billions and bet on new products he knew they didn’t understand, but in 2007, he was vindicated.

The market meltdown that year was almost perfectly timed for the release of his 2008 book on the crisis, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, which predicted that investors would lose at least that much money to the reckless behavior of Wall Street. In fact, the devastation was so great that he revised the book in 2009 as The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown.

“I’d been watching this thing evolve since 2003,” says Morris, whose book won the Gerald Loeb Award, which recognizes excellence in journalism in the fields of business, finance, and the economy. “The whole bubble just got bigger and bigger and bigger and it became clear that the whole world was going to be in trouble because housing prices had doubled in six or seven years.”

He had long been schooled in the dangers of greed and financial innovation. He had researched the topic for his 1999 book, Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen, a history that includes everything from 19th century “wildcat bankers” to Michael Milken.

Since graduating from Penn Law, Morris has had an eclectic career which includes 12 years of government service — including positions as director of the New Jersey antipoverty program, assistant budget director in New York City, and secretary of Social Health Services in Washington State — a stint as a corporate banker for what was then Chase Manhattan, and, until 2004, president of CapitalThinking Inc., a venture-backed software company that sells to the financial-services industry.

Morris defies the stereotype of the writer as neurotic obsessive driven to drink by the terror of the blank page.

“I tend to write about things that I want to learn about,” the 71-year-old New York resident says. “Books are something that I find very congenial. I find it fun… and I think of myself as a craftsman, not an artist.”

He has cast his writer’s eye on New York City’s fiscal crisis (The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment, 1960-1975), the Cold War (Iron Destinies, Lost Opportunities: the Arms Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, 1945-1987) and the Catholic Church (American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church). In all, he has written 12 books.

One of his most highly-praised works focused on a group of doctors. He had stumbled across data showing that Americans spend more on hearts than on cars, which sent him on a research spree that led him to Columbia Presbyterian in New York City. He spent six months at the hospital, work that culminated in 2007’s The Surgeons: Life and Death in a Top Heart Center.

Watching doctors there perform surgery, he realized that one key to their success was an intense, systematic review of their work that reduced errors and improved surgical outcomes.

“There was sort of this really harsh criticism that they maintained toward each other, and they never took it personally,” Morris says. “They would have a meeting where they . . . had to say, ‘What did you do wrong,’ and there wasn’t anything judgmental about it because they all did stuff wrong. Everybody was honest all the time. It was very impressive. You almost never see that kind of thing, certainly not in the corporate world, not in the finance world.”

CapitalThinking’s business gave him a window into new classes of arcane credit derivatives, that spiraled from $1 trillion outstandings to $50 trillion in just a few years. There was poor documentation, few or no controls, and they were often used to conceal dangerous levels of debt — a colossal accident waiting to happen. He took his money out of the stock market in 2005, but later used some of it to bet against the banks just before the crash.

The market collapse took a few years longer than he anticipated, mostly, he says, because the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low.

Unethical and even criminal behavior also contributed, he says. Prosecutions have been rare, he says, because the cases are hard to make. He also thinks the federal government, having spent at least $1 trillion to rescue the banks, did not want to sue and force them to lose more.

Those who deserve blame for the crisis include a “broad swath of people,” including some in both the Democratic and Republican parties, who believed that “if you let finance run untrammeled, bankers will distribute capital into most efficient channels, and the whole world will prosper,” Morris says. “That just happens to be wrong.”

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.

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.

Dean Bernard Wolfman in a 1975 Penn Law yearbook photo

Bernard Wolfman C’46, L’48, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Fessenden Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard University, died August 20, 2011. He was 87. 

Penn Law's portrait of Dean Bernard Wolfman Artist: Richard Hurd. Date: 1975.

Gifts to Penn Law in memory of Mr. Wolfman can made online or sent by check to:

The LLM program at the University of Pennsylvania Law School is a one-year, full-time course of study in advanced legal topics designed for lawyers trained outside of the United States. The curriculum and cross-disciplinary perspective provide a superb legal education, and present opportunities for students to take law-related classes outside the Law School at Penn’s other elite schools, departments and programs.

• Jesse Krohn, L'11
• Stephanie Brockman, L'11

Over 700 Penn Law alums and their guests participated in Alumni Weekend 2011 on May 13 and 14, visiting campus and catching up with classmates and friends.
 
The Senior Partners Society, a group of alumni from the class of 1960 and earlier, met on Friday morning for the group’s annual luncheon in Biddle Law Library. Following lunch, the group previewed a video clip of the Senior Partners Oral History Project, an ongoing venture designed to collect and archive memories from alumni throughout the history of the Law School.
 
Two interesting and very different CLE panels were presented on Friday afternoon in Gittis Hall. Key legal issues in major league baseball was the topic for the first panel, which featured Marvin Goldklang, W’63, L’66, Ed Weiss, L’91 and Professor Christopher Yoo, while Alan Beller, L’76, Robert Hoyt, L’89, Heath Tarbert, L’01 and Professor David Skeel took up Financial Reform and Dodd Frank in the second panel.
 
Individual classes held cocktail receptions on Friday night throughout the Law School and in various locations in center city Philadelphia. The Saturday morning family picnic, held in the Goat this year due to inclement weather, was nonetheless a big success.
 
The highlight of the weekend was the Reunion Gala, held this year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for all reunion classes. A record-breaking 585 Penn Law alums and their guests were treated to cocktails in the Great Hall while enjoying music by the Brazilian band, Minas, a seated dinner in the museum’s beautiful galleries, and a chance to meet and celebrate reunions with many generations of Penn Law alumni. After experiencing his first reunion, Class of 2006 president Thomas Williams said he felt as if he had been welcomed into a family and was no longer just a graduate of the school.
 
For those of you who want to remember the Weekend, and for those who were unable to attend and want to get a sense of what occurred, please take a look at the terrific photo gallery and video.
 
We look forward to welcoming graduates from class years ending in 2’s and 7’s at Alumni Weekend 2012 on May 11 and 12. Please mark your calendars now! It’s never too early to make your plans.

Video

Photos

By Greg Johnson. Reprinted from the Penn Current.

David L. Cohen L'81 Photo by Peter Tobia

Through the years, Philadelphians have used a number of different adjectives and phrases to describe one of the city’s most high-profile and powerful adopted sons, David L. Cohen, including “level-headed,” “straight-forward,” “structured,” “disciplined,” the “calm in the eye of the storm,” a “stickler for details,” “savvy,” “tough” and a “methodical orchestrator.” But encountering him in person brings a different word to mind—unassuming. (Even his office inside the sleek Comcast high rise is unpretentious.)

Cohen is a big deal. He is chairman of the Board of Trustees of one of the world’s most prestigious universities, executive vice president of one of the world’s leading media, entertainment and communication companies and the former chairman of one of the country’s largest law firms. Yet he is also immensely approachable and dismayed that anybody might think otherwise.

A 1977 graduate of Swarthmore College, where he triple majored in political science, history and economics, and a 1981 alumnus of Penn Law School, Cohen is chairman of the Penn Board of Trustees, executive vice president of Comcast Corporation and formerly the chairman of Ballard Spahr.

He was a top legal prospect fresh out of Penn Law, where he graduated summa cum laude and served as executive editor of the Penn Law Review. He was recruited by a host of high-powered law firms before deciding to join Ballard Spahr.

In the late 1980s, Cohen served as press secretary and campaign manager to Ed Rendell, and became Rendell’s chief of staff when he was elected mayor in 1991.

Many scribes, when writing about Cohen, reference Buzz Bissinger’s 1997 book, A Prayer for the City. Cohen and Rendell are the main protagonists of the story, which meticulously details Rendell’s first term as mayor.

As Mayor Rendell worked to save the city from bankruptcy, revitalize its image and wrestle with its powerful unions, Chief of Staff Cohen was right by his side, crisis by crisis, success by success, failure by failure. Some have even labeled him the “co-mayor” of the city, a title he would most assuredly reject.

Cohen left city government in 1997 to become chairman of Ballard Spahr, and then joined Comcast in 2002.

The Penn Current visited the 52nd floor of the Comcast Center to discuss Cohen’s passion for Penn, the strengths of the University, plutonium on commercial airplanes and some parting words of wisdom for the Class of 2011.

Q. Shortly after you were nominated to become chairman of the Board of Trustees in 2008, you told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Penn is your No. 1 passion, other than your family and your job. What does the University mean to you and why are you so passionate about it?
A. Almost everything I’ve been able to accomplish professionally has derived from my education, my undergraduate education at Swarthmore and my legal education at Penn. Then, if you think about what has happened to Penn over the last 15 to 20 years, the growth in its reputation, the growth in its impact on the community, a tremendous amount of that has been tied to an institutional, educational and philosophical strategy of building close ties with the community and becoming a visible and unbelievably important part of the Philadelphia community. A lot of that started at the time when I was chief of staff to Ed Rendell, and I got to see firsthand the incredible impact that Penn had on the Philadelphia community by its decisions to invest in the neighborhood, by a judgment made to change the relationship between the University and the neighborhood.

Obviously I care a lot about Philadelphia, and I think Penn deserves credit for being the private sector institution that proves that working together with the government in a public-private partnership can dramatically impact the quality of life in a neighborhood. Seeing my alma mater making that kind of a commitment to my city made me proud, and it made me recognize the very special people who were at Penn and the very special role that it could play in the life of the city and of the region.

It was in that period of time that I became engaged actively as a volunteer at Penn, first as a Trustee of multiple Health System and Medical School boards, and then ultimately as a University Trustee and then as chair of Penn Medicine and chair of the Trustees. That volunteer experience at the University only built on my commitment and passion for the University and for the impact that it could have, not only locally and regionally, but nationally and globally.

Q. What do you think are the University’s greatest strengths?
A. I’ll put them in a few categories. We start with the institution itself and its reputation in category one. It’s an institution that’s both the twin towers, if you will, of the pure University of Pennsylvania plus Penn Medicine bound together inextricably and working together to advance the interests of the University as a whole.

Category two is the leadership. In Amy Gutmann, I think we have the best university president in the country. She defines an incredible vision with an incredible ability to execute, to attract high-quality staff because it’s not just about Amy, it’s about her senior staff and the people she’s attracted. On the academic side, I think Penn has enormous strength because of the deans and faculty and provost.
The last category is the students. As Trustees, whenever we have a presentation, the only thing that is more powerful than hearing from our faculty is hearing from our students. They never fail to blow us away with their maturity, their incredible complexity, how well-rounded they are, their intelligence. If you take all that together, it’s a powerful enterprise.

I think the other great strength of the University is the vision that our last two presidents have articulated. I think as a university in Penn’s current positioning, we have exactly the right goals and we have momentum towards each one of those goals. The goal of improving access to education couldn’t be more relevant and couldn’t be more important. And there is the goal of local, national and global engagement. Our philosophical approach to collaboration across schools, between the University and Penn Medicine being a huge example, with the Penn Integrates Knowledge professors as the centerpiece of an institutionalized focus on encouraging and facilitating faculty in different schools, deans in different schools, students attending different schools to work together, and to have an integrated and collaborative educational enterprise. I think it is a powerful vision that is being executed brilliantly and that has created enormous momentum for the school going forward.

Q. Is it true that at Penn Law your nickname was ‘Chief Justice Cohen’ because of your legal intellect?
A. I can’t figure out whether that is true or not. I’ve read it before, so it’s been reported. I’m not sure I ever remember anyone calling me ‘Chief Justice Cohen,’ but maybe it was whispered behind my back, or maybe it was a little bit of revisionist history. I have my 30th law school reunion this year so I’ve actually spent some time recently thinking about my classmates. It was still a time when a reasonable percentage of the class, probably 20 percent or so, stayed in Philadelphia. Many of them are still my best friends in life. As a class, we do a pretty good job of staying in touch with each other.

It’s another good hallmark of Penn, the ties that bind students and alumni together. But I’d be honored if anyone in my class today thought that I deserved that nickname because there were a lot of smart people in my class and a lot of people who are incredibly accomplished and have been incredibly successful.

Q. Your wife, Rhonda, told the Inquirer that you ‘slept half the day, often through lunch’ while at Swarthmore and your famous work ethic didn’t really kick in until you came to Penn Law.
A. Well, it was a little bit of a different body clock. I’d also stay up until 4 o’clock in the morning. Actually, in fairness, I think whatever my work ethic is, it really didn’t kick in until after I started practicing law. But it is true. I am up very early now. But in college, I lived a standard college student life. I did have to set an alarm to make sure I’d be up for lunch on the weekend, but I might have stayed up till 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning before turning in.

Q. Why did you choose to triple major at Swarthmore?
A. I always knew I wanted a liberal arts education because I was curious about a lot of different things, so a triple major was perfect. And there’s a lot of relationship between those three, it wasn’t like it was physics, the classics and political science. Political science, history and economics I think in some ways are the guts of a liberal arts education, or certainly all important components of the guts of a liberal arts education.

Q. You have said you wanted to be a lawyer ever since you were 3 years old. Why have you always had an interest in the law?
A. It’s one of those questions that you sort of don’t know the answer to. My grandfather, my father’s father, was a lawyer and judge. Even though he died when I was 4 years old, my parents tell me that when I was young, I always gravitated to him and him to me. He was also actively involved in politics. I loved every day of practicing law. I think that being a lawyer is probably more an encapsulation of things that I like to do. Being intellectually curious, I like to learn everything you can possibly learn about a particular subject. I like to debate and argue and advocate. I like to analyze; I’m a fairly analytic person. I like to write, I like to read. If you think about it, those are all essential attributes of being a good lawyer, and they’re arguably pretty important attributes for what I do now.

Q. Do you ever miss being a lawyer, since it was something you were so good at?
A. It’s interesting, I do miss the practice of law every once in awhile. I think what I miss more than the practice of law is my partners in the law firm. I miss the collegiality and the friendship. I had those five-and-a-half years in City Hall, but I really grew up with a lot of the people at Ballard Spahr. I had said at the time I came to Comcast that if I were to list my Top 20 friends in the world, probably 15 of them would have been at Ballard. So I miss that more; I miss my partners, I miss the atmosphere of the law firm, but it’s hard to say I miss billing hours or collecting bills from clients. And I get to do so much of what I used to love doing as a lawyer in this job that I couldn’t be happier where I am now.

Q. You met your wife while writing for the Swarthmore student newspaper, The Phoenix. Did you have an interest in media at an early age?
A. I had great interest in media as a consumer. But journalism gave me an opportunity to write, to be able to learn things about a subject, synthesize it and make it easily understandable for people who may be less familiar with the subject matter. In some ways, you acquire a comparable skill set to be a journalist as you do to be a lawyer. My friends in journalism might not be happy about that, but…

Q. And I understand that you also managed the campaigns of two of your friends who ran for student government at Swarthmore?
A. That was my first involvement in politics. It’s funny, I was with one of those friends [recently] in Washington and we were talking about this race. I managed the campaign of a friend for student body president and I am still friendly with her today. She’s a member of the Swarthmore Board of Managers, as is my wife, so we actually see her and her husband frequently these days.

Q. Did you learn anything from those campaigns that you later used in Ed Rendell’s mayoral campaigns?
A. [Laughs]. Those were a lot easier than mayoral politics. Actually, when I worked in Congress, I managed a New York State Assembly campaign and I participated in managing a Congressional campaign, but there’s nothing like a mayoral race in a big city in terms of the depth of skills you have to bring to the table to effectively manage that kind of a race.

Q. Am I correct that while at Swarthmore, you interned over the summer for Congressman James H. Scheuer and you wrote a bill prohibiting shipments of plutonium aboard commercial aircraft?
A. Right, I did. You don’t often find a topic like this. It’s simple, easy to understand. It literally was passed while I was there that summer. So the topic came up, we researched it, wrote the legislation and we actually got the bill passed, all in a two-and-a-half month internship.

Q. They used to carry plutonium on commercial airplanes?
A. They used to carry plutonium in basically steel drums on commercial airplanes. And the containers weren’t crash-proof, so if the plane crashed and the container opened, you would have a radiation leak. The congressman represented a district that included John F. Kennedy International Airport so it was obviously of relevance to his constituents.

Q. Your work ethic is legendary. People have described you as ‘famously tireless;’ Bissinger wrote of you going to work at 3 a.m., working for nearly three days straight and sleeping for three hours over three nights during contract negotiations. How were you physically able to pull it off? Is it just drive?
A. I think everyone’s metabolism is a little bit different. Particularly at that time, I was in my 30s and didn’t need a lot of sleep. I was with Ed Rendell in Chicago [recently], we spent a day together out there doing some things, and we were both talking about the fact that—because you’re now talking about almost 20 years later—neither one of us runs at quite the same level as we did when he was mayor. But part of it is adrenaline and the press of business. I think if I didn’t have anything to do, I would have been sleeping a lot more than three hours a night during that period of time. But when you’re constantly on the run and there are constantly things to do, I think your body helps you, at least for some period of time, to compress the hours of sleep that you need. And I was always good about catching up when I needed to catch up. I certainly sleep more than three hours a night today. But I do think I need less sleep on average than most people do.

Q. You have a beautiful view from up here; it looks like you can see the entire city in all directions. When you look out the window, what do you see?
A. I see a few things. What I see when I walk around this building is what a great city we live in. The diversity of it. The walk-ability of the downtown. Quite frankly, you can see every major construction and renovation project as it goes on. We get a bird’s eye view of the Convention Center looking out of this window. You get a real sense of the vibrancy and the diversity of the city.

There’s another story that I tell though. We are 850 feet or so in the air and you look out heading in the Northeast direction, and it looks really nice. It looks orderly, the streets are straight, everything is clean, it looks terrific. That’s what one of the poorest areas in America looks like from 850 feet high. The point I make is too many of our policymakers, our opinion leaders, our thought leaders, our elected officials, only see places like North Philadelphia from 850 feet high or from movies. They don’t see it down at the street level. They don’t see the impact of poverty and drugs and the lack of equal education opportunity, because you can’t see any of that from up here. You can only see it when you’re actually down in the street or driving in a car.

I don’t think that people who think less about these issues than, frankly, I think about these issues are hard-hearted people who aren’t interested in making sure that everyone in America has an equal chance to succeed in life, that everyone has a fair opportunity to get a job in the Comcast Center some day. The solution to that, of course, is to get more people to see what’s happening in our cities at street level, and not just from the top of beautiful skyscrapers like the Comcast Center.

Q. Of the many different terms people have used to describe you, a common image is that of a problem-solver, someone with the ability to get things done. Bissinger wrote that you reacted to chaos not by succumbing to it, but figuring out how to conquer it by ‘taking the puzzle and shaping it into a set of manageable pieces.’ Is that an accurate description?
A. Well it’s hard to talk about yourself in that way. It was nice to read what Buzz said. I’m a much bigger believer in collaboration, in teams, than I am in my own ability. If you were to ask me what I thought some of my biggest strengths were, I do think my biggest strength is an ability to put together teams of really good people to help manage chaos or to solve problems, and to draw on the talents and strengths of multiple people on the team. On the best teams, of course, you have people whose strengths compliment other people’s weaknesses. So I think all that I will raise my hand and accept responsibility for is being a much better-than-average judge of talent, and doing a good job of bringing really talented people together to solve problems and to bring order to chaos.

Q. Are there any misconceptions that people may have about you?
A. I think the thing I hear most frequently is that a lot of people just know me from television or from a public persona, and I’m just a normal guy. I hope I’ve never allowed my head to be turned by any of the nice things that people have said and any successes that I’ve been able to have in life. It makes me feel good when people say, ‘Gee whiz, we can’t believe how nice you are and how you’re willing to talk to me.’ I like talking to anyone. I think that’s a common perception of people who are reasonably well-known, that there is a sense of aloofness or arrogance. I hate that word. I don’t know any people who know me, or have had a chance to work with me, who think I’m aloof or arrogant. But maybe it’s people who just know of me as opposed to knowing me. And I think that’s not an accurate window into my real personality.

Q. Comcast, with 127,000 employees, is sort of like a small city. Are there any similarities between helping to run a major corporation and a major city?
A. I think that these are both big, complicated enterprises. There are significant differences between private business and government, but they are big, complicated enterprises with lots of problems to solve. They’re both organizations that have a lot of talented people. Clearly in Brian Roberts, who is as good a CEO as any in the country, and Ed Rendell, who was as good a mayor as any mayor in the country, they both benefit from extraordinary leadership at the top, and from an extraordinary team of talented people who were put together to attack problems and to execute their vision of those institutions. Frankly, you could say the same thing about Penn. A big, complicated institution, lots of problems, an enormously effective leader. In each of those places, leaders have put together enormously talented and effective teams to execute a vision and advance the interests of the enterprise.

Q. The Penn Class of 2011 will graduate in 11 days. If you could give them one piece of career advice or life advice, what would you say to them?
A. My one piece of life advice is to follow your passion. Follow your passion in your career, follow your passion in your personal relationships and follow your passion in the way in which you live your life outside of your place of employment and your family. That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to do the same thing because everyone has different passions, but I think if you follow your passion, you maximize your chances for success and for enjoyment in life.

Originally published on May 5, 2011

By Van Jensen. Reprinted from the Penn Law Journal.

Michael Richter L’93

Every day, Facebook’s more than 500 million users share about 1 billion posts, links and photos.
 
The torrent of information on the site— where users live, what they like, how old they are, who their friends are— gives Facebook one of the deepest wells of personal data on the Internet and is a large part of why the company is so admired by Wall Street. In January, Facebook received a $1 billion investment arranged by Goldman Sachs and was valued, some say conservatively, at $50 billion.
 
But that trove of information is a double-edged sword. It also makes Facebook a target for those who sell or otherwise exploit personal data. For instance, an October 2010 Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that third-party applications on Facebook had been accessing users’ information and transmitting it to Internet tracking companies.
 
Facebook is confronted with a paradox: Users flock to the site because it allows them to share information and photos with others, but at the same time they expect Facebook to safeguard their information.
 
The challenge of balancing those seemingly incongruous desires falls in large part on the shoulders of Facebook’s chief privacy counsel, Michael Richter L’93. Richter faces the heady tasks of keeping the company in compliance with privacy laws around the world and helping craft policies to satisfy users and regulators.

Richter, who calls himself Facebook’s privacy ombudsman, works with product managers, engineers and the management team on the development of new products. He also meets with regulators and privacy groups in advance of product launches.

“Privacy comes up in every product that we build,” said Richter, who joined the company in 2007 with limited privacy law experience. “I had to learn everything there is to know about privacy and give the company good legal advice, balancing what’s best for the company with the legal risks.”
 
Richter always has pursued assignments that he finds interesting and challenging rather than ones that offer the most impressive title. He joined Facebook after serving as head of both worldwide litigation and intellectual property at eBay. His career also has had detours into screenwriting, theater and independent film.

Challenges at Facebook came in short order for Richter when the Canadian privacy commissioner declared that the company did not meet Canada’s privacy laws. Richter worked closely with regulators to resolve the issue. The agreement is confidential, but Richter said the key was in educating the privacy commissioner on how Facebook operates.

“At the highest level, Facebook and regulators have the same goal,” he said. “We are both trying to give users control over their information. When we don’t agree, it’s usually because the regulator is trying to protect user privacy in a context where users want to share their information.”
 
Another challenge Facebook faced early in Richter’s time at the company was with its Beacon advertising program. Launched in 2007, the service automatically posted notices on users’ profiles when they interacted with third-party companies such as Blockbuster and Overstock.com. Critics argued that the system operated without explicit permission from users, and in 2008 some users filed a class action lawsuit. Facebook shuttered Beacon in 2009 and settled the lawsuit.
 
Richter called the program misunderstood. Users thought of it as a purely commercial product and not as a system to share outside information within Facebook, he said. Now, he pointed out, users share outside links and other information constantly.
 
Much of the criticism of Facebook has implied that the company seeks to exploit user information toward monetary gain. A legal scholar from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School described Facebook’s tactics as “act now, apologize later.”

Richter disagreed with that assessment. Facebook explicitly prohibits app creators from sharing user information, he said. The company makes money through its targeted advertising program and credits purchased to use within applications. Neither of those activities provides outsiders with access to users’ personal data.

Facebook always has made privacy a top priority, Richter said. But since he started, the company has expanded the number of employees who focus specifically on that area.

“I think it gets better headlines when people criticize our approaches to privacy,” Richter said. “But the fact of the matter is that we have better privacy controls than almost any other site. … I think we do a much better job than people give us credit for.”

Much of Richter’s effort in recent years has gone into updating and revising Facebook’s privacy policy and statement of rights and responsibilities. Those came under scrutiny by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and others in 2009, which led to the revision.

Richter made two posts about the changes on the Facebook blog, each of which drew hundreds of comments. The second entry, in March 2010, revealed that all proposed changes to the policies would be posted publicly, and users could offer feedback.
 
“Ultimately it was a great experience, because we’re doing something really unique,” he said. “We give users an opportunity to vote on [changes], which I don’t think any company has ever done.”

Richter’s job also entails dealing with frequent public criticism, such as in May 2010 over what a writer on techcrunch.com called the company’s “mind bogglingly complex” privacy controls. After listening to feedback from users, Facebook introduced a new simplified privacy control that has been well received.
 
“It’s a balancing act between simplicity and granularity of controls,” Richter said. “Some users want to be able to tweak every setting for every piece of content. But to a lot of people that’s very confusing.”
 
One lesser-known privacy control that Facebook introduced is within the publisher — the field that allows users to share a status update, link, photo or video. Next to the Share button is the icon of a lock. By clicking on it, users can decide who among their friends or non-friends will be able to see what is posted.
 
Richter keeps part of his profile open to anybody, and one can learn that he was born in Miami and is a fan of both the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Clippers. Among his favorite bands are Wilco and Arcade Fire. But to understand how Richter came to Facebook, you have to dig a little deeper.
 
Richter came to Penn Law through New York City, where his parents sent him for boarding school. At the time, he’d never been to New York and didn’t know a soul there.
 
Though he’d planned to attend law school from an early age, he took a year after receiving his bachelor’s degree at Yeshiva University to explore his interest in theater and film. He acted in a play and wrote screenplays, selling one script to a producer who was also a lawyer.
 
“He convinced me the best way to get involved in the entertainment business was as a lawyer,” Richter said. “It’s really hard to get people to take a look at your [screenplay]. Law was the easiest way for someone like me without a lot of connections to work my way into the industry.”
 
Richter enrolled at Penn Law, and he quickly felt at home.
 
“[Penn] tries to foster community,” Richter said. “And the type of students they select, everyone is obviously very intelligent, but they’re well rounded and diverse.”
 
At Penn, Richter kept up his artistic interests. He directed Chicago for the Law School Light Opera Company and wrote and acted for the law revue. He recalled acting in one skit that drew laughter and applause. Afterward a deputy dean asked Richter, “What the hell are you doing in law school?”

Richter channeled his passions into working in entertainment law in New York, and eventually he became interested in Internet law. The dot-com boom had started, and Silicon Valley firms were desperate for lawyers. He and his wife, Sara, moved to California in 1999.
 
“This was the place to be,” Richter said. “This was where all of the cutting edge legal issues were happening.”
 
After working at a firm and at eBay, Richter found his way back into the arts. While at eBay, he penned a screenplay called Two Mothers. It follows two women who meet after both of their sons die in a bus bombing. Fellow alumnus Marc Posner C'85, L’92 helped him on the script.

Richter partnered with a production company he had volunteered with previously. The movie was filmed in northern California.
 
After the festival circuit, the producers plan to release the movie in a few cities and, if it’s successful, have a wider release.
 
Richter is glad to have taken the risk of making the film.

“It was a fantastic experience,” he said. “I liked being involved in the process. The story I wanted to tell was pretty much what ended up on the screen.”
 
Nevertheless, Richter was quick to say he doesn’t see film as a career. Facebook continues to offer a variety of challenges. Every day those 500 million users are posting a billion updates, and it’s up to the privacy ombudsman to look out for them.

By Fredda Sacharow. Reprinted from the Penn Law Journal.

Judy Shen L'05

Three basic strokes - two vertical, one horizontal – form the Chinese word cai, which means “human talent.” 

Judy Shen L’05 chose that simple symbol for an organization she hopes will have a profound effect on an underserved segment of China’s population: its migrant children.

The outgrowth of a two-week summer program Shen launched in 2006 in Beijing, CAI (pronounced sigh) has reached out to more than 1,500 children to enrich their school experience through sports, music and the arts – amenities often in short supply in the country’s cash-strapped migrant schools.

For Shen, it’s just a beginning.

In recent decades, as China’s explosive economic growth fueled a need for workers, families responded by moving to the cities to find jobs, or by sending their children ahead to become wage-earners. The mass movement created a steady stream of internal immigrants with limited social services and educational opportunities available to them, Shen says.

What schools did exist were often housed in abandoned factories or in woefully outdated facilities with no indoor plumbing.
 
“Children in the street would come up to my Caucasian friends, begging for money,” recalls Shen, who went to Beijing as a Fulbright scholar researching intellectual property law in China six years ago and stayed to build a new nonprofit from the ground up.
 
“I wanted to know where they came from, why they were there, and why there were no services for them. They were a forgotten population.”

Shen was born in China; her parents moved the family to New York when she was six. She was at once appalled and inspired by the plight of the migrant children, whose numbers she estimates at close to 78 million throughout the country.

She remembers in particular one boy of 12, who left his outlying village for Beijing when a family friend promised a job in the city. The “job” turned out to be washing cars in the dead of winter for the U.S. equivalent of 70 cents per car – of which the youth earned nothing.

Recruiting an ad hoc team of 30 volunteers, both Chinese and foreign, and securing a $5,000 grant from Cummins, Inc., Shen began that first summer by partnering with an existing school to offer classes in dance, photography, sculpting, drawing  and other creative outlets. Sixty eager children, ranging from 9 to 13, flocked to what Shen was convinced would be a one-time program.

She was a corporate associate with the American-based law firm Skadden Arps by then. What did she know about running a supplementary education program, Shen thought.

And yet …

“After that first project was completed, the feedback from the children was so tremendously positive I felt compelled to continue,” says Shen.

Taking a six-month leave of absence with full support from Skadden, the young attorney began working toward her vision of providing underprivileged children in both rural and urban China a transformative learning experience, one formulated around what she calls the Four Cs: care, courage, confidence, and commitment.

From the beginning, Shen has believed that focusing on “soft” skills rather than on the technological know-how they get during regular school hours would help her children navigate through the challenges migrant life throws at them.

Testimony supporting her thesis has come not only from the teachers and administrators CAI has paired with over the years, but also from her target audience: the students themselves.

Shen treasures a letter she received in 2007 from Liu Rui, a fifth-grader who came to Beijing from Sichuan Province with her parents. Liu Rui, who enrolled in the summer arts program, was an introverted child with no friends. By the time she left, Liu Rui had made a best friend and become more expressive, writing to her mentor in scrawled characters that grew increasingly exuberant: “When I grow up and am able to find a job, when I have time, I will also become a volunteer, to enrich migrant children’s life by teaching them arts.”

Tingting, also from Sichuan Province, had a similar experience. Extremely short in stature and painfully shy, the child joined CAI’s basketball for girls program, hoping it would improve her health and make her stronger. As the weeks progressed, the little girl who never dared to make eye contact with an adult came out of her shell and opened her heart to Shen.

“Through our program, she felt much healthier, and shared that she was more confident as a result, had developed new friends and became quite social,” Shen recalls.

Currently working with a $150,000 annual budget, with funding from foundations, corporations and individuals, CAI operates under the auspices of the Promise Foundation, a tax-exempt public charity Shen set up in the United States and Hong Kong to support its growing reach.

The initiative has become a full-time job for Shen, who is convinced she gets as much out of it as the youngsters do.

“I think for me this has truly been life-changing,” she says. “It’s amazing to see the amount of goodness in the people who volunteer, the promise that is in the children.”

The volunteer ethos has been slow to develop in the country of her birth, Shen adds.

“That was one of the major challenges I faced at the beginning. The idea of volunteerism in China was so new, people would stare at me when I asked if they wanted to be part of CAI. It just was not part of the society.”

A former law school classmate who was with Shen in China for a post-Bar Exam trip says she is filled with awe at what Shen has accomplished in just a few short years.

“What Judy is doing is the most amazing thing,” says Alicia Novak L’05, now an attorney in Boston. “She started this from nothing, and now she has affected thousands of children in an area of very high need. There’s really no culture of volunteer service in China, and she is helping to instill one there.”

Her fellow alumna could have had her choice of jobs back in the states, but opted to remain in her native country because “she could do good work there,” says Novak, a member of CAI’s Board of Directors who often served as a sounding board for Shen during the early weeks and months of the initiative.

The imperative of community service is hard-wired into Shen’s soul. Early on in her schooling, she tutored younger students and ladled food in soup kitchens. Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, she threw herself into rescue efforts, working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross to relocate survivors and provide counseling.

“I always thought I would go into the medical field, but law came calling,” Shen says. The training she received at Penn armed her with the tools to establish and steer the nonprofit, from negotiating with potential educational partners to uncovering funding sources, she explains.

“On a daily basis, I find myself relying on my legal education to analyze and resolve new and evolving challenges,” Shen says. “In the most direct way, my legal background helped me develop our organizational structure – which now encompasses a U.S. 501 (C)(3) charitable organization, a Hong Kong charity, and a Chinese legal entity.”

She also relies heavily on her fluency in Chinese and her knowledge of the nation’s culture – both of which ease Shen’s interactions with the locals and give her credibility with her young charges, she says.

Shen returned to the United States this past winter to await the birth of her first child, Joshua, who arrived on Feb. 7, and began drafting a long-term strategy for expanding CAI’s reach. Having recently branched out into teacher training – some 120 educators have already participated in CAI-led sessions in rural schools in two provinces – she is now focusing on a program for special-needs students, with an emphasis on autistic youngsters.

The Chinese government says there are approximately 100,000 children with the condition, but other sources, such as the World Health Organization, say the number is closer to 600,000, and may reach as high as 2 million.

“There is a dearth of attention paid to this population, and to the availability of quality services for special-needs education,” Shen observes. “We’re in the process now of conducting market research and analysis to develop a long-term strategy for this program.”

Penn Law hosted its 162nd graduation ceremony on May 16 at the Academy of Music. Edward G. Rendell C'65, Hon'00, the 45th Governor of Pennsylvania, gave the commencement address.

Penn Law’s Class of 2011 included 273 graduates receiving the Doctor of Law (JD) degree, 95 students receiving the Master of Laws (LLM) degree, 1 student receiving the Master of Comparative Law (LLCM) degree, and 2 receiving the Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) degree for a total of 371 graduates.

Video

Producer: Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law (directed by Professor Regina Austin); Cinematographer: Irit Reinheimer; Editor: Neal Swisher

Photos

Spring 2011 Penn Law Journal

There are many reasons to attend Penn Law School: the ambitious cross-disciplinary program, the stellar faculty, the inviting campus in a manageable city. But the one thing that keeps alumni coming back and students flocking to our doors is the warm and welcoming culture which, in its own way, makes us a magnet school. This spring's Penn Law Journal highlights the people who create and maintain our unique atmosphere and the advantages this professional community provides to our graduates.

Also included in the Journal's 46th volume are an interview with Michael Richter L'93, chief privacy officer at Facebook; a feature on the organization Judy Shen L'05 created to help migrant children in China; and a tribute to Alan Lerner W'62, L'65.

First published in 1956 as Law Alumni News and issued twice each academic year, the Penn Law Journal highlights faculty, alumni, and student achievements, institutional news, and law school events.

Read the Spring 2011 Penn Law Journal
Visit the Alumni Communications Webpage

Congratulations to our graduating class and a big welcome to friends and family! On Monday, May 16, Penn Law will host its graduation ceremony at the Academy of Music. Edward G. Rendell C'65, Hon'00, the 45th Governor of Pennsylvania, will give the law school's commencement address.

Penn Law’s Class of 2011 includes 273 graduates receiving the Doctor of Law (JD) degree, 95 students receiving the Master of Laws (LLM) degree, 1 student receiving the Master of Comparative Law (LLCM) degree, and 2 receiving the Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) degree for a total of 371 graduates.

We look forward to honoring your hard work and achievements in the days to come and hope to see you at the events below.

Law School Graduation Reception
Sunday, May 15
2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Penn Law, 3400 Chestnut Street  Directions
Hosted by Dean Michael Fitts and the Penn Law Alumni Society 
Please note that this is a ticketed event. Guests who have mobility issues may enter the Law School for the reception via the Chestnut Street door.

University Commencement Ceremony
Monday, May 16
10:15 a.m.
Franklin Field, 33rd and South Streets  Directions
Speaker: Denzel Washington, Academy Award Winning & Tony Award Winning Actor and Director

Students: Meet at 39th and Locust Walk by 8:45 a.m. on Monday morning, and you will be given instructions that get you into the proper place in line. Law students will march together in the parade through campus, leading to Franklin Field. On the Field, each dean introduces his or her students, and the President of the University then pronounces you graduated.

For more information, please visit Commencement 2011 and follow PennCommence on Twitter.

Law School Graduation Ceremony
Monday, May 16
3:00 p.m.
Academy of Music, 1420 Locust Street  Directions
Speaker: Edward G. Rendell C'65, Hon'00, the 45th Governor of Pennsylvania

Guests: You may enter the Academy at 2:15 p.m. or shortly after. Seating is on a first-come basis. Each guest will be required to have a ticket. The numbers on the tickets are not seat numbers. This is a general- admission event. The accoustics throughout the hall are excellent and the sightlines are very good.

Guests using wheelchairs or who have problems with steps can enter the Academy at 2:00 p.m.(before the front doors open to the rest of the attendees), via a door on the south side of the building. Facing the Academy from Broad Street, there is a driveway on your left. You guests can enter the accessible door down that driveway. Cars may not go down the driveway. Ushers from the Academy will be on hand to help those using wheelchairs find the areas set aside for wheelchairs.           

A sign language interpreter be on the left side of stage, signing the remarks of the speakers. If you would like to see the interpreter, please sit on the left side (that is, facing the stage) and up front.

Students: Graduating students should go to the rehearsal hall of the Academy of Music. It is located on the 1400 block of Locust Street, halfway between Broad Street and 15th Street. You must be in the rehearsal hall by 2:15 in order to find your place in line. There is no place at the Academy or the rehearsal hall to leave purses, packages, or so on. Please leave your personal items with your guests.

Careers: Clerkships

Christopher DiPompeo L’09

Two years after graduating, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Christopher DiPompeo L’09 has landed one of the most coveted positions in American law: a clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court. In July, DiPompeo will begin clerking for Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.

What path did DiPompeo take to land a litigator’s dream job?  He answers the question with characteristic humility – a trait that belies his considerable achievements.  

After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2004, DiPompeo joined Penn Law in 2006. During his first year, he took the standard 1L classes, which he “enjoyed very much and in which I happened to do well.” At the end of that year, he participated in the Law School’s journal writing competition and “happened to be accepted on the Law Review.” In the spring of his 2L year, he applied for a number of Law Review Board positions and “happened to be picked” as Editor-in-Chief.

DiPompeo served as Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review for almost half of his law school career. “That really dominates what I remember about law school, because we were, in some sense, entrusted with keeping this great institution that had been around for 157 years or so going,” he said, adding with self-effacing humor, “We always joked that hopefully it would take more than us to stop it.”

DiPompeo ran the Law Review successfully, including publishing a comment, "Federal Hate Crime Laws and United States v. Lopez: On A Collision Course to Clarify Jurisdictional Element Analysis," which was awarded a 2009 Burton Distinguished Writing Award as one of the 15 best student-written articles of 2008.

In the fall of his 3L year, DiPompeo applied for clerkships, and during the 2009-2010 term clerked for Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. “That was a great year, we had a lot of interesting cases,” DiPompeo said. “I had two co-clerks, both of whom were fantastic, and it was great to work with the judge and get an understanding of his perspective, how he approaches cases, writes opinions, and decides cases.  I can’t think of a better way to start a career than to work with and learn from someone like Judge Niemeyer.”

Meanwhile, DiPompeo was encouraged by faculty and fellow students to consider applying for a clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court. “Several people at the Law School were helpful – Dean [Michael] Fitts, Professor [David] Skeel, and Professor [Matthew] Adler wrote recommendation letters for me, and Chris Fritton in the Career Planning and Professionalism office was very helpful, too.”

Also helpful, he said, was Penn Law’s Clerkship Committee, comprised of Penn Law faculty and staff who work closely with students on their applications. “I took a class with Professor [Christopher] Yoo, who is a member of the Clerkship Committee, during law school.  Over the years, we talked a lot about the process and strategy - about the interview, what to expect, and how to prepare for it, which was very useful.”

DiPompeo emphasized the importance of good writing in his career development, starting with “Penn Law’s Legal Writing program, then as an editor on a law journal, and the editing and writing skills I developed while clerking.  I think it’s really important. In fact, I think it’s one of the main reasons Judge Niemeyer and others were willing to write letters for me, because all judges are looking for clerks who can write well. And that’s a skill I learned at Penn Law.”

DiPompeo also credits his Law Review experience with helping him make connections with his past and future clerkship colleagues.  “One of the great things about working on a law review like the one at Penn is the opportunity you have to meet your peers at other schools working in the same positions.  In fact, I first met one of my co-clerks from last year when we were roommates at a law review conference in Virginia.  And going into this clerkship with the Chief Justice, there are several people I’ll be clerking with whom I know from various interactions we had while working for our law reviews.”

DiPompeo discussed the importance of those relationships during his interview with Chief Justice Roberts. “One of the questions I was asked in my interview was, ‘What are some of the things I missed about clerking?’  And that was interacting with my co-clerks, the judge, and his secretaries in chambers. My co-clerks and I had lunch together almost every day and talked about our cases. It was a unique experience, because every week we had different cases coming in and new fact patterns that we’re dealing with, and new areas of the law, to which we were complete novices.”

His interaction with his co-clerks, DiPompeo said, was similar to his interaction with other members of the Law Review. “I think one of the best aspects of working on the Law Review was the opportunity it gave us to sit around in the office and talk about the articles and different questions that were coming up, whether through editing or while going over some of the substance. That’s something I missed about law school –it’s something I really enjoyed when clerking last year, and something I’m looking forward to again next year.”

As part of its commitment to supporting public interest legal careers, the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Toll Public Interest Center (TPIC) has selected four 2011 Postgraduate Fellowship Award recipients.

The Fellowships, which were created in 2009 and expanded this year to include the newly created S. Gerald Litvin & Dennis R. Suplee Fellowship, support Penn Law graduating students or recent alumni in their pursuit of public interest careers. Fellows design their own public interest projects and work with partnering non-profit organizations locally, nationally, or internationally on pressing issues and advocating for clients.

Fellows are selected by the TPIC Advisory Board, a group of legal professionals who serve as counsel to TPIC on its public interest programs and initiatives. The Fellowships are awarded through a competitive process, and recipients are screened through written applications and interviews. Successful applicants must demonstrate both a strong commitment to public service and an effective partnership with a public interest organization that will allow them to provide a necessary legal service to an under-represented cause or community. The Fellowships are designed to launch long-term public interest careers.
 
“I am impressed by the caliber of this year’s Postgraduate Fellows, and I admire their enthusiasm for and commitment to social justice and public interest lawyering,” said Michael A. Fitts, dean of Penn Law. “In addition, I am excited to announce our newest Fellowship, the S. Gerald Litvin & Dennis R. Suplee Fellowship, generously funded by Law School alumnus Gerald McHugh [L'79].”

McHugh added, “Jerry Litvin and Dennis Suplee are the ultimate role models for any young lawyer. "This Fellowship will help a Penn Law graduate follow in their paths.” Litvin L’54 is senior counsel at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP and Suplee L’67 is a partner and former chair of Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP.

The 2011 TPIC Postgraduate Fellowship recipients and their projects are:

• Matthew McFeeley L’11, awarded the Penn Law Public Interest Fellowship. McFeeley will partner with environmental NGO the Natural Resources Defense Council of Washington, D.C. As part of his project he will develop research that details the health and environmental impacts of oil and gas drilling – especially new forms of intensive natural gas extraction –  on low-income, rural communities across the United States. In addition, he will help develop litigation to remedy harms and prevent future violations, and will advocate for new protections.
   
• Abel Rodriguez L’11, awarded the Langer, Grogan and Diver Fellowship in Social Justice. Partnering with Nueva Esperanza, a Philadelphia faith-based organization, Rodriguez’s project will provide low-income elderly and disabled immigrants in Philadelphia with outreach and legal services to help them navigate the complex naturalization process and begin receiving the life-saving and poverty-reducing benefits to which U.S. citizens are entitled, particularly Supplemental Security Income. Rodriguez will represent clients in federal court appeals, collaborate with non-profits to ensure clients receive benefits, provide comprehensive legal services, and contribute to federal litigation to extend benefits to immigrants.
   
• Benjamin Salvina L’11, awarded the S. Gerald Litvin & Dennis R. Suplee Fellowship. With partner organization Mazzoni Center Legal Services of Philadelphia, Salvina’s project will focus on helping low-income LGBT persons facing employment discrimination. He will provide community education, strengthen organizational ties, negotiate with entities engaging in discriminatory practices, and represent clients before the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, and state and federal courts.
   
• Joanna Visser L’10, awarded the Philadelphia Fellowship. Partnering with Philadelphia’s Juvenile Law Center, Visser will engage in outreach, litigation, and policy advocacy to strengthen ongoing efforts to end the practice of sentencing juveniles to die in prison, and will assist prisoners who are challenging the constitutionality of their sentences following the U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decision in Graham v. Florida. In addition, she will counsel Penn Law students on local pro bono and public interest opportunities, and serve as a bridge between Penn Law and Philadelphia’s robust public interest legal community.
   

Founded in 1989, TPIC is at the center of public interest initiatives at Penn Law, helping all students to cultivate meaningful opportunities to provide pro bono legal service to under-represented communities, while mentoring students who hope to make public interest their professional focus. The Center’s pro bono program, which includes a 70-hour pro bono requirement and emphasizes students’ professional development, has been recognized with the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award.

Part 2 of a four-part series about the 2011 Sparer Symposium.  

By Jenny Chung C’12

Opening with an excerpt from Hungry in America, a documentary slated to open this winter, “Poverty’s Youngest Victims: Ethical Choices for First Responders and Advocates in the Fight for Healthy and Affordable Food” centered on issues of food security and approaches to partnerships between medical and legal professionals.

Dr. Mariana Chilton, associate professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health, provided a brief explanation of the Witnesses to Hunger photo advocacy project, which equipped 42 Philadelphia women with cameras so they could document the process of raising children in poverty.

Chilton said she was inspired to launch Witnesses to Hunger after being called to testify before Congress on the impact of public policy with regard to the health of young children. Disappointed in the House of Representatives’ response to her testimony and “total lack of understanding” of the realities of poverty, Chilton found it “unacceptable that [she] would be there as an ‘expert witness’ when there’s someone who’s homeless and hungry and completely disregarded in the national dialogue.”

Chilton, who also serves as principal investigator for the Philadelphia Grow Project and co-principal investigator of Children’s Health Watch, stressed that Witnesses to Hunger—which has since produced 10,000 photographs exhibited nationwide—is not about “voyeurism,” but social action.

The principal objective of the project, Chilton said, is one of “[cutting] through indifference and [bringing] to light the experience of hunger that is generally muffled and hidden by those who experience it.”

To shed light on the magnitude of hunger in the United States, she cited statistics indicating approximately 49 million people—14 percent of the general population—are food insecure and, as such, lack access to enough food to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle.

University of Maryland School of Law Professor David Super voiced “emphatic agreement” with Chilton’s view of hunger as a “problem that defies isolation.”

Due to the recent economic crisis, Super said, state governments are largely understaffed and undergoing attrition at a time when the number of applicants for assistance has been rising.

“Tens of thousands of households that remain eligible for assistance are being arbitrarily cut off because the state doesn’t have the staff to handle the paperwork that keeps them in [the food stamp program],” he said, adding that the most vulnerable sector of the population is the “new poor”—that is, aid applicants who had not required assistance before the economic downturn and are consequently unfamiliar with the availability of legal services and welfare programs.

Because many of those in need do not seek out legal aid on their own, Super advised public advocacy lawyers to locate clients by “working closely with healthcare providers.”

According to Dr. Kathleen Conroy, Medical Director at Medical-Legal Partnership and Children’s Hospital Boston pediatrician, “medicine…is really the tip of the iceberg” given the fact that low-income families are often facing a variety of poverty-related stressors.

She then presented the findings from a 2007 study indicating that while patients are willing to discuss food insecurity with their physicians, healthcare providers consistently fail to inquire into this area of their patients’ lives.

“As a medical person it’s shocking to realize the legal services available to low-income people are so few,” Conroy said, characterizing legal needs as a subset of social needs requiring legal intervention. “Medical staff can help fill the information gap.”

Jonathan Stein L’67, General Counsel at Community Legal Services, speculated that much of the “nonasking” Conroy describes is grounded in “doctors thinking they can’t do anything” and can be remedied by empowering medical personnel to expand the range of assistance they provide to patients.  

“Poverty requires a broad attack on many fronts,” he said, urging law students interested in public advocacy to participate in pro bono work and seek externships with nonprofits.

“The critical component of any profession is having a vision of systemic reform,” Stein said. “[Law students] can [use] their individual casework experience to [see] broader problems that need impacting.”

Flickr: 2011 Public Interest Week Pictures

Partnering Against Poverty: Examining Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Public Interest Lawyering
By Jenny Chung C’12

A diverse array of panelists ranging from public-interest lawyers to academics to experts across various disciplines convened to discuss poverty issues within both Philadelphia and the broader national context at the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s 30th annual Edward V. Sparer Symposium, held March 18 at the Levy Conference Center.

Comprising a full day of presentations and discussions on subjects relevant to the practice of public-interest advocacy, this year’s symposium concluded with remarks from Sister Mary Scullion, co-founder, executive director and president of Project H.O.M.E., a program offering solutions to homelessness and poverty that has garnered national acclaim.

Breaking Down Barriers to Re-entry: A Conversation about Life After Conviction
Titled “Breaking Down Barriers to Re-entry: A Conversation about Life after Conviction,” the first of the day’s panels aimed to initiate dialogue on the potential of cross-disciplinary collaboration to address challenges faced by individuals with criminal records.

According to moderator Lisa Margulies L’12, the panel focused primarily on two layers of impact—the individual and community—and examined efforts to empower those with criminal records by enabling them to start afresh.

“Only by putting these puzzle pieces together can we maximize impact and create lasting change,” she said.

Prior to the panelists’ discussion, a short video on employment challenges faced by those with convictions, which was created by third-year students enrolled in Professor Regina Austin’s legal advocacy seminar, was shown to illustrate the societal impact of obstructing formerly convicted persons from finding employment.

According to the video, which will be exhibited at the Penn Visual Legal Advocacy Video Festival on April 12, it is now more difficult for formerly convicted individuals to find work than ever due to the ease with which employers can conduct criminal background checks.

Panelist Wayne Jacobs named removing the box inquiring into an applicant’s prior criminal history from employment applications and securing the right to vote for formerly convicted persons among the group’s most significant successes.

Jacobs, himself a formerly incarcerated person who had “spent the last 20 to 25 years going back and forth through the prison system,” co-founded X-Offenders for Community Empowerment, an advocacy organization dedicating to securing the interests of formerly convicted persons attempting to reintegrate into society. He now serves as the initiative’s executive director. 

According to Philadelphia Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, two of the “biggest reasons” constituents approach her as an elected official are employment and housing concerns.

Miller, who had worked in collaboration with Jacobs to “ban the box” on job applications asking whether an individual had ever been convicted, characterized the resulting legislation as a means of “combating discrimination” against those with criminal records.

“I’m aware that many times when an employer looks at the application and sees that box checked, they put it aside, never to be seen again,” she said. “There is a whole movement in the U.S. to get these laws passed—Philadelphia wasn’t the first, and we won’t be the last.”

Miller likewise affirmed the necessity of assisting formerly convicted persons with securing employment, citing the statistic that “easily half of [Philadelphia’s] population has someone within their relationships or family that’s a formerly convicted person.”

Thomas J. Innes III, who serves as Director of Prison Services for the Defender Association of Philadelphia, then gave an overview of “Roots to Reentry,” a successful reintegration program through which inmates learn valuable gardening and landscaping skills before being placed with a permanent employer in either industry. According to Innes, of the 11 inmates who completed the program last year, 10 are now employed and doing well on parole.

Magistrate Judge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania L. Felipe Restrepo likewise recounted his involvement with the Supervision to Aid Reentry (STAR) program, launched to prevent those who have served long prison sentences for violent crimes from being rearrested. STAR identifies employers friendly to formerly convicted persons and requires participants to meet with magistrate judges every two weeks. After 52 consecutive weeks of satisfactory performance, participants are presented with a motion to reduce their term of supervision by one year. “The transition when folks come home is difficult [and] participants require mentorship,” he said.

In addition to emphasizing the importance of collaboration between city government and local nonprofits, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison maintained that expanding educational opportunity for inmates is key to preventing recidivism.

“Approximately 35 to 40 percent of people in our jails read at a first or second grade level,” he explained, adding that the City has since tripled its ability to provide GEDs to those awaiting trial and is currently providing opportunities for one-fifth of people earning GEDs in prison.

“It’s about making sure everyone has equal opportunity,” he said. “Ninety percent of people in the criminal justice system will come home—the question is, what kind of home are they returning to? They may have been guilty of a misdemeanor but will end up serving a life sentence [in the absence of opportunity.]”

Flickr: 2011 Public Interest Week Pictures

By Jenny Chung C’12

Ken Hurwitz L’76 WG’76, a partner at the law firm Haynes and Boone, provided attendees at a recent breakfast talk at the Biddle Law Library’s Rare Book Room an overview of the energy law field, and the many career paths open to those involved in the sector.

Sponsored by the Penn Law Energy Club, Hurwitz’s talk highlighted the changes the energy sector has undergone over the past 35 years. Hurwitz, who earned both his J.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Penn in 1976, recalled that when he graduated, there had been “no real energy field, per se,” adding, “there was public utility practice, environmental practice and some natural gas practice, but that was about it.”

In the past, the electric utility industry had been structured in such a way as to preserve vertical integration. According to Hurwitz, electric utilities firms owned production, transmission and distribution mechanisms, earning 80 to 90 percent of all revenue from retail sales to commercial, industrial and residential users.

Regulated by the Federal Power Commission (now known as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), such utilities also engaged in limited wholesale activities and limited reserve-sharing agreements with others, he said.

Within this  “fairly tight structure,” law firms represented utilities seeking to complete wholesale transactions. When inflation set in during the 1960s, many utilities likewise sought to raise their rates and, correspondingly, representation from law firms.

“There were firms in Washington that filed rate increase cases before the Federal Power Commission and firms nationwide which represented utilities that wanted to raise retail rates,” Hurwitz said, adding that certain segments of the legal profession opposed such rate increases. He cited firms that represented electric co-ops which resold utilities to distribution co-ops as examples of the latter group.

With regard to the natural gas sector, firms would go before the Federal Power Commission and contest utility firms that represented pipelines, which were integrated in that they provided bundled services consisting of both sales and transportation.

“Lawyers practicing in the utility area were either pro-utility/pipeline or anti-utility/pipeline,” he said.

In 1978, a “revolution” occurred with the passage of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), which opened up the electric generation field to competition with utilities. For instance, Hurwitz explained, small power producers that used renewable energy sources were given the right to require electric utilities to divide their power.

Because PURPA facilities could require an electric utility to sign a contract with them for thirty years, Hurwitz explained the law “furnished many benefits to a new section of generators” and “gave rise to a vibrant and competitive independent power sector.”

“You get excited as a lawyer because there’s now a whole new class of clients you can represent,” he said.

Shortly afterward, the natural gas sector also underwent significant changes as a result of FERC Order 436, which “changed the nature of how pipelines did business,” Hurwitz recounted.

He explained that pipelines were required to provide open access transportation, effectively being converted from purchase and resale agents to transportation entities.

Once the Energy Policy Act was passed in 1992, electric utilities were required to provide transmission services to third parties, resulting in a “whole new series of entities…that could generate and transport power.”

According to Hurwitz, the implications for energy law deriving from the previous legislative measures were far-reaching.

“In the old days, who you could represent was fairly limited,” he said. “Now, things have opened up in new, varied and interesting ways [as] numerous groups of potential clients came into being.”

Hurwitz characterized the 1980s in general as a period of change, largely due to the massive deregulation carried out by the Reagan administration. In Washington, D.C., for instance, the “specialized boutique” firms of the past were gradually replaced by an influx of out-of-town firms which performed more “generalized” commercial work.

“In the old days, the only utility transaction work that went on was when utilities wanted to issue bonds,” he said. “Today, there are all sorts of litigation and transactions that go on—plenty of regulatory work.”

“Energy has become an exciting field with lots of potential employers,” Hurwitz added.

He advised law students looking to enter the field to postpone working at government agencies for a few years upon graduation in order to acquire more extensive experience.
“Four to six years out of law school is ideal [for entering a government agency],” he said. “You get a good law firm foundation and more expertise.”

While Hurwitz deemed “becoming ingrown at a law firm” as the “most traditional and successful path in private legal practice,” he acknowledged that in the current economic climate, many firms are reluctant to hire first or second-year associates.

“The difficulty firms are having is that they aren’t quite sure where this new world will end up,” he said. “They’re reluctant to discount because of the expectation that they’ll return to the old world in which they can command premium rates.”

Regardless of the path one chooses to pursue, Hurwitz said, diligence and a passion for the profession are essential to success.

“You really have to work hard and like what you’re doing,” he said.

By Jenny Chung C’12

According to Joan Messing Graff, the 2011 Penn Law Public Interest Week Honorary Fellow in Residence, guaranteeing fairness and equality in the workplace is imperative because work fosters “self-worth, a sense of value, a sense of identity and a sense of purpose,” she said as part of a Public Interest week lecture she delivered the evening of Mar. 16 in Silverman 245A.

Named the first female executive director of the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco-Employment Law Center (LAS-ELC) in 1981, Graff shared her extensive public advocacy experience with Penn Law students and faculty in attendance. 

Graff opened her talk with a brief overview of her personal and professional background, during which she ascribed her enduring passion for justice to an upbringing “grounded in social values.”

She earned her undergraduate degree from the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations before entering law school at Columbia University, where she was one of the few women in her class at a time when the presence of women lawyers, she recalled, “was not embraced.”

Graff went on to co-found the San Francisco-based Equal Rights Advocates, one of the first nonprofit legal organizations in the U.S. dedicated to advancing women’s rights, which achieved significant success toward opening employment opportunities for women.

She now heads LAS-ELC, which has been in continuous operation since it was founded in 1916 to represent low-wage workers and train law students in public-interest practice.

According to Graff, LAS-ELC clients are poor and face problems ranging from nonpayment of wages to discrimination to harassment. She added that since the recession, the number of clients approaching LAS-ELC for legal assistance has “increased exponentially.”

Graff characterized the Center as “one of the rare organizations that have been able to marry direct services to impact litigation,” fields which require “very different skill sets and attract very different types of people.”

When she first arrived in San Francisco, Graff said, relations between the two sectors were “very tense.”

“Public interest lawyers viewed direct service lawyers as constantly governed by political correctness,” she explained. The former, in turn, were perceived by their direct service colleagues as “elitist [and] arrogant.”

Graff said that while there initially existed some friction between direct service lawyers and impact litigators at the Center, it was soon overcome. “We worked through it and reached a successful model,” she said. “The cultures of both these sides of the office were completely merged—it’s a thriving practice that integrates them both.”

Emphasizing the importance of responding to the needs of client communities instead of “litigating from on high,” Graff explained that the Center’s litigation priorities are determined by input from nightly clinics it holds around the Bay Area.

To illustrate the nature of her clients’ concerns, Graff outlined an ongoing case brought to litigation through the clinic: a woman who worked at Foster Farms for 20 years was unlawfully fired for taking a family leave—granted by her employer—to visit her gravely ill father in Guatemala. According to Graff, to justify the firing, Foster Farms contended the client had fabricated her father’s illness.

Graff followed this with an account of a “groundbreaking” case which had been brought on behalf of black firefighters systemically excluded from positions in the San Francisco Fire Department. 

The case was significant in light of the fact that “fire departments have historically closed doors to minorities and women and handed down desirable jobs through nepotism,” according to Graff.

She told her audience that 15 years elapsed before this particular case was resolved, during which period the Center collaborated with coalitions that represented minorities and women firefighters.

Even after a settlement was reached, she said, its enforcement required years of monitoring due to the “extraordinary” level of resistance. The Center’s efforts, however, were amply rewarded when two of the plaintiffs became, respectively, the first African-American and woman fire chiefs.

“When you break down boundaries,” Graff said, “there need not be a long time to achieve immense successes.”

Graff expounded on another case brought by a client who had worked for over two decades as a mailroom clerk at a bank despite a developmental disability. Regardless of his years of reliable service, the client was fired after his employer outsourced the functions he was performing.

“They didn’t find him responsive enough or understand his disability,” she said. “He was devastated—for him, his job was himself. It showed him he was a meaningful, contributing member of the community.”

Graff reflected that her clients have become increasingly vulnerable since the recession as they work “low-level jobs and are viewed as dispensable.” Additional sources of employment instability, she asserted, can be found in outsourcing and the increased classification of workers as independent contractors who can be denied an hourly wage and health benefits. 

“The latest numbers say more than 14 percent of Americans are living below the poverty line,” she said. “This is shocking in our country—we tend to think of ourselves as ahead of the game on that.”

According to Graff, a substantial part of the problem is that low-wage workers are frequently considered “fungible” to employers. “They aren’t seen as real people—here today, gone tomorrow. It’s tragic as we assist our clients to see their pain at being treated as if they’re nothing, which often happens.”

She added that because many of her clients were employed by underfunded firms, “complete justice” is often impossible due to employers’ inability to pay their settlements.

Graff cited domestic workers as a group that finds it especially difficult to assert their legal rights because of their relative isolation and lack of community.

“We represented a 70-year old Spanish-speaking housekeeper who worked for a family in Hillsborough, California—she was paid from $3 to $4 an hour working 14-hour days, six days a week without any breaks, overtime, vacation pay or sick leave in a hostile environment,” Graff said.

In response to the case—which concluded with a settlement—a newly-formed group organized around domestic worker issues held a respectful march through Hillsborough to communicate with and educate other domestic workers on their rights.

Graff noted the client herself eventually became an active member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Under her direction, the Center is now working on securing jobs for low-wage workers in San Francisco, extending requirements for sick leave in California and granting domestic workers basic rights like sick leave and overtime pay, among other issues.

“Employment law is ever-changing—that is the joy and wonder of practicing in the field,” Graff said. “Employment is a civil right that needs to embrace every right that people have.”

From Monday, March 14 through Friday, March 18 the Toll Public Interest Center (TPIC) at Penn Law is hosting the Law School’s annual Public Interest Week, a series of workshops, conferences, and events which explores pressing issues in pro bono and public interest lawyering. The focus of the week is on the pursuit of justice – and it will help students explore the many ways in which they can engage in advocating for social justice.

From Monday, March 14 through Friday, March 18 the Toll Public Interest Center (TPIC) at Penn Law will host the Law School’s annual Public Interest Week, a series of workshops, conferences, and events which will explore pressing issues in pro bono and public interest lawyering. The focus of the week will be on the pursuit of justice – and it will help students explore the many ways in which they can engage in advocating for social justice.

The week will culminate in the 30^th anniversary of the Sparer Symposium on Friday, March 18, the theme of which is “Partnering Against Poverty: Examining Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Public Interest Lawyering,” and which will convene legal academics and practitioners to provide insight into the dynamic relationship between scholarship and practice in the area of poverty law.

Joan Messing Graff, executive director of the Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center, will serve as Honorary Fellow in Residence for Public Interest Week. She will be an active participant in the week’s events and will lecture on “Putting Justice to Work: Defending the Rights of Workers” on Wednesday, March 16 at 5 p.m.

Additional Public Interest Week events will include:

• A public interest practice area fair and reception;
• A panel discussion on advocating for justice on consumer matters;
• A screening of the film Lost Souls and discussion with the film-maker on issues of immigration, migration, and family;
• A workshop for students on how to thrive as a public interest lawyer;
• A discussion on racialized tracking in American schools;
• A panel discussion on litigation strategy in the context of disability rights;
• A workshop on the nuts-and-bolts of post-graduate public interest fellowships;
• The week will end with the third annual Penn Law Public Interest Alumni Dinner, bringing current students together with the legal professionals in whose footsteps they hope to follow.

For a complete list of events, see the Public Interest Week Calendar.

As part of Public Interest Week, the Sparer Symposium on Friday, March 18, will explore novel solutions to the poverty crisis in the U.S., addressing both the advantages and difficulties of cross-sector and cross-profession collaboration. The Symposium has been designed to facilitate critical discussion among participants, and will include practitioners from diverse backgrounds as well as people facing the myriad problems associated with poverty.

Sparer Symposium panelists will address issues related to the law and poverty, such as prisoner re-entry; the poverty-environment connection; digital approaches to poverty mitigation; and advocating for healthy and affordable food. Sister Mary Scullion, Co-Founder, Executive Director and President of Project H.O.M.E. in Philadelphia, will present a talk on Friday, March 18 at 5 p.m. at the closing reception. The Symposium has been approved for 6 hours of substantive CLE credit and 1.5 hours of ethics CLE credit for Pennsylvania lawyers.

For a complete list of Symposium panels and participants, see the Sparer Symposium Schedule.

Penn Law’s Toll Public Interest Center, founded in 1989, provides students meaningful opportunities to provide pro bono legal service to under-represented communities. The Center’s pro bono program, which includes a 70-hour pro bono requirement and emphasizes students’ professional development, has been recognized with the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award.

Building on its faculty, curricular, and research strengths in law and technology, the University of Pennsylvania Law School has received a major gift to establish a leading-edge intellectual property (IP) and technology legal clinic.

The new clinic will be called the Detkin Intellectual Property and Technology Legal Clinic at Penn Law in recognition of the gift by Peter Detkin EE ’82, L’85, the noted IP entrepreneur and Founder and Vice-Chairman of Intellectual Ventures, an invention investment firm, who currently serves on the Board of Overseers for Penn’s Engineering school.  The clinic will be designed to set a new standard for higher legal education in IP and technology by providing hands-on, practical experience along the technological, legal, and business pathways that comprise the commercialization of innovation.

“The Detkin Intellectual Property and Technology Legal Clinic, made possible through Peter’s wonderful generosity, will enable Penn Law students to gain tremendous insights and professional experience in the real world of IP and technology law and commercialization,” said Michael A. Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. “The clinic is a testament to Peter’s entrepreneurial spirit and to his impressive career and achievements in the legal profession and in technological innovation. And as an enterprise at the crossroads of law and technology, the clinic also epitomizes Penn Law’s leadership in cross-disciplinary legal studies.”

“My career has been at the intersection of law and technology, and I believe that all business and technology professionals need a solid understanding of intellectual property,” said Detkin. “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.”

Detkin added: “This clinic will be designed to provide Penn students throughout the University a unique opportunity to learn about how IP is handled in the real world; 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.”

The Detkin Clinic will be administered by and housed at Penn Law’s Gittis Center for Clinical Legal Studies and will be operated in collaboration with Penn’s Center for Technology Transfer (CTT), which is dedicated to moving the world-class research and technologies developed at Penn to the marketplace where they may be developed for the public good. The clinic will involve extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration between Penn Law and Penn’s Schools of Engineering, Medicine, Business (Wharton), Arts and Sciences, and other Penn departments and programs involved in the patenting and licensing processes, as well as related research. It will be directed by a clinical faculty member to be named in the coming months.

In addition, the clinic will be closely integrated with Penn Law’s curriculum in law and technology and build upon the strengths of its research programs, such as Penn Law’s Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition. Projects from the Detkin Clinic will be used as case studies in non-clinical courses, and students will be expected to have completed certain prerequisite Law School courses, such as Introduction to Intellectual Property and  Patent Law, prior to enrolling in the clinic.

Real-world cases on which students will likely work include invention and market evaluation, patent prosecution and patent application development, strategic decision-making related to patents and licensing, and negotiation of licensing or other commercialization deals.

The Detkin Clinic will complement nine other clinics at Penn Law’s Gittis Center for Clinical Legal Studies, which engage Penn Law students in direct legal representation of individual and organizational clients in a range of domestic and international venues.

Professional Excellence: Mentoring and Networking

Don't let the somewhat stodgy name fool you. The American Inns of Court – an association of lawyers, judges, legal academics, and law students who share a passion for professional excellence – is one of the most successful legal mentoring organizations in the country. Founded in the late 1970s by Chief Justice Warren Burger and some of his colleagues with the purpose of promoting professionalism and ethics in mentoring for young lawyers, the American Inns took the model of the British Inns and made it fit the American legal profession.

Today, Penn Law’s Inn of Court offers camaraderie, education, and a chance for true relationship-building among a vibrant community of current and future members of the bar. Members of the Penn Law Inn meet each month for a cocktail hour, "breaking bread" over dinner, and a presentation that typically involves a mock case and raises hot legal issues of the day. Students work directly with judges and practitioners in preparing and delivering the presentations, which are eligible for CLE credit.

Recently, Judge Gene E.K. Pratter L’75 spoke about her experience as a member of the Penn Law Inn of Court.

 Careers and Fellowships: Appellate Advocacy

By Sophie Jeewon Choi C’13

Four months after breaking ground for a new 40,000 square foot, state-of-the-art building, the University of Pennsylvania Law School celebrated the completion of the steel erection phase of the project with a Topping Off ceremony on November 4. Dean Michael Fitts, Penn President Amy Gutmann, members of the Law School’s Board of Overseers, and Penn Law faculty, students and staff gathered to sign the final steel beam and watch as the construction crew placed it at the top of the new Golkin Hall.

Click any photo below to view a slideshow of the Topping Off ceremony and celebration.

Read more:
Topping Out Golkin Hall

Brigadier General Ayres will speak at the conference, "Rule of Law Reform in Iraq and Afghanistan: Challenges for the Coming Decade," which is co-sponsored by Penn Law and the National Constitution Center and will take place on Sept. 23-24.  Here, he answers questions about his career as a Judge Advocate General and how the Corps has changed since 9/11.

Q: You were commissioned in the U.S. Army after graduating from West Point in 1984, and later received a JD from Penn Law and an LLM from the Judge Advocate General’s School. You’ve served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. For those who may not be familiar with the JAG Corps, can you give some background on the Corps and your role?

Several months after the Law School conducted a successful fund-raising challenge at the end of the last fiscal year, Paul Levy L’72 has issued one of his own.

The ACE Rule of Law Fund has awarded a $50,000 grant to the University of Pennsylvania Law School in support of a conference it is sponsoring in partnership with the National Constitution Center on the legal challenges facing new constitutional democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the Fund’s largest grant to date.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Latin American Law Students Association (LALSA) will hold a conference entitled Forging Ahead: U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America under the Obama Administration on Saturday, Jan. 30 at 6 p.m. in the Law School’s Levy Conference Center. The conference will feature Dan Restrepo, L’99, who serves as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for western hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

Michael O’Connor, a 2009 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is the winner of the Alliance Defense Fund’s William Pew Religious Freedom Scholarship Competition for 2008-2009.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School has awarded its Cohen Public Interest Fellowship for 2009-2010 to Victoria Messina L’05. The fellowship will support Messina’s work at Penn’s Toll Public Interest Center, where she will develop and supervise student-run pro bono projects. 

Six University of Pennsylvania Law School graduates – including a justice on the Delaware Supreme Court, one of the country’s preeminent trial attorneys and a leading investor – are being honored for their career achievements, pro bono work, service to the legal profession and service to the Law School.

They are:

• Robert S. Blank L’65, a senior partner with the investment partnership Whitcom Partners.
• Randy J. Holland L’72, a justice on the Delaware Supreme Court.
• David Richman L’69, a partner with Pepper Hamilton.
• Richard Sprague L’53, a dominant presence in Philadelphia courts for decades.
• Leba Tolpin L’06, an attorney representing at-risk youth in Delaware.
• Stella Ming Tsai L’88, a partner with Archer & Greiner.

“These honorees have made – and continue to make – enduring contributions to the law, to the welfare of their clients and to the future of the law school that was a springboard to their success,” said Penn Law Dean Michael A. Fitts. “Each of them epitomizes the importance of being dedicated to something larger than one’s self, to helping create opportunities for others.”

The awards will be presented during an Oct. 7 ceremony and reception celebration at Penn Law.

The Distinguished Service Award honoring service to Penn Law will be awarded to Robert S. Blank, senior partner of Whitcom Partners and co-chair and co-CEO of its affiliate, Whitney Communications Co. The firms make investments in public and non-public companies and have operated large-market FM radio stations and network-affiliated television stations, cable television systems, trade magazines, newspapers and other publications. Blank began his law career as an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, DC, and later worked in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman, Sachs. He joined Whitcom in 1971. Blank is a director of Toll Brothers Inc., a member of Penn’s Board of Trustees, a member of the Penn Medicine Board, an overseer of both The Wharton School and Penn Law, and he serves on the board of managers of The Wistar Institute.

Sprague is principal with the firm of Sprague & Sprague, where he has represented a variety of high-profile figures, including basketball star Allen Iverson and radio personality Howard Eskin. In 2000, Sprague was listed in Philadelphia magazine’s Power 100 as the 25th most powerful person in Philadelphia.  He has served as special prosecutor for the Allegheny County District Attorney since 1999 and as special prosecutor for the Philadelphia County District Attorney since 2000.  Sprague was chief counsel and director of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, investigating the murders of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sprague’s 50-year career has also included leading roles in a test of the insanity defense and in prosecuting United Mine Workers president Tony Boyle for the murder of Joseph “Jock” Yablonski.

Tsai, a partner with Archer & Greiner, focuses her practice on corporate governance and governmental affairs, and she has extensive commercial litigation experience, including trial work. She has served as one of the city of Philadelphia’s top lawyers, managing the 45 attorneys of the Health and Human Services Unit. She also supervised attorneys who represented the city in civil rights and labor relations matters in state and federal courts and before local, state and federal labor boards and commissions.   During her tenure at the Law Department, Ms. Tsai made substantial contributions to the system-wide implementation of court reforms designed to achieve the safety, permanency and well-being of at-risk children and youth in Philadelphia. She subsequently served as an inaugural member of Philadelphia’s Board of Ethics and helped rewrite the city’s complex and outdated zoning code to help facilitate sustainable growth. She is a former president of Penn’s Law Alumni Society.

The Young Alumni Award, honoring professional achievement of a student who graduated within the past 10 years, will be presented to Leba Tolpin. Since September 2006, Tolpin has served as a staff attorney and the Steven J. Rothschild Skadden Fellow at the Disabilities Law Program at Community Legal Aid Society Inc. in Wilmington, Delaware, where she represents at-risk youth.  She also advocates within the juvenile justice facilities and the juvenile delinquency system and has represented children in Social Security and Medicaid appeals and in school disciplinary removal hearings. She recently accompanied her husband, a doctor, on a service trip to the Himalayan Mountains, establishing medical clinics in remote villages.

The inaugural Howard Lesnick Pro Bono Award, named for a longtime Penn Law professor and awarded to a graduate who has shown a sustained commitment to public service as part of a private-sector career, will be awarded to David Richman. A partner with Pepper Hamilton and a trial and appellate lawyer, Richman previously served 18 years as a court-appointed counsel to the inmates of the Philadelphia Prison System in a federal class action. He has worked as an Assistant DA for Philadelphia, following service as counsel to an ad hoc committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives investigating corruption in the state government. He co-founded the PA Innocence Project in 2008 and is the organization's president.

Michael Smerconish, a 1987 graduate of Penn Law School and a talk-show radio host, describes his one-on-one interview with President Obama in his Philadelphia Inquirer column.

"The president soon arrived for his first live radio interview from the White House, five or six minutes ahead of schedule," Smerconish writes. "Suddenly, I faced the task of shooting the breeze with the most powerful man in the world."

Students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School will have even more opportunities to advocate for human rights and asylum protection, thanks to a gift from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and its partners. The gift honors Robert C. Sheehan, a 1969 graduate of the Law School who recently ended his 15-year tenure as executive partner of the law firm and assumed a new role as the firm’s pro bono partner.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School is awarding its first Philadelphia Fellowship to 2009 graduate Daniel Urevick-Ackelsberg, who will work with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.

After 30 days, dozens of emails, and hundreds of phone calls, Penn Law successfully reached the finish line of its June Challenge by receiving gifts from 1,245 donors for a total of $960,922.

Three University of Pennsylvania Law School graduates have issued this challenge: get 500 donations to the Law School’s annual fund by the end of June and they will donate $25,000 to their alma mater; get 1,000 donations by June 30 and receive a total gift of $125,000.

It was a tour de force. Richard A. Sprague, L’53, grand inquisitor, fierce competitor and Philadelphia’s preeminent trial lawyer, gave a lecture last March that seemed more like a clinic on how to prosecute a murder case. Making the classroom his courtroom, he recounted the hard investigative work, the skillful presentation of witnesses and the courtroom choreography that leads to conviction.

Within hours of planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Cozen O’Connor was flooded with calls from insurance companies. A simple question, “Can we sue Afghanistan?” evolved into a full-blown case in which the prominent Philadelphia law firm is holding more than 400 alleged sponsors of al-Qaeda, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and several Islamist charities, financially liable for 9/11. 

            Gather forty of the nation’s leading general counsel, law firm partners and legal academics in a San Diego conference room.  Add one economist. Welcome a U.S. congressman and a British solicitor via videoconference. Then, lob in this piece of raw meat: legal regulations are antiquated, law school accreditation requirements are misguided, and Big Law’s billable hours are corrosive.  Discuss. 

• Multi-jurisdictional practice. Members of the Bar in one state should be able to practice in any state, as long as they agree to abide by local rules. Federal preemption may be required to accomplish this.
• Litigation. Too much litigation is too expensive, primarily because of exhaustive discovery.
• Court reform. Rebecca Love Kourlis, a former justice of the Colorado Supreme Court who is executive director of the Institute for Advancement of the American Legal System, pointed out that judges have little incentive to control cases and that the Bar sometimes comes down hard on judges who efficiently manage cases through the system. The notion that court performance metrics must focus on measuring time to disposition alone is not only misleading, it can actually result in bad outcomes. According to Kourlis, this narrow view only encourages settlements, which in turn reduce trials and appellate decisions that contribute to the common law, making it harder for in-house counsel to assess risk and driving up legal costs. Kourlis contends that other measurements must be built into the performance assessment process and the Bar must demonstrate support for these criteria. Those other measurements should emphasize procedural fairness, such as: was the judge prepared for the hearing or process and respectful of participants; was he or she timely in moving the case along and in rendering decisions; and, were those decisions clear?
• Billing. The billable hour emphasizes effort over results and is leading many businesses to ramp-up in-house counsel or to out-source (to India) to control costs. “At large law firms, lawyers don’t know what their jobs are: make money or serve clients,” said Scott Gilbert, co-founder and chairman of Gilbert Oshinsky. Clients could force a new compensation structure on Big Law simply by refusing to hire firms that have billable hour quotas.
• Client-firm interactions. These associations need to become less transactional and more relational. “Clients should be willing to invest in firms beyond giving them business,” said David Wilkins, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Treat firms as true partners.”  Carla Powers-Herron, group counsel at Shell Oil Co., added: “The law firm structure has killed creativity. It’s all about the book of business, not about how to best serve clients. There’s no focus on value.”    Harvey Anderson, vice president and general counsel at Mozilla Corp., suggested that firm lawyers “participate in client business meetings, go to marketing planning sessions, learn about the business and act like an owner of the problem not just a provider of discrete legal advice.” 
• Legal education. Legal education is too analytic, insufficiently collaborative, and emphasizes legal analysis at the expense of problem-solving and skill-building. Law schools should not become trade schools, but they would benefit from better engagement between faculty and practicing attorneys and by having more practicing attorneys in their teaching ranks. “We have people teaching who don’t practice. You would never find that in medical school,” said Michael Roster, former chairman of the Association of Corporate Counsel. The association’s Value Challenge is actively engaging inside and outside counsel in conversations regarding needed changes in the profession.
• Practicing law. The practice of law should be more narrowly and clearly defined so that it does not prohibit the provision of some basic services by non-lawyers. “We simply do not need lawyers to do some of the things that we need to have done,” said former Penn Law Dean Robert Mundheim, now of counsel at Shearman & Sterling.  Added Emory Law School Professor George Shepherd: “My mom works as a tax preparer for H&R Block, and she’s not a CPA.”
• Ownership. Allowing outside investment in law firms would do more than provide additional capital; it would bring greater discipline of business reporting and analysis to the legal profession.

Nominations are now open for candidates for the first-ever recipient of the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Award for Excellence in Pipeline Diversity, to be presented by the American Bar Association.

Sadie Alexander was the first African-American to earn a doctoral degree in economics at the University of Pennsylvania, completing it in 1921, and she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1927, becoming the first African American woman to do so.

Related links:
Announcement of award
Photograph of Sadie Alexander
Film "Imagining Sadie," from the Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law.