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.

By Jenny Chung C'12

Claire Finkelstein, Jens Ohlin, Ambassador Thomas Graham, Daphne Eviatar and Kevin Govern

On Wednesday, November 30 the Institute for Law and Philosophy (ILP) of the University of Pennsylvania Law School hosted a panel discussion on the “Ethical and Legal Dimensions of Targeted Killing,” drawing an audience of faculty, students, and members of the public, and which brought to light a “sea change” in modern conceptions of war and national security policy.

Moderated by Claire Finkelstein, an ILP co-director and Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, the panel brought together four prominent authorities in the fields of international and criminal law, national security policy, military ethics, and human rights.

Finkelstein opened by highlighting both the timeliness and relevance of discussing military ethics as an issue with which both the Obama and Bush administrations have grappled in combating terrorism.

She noted the “enormous sea change” the nation has undergone in recent decades concerning “fundamental conceptions related to war [and] the traditional distinction between combatants and civilians.” In addition, because the notion of sovereignty now plays a decreasingly important role in terms of identifying enemy threats to the country, Finkelstein said, important issues have emerged surrounding “how we think about the relationship between U.S. military action in the fight for security and the civilian-combatant divide.”

Finkelstein also identified the expansion of executive authority in the wake of 9/11 as another ideological shift. “We have according to many policymakers and lawyers been in a protracted state of emergency since 9/11—in times of emergency, the executive branch is conceived of as having broader powers,” she said. “What do we make of a state of emergency with no beginning, middle or end in sight?”

The panel commenced with a question on whether the Obama administration’s current use of targeted killing can be considered ethically or legally problematic.

Jens Ohlin, Associate Professor at Cornell University Law School and expert in international humanitarian law, criminal law and international law, asserted that the Obama administration has demonstrated “remarkable restraint” in carrying out targeted killings.

“I’m convinced [that] under international humanitarian law if civilians are participating in hostilities they can be targeted,” he said, adding that this approach has served as a “guiding principle” to the administration.

Claire Finkelstein, Jens Ohlin and Ambassador Thomas Graham

Ambassador Thomas Graham, Special Representative of the President for Arms Control, Non-Proliferation, and Disarmament (1994-1997), emphasized that the acceptability and legality of targeted killings and the drone technology used in such operations depend largely on whether or not they occur in a war zone.

“Using targeting killing drones in struggle against the Taliban is a legitimate part of military action,” he explained. “The use of military weapons like drones in Yemen, far removed from any war zone, is problematic.”

Senior Associate at the Law and Security Program of Human Rights First Daphne Eviatar contended that the methods adopted by the current administration are not lawful.

“It’s not clear that the admin is targeting only belligerents because of the secrecy surrounding the program,” she said. “The administration doesn’t even acknowledge it has a CIA drone program, which conducts the bulk of its strikes. We don’t know who they’re targeting, why, or the extent of civilian casualties because it’s not recorded—there’s a murky view of what’s going on.”

Ave Maria School of Law Associate Professor Kevin Govern, who specializes in military ethics and military law, expressed confidence that “adequate legal oversight” is exercised and argued that the perception of killing occurring more often than capture is mere “speculation confirmed by rumor and innuendo.”

The question that followed concerned who could permissibly targeted in war aside from combatants and elicited a range of responses from the panelists.

While there exists a “functional equivalence” between citizens engaging in hostilities and enemy combatants, Ohlin said, it is exceedingly difficult to identify the civilians who are directly participating in hostilities (DPH).

He suggested as a possible solution the categorical classification of individuals belonging to hierarchical nonstate groups who exercise a “continuous combat function” as combatants.

Eviatar corroborated the notion that DPH status is difficult to assess and added that targeted killings are based on intelligence that may not be altogether accurate. “Mistakes are being made all the time in that area,” she said. “More transparency on the kind of intelligence being used is important to knowing whether the right people are being targeted.”

The panelists then turned to the question of the extent of military duty to capture rather than kill in international conflicts.

According to Ohlin, while international humanitarian law dictates capture on condition of surrender, the law of armed conflict does not. “It’s a determination of what body of law applies,” he explained. “If you’re going to argue there is a duty to capture, I take it what you’re really arguing is that the law of armed conflict just doesn’t apply to the operation.”
 

Daphne Eviatar and Kevin Govern

“The Pentagon’s statistics indicate 84 to 86 percent of ongoing kill-or-capture operations involved no use of violence,” Govern said, maintaining that “elected legislators” must be trusted to perform their role as “oversight” and the military to “ensure a detailed planning process” precedes every operation.

When asked whether the targeted killings of Osama Bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki were legal and ethical under the principles of law and morality of war, Govern replied that as they met the four basic criteria: “military necessity, proportionality of the use of force, avoidance of unnecessary suffering and discrimination/discernment,” both were legally and ethically justified.

Eviatar contended, however, that while the Bin Laden raid is widely regarded as morally justified, “it may have been an illegal operation.” She added that “al-Awlaki was also problematic because […] there was no real indication that he was DPH and should have been subject to arrest and prosecution.”

In Graham’s view, there had never been any intention to capture Bin Laden alive, as that would have “triggered terrorist actions all over the world to get him released.” While the raid was “contrary to policy,” he nevertheless believes it was justified.

The case of al-Awlaki, however, was “very different” and due process should have taken precedence over military necessity, Graham said. “He was an American citizen killed by the U.S. government without a full trial in a country that wasn’t part of a war zone,” he explained. “I don’t think something like the al-Awlaki case should ever happen—there has to be some deference paid to the fact that we do have a Constitution.”

Additional Event Photos: Panel Discussion: Ethical and Legal Dimensions of Targeted Killing (Flickr)

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.

By Jenny Chung C'12

Penn Law Professor Cary Coglianese

An audience of students, faculty, and members of the public filled Penn Law’s Levy Conference Room November 19 for the 2011 Journal of Business Law Symposium, a full-day event comprised of three panels and five keynote lectures delivered by leading authorities in the fields of corporate law, financial regulation, and commerce, as well as other fields.

Organized by the Law School’s Journal of Business Law, this year’s Symposium addressed the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act and the wider topic of consumer financial protection.

Professor Cary Coglianese’s opening remarks centered on the common ground between recent questions concerning relations between public authority and the ordering of private affairs as compared against those raised several centuries earlier at the nation’s founding.
 
“We’re considering today questions that have deep roots in American history and a core reflected in the movements of today,” he said. “The concerns underlying Occupy Wall Street’s efforts tap into a deep suspicion of power that underlies the American polity.”

He advised audience members to ask themselves how a conference organized around the issue of consumer protection five to ten years from now would assess whether the Dodd-Frank Act was successful at ending corporate abuses and, in turn, what criteria should be employed in evaluating the success of legislation intended to regulate relations between businesses and consumers.

“A gathering like [this Symposium] comes at a perfect time to look backward as well as forward and look forward to looking backward,” he added.

Wharton School of Business Professor Franklin Allen

Prof. Allen keynote address: Dodd-Frank and systemic risk

Coglianese’s introduction was followed by the Symposium’s first keynote lecture, delivered by Wharton School of Business Professor Franklin Allen, who discussed systemic risk within the framework of the Dodd-Frank Act.

According to Allen, most regulators before the financial crisis were confident that controlling the risk assumed by individual banks was sufficient to prevent crises as it forestalled the buildup of risk in the financial system. He suggested that this view is “fundamentally flawed” given its inability to account for systemic risk, which can arise from “panics, banking crises due to asset price falls, contagion [and] foreign exchange mismatches in the banking system.”

Tracing the origins of financial panics to “multiple equilibria in the banking system” which compel people to withdraw their funds from banks when they sense others are likely to withdraw—even if there exists no other rational incentive to do so—Allen posited the guarantee of all short-term debt as a possible method of ruling out such “self-fulfilling equilibria” but cautioned that this approach may entail other types of systemic risk and itself prove costly.

Allen also identified the extensive involvement of banks in real estate and too-low interest rates coupled with large foreign exchange reserves—mostly held in dollars and accumulated by central banks in Asia—as contributing factors to the crisis.

He emphasized the need to reduce global imbalances and explained that self-insurance by Asian countries through large reserves is optimal for the countries in question but “inefficient” globally. To rectify this, he suggested, a stronger Asian presence in the governance structure of the International Monetary Fund is central.

Allen also proposed that ensuring the permanence of the IMF liquidity facility may provide the solution to foreign exchange mismatches, another source of systemic risk.

“Systemic risk is a complex phenomenon and we don’t understand it well enough,” he said. “Central banks are constructed to manage crises, but those who are dissidents are screened out from the get-go—it’s important not to do that so we don’t miss things as we did in the previous crisis.”

Prof. Jacoby keynote: Regulatory innovation and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection

UNC School of Law Professor Melissa B. Jacoby, authority on bankruptcy and commercial law, delivered the next keynote speech on regulatory innovation and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

Jacoby opened her talk with the observation that current discussion of the Bureau’s existence “has played out in extreme terms” and “moderate discussion” of the issues is necessary.

UNC School of Law Professor Melissa B. Jacoby

While the principal objective of the bureau is to raise consumer confidence in financial markets and ensure individuals make “smart” decisions, she said, the Bureau also provides a basis for systematic assessment of the market in addition to venues for direct two-way communication with the public like online interactive forms and comment logs.

“This was a particular way to communicate with and get substantive comments back from a wide swath of the population—as confidence builds one can anticipate even more,” she said, adding that public commenting affects public perception of the Bureau “perhaps more so than voting” by providing a means of fostering a sense of inclusion.

Shifting her focus to the Dodd-Frank Act, Jacoby maintained that the passage of the bill was key to safeguarding the ability of states to protect their own citizens insofar as it enabled states to enforce their own consumer protection laws.

Citing the inability of government to “solve all problems” as justification for the Bureau, Jacoby criticized the “extreme” nature of the arguments frequently leveled against it.

“People opposed to the Bureau talk about the ‘right to be wrong,’ and it’s hard to disagree with that as a general proposition, but when people can’t internalize the consequences of their decisions we have to move beyond that,” she explained.

In her view, government has long played a role in encouraging debt, and while the state does and should be entitled to invest significant resources in subsidizing debt collection, it is imperative that “ground rules” be set.

“No one likes all aspects of the Bureau, but we need something to look across the entire market and provide a credible threat of enforcement somewhere within the system. There has to be an actor who can and will step in,” Jacoby said.

Professors David Skeel, David Reiss, Jason S. Johnston and Paul G. Mahoney

Feature panel: Consumer Protection and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Moderated by Penn Law Professor David Skeel, the first panel addressed “The Project of Consumer Protection and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” and invoked the expertise of four distinguished legal scholars.

The panel commenced with a modern-day fable, recounted by Professor David Reiss of Brooklyn Law School, illustrating the “fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews” held by people evaluating the events leading to the subprime market crisis.

A reimagining of the age-old tale of the emperor’s new clothes, Reiss’ story involved an emperor swindled by scoundrels posing as lenders who claimed to have invented a mortgage “so insubstantial it looks burdensome to anyone too stupid to appreciate its quality.” While the entire kingdom perceived the mortgage as heavy, no one was willing to voice his opinion for fear of appearing incompetent.

The moral of the story, Reiss suggested, is that “disclosure can be insufficient to convey the complexity of certain transactions to many consumers” and that the persistence of “muddled and conflicting views about consumer protection” will result in inefficient regulation.

University of Virginia Law School Professor Jason S. Johnston then offered a preliminary critique and examination of the likely consequences of the Dodd-Frank Act’s consumer protection provisions, highlighting areas in which Dodd-Frank departs from existing law.

Prior to the subprime mortgage crisis, Johnston said, prudent consumers had adapted expectations and were reluctant to approach adjustable rate mortgages due to the risk of rates increasing. However, this changed when rates were artificially suppressed from 2001 to 2005 and the Federal Reserve actively encouraged consumers to take out adjustable rate mortgages and lauded the rise of the subprime segment.

Johnston contested the legitimacy of attributing consumer mortgage decisions to “irrational optimism,” contending that those “running national policy and the Federal Reserve especially” should be held accountable.

University of Virginia Law School Professor Jason S. Johnston

Johnston argued that Dodd-Frank fails to address the central issue of government officials and experts misrepresenting market conditions to rational consumers. “If they say low interest rates are now a permanent feature of the economy and you trust them, reading contract terms is irrational because what matters is haste,” he explained.

He added that fundamental reform is needed with regard to the role of the Federal Reserve. “Its discretion has to be limited and its powers restricted—not expanded,” he said.

Paul G. Mahoney, Dean of the University of Virginia Law School, spoke on the shift in regulatory philosophy from disclosure-based standards to restricting and shaping contracts between firms and consumers.

While the drafters of the first federal securities laws explicitly rejected the merit review approach in favor of more disclosure-based systems, enabling fully-informed investors to decide what is best for them, Mahoney explained, this strategy has eroded over time in favor of policing abusive deals.

The change in approach, he said, is reflective of a “current and powerful strand in academic thinking” which holds that individuals are subject to a range of cognitive biases that interferes with their ability to select the best financial product for them even if they are fully informed about the terms.

Mahoney criticized the idea that social welfare can be improved by suppressing consumer preferences and replacing them with those designated by technocrats, noting the “remarkable similarity between arguments that consumers are too dumb to make good decisions and those a century ago in favor of a centrally planned economy.”

While the proponents of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau argue that the Bureau will not seek to manage financial markets but instead nudge consumers in right direction, Mahoney remains skeptical.

“Governments are not good at nudging, what they do is shove,” he said, adding that the current approach “ignores public choice theory.”

University of Virginia Law School Professor Edmund W. Kitch concluded the panel by examining the ways in which the Bureau could tackle consumer credit card debt.

According to Kitch, the simplest criterion by which to determine whether it is advisable for a consumer to borrow capital relates to whether or not the consumer has available projects which will yield a higher rate of return than the cost of capital.

“If we’re going to assume in terms of credit cards that the rate of return is 18 percent, it’s a very high rate,” Kitch said. “It’s hard to identify projects that return in excess of 18 percent a year, and if you use that standard I agree that Americans are drowning in debt.”

Given that the Bureau cannot impose an interest rate cap, the next viable alternative in Kitch’s view is extending credit only after the project for the use of the credit is evaluated and approved by an independent expert acting in the interest of the consumer to determine whether the proposed use of the credit has a reasonable return that exceeds the rate on the card.

Kitch explained that while the Bureau’s budget may be insufficient to provide this service, it could mandate that banks pay for it or outsource to firms specializing in evaluating credit extensions, which would then be evaluated and approved by the Bureau.

“This would raise the cost of providing credit cards but reduce the amount of outstanding debt,” he said, adding that “every means” of consumer credit must be covered to render this method effective. 

Founded in 1997, the Journal of Business Law publishes articles and comments on a broad range of business law topics including corporate governance, securities regulation, capital market regulation, employment law and the law of mergers and acquisitions.

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.

Symposium Editor Jesse Rabinowitz L'12 introduces panelists

By Jenny Chung C'12

On Friday November 11, an audience of faculty and students convened at the Levy Conference Center for this year’s Journal of International Law (JIL) Symposium, comprised of two keynote lectures and three high-level panel discussions which engaged experts in fields ranging from Islamic law to Middle East politics and democratization, to international communications and human rights.

Organized in association with International Human Rights Advocates, this year’s Symposium examined, among other issues, the political climate pervading the post-revolutionary Middle East in a panel moderated by political science professor Brendan O’Leary and attended by panelists Dr. Lina Khatib, Adnan Zulfiqar, and Dr. Nabeel Khoury.

Featured Panel: The Post-Revolutionary Middle East: A Realistic Picture

As part of the day’s proceedings, one of the three panels, titled “The Post-Revolutionary Middle East: A Realistic Picture,” featured Dr. Lina Khatib, the manager and co-founder of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, who offered insight into the transitional phase facing post-revolutionary Middle Eastern states. While democracy may not be sustainable in every nation, she maintained, it will have exercised an overall “positive effect” on the countries that experience it.

“Even if the coming period sees a regression, we can say the status quo and the region has definitely changed, and there is no turning back,” Khatib said.

She attributed this in part to the convergence of formal and informal spheres of political participation, as evidenced by “institutions and people coming together,” particularly in such locales as Tunisia, where number of registered political parties rose in the wake of the revolution.

Citing “organization, leadership, program, strategy, coalitions and resources” as the six factors essential to democracy advocacy, Khatib contended it is “not enough” for post-revolutionary states “to be driven by democratic ideals.”

Though she characterized the internalization of a democratic political culture as a “long and rough journey,” Khatib noted several monumental changes that have already occurred: once exclusive to political or economic elites, she explained, formal political space has become progressively more accessible to citizens.

Further, while authoritarian regimes routinely preempted the formation of rival factions, Khatib foresees a gradual “institutionalization of opposition” from which contending political parties are empowered to emerge.

She also cited the replacement of strong authoritarian institutions with weak civil ones as states strengthen their infrastructures and the suspicion with which Middle Eastern youth regard formal politics as challenges countries moving toward democratic rule must overcome.

“The prospects for political participation in the post-revolutionary Middle East face more challenges than opportunities, but this is not surprising considering the region is recovering from decades of authoritarianism,” she said, adding that “a new era of political participation in the Middle East is in the making.”

To Adnan Zulfiqar, who discussed Islamic law and its relevance to post-revolutionary events in the Middle East, the “elimination of apprehension about voicing dissent or discontent” may constitute the principal “cornerstone upon which democracy will likely be built.” Zulfiqar, who graduated from Penn Law in 2007, is currently the Law & Public Policy Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Global Communication Studies.

Urging his audience to be mindful of the context out of which democracies are emerging in the region, Zulfiqar asserted that the question of religious values in a legal system will invariably “present challenges in a society where individual beliefs will vary.”

“It’s difficult to dissociate religion from the law when religion has a prominent place amongst the constituency,” he explained. “People wish to see their values reflected within laws of the nation.”

Zulfiqar cautioned against viewing recent events in the Middle East through an “ahistorical lens” and emphasized the importance of “[avoiding] the tendency to consider the relationship between religion and politics as uniform across the Muslim world.”

While the role of Islamic law will vary from one country to the next, he pointed out that many citizens have come to associate Islam to some extent with democracy due to its historical opposition to sectarian authoritarian regimes.

According to Zulfiqar, Islamic law in the post-revolutionary Middle East will be “subject to the court of popular opinion,” with certain components of Islamic doctrine garnering the most attention due to their symbolic significance.

Moreover, he added, religious majorities formerly marginalized under sectarian regimes will perceive themselves as “vulnerable” and seek out parties espousing ideologies for which they had previously been “suppressed.”

“The status of Islamic law is one that will be negotiated by the public, heavily influenced by historical context and will have to contend with the politics of individual constituencies,” Zulfiqar concluded. “Islam will be central to the construction of these democracies because it is central to the lives of the people for whom these democracies are being constructed.”

According to Dr. Nabeel Khoury, who serves as the Director of the Near East South Asia Office of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the succession of Middle Eastern revolutions held the promise of “blood, sweat and tears,” signaling the beginning of an “arduous process.”

Khoury suggested that while the current administration has expressed unequivocally its intent to aid the transition to democracy, it has not proceeded without hesitation. The transition itself, he said, has been a “work in progress in terms of both details and implementation” and is a “new process for everyone concerned” overall.

Outlining the shifting axis politics in the Middle East, Khoury observed that “the tradition has always been for international actors to compete and regional actors to align.”

While the decades between 1950 and 1970 witnessed an ideological struggle between Arab countries as to the ideal political systems and international alliances to adopt, Khoury recalled, in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 there emerged among them a conscious effort to set aside ideological differences in favor of collaborating on economic and political issues.

He further explained that the resultant decline of foreign (specifically Soviet) influence in the region gave rise to the ascendance of Islamic influence, which continues to operate in the present day.

“Traditional axes in the region are being reshaped and the region will look quite different in a few years—U.S. alliances in the region will look different as well,” Khoury said. “We must strike a balance between assisting the transition and keeping good relations with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries knowing our perspectives are diverging more and more and there will be tensions and problems.”

While he maintained that the new regimes resulting from the Arab uprisings are likely to prove “difficult” in their dealings with the West, Khoury remains confident they will not be “hostile.”

“These Islamist parties […] have values and priorities that may differ from the pro-Western regimes that preceded them, but in the end they’re willing to compromise and negotiate in the international arena,” he said, adding that a critical challenge for the U.S. will be to support emergent democracies “without alienating conservative monarchies in the region.”

Closing Keynote: Is Liberty God’s Law? Shari'a, the Military and the Arab Revolutions

The symposium concluded with a keynote speech delivered by Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl L’87, a prominent scholar in the disciplines of Islamic law and Islam and an authority on human rights.

While confining the majority of his remarks to the Egyptian revolution “as a case study,” El Fadl also evaluated the impact of other revolutions on the Middle East as a region.

Noting the disparity between the “rich body” of scholarship produced theorizing the sociological and political catalysts of revolutions—particularly those engendering stable democracies—and the “impoverished” literature addressing so-called “subaltern or postcolonial” revolutions, El Fadl invited scholars to shift their focus from “commentary” to the production of “systematic paradigms” which offer principles that illuminate “which revolutions produce what, and why.”

He identified the “militarization of the state”—by which the army is no longer limited to the barracks but rooted in the “administrative structure as well as the oppressive powers of the state”—as one of the key factors shaping the Middle Eastern revolutions.

Within the context of Egypt, he explained, part of the national infrastructure rests on the prevailing expectation that upon retirement from the military one will receive a federal appointment to the board of a private company, inducing many private corporations to hire retired officials in order to avoid conflicts with the state.

“This is part of the reality that revolutions—whether in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria or Yemen—have to confront and deal with,” El Fadl said, adding that “part of the military’s ideological makeup is that they are essential not to defend but to run a country [where] one foot is rooted in a culture shared with the rest of society, while the other is rooted in a unique subculture of the military creed.”

In spite of participants in the Egyptian revolution invoking such slogans as “the army and the people are one hand” in hopes of forestalling violence from the military, he recalled, the schism dividing the military and civilian consciousness became evident when the military began attacking praying citizens and bombarding religious buildings.

Moreover, while the military initially agreed to meet with Egyptian intellectuals—himself included—to discuss the future after the revolution, over time the number of “untouchable” issues continued to increase.

“The military said it was willing to transition to democracy but that there are high-stake interests […] that cannot be left to the vagaries of the democratic process,” El Fadl said. “How much space is left for a democracy to work? What does it mean to speak of a democratic revolution in a state where the military has become its own monstrous interest?”

In spite of these misgivings, El Fadl is confident democracy will secure a foothold in Egypt. “The move for democracy has been demonstrated time and again, and my expectation especially as to Egypt is that there will be a reexplosion,” he maintained. “The streets will explode again, and we’ll be confronted with the same negotiation issues.”

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.

Thomas Wilner, Morris Davis, Sig Libowitz, Peter Riegert

By Kathryn Siegel C’12

On Thursday, October 28 in the Haaga Classroom of Gittis Hall, Penn Law hosted a public screening of the short film The Response, a re-enactment of a Guantanamo Bay military tribunal based on actual transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals, followed by a Q&A session with the film’s writer/producer Sig Libowitz, actor Peter Riegert, along with former military lawyers Thomas Wilner and Col. Morris Davis.

Writer and producer Sig Libowitz said he was inspired to create the film after reading one page of such a transcript in a University of Maryland School of Law classroom.

“Sometimes you get struck by something you found and have to follow it,” he said. He went on to uncover thousands of transcript pages which, coupled with discussions with military lawyers, formed the basis of the screenplay. The Response was “shortlisted for an Academy Award,” according to event organizer Jean Yin L’12, and is currently being screened across the United States and in Europe, including showings at the Pentagon and West Point Academy.

The movie consists of two parts. The first half depicts the detainee’s public hearing, where he faces accusations of bombing a U.S. Embassy building. The detainee, Ph.D. engineer Hassan Ali Al-Aqar, played by Aasif Mandvi, denies involvement but points out the flaws of the tribunal process. Namely, that he is denied a lawyer and access to the confidential evidence being used against him.

The second half portrays the three judges’ private discussion, in which they reflect on the fairness of the process and weigh the risks of clearing the detainee. Colonel Carol Simms, played by Kate Mulgrew, argues that the case is strong enough to hold him further. The remaining judges – Colonel Jefferson, played by Riegert, and Captain Miller, played by Libowitz – distrust the evidence that may have been extracted through torture. They also feel uneasy about passing judgment on a man so unable to defend himself. Jefferson ultimately deems him innocent, Simms deems him a threat, and the movie ends with Miller sitting alone, head bent, unsure of what to do.

When the final credits wrapped, Libowitz and Riegert, along with former military lawyers Thomas Wilner and Colonel Morris Davis, took questions from the audience. Wilner formerly represented Guantanamo detainees in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Col. Davis is the former Chief Prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay.

Thomas Wilner, Morris Davis, Sig Libowitz, Peter Riegert

The four panelists discussed the injustice of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. According to Col. Davis, tribunals finding a detainee to be innocent were often done over until judges reached the opposite verdict.

“It was an Alice in Wonderland type environment,” he says. “We’ve created this process that runs from the law.”

Riegert, who had a recurring role in The Sopranos and also appeared in the movie Animal House, compared a scene in that film to the government’s approach to Guantanamo.

“The fraternity [in Animal House] appears in front of a Greek council, and Dean Wormer gets so frustrated that he throws them off campus. [Likewise,] the administration didn’t know how to deal with Guantanamo, so they threw away the law,” he asserted.

Guantanamo held 775 detainees at its maximum. According to Wilner, many of those were captured in Pakistan, away from the actual crime sites located in Afghanistan, and were not originally arrested by U.S. troops. This left room for coincidental evidence and false testimony. Most of the 775 have been released, but 171 still remain. Of those, 89 have been absolutely cleared, but remain imprisoned.

In response to a question from an audience member, Col. Davis stated that there is a 10 percent rate of recidivist action among those released from Guantanamo, but not all are necessarily acts of violence.

“It could be something as simple as writing an op-ed about against Guantanamo,” Davis said. Therefore, he explained, it is impossible to know the extent to which harsh treatment at the site spurred former prisoners to terrorist acts.

According to Wilner, “this issue goes to the heart and soul of the nation. What binds us together are the principles of freedom and justice in a court of law.”

Libowitz echoes the responsibility of upholding justice. “Lawyers created Guantanamo, and lawyers have the power to undo it.”

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.

William B. Chandler III

By Jenny Chung C’12

In delivering the Institute for Law and Economics’ (ILE) Distinguished Jurist Lecture at Penn Law on Tuesday, October 25, William B. Chandler III, recently Chancellor to the Delaware Court of Chancery, highlighted the pivotal roles lawyers and legal scholars play in guiding the development of corporate law. 

Addressing faculty, students, and jurists present, Chandler, now a partner at the firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who served  for 22 years on the Delaware Court of Chancery - 14 as Chancellor and eight as Vice Chancellor – also likened the development of corporate law to the gradual formation of the Grand Canyon.

Outlining the history of Delaware corporate law, Chandler explained that Delaware rose to prominence as a state for incorporation following changes to New Jersey’s corporate law in the early 20th century. As a result, Delaware was well-positioned to capture disaffected corporations looking to evade new and restrictive measures.

“The later rise of Delaware corporations was much like the uplift of the Colorado plateau [to the birth of the Grand Canyon],” Chandler said. “It put Delaware directly in the path of the ‘river’ of corporate law issues.”

Further extending the metaphor, Chandler characterized the evolution of corporate law as a symbiotic process akin to erosion along a riverbed.

“The river may cut through and shape the rock, but the rock contains and holds the river,” he said. “So too with Delaware corporate law—the doctrine contains and holds issues and participants even as they cut and form the doctrine.”

Chandler then proceeded to discuss the shareholder rights plan, also termed the “poison pill,” a strategy intended to ensure that a given corporation’s board of directors retain a role in the tender offer process. Validated by the Delaware Supreme Court in 1985, the plan has evolved considerably since then: while the pill’s initial formulation entailed a 20 percent ownership trigger, permitting activation of the plan once a single entity or group acquires 20 percent of company stock, the Court later upheld pills with 15 and 4.99 percent triggers, respectively.

Much as the pills’ trigger levels have changed over the past two decades, Chandler said, so too has the definition of what constitutes “stock” with regard to reaching the trigger level. Both phenomena illustrate the mutable nature of financial markets, which have since witnessed concerns surrounding derivative pills and the possibility of potential acquirers attempting to redeem a pill by replacing the board of directors who had adopted it.

He cited academia as another pivotal influence, adding that that the Chancery Court has “been able to make use of academic criticism in large part due to the fact that we have an abundance of academic commentary,”  even, on occasion, receiving it “in real time on the very cases we’ve just decided or are yet to decide.”

“There are scholars in the corporate river writing extensively on topics before the Court,” he said. “Chancery judges read and consider these timely papers.”

Chandler issued over 1000 opinions and has been recognized as one of the country's most influential judges in the field of corporate law. According to Chandler, the involvement of both market players and legal scholars in doctrinal development places judges in a “precarious” position which requires them to alter market conditions by influencing corporate actors while attending to the particularities of the immediate case.

“In this way, judicial opinions in the adversarial common law process are an imprecise way to form judicial doctrine,” he said. “Judges are rightly focused on just the facts of the parties before them… trying to construct broad doctrine in the abstract is far more dangerous.”

“If too many cases result in a gaping gash in the wall of the canyon…there would be a materially increased risk that the canyon itself might collapse, its structural integrity compromised irretrievably,” Chandler explained, adding that the judiciary directs the evolution of doctrine on the basis of “parties’ agreements, academic insights and a rich body of precedent.”

In his introductory remarks, Michael Wachter, the William B. Johnson Prof. of Law and Economics at Penn Law and Co-Director of ILE, emphasized the far-reaching influence of the Delaware Chancery Court, observing that “Delaware Chancery and Supreme Courts have made Delaware corporate law America’s corporate law and the model for the rest of the world.”

Wachter noted, “Some say the business of America is business - that’s poetic license and a simplification,” he said. “But it’s not a simplification to say that the chancery court is America’s business trial court and that Chancellor Chandler has led that court with acuity, dignity, modesty and great distinction for 14 years.”

In 2011 Adjunct Professor of Law Leo Strine L’88 succeeded Chandler as Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery; Strine previously served as Vice Chancellor of the Court.

Professor Christopher Yoo

By Nicole Greenstein C’14

On Monday, October 24, three of the nation’s leading experts on telecommunications law and competition policy convened in the Faculty Lounge to celebrate Christopher S. Yoo, the Law School’s John H. Chestnut Professor of Law and the Director for the Center of Technology, Innovation & Competition, and his recent book, Networks in Telecommunications: Economics and Law, which he co-authored with Daniel F. Spulber. The Hon. Stephen Williams, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit, Herbert Hovenkamp, the Ben and Dorothy Willie Professor of Law and History at the University of Iowa, and Howard Shelanski, a Professor of Law at Georgetown University, joined Yoo in the symposium to reflect on his groundbreaking book and its important implications for regulatory policy and the law of networks.

Speaking to a room filled with Penn Law faculty and students, moderator and Edward B. Shils Professor of Law Cary Coglianese opened the evening’s event with a few words about Yoo’s new book.

“The argument of the book,” Coglianese explained, “can be encapsulated by one sentence: ‘Markets, rather than regulators, should determine access to networks.’”
 
Coglianese continued on to say how this central theme in Networks in Telecommunications is an important one in an era where the global economy depends on telecommunications networks. He also praised Yoo for developing his argument methodically with great detail and precision, whether he was presenting an in-depth analysis of graph theory or of the law and economics of regulation.

Judge Williams agreed with Coglianese’s praise.

“I definitely want to second what Cary said about the quality of the book,” Williams said, adding that it proved to be a very illuminating read that earned one of the more “prominent places” on his bookshelves.

Williams also appreciated the book’s argument about monopolies among networks. He agreed with many of Yoo’s critiques of access mandates, adding that such requirements often cause networks to turn into “a fully regulated monopoly, which is hardly conducive to innovation or efficiency.”
 
Professor Hovenkamp took the podium next to offer his commentary on Yoo’s book.

“The thing I really like about Christopher’s book is that it's technical but very approachable,” Hovenkamp said. “It will be talked about for a long time, and I expect it to be cited many, many times in both the academic literature and the case law.”

Hovenkamp also strongly agreed with Yoo’s argument that regulations infringe too much on networks — a mistake that discourages innovation, which is a crucial component to the world of technology. Regulatory policy, Hovenkamp said, “approaches the problem with a machete rather than a scalpel, and the result is that it probably creates very significant deterrents to innovation.”

Professors Christopher Yoo, Howard Shelanksi, and Cary Coglianese

Professor Shelanski also echoed sentiments expressed by the two earlier commentators on regulation.

Poorly designed regulatory policy, Shelanski argued, “can render the whole architecture inefficient, and greatly affect forward-looking decisions about how the network will evolve.”

Although Shelanski agreed that the book serves as a cautionary tale for regulatory policy, he added that unfortunately the regulatory agencies have at times failed to pay attention to the kinds of concerns the book raises.

Professor Yoo also gave his response to the three commentators and talked about the process of writing his book at the end of the evening’s symposium.

“The goal of the book was very simple in many ways,” Yoo explained. “We never really understood how networks work. They’ve been a black box.”

In the modern world, however, the importance and influence of networks extend beyond just a black box. The book looks for new insights into the regulation of networks by delving into this “remarkably under-theorized, under-studied area.”

Yoo noted after the event that his only regret was that his co-author was unable to be part of the celebration.

For audience member Jonathan Mincer L’12, the book symposium proved to be a thought-provoking experience.

“Professor Yoo focused on the importance of understanding a system before regulating it,” he said. “On the other hand, Professor Shelanski brought up the interesting point that sometimes entrenched systems need to be changed for the common good.”

Mincer was impressed with the symposium’s commentators. “These are three luminaries in the fields of antitrust and regulation, so it was a real honor to see them,” he added.

Professor Coglianese viewed the event as a resounding success.
 
“We are very fortunate to have this great book to talk about, as well as three distinguished commentators from the fields of antitrust and regulatory policy,” he said.  “The event generated a rich and healthy discussion with significant implications for the future of technology and the Internet.”

Attorneys Ashley Parrish and Margaret Winter

By Jenny Chung C’12

A panel event featuring attorneys Ashley Parrish and Margaret Winter, experts in the field of prison reform litigation, convened Wednesday, October 19 at Penn Law to address questions of constitutionality and social policy relevant to healthcare reform in state prison systems.

Jointly sponsored by the Law School’s Prison Education and Advocacy Project, International Human Rights Advocates and the Health Law and Policy Group, the panel drew a sizable audience of students interested in inmate healthcare reform and policy.

Winter, who currently serves as associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, highlighted the necessity of providing adequate medical and psychological treatment to inmates. “Often if general conditions are bad in a prison, you can probably guarantee that medical and mental healthcare will be deplorable,” Winter said.

She added that as “captives of the state,” prisoners are entirely reliant on the state for the “basic necessities of life.”

Demand for access to healthcare among the prison population is especially high, she explained, given that many inmates suffer from chronic diseases prevalent among the poor while others are afflicted with untreated psychological conditions.

The need for prison healthcare reform has become still more pressing, Winter noted, since the extension of prison sentences by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act. “We’re seeing a vast new geriatric population in prisons with needs that younger prisoners don’t have,” she elaborated. “It’s inevitable that people are going to suffer unnecessary deaths and permanent injuries if there isn’t appropriate healthcare.”

Parrish, a partner at the Washington, D.C. office of international law firm King & Spalding and a member of its national appellate and strategic counseling practice group, was involved with the landmark Coleman v. Wilson case, a class-action suit brought against the California Department of Corrections on behalf of mentally ill inmates. This enabled him to identify several critical failings within the California prison system: inadequate space, understaffing, and the absence of effective protocols for evaluating the health of inmates. 

While the Coleman case resulted in a series of court orders that brought marginal improvement to the prison system, Parrish said, California prisons saw sharp rises in population shortly afterward due to the passage of legislation revising the terms of parole and sentencing. The conditions that ensued, he recalled, were appalling.

“There were 200 prisoners held in a gym, with beds stacked three high, and one toilet for 57 prisoners,” he recounted.

According to Parrish, a special prejudge panel convened in 2006 determined that a prisoner release order was to be granted to reduce the number of inmates housed at each facility, a finding later affirmed by the Supreme Court.

Margaret Winter, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project

To contextualize the “extraordinary” nature of the decision, Winter provided a brief history of prison reform advocacy in the U.S., introduced as recently as the 1970s. 

After a brief period of prison reform expansion, she said, in the 1990s the Supreme Court grew “increasingly hostile” to the possibility of federal intervention in state prison systems, thereby introducing greater difficulty to the securing of injunctions for the release of prisoners.

“Our jaws were dropping, because somehow a court was reaffirming some very basic principles that it had been sneering at for a couple of decades,” Winter recalled. “This decision… is the first really powerful ray of hope that things are changing now.”

Parrish framed the ruling within the ongoing debate concerning the degree of federal intervention permissible to ensure the efficacy of political processes at the state level. “The real problem isn’t that states are making bad political judgments—it’s that they’re not made to suffer the consequences,” he said. “What’s happening to the prison system is symptomatic of failings across a range of different areas.”

According to Alexandra Holson L’14, this year’s PEAP membership coordinator, Parrish and Winter were invited to speak on the basis of their “incredible qualifications” and experience collaborating with the Supreme Court and high-level organizations to improve prison conditions. 

“We invite students to go into the jails to teach prisoners,” as part of PEAP’s programming, Holson said, “but it’s often hard to show them the bigger perspective about what actually goes on because what they’re seeing is a reward program for inmates who have behaved well. They don’t see the other side of the spectrum—like housing or healthcare—so we wanted to plan programs that show another perspective and level of consideration for the populations they visit.”
 

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.

The days of widely tolerated prejudice against Latino individuals in the United States have long passed. But in a recent paper, "Perpetuating the Marginalization of Latinos: A Collateral Consequence of the Incorporation of Immigration Law into the Criminal Justice System," University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Yolanda Vazquez argues that crimmigration – the comingling of criminal and immigration law – has replaced overt discrimination as the modern day apparatus for extending a history of Latino exclusion, discrimination, and marginalization in this country.

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

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

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

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

They are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

View student and alumni profiles.

Additional photos on Flickr:
2011 JD Orientation
LLM BBQ

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:

In Religion in Legal Thought and Practice, Howard Lesnick, Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law, examines moral issues in public and private life from a religious but not a devotional perspective. Rather than seeking to prove that one belief system or moral stance is right, the book guides readers to a greater understanding of the effect of religious beliefs and practices on ways of conceiving and addressing moral questions, without their having to accept or to reject a specific religious outlook. Professor Lesnick sat down with Penn Law’s Office of Communications to give a deeper look into the major themes in his book.

Penn Law (PL): Please tell us about the book.

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.

Tiffany Southerland L'11, former president of the Penn Law Black Law Students Association, speaks about the professional and practical benefits of participating in Penn Law student groups.

Spencer Pepper L'11, Emily Stopa GR’11 L’11, Robert Cooper L'12, Matthew McFeeley L'11, Lou Rulli, Anthony Shaskus L'11, Altin Sila L'11, Katherine Andrews L'11, and Grace Sur L'11

As just one demonstration of the ways in which Penn Law’s Legislative Clinic bridges theory and practice, this academic year the Clinic’s students had their final class in Washington, D.C. – in Vice President Joe Biden's conference room at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, meeting with Law School alumni well versed in the Capitol’s legislative affairs.

On May 5, 2011, Clinic students, led by Louis Rulli, Practice Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs at Penn Law, closed out the semester on Capitol Hill with an enlightening discussion of inside tips on legislative advocacy in the U.S. Senate, and received valuable career advice from four legislative staff veterans:  Nicole Isaac L’04, Deputy Director of Legislative Affairs for Vice President Biden;  Drew Littman L’85, Chief of Staff to Senator Al Franken; Alyson Cooke L’ 89, Majority Counsel on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee; and Martin Paone, Executive Vice President of Prime Policy Group and former Democratic Secretary in the Senate. 

“I learned a great deal from the panelists, particularly about what it takes to become a successful staffer on the Hill,” said Spencer Pepper L‘11. “Encouragingly, the speakers highlighted their Penn Law education as one of the keys to their success. For me, the D.C. class was the culmination of a fun and exciting experience working at the House Budget Committee and my semester as a student in the Legislative Clinic.”

The Legislative Clinic at Penn Law is one of only a handful of legislative clinical programs in the nation devoted exclusively to legislative lawyering and the formation of public policy. Students get first-hand experience through their work at federal legislative placements, as well as through coursework readings and discussions, simulations, and legislative drafting exercises in the classroom.

During the course of the semester, students balanced out a weekly seminar at Penn Law with travel to Washington D.C. two days each week to work, through externships, on legislative matters at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, and House Budget Committee, and in the offices of elected members such as U.S. Senators Robert Casey, Frank Lautenberg, and Jack Reed, and Representatives Gregory Meeks, Christopher Murphy, and Diana DeGette. 

After this year’s final class on Capitol Hill, Biden senior staff member Nicole Isaac conducted a tour of the Vice President's ceremonial office in the Capitol for the students before they returned to Philadelphia.

“The final class was a great close to a busy and exciting semester in which Penn students contributed significantly to the work of Congress, while also experiencing first-hand many difficult challenges inherent in the legislative arena,” stated Professor Rulli.

“For me, the meeting was a chance to hear about how to build a successful career in Washington from those who have done it, and to connect with Penn Law alumni who are ready and willing to help those of us who are about to graduate,” said Matthew McFeeley L’11. “I spent the semester working in the offices of a Senate committee and it was interesting [in this final class] to see how our alumni used their legal education to comprehensively advise members of Congress - serving at once as political strategists, policy analysts, procedural experts, negotiators, and legislative drafters.”

Grace Sur L’11, who served in an externship in Senator Lautenberg’s office this semester, noted, “It was an amazing experience because it was a chance to learn firsthand how our federal government works.” Because each student in the Legislative Clinic had a unique experience working with Senators, Representatives, or for Congressional committees, “we each brought a very interesting and different perspective to the table when we discussed different issues related to Congress, such as how to draft legislation and what the role of a lawyer is on the Hill.”

For Emily Stopa GR’11 L’11 it was “a privilege” to talk with Penn Law alumni working at high levels in Washington, and “to hear about the joys, triumphs, and life-long relationships that come with the career, as well as the disappointments and sacrifices. The meeting definitely gave me a more well-rounded perspective on the life of a Congressional staffer, and underscored the advantages of having a thorough understanding of the legislative process."

The Clinic’s externships provide a range of educational experiences, such as learning how the Cloak room works or how different Senators sign onto a resolution or proposal.

“I learned the most from attending committee hearings and staff briefings and writing memos for my legislative aides,” Sur said. “For example, when [Senator Lautenberg’s] legislative aide for environmental issues took me through the process of proposing a bill and promoting it in committee, I was amazed at how much work went into the process. It was also incredible to see how strategic members of Congress have to be, from the very words he or she used in a one-page Dear Colleague letter to garner co-sponsors, to the timing of presenting an issue or bill in committee.”

Anthony Shaskus L‘11, who interned in the office of Congressman Murphy, found that he “developed a firm understanding for the inner workings of Congress,” he said, and “made relationships that will carry on long after.”

For Altin Sila L‘11, his legislative experience brought the unexpected. “I had some amazing experiences that I didn’t expect. I sat feet away from people like Ben Bernanke, Mike Mullen, and Robert Gates as they testified at hearings, and I was able to meet Justice Breyer and the Turkish Ambassador to the United States. The staff gave me assignments they thought were substantive and thought to include me on meetings and events they thought I would find interesting.”

Altin added: “I feel that I have made some great contacts that will help me accomplish that. This has been a great way to conclude my legal education and begin my career, and I’m truly grateful for the opportunities that the Clinic afforded me.”

Doug Penrose L'11, Matthew McFeeley L'11, Katherine Andrews L'11, Emily Stopa GR’11 L’11, Drew Littman L'85, Alyson Cooke L'89, Nicole Isaac L'04, Martin Paone, Altin Sila L'11, Robert Cooper L'12, Grace Sur L'11, Anthony Shaskus L'11, and Spencer Pepper L'11

For their work on the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court Case Padilla v. Kentucky, Penn Law Professor Stephanos Bibas and Clinical Supervisor and Lecturer Yolanda Vázquez have received the 2011 Jack Wasserman Memorial Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Bibas and Vázquez were among a twelve-member team of pro bono attorneys selected for excellence in litigation in the field of immigration law for their work on Padilla. Students in Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic, which Bibas directs, also worked on the case. The Padilla team was presented with the award on June 16, 2011 during the AILA’s Annual Conference in San Diego, CA.

The AILA recognized the Padilla team for improving the rights for immigrants in the U.S. court system by successfully arguing to the Supreme Court that “criminal defense lawyers must advise their noncitizen clients about the risk of deportation if they accept a guilty plea.”

In announcing the award the AILA noted that in its opinion, the Supreme Court recognized that current immigration laws impose harsh and mandatory deportation consequences onto criminal convictions, a result of Congress’ 1996 decision to eliminate the Attorney General's discretionary authority to cancel removal in meritorious cases. "These changes to our immigration law have dramatically raised the stakes of a noncitizen's criminal conviction,” Justice Stevens wrote in the Court’s opinion. “The importance of accurate legal advice for noncitizens accused of crimes has never been more important."

The AILA stated in their announcement, “The litigation team took on this pro bono case as a labor of love, and brought about a result that has transformed the landscape of the rights of immigrants in our system.”

Bibas, the Director of Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, is a leading scholar of criminal procedure with expertise in criminal charging, plea bargaining and sentencing. He studies the powers, incentives, information, and psychology that shape how prosecutors, defense counsel, defendants, and judges behave. Bibas has litigated a wide range of Supreme Court cases, both criminal and civil, and is writing a book (Assembly-Line Criminal Justice, Oxford, forthcoming 2011) on how criminal justice should do more to encourage acceptance of responsibility, remorse, apology, and forgiveness.

Vázquez, a former public defender in the District of Columbia and Chicago, is an expert on the intersection of immigration and criminal law and its impact on defendants, society, and the criminal justice system. Her research focuses on defense counsels’ duty to advise noncitizen defendants on the immigration consequences of a criminal conviction. Vázquez also studies the effect of the intersection of immigration and criminal law in the criminal justice system on Latinos, arguing that the incorporation of immigration law and enforcement into the criminal justice system has become the primary means to subordinate and socially marginalize Latinos living in the United States. She currently co-teaches in the Civil Practice Clinic in addition to teaching a Crimmigration seminar.

Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic is the nation’s first to closely integrate students’ practical experience on U.S. Supreme Court matters with a semester-long academic seminar on the workings of the Court. Students conduct research, draft briefs, and help prepare strategy; in the past two years Clinic students have worked on three Supreme Court cases that Clinic instructors argued on the merits, and many more as amici, co-counsel, or at the cert stage.

Founded in 1946, the AILA is a non-profit, national organization of over 11,000 attorneys and law professors who practice and teach immigration law. The Jack Wasserman Memorial Award was established by the AILA in 1980.

Additional members of the Padilla v. Kentucky litigation team include:

• Stephen B. Kinnaird, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, Washington, DC
• Timothy G. Arnold, Dept. of Public Advocacy, Frankfort, KY
• D. Scott Carlton, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, Los Angeles, CA
• Adam S. Cherensky, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, Los Angeles, CA
• Alexander M.R. Lyon, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, Palo Alto, CA
• Mitchell A. Mosvick, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, Washington, DC
• Richard E. Neal, U'Sellis & Kitchen, PLC, Louisville, KY
• Leeann N. Rosnick, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, Washington, DC
• Elizabeth Stevens, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, San Francisco, CA
• Norton Tooby , Law Offices of Norton Tooby, Oakland, CA

Infusion of funds allows the Law School to guarantee students summer funding for public interest work

Jane Toll GSE’66 and Robert Toll L’66.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School has received a $2.5 million gift from Robert Toll L'66 and Jane Toll GSE'66, which will enable the School to expand its existing public interest programs by supporting an array of student pro bono initiatives that has doubled in the past three years, guaranteeing summer funding to hundreds of students annually who engage in public interest related work, and supporting a generous loan repayment program for which the demand has increased 50 percent in recent years.

Mr. Toll, Executive Chairman of the Board of Toll Brothers, Inc., the leading builder of luxury homes, and his wife Jane have been strong supporters of the Law School and its public interest programs. The Tolls' most recent gift will fund ongoing loan forgiveness programs, internships and fellowships, pro bono service projects, and scholarship in the field of public interest.

"The Tolls have been major benefactors in the creation and the expansion of public interest programs at Penn Law," said Michael A. Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. "This gift provides a new infusion of funds in the midst of an economic downturn that will provide the Law School with additional means to increase our support for students and alumni pursuing public interest careers."

"It's my hope that graduates of Penn Law will run public interest organizations and significant departments, agencies, councils, etc. of our government, bringing our uniquely educated students to positions of leadership in the near future," said Mr. Toll.

Penn Law founded its public interest center in 1989 and renamed it the Toll Public Interest Center (TPIC) in 2006 in acknowledgement of a $10 million gift from the Tolls, which allowed the School to significantly expand the Center's activities. Today, TPIC is a multifaceted, cross-disciplinary program whose mission is to provide Law School students with meaningful opportunities to provide pro bono legal service to under-represented communities.

A national leader in promoting public interest and pro bono legal service, Penn Law is the first top-ranked law school to establish a mandatory pro bono requirement and the first law school to win the American Bar Association's Pro Bono Publico Award. In promoting the culture of public service at the Law School, TPIC is a locus for extensive pro bono and public interest programs at Penn.

These programs include more than twenty pro bono projects in which students represent clients in a variety of fields and cases, including civil rights, environmental justice, family law, governmental practice, health law, immigration, international human rights, labor law, women's rights, and youth law.

Each year through these projects, and in partnership with legal service providers and government agencies nationwide, more than 500 students engage in tens of thousands of hours of service. In the past three years students have contributed over 30,000 hours of pro bono service for disadvantaged clients.

Since the Tolls' initial gift in 2006, each year hundreds of students have received financial support through the Law School and TPIC for unpaid summer internships in the public sector; for example, this past year 60 percent of Penn Law 1Ls received such funding. With the Tolls' most recent gift, the Center is now able to guarantee summer funding for students. The Center also provides funding for spring break service projects, such as projects this year in Jordan and Kenya.

Penn Law provides its alumni who engage in public interest work loan repayment assistance through TollRAP, a generous Loan Repayment and Assistance Program (LRAP). All alumni who engage in public interest legal work are eligible for assistance. The amount of assistance is based on a formula that considers the applicant's income and annual law school debt.

The 2006 gift also enabled the Law School to expand the Law School's Public Interest Scholars Program, which funds full scholarships in the first year and two-thirds scholarships in the second and third years for students committed to practicing in the public sector. Since the Program's inception, Toll Scholars have obtained leading public interest fellowships, such as Skadden and the Independence Foundation Fellowships; and have joined government and advocacy organizations such as the Department of Justice, the ACLU, and the NAACP-LDF.

The Toll Public Interest Center hosts a myriad of public interest-related events each year, including Penn Law's annual Public Interest Week, which includes an Honorary Fellow-in-Residence program that brings powerful public interest advocates such as Stephen Bright and Nan Aaron to campus, as well as the Edward V. Sparer Symposium.

In addition, each year the Center awards five competitive post-graduate fellowships to 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 – ranging from the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center to the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. – on both impact and direct advocacy for underrepresented causes and populations.

"Thanks to the generosity of the Tolls, we have literally been able to double our student initiatives over the past several years," said Arlene Finkelstein, executive director of TPIC. "As a result, all students at Penn Law are able to engage in a wide range of meaningful pro bono opportunities that offer tremendous hands-on experience, while providing service to the community at a time of tremendous need."

Finkelstein added: "Likewise, the Law School has been able to expand the funding and resources we offer aspiring public interest lawyers to best prepare for careers in service – while also supporting our graduates with generous loan repayment assistance that enables them to embrace public interest advocacy despite their law school debt."

Mr. Toll has been a member of the Law School's Board of Overseers since 1992 and has served repeatedly as guest auctioneer for the Penn Law's Equal Justice Foundation Auction. He is a former member of the Penn Board of Trustees and currently serves on the board of directors of Cornell Real Estate School; Seeds of Peace, which he and his wife Jane cofounded; and Beth Shalom Synagogue. He is also a managing director of the Metropolitan Opera. Toll Brothers is the sponsor of the Saturday broadcast over the Toll Brothers Metropolitan Opera Network heard round the world.

For more information about public interest programs at Penn Law, please visit www.law.upenn.edu/pic.

Penn Law's business and corporate law faculty have dominated the 17th annual poll of the "Top Ten Corporate and Securities Articles of 2010," recently conducted by Corporate Practice Commentator. Articles by Professors William Bratton, Jill Fisch, Edward Rock, David Skeel, and Michael Wachter were among the top ten selected by corporate and securities law academics, which were chosen from more than 440 published and indexed in legal journals in 2010.

“Like last year, Penn Law was the first in the number of faculty publishing top ten business and corporate law articles, and I congratulate our five Penn Law professors on this achievement,” said Michael A. Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. “The Law School’s business and corporate law program is unrivaled among our peers. This latest accomplishment is indicative of our faculty’s expertise, for the benefit of Penn Law and the wider world.”

	William Bratton and co-author Michael Wachter’s article, The Case Against Shareholder Empowerment, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Bratton, a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Law School’s Institute for Law and Economics (ILE), is recognized internationally as a leading writer on business law. Wachter, the William B. Johnson Prof. of Law and Economics and ILE Co-Director, is a prominent cross-disciplinary scholar with current research focusing on topics of the intersection of corporate law and finance. In their article, the authors argue that empowering shareholders of public companies only enforces company management to maximize the market price of its stock. The goal to increase shareholder value was one of the major causes of the global financial crisis. In short, the authors claim shareholders seek short-term returns rather than focusing on long-term company value.
	Jill Fisch is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of ILE whose work focuses on the intersection of business and law, including the role of regulation and litigation in addressing limitations in the disciplinary power of the capital markets. Fisch and co-authors Stephen Choi and Marcel Kahan, both professors at New York University School of Law, were acknowledged for The Power of Proxy Advisors: Myth or Reality?, published by Emory Law Journal. The article focuses on the role of proxy advisors and how they influence shareholder voting outcomes.
	Edward Rock L’83, the Saul A. Fox Distinguished Professor of Business Law, writes on corporate law and corporate governance. His article, Embattled CEOs, co-authored with NYU’s Marcel Kahan in the Texas Law Review, addresses the declining power of chief executive officers of publicly-held corporations in the United States to their boards of directors and to their shareholders.
	David Skeel, the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law, writes on bankruptcy and corporate law and his article, Bankruptcy or bailouts?, co-authored with Kenneth Ayotte of Northwestern University School of Law for the Journal of Corporation Law, explores why bankruptcy would often be a better solution to the financial distress of large financial firms than the bailouts the government has used throughout the financial crisis. The authors highlight that although bankruptcy is not always the optimal response to financial distress, Chapter 11 is can be more effective than generally realized.

In addition, Penn Law Adjunct Professor of Law Leo Strine L'88 was selected for his article Loyalty's Core Demand: The Defining Role of Good Faith in Corporation Law for the Georgetown Law Journal, co-authored with Lawrence Hamermesh of Widener University School of Law, R. Franklin Balotti of Richards, Layton & Finger, and Jeffery Gorris of Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell, Attorneys At Law. The authors explore the role of good faith in corporate law, and question the duty of loyalty, and argue if the obligation of directors to act in good faith is a separate, free-standing fiduciary duty or a fundamental aspect of the core duty of loyalty.

By Sean Moloney L'12

Cary Coglianese, Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science and Director of the Penn Program on Regulation

On his first day as President, Barack Obama announced his administration’s “commitment to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.” Since then, the Obama Administration has implemented a major Open Government Initiative to increase transparency, participation, and collaboration across the federal government.
 
With federal agencies implementing an increasing number of open government projects, researchers and federal officials have noticed how little empirical research currently exists on transparency. As a result, they have begun to focus on developing an invigorated research agenda on transparency and its impacts. What ,exactly, are the benefits and costs of open government? How can its effects be studied empirically?

To answer these and other questions, the Penn Program on Regulation (PPR) held a workshop in Washington, D.C. last Friday. This workshop on “Assessing Open Government: Research Challenges in Evaluating Transparency” brought together over two dozen academics, government officials, and representatives from non-governmental organizations.

Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science Cary Coglianese, the workshop’s organizer and moderator, described the event as a “day of robust, interactive dialogue around a research agenda for open government.” In reflecting on the Obama Administration’s Initiative, Professor Coglianese noted that although concerns about governmental transparency date back decades and will continue for several more, the current administration has certainly heightened the salience of studying transparency.

The PPR workshop aimed to launch a collaborative research agenda from across the fields of law, social science, and information science. In the workshop’s opening sessions, participants attempted to define “open government” and develop a theory of its potential benefits and costs. Following a luncheon keynote address by Beth Noveck, the former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer who led the creation of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative, workshop participants discussed both the metrics and research designs that could be used to study the impacts of increased transparency.

Workshop participants agreed that the phrase “open government” encompasses a broad range of distinct, though related, policies and programs. Some of these involve releasing information retrospectively, like in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, while others proactively seek to inform members of the public so they can weigh in on pending decisions. Workshop participants seemed to agree that, for the purposes of research, the meaning of open government should ultimately be defined for each policy or program by its purpose, logic, and audience.

When it comes to assessing open government’s benefits and costs, some participants worried that although open government may reduce corruption and prevent the inefficient use of resources, it may also discourage officials from voicing important yet unpopular opinions when debating policy decisions. Others expressed concern over the time and money it takes for government to respond to FOIA requests, regardless of the value of the information requested.

Professor Anita Allen speaks at "Assessing Open Government: Research Challenges in Evaluating Transparency"

However, others asserted that transparency need not always compete with important values such as privacy, security, and efficiency. For example, it was noted that freedom of information laws have actually helped legal advocates uncover questionable governmental practices that impact individual privacy.

As Professor Coglianese said in summarizing the workshop, “The benefits of open government come with concrete costs, but conversely these costs can result in real benefits.” The challenge for researchers is to identify and measure both the intended and unintended consequences.

With respect to research metrics, participants admitted that research goals and data selection will ultimately depend on the type of open government project being evaluated. Tailoring metrics to specific projects, however, may be hampered practically by cost and regulatory barriers, such as the federal Paperwork Reduction Act.

Several workshop participants noted that advances in empirical knowledge of open government will likely depend on the accumulation of many small-scale, narrowly focused research studies, rather than on one “home run” study. Researchers also urged the use of multiple research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative.

In his closing remarks, Professor Coglianese reflected on the many challenges illuminated by the workshop that confront researchers who seek to study open government empirically. Despite these challenges, he remained hopeful because of the many productive suggestions that emerged from the dialogue indicating that additional research is both possible and needed. 

“It is striking how little empirical research exists on governmental transparency, despite its centrality to democracy and the rule of law, two widely-studied bedrock values of good government,” he said. “Even a little more analysis of open government could go a long way.”

PPR plans to issue a follow-on report summarizing the dialogue to help further stimulate both additional open government research as well as clearer thinking about how to design effective open government policies. 

For additional coverage of the event, please visit the RegBlog website.

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.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School has named four winners of teaching awards for the 2010-11 academic year. They are Jill Fisch (Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching), the Honorable Kent A. Jordan (Adjunct Teaching Award), Gideon Parchomovsky (A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course), and David Skeel (Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence). In addition, Professor Sarah Barringer Gordon received the University’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Jill Fisch Receives the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching Jill Fisch, Perry Golkin Professor of Law and Co-director of the Institute for Law and Economics, has been awarded the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching. This year Professor Fisch taught classes on Corporations and Corporate Governance. Sample Student Accolades “Professor Fisch is absolutely amazing – helpful, responsive, and [she] did an amazing job of stimulating interest in the area and sharing her knowledge on a variety of corporate governance subjects.” “Almost half of every class is dedicated to discussion of the issues treated. Independent thoughts are not only encouraged but also stimulated by Professor Fisch, who is always keen to have the students see the two sides of the coin. Attending class is always enriching.” “She was very respectful of students, very reasonable in her expectations, and was very accommodating about meeting outside of class.”

Honorable Kent A. Jordan Receives the Adjunct Teaching Award Honorable Kent A. Jordan, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, received the Adjunct Teaching Award for his class Intellectual Property: Trademarks. Sample Student Accolades “Judge Jordan is a great professor and not only teaches the material effectively but balances it well with stories about the application of the law in practice and the courtroom.” “He's hilarious, charismatic, clever and engaging.” “The lectures are excellent and the class is frequently tied to current events and issues that are developing in the law while the class is in progress.”

Gideon Parchomovsky Receives the A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course Gideon Parchomovsky, Professor of Law, has been awarded the A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course for his class in property law. This is the second time Professor Parchomovsky has been selected for this award. Sample Student Accolades “Professor Parchomovsky is an excellent instructor –  clear, organized, knowledgeable, patient, humorous.” “Professor [Parchomovsky] did a great job simulating interest while constantly supplementing our reading with information on studies related to what we were learning. [He] also kept the energy in classroom high and positive.”  “While I was not interested in property before the course, I now already see the world a bit differently from taking his class.”

David Skeel Receives the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence This is the third time a graduating class has selected David Skeel, S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law, to receive the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching. In recent years he has received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the University's Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Skeel teaches Bankruptcy Law and Commercial Credit II and leads the Globalization of Corporate Governance Seminar. Sample Student Accolades “Skeel is fantastic. He really enlivens what could be extremely tedious subject matter. He's clearly enthusiastic about the issues and that helps a lot.” “He does a great job engaging the class, explaining principles clearly, and keeping things interesting with amusing hypotheticals.” “Professor [Skeel] was very encouraging, and the discussions were lively, especially when people were allowed to freely debate their divergent ideas about corporate governance.”

Sarah Barringer Gordon Receives a University of Pennsylvania Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law in the School of Law and Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences, was awarded a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from the University of Pennsylvania.  Since joining Penn Law in 1994 Gordon has taught classes such as Church and State, Property Law, American Religious History, and Legal History. She has been awarded the law school’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence twice—once in 2004 and again in 2009. Sample Student Accolades “Professor Gordon brings an interesting insight to every topic and delights in showing you something new or surprising by her novel interpretations. She also seems to genuinely care for her subjects and treats the sources on their own validity.” “Professor Gordon truly wants to make sure that she structures her lectures toward her students' interests. She does research to prepare lectures on topics of interest to us, which is satisfying as a student to know that she cares about our interests and she truly knows the information that she is delivering to us. That passion is certainly contagious and stimulates class interest.” “She should be the model for professorial balance between research and teaching, as she clearly loved doing both and let the former lead her in the latter.” “She encouraged independent study and discovery with whoever wanted to chat with her. I have a feeling she lit several intellectual fires this semester and that people will actually enjoy writing their final papers!”

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.”

Practice Associate Professor Sarah Paoletti and students from the Transnational Legal Clinic interview community leaders in Haiti

Civil society in Haiti is still struggling to reemerge from the destruction brought about by last year’s devastating earthquake, as well as the infrastructural and other challenges that existed long before in the country. Amid these stark challenges six students in Penn Law’s Transnational Legal Clinic (TLC), supervised by Practice Associate Professor Sarah Paoletti, travelled to Haiti during spring break this semester. 

Over the course of the week, Elizabeth Eisenberg L’11, Cora Ang GL’11, John Moore L’11, Rekha Nair L’12, Samantha Stephens L’11 and Erika Tang GL’11 worked alongside the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and its sister organization Bureau des Avocats Internationaux to conduct on-the-ground research, interviews, and consultations in preparation for drafting a report on labor and human rights in Haiti to be submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council as part of Haiti's upcoming Universal Periodic Review.

The Universal Periodic Review is a process established in 2006 by the United Nation's Human Rights Council with the purpose of evaluating each country's human rights record in light of the obligations established in the U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, other human rights instruments, and the country's own stated commitments.

While eager to participate and have their voices heard during this process, representatives of grassroots organizations and representatives from the most impacted communities do not have the resources to draft and submit the reports on their own. Therefore, students from the Transnational Legal Clinic took responsibility for drafting a report on labor rights.

“Since the earthquake the students had been eager to do something for Haiti, but I didn’t want to be just another foreign group on the ground,” said Professor Paoletti. “In this case there was a defined task, a demonstrated need, requests from grassroots organizations, and a set deadline, which contributed to making it a meaningful experience and an opportunity for real engagement with groups impacted by what we do.”

Throughout the week, the Transnational Legal Clinic team met with human rights lawyers, representatives from large international humanitarian nongovernment organizations, investigative journalists, the chief executive officer of Digicel (a cell phone carrier and the largest private employer in Haiti), staff from organizations working to combat abuses committed against Restavek children (children sent to live with other families who then find themselves in situations of domestic servitude and forced labor), representatives from an organization of women survivors of gender-based violence who assist other women and children victims of gender-based violence, tent camp residents, and a host of grassroots advocates. They visited two large camps – one an ad hoc settlement and the other a planned camp – to assess the economic opportunities available to the residents.

“This trip exposed students to how complex issues of human rights are, especially in a post-disaster setting and the importance of ensuring the people most directly affected by disaster and policy are a part of any discussions addressing human rights concerns and recommendations for moving forward,” said Paoletti.

“My work prior to this had been research only,” said Rekha Nair L’12. “In going to Haiti I got to see the problems and issues on the ground. The trip helped me to understand how to engage grassroots groups and local people on these issues. I also realized that while an outside organization from the United States or elsewhere can do meaningful work, lasting social change can only come from within, from a Haitian people and government empowered and committed to making a change together.”

Breakfasts and evenings were spent debriefing, conducting research, preparing for the next day's set of interviews, and drafting portions of the labor report, which TLC submitted to the United Nations on March 21st. The work of the clinic students constituted a valuable contribution to Haiti's Universal Period Review by raising critical questions and identifying key recommendations from across Haitian civil society for the advancement of human rights and labor rights in Haiti.

Cora Ang GL’11 described the scene in Port-Au-Prince as “truly traumatic” but explained that “there was a willingness of the people to have their voices heard.”  She said, “Whether we were navigating our way through the narrow paths of a tent camp or interviewing abused women, the narrative that echoed was the same: Access to education, access to job opportunities, adequate housing, access to clean water and healthcare. This is still what the population at large needs in order to survive each passing day and forge a future.”

Professor Seth Kreimer accepts Penn Law's inaugural Beacon Award

University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Seth Kreimer received a standing ovation as he was honored with the Law School’s inaugural Beacon Award to recognize a faculty member’s contribution to pro bono and public interest service. The award was part of Penn Law’s annual Public Interest Recognition Event, held Thursday evening, April 14, at the Levy Conference Center.

Kreimer “has been a resource, literally, for every public interest organization in Philadelphia, whether it’s the Women’s Law Project, Juvenile Law Project, AIDS Law Project, ACLU, [or the] Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia,” Penn Law Senior Fellow David Rudovsky said in presenting the award. “He has a passion and a commitment to fairness, to equality, [and] to access to justice that motivates him in a way that’s really unique among people in the field.”

Rudovsky described Kreimer as the go-to source for legal advice for lawyers facing the toughest issues in public interest and civil liberties litigation. “There’s Westlaw, there’s Lexis – there’s also something known as ‘Seth-law,’” Rudovsky said, eliciting laugher from the crowd.  

In accepting the award, Kreimer invoked the late Justice Louis Brandeis. “[Justice Brandeis] used to say that the only legitimate basis for accumulating wealth or professional privilege is the opportunity that it provides from time to time to do the right thing,” Kreimer said. “Over the years, I’ve been blessed with a series of sources of professional privilege that have made it possible for me to undertake pro bono efforts and this is an occasion to express my gratitude.”

Kreimer thanked the Law School, and particularly Dean Fitts, for providing him with a base on which to work on civil rights and civil liberties issues. He thanked public interest organizations, lawyers, and his clients for giving him a chance to join them in “efforts to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.” And he thanked his students. “I have been honored by the insight and the eagerness and the passion of the students at Penn Law School,” he said. “I look forward to seeing after you leave and go out in the world the ways in which you use your professional privileges from time to time to do the right thing.”

Third-year student Kristen-Elise Brooks received the C. Edwin Baker Award for performing the most pro bono hours of any student in the Class of 2011 – 426 hours over her three years at the Law School. “I’m sure that most people expect that the person who has the most [pro bono] hours would be going into public interest straight out of law school – and I’m not. I’m going to be starting in the fall at Paul Weiss,” Brooks said. “I think that’s one of the wonderful things about Penn. It’s that everyone does pro bono here. It’s not that there are public interest and firm people … Everyone is pro bono oriented.”

The event recognized the work of numerous Penn Law students, public interest law attorneys and advocates, and over 20 student-run pro bono groups. Loida Moreno, director of volunteer services for the Philadelphia Prison System, took the opportunity of being honored for her work with Penn Law’s Prisoners’ Education and Advocacy Project to thank the students at the event. She recognized “all the students that in one way or another took the time, the initiative, the leadership, and the effort to say, ‘I’m going to be part of a project for people that, for the most part, people choose to forget.’”

For a complete list of individuals and organizations honored, see the Public Interest Recognition Event program (PDF).

Flickr: Photos from the Annual Public Interest Recognition Event

Bridging Theory and Practice

Bok Visiting International Professor KP Krishnan

Dr. KP Krishnan, the Secretary of the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister of India, this semester came to Penn Law to serve as a Bok Visiting International Professor, where he taught a seminar on capital market regulation in India.

Each year through its International Program Penn Law invites several recognized experts in international and comparative law from around the world to Philadelphia, providing students access to senior experts, jurists, and professionals who offer new perspectives on cutting edge issues.

Penn Law’s Office of Communications interviewed Dr. Krishnan on his experience at the Law School and how globalization is impacting the exchange of ideas between India and the U.S.

Penn Law: What brought you to Penn Law through the Bok International Visiting Professors program?

KP Krishan (KK):  Really, it was a chance conversation with folks at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), which is a center here at Penn,  which led to a meeting with the Penn Law  people.  I was visiting New York and Washington for work last year, and one thing led to another: while I was in Philadelphia I met with Professors Eric Feldman, Anita Allen and Jill Fisch and Associate Dean Amy Gadsden at the White Dog Cafe, and I had this formal offer to be a Bok professor.

I’ve been teaching in India on financial sector regulation – not as a regular full course, but co-teaching with other professors. So, when this offer came, in a sense it was a natural extension of what I’ve been doing off-and-on. 

PL:  Please tell us about your current work in the Indian government. 

KK:  I belong to the Indian Civil Service, and in the Indian Civil Service  the way it normally works is, we spend a lifetime in the government.  Since July 1 last year my present job is to be the secretary of the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council.  The nearest equivalent of this is the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Immediately prior to that, for five years I ran the financial markets division in the Indian Ministry of Finance, which deals with financial sector regulation, as well as international cooperation in the financial sector.  My present job is much more macro - it includes the financial sector also.  It is much more advisory and economy wide. 

PL:  Are you able to bring that experience to bear in your Law School class?

KK:  Yes. Regulation, particularly financial sector regulation, by its very nature, has an enormous amount of policy content. And in a context like India, where a lot of the regulation is done through the mechanism of law, the political process – that is, the parliamentary process - clears the regulation. This by definition involves all the major political parties, their ideologies and their view on markets and the state – should there be greater role of the state, a lesser role of the state, etc.  The final outcome is necessarily an amalgam of all the expert views, thinking, and knowledge of finance and law, and finally, what is acceptable politically.

Therefore, I think, a person who has had the advantage of a ringside view of all of this brings to the classroom a sense, or a reality check, about what happens and how the best should not become the enemy of the good.  And that’s what I’ve tried to bring to the seminar at Penn Law. 

An interesting aspect is the parallels with the U.S. system.  At one level, we are very different. But at another level, the processes in a democracy are ultimately the same.  It is the politically accountable politicians who make the last call.  Do they always make the call in the public interest?  Do they make it on the basis of some other lobbying group, or on account of international pressure?  These are the kind of things that we discussed in the class.

PL:  What was it like in the classroom? Who participated?

KK:  I had nine students from the Law School, and interestingly, two Wharton professors – one who teaches accounting, another who teaches economics and business policy – as well as an Indian infrastructure lawyer, and Professor Shyam Balganesh from Penn Law. An average class was about 12 or 13 folks.  A very interesting mix of people.

PL:  What are the key similarities or differences in the regulatory frameworks in India and the U.S.?

KK:  Regulation in both countries has been, in a sense, path-dependent.  That is, it’s not something which somebody sat up one day and designed –it’s the result of history, not exactly what, ideally, a professor would recommend.  In India we have a multiplicity of regulators, exactly like the U.S. does, but for very different reasons.  The U.S. has it for reasons of the federal distribution of powers – the distribution between the states and the federal government.  In India, the entire financial sector rests with the government of India, namely the federal government, but nevertheless, we still have a multiplicity of regulators.  And bringing about coordination between regulators has been a major theme in both countries. 

The pre- and the post- [2008 financial] crisis issues in India and the U.S. actually led to identical conclusions – we need greater coordination amongst regulators.  But at the same time, we need to keep politics out of this because the fundamental issue is consumer protection.

PL:  What is the value of comparative law in this context?

KK:  Let me just give you one example. One of the major problems that came out post the Lehman crisis in the U.S. was the unregulated, or the over-the-counter markets - the OTC markets - a bilateral market between a buyer and a seller, not intermediated by a stock exchange or any other kind of exchange.  Through its history, India has had an explicit preference for exchange-traded markets over OTC markets, where a lot of the information doesn’t come out in the public domain - so when a crisis of the kind that happened in 2007 or 2008 occurs, you do not actually know how badly off is a particular financial firm, because a lot of their trades are known only to them and their counterparties.

So, when the crisis blew up, the government could not even estimate what is the kind of damage that was going to hit the system, and therefore, what it was that the government needed to do.  So instead we have encouraged the much more open, transparent, publicly traded exchange markets.  And so post-2008, the Financial Stability Board, the G20, have actually begun to mandate exchange-like regulations for the OTC markets. 

In this sense, the flow of best practices now seems to be two-way, and I think the Financial Stability Board and the G20 have encouraged this two-way flow of ideas.  It is still dominated by a flow coming from the OECD to the emerging markets economies, but I believe there are also the beginnings of what I would think is an encouraging trickle of a flow in the developing world’s direction, which is hugely important.

One of the major consequences of globalization is a much more interconnected world. So, I also want to note what the Law School and Penn in general are doing to organize a structured flow of ideas between scholars and practitioners in India with their counterparts in the U.S. is going to be increasingly relevant and important for globalization to become a meaningful, productive and mutually beneficial process.

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.

Supreme Court Clinic students with Stephanos Bibas, Stephen B. Kinnaird, and James Feldman in Washington, DC after the Turner v. Rogers argument in March. They will return on April 18 for the case of Tapia v. United States.

Can a court give a defendant a longer prison sentence in order to promote the defendant’s rehabilitation? The U.S. Supreme Court will hear argument on this issue in the case of Tapia v. United States on Monday, April 18, despite the case being “orphaned” by the U.S. Solicitor General’s office.

Stephanos Bibas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the director of Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic, was appointed amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) by the Court to advocate for the government’s abandoned position in the case. About twice every three terms, the Court appoints a lawyer to represent an orphaned issue, and often it chooses a justice’s former clerk. Professor Bibas clerked for Justice Kennedy, is a former federal prosecutor, and has written on sentencing, the issue in Tapia. 

Of note, Professor Bibas has been assisted in the case by students in Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic, who have helped conduct research, draft the amicus curiae brief, and prepare strategy. Tapia is Bibas and the Supreme Court Clinic’s second case to go to oral argument this semester. In March, 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.

"We are blessed to have a dozen bright, eager students who have helped to strategize, research, write, and edit the briefs,” Bibas said. On Tapia, he added, “They've helped us immeasurably in giving the Supreme Court a perspective on the history of rehabilitative treatments and sentencing reform that it otherwise would not have heard."

Penn Law’s Supreme Court Clinic is the nation’s first to closely integrate practical experience on Supreme Court matters with a semester-long academic seminar on the workings of the Court. Clinic students work on active Supreme Court cases, including participating in moot court rehearsals and attending oral arguments at One First Street.

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 Solicitor General, and combined have argued more than 60 cases before the Supreme Court.

Sarah Carroll L’11, a student in the Supreme Court Clinic who wrote research briefs in support of Bibas’ oral argument, said, “It’s an amazing opportunity to help with actual Supreme Court litigation through the Clinic while still in law school. Professor Bibas takes our suggestions seriously; when we’re sitting in class one of us can say ‘this paragraph wasn’t that persuasive to me,’ and he usually revises it based on our input.”

“In the class and in the Clinic you can watch your own work get a lot stronger,” said Katherine Meeks L’12. “The ethos is very collaborative, so when you circulate a draft [of a brief] you expect to get comments, criticisms, and suggestions. I’ve learned a lot about how to make good legal arguments and write well, and not be afraid to make a mistake.”

Meeks added, “You try to do your best work for it. It just takes your skills to a different level.”

By Jenny Chung C’12

On April 11 Anne-Marie Slaughter, recently the U.S. Department of State’s Director of Policy Planning and a renowned international relations and international law professor, told an audience in Gittis Hall as part of the annual Leon C. and Judith W. Holt Lecture on International Law that equipping students for global leadership lies “at the heart” of the work she currently performs.

Slaughter’s address to a packed hall of students, faculty, and members of the public examined legal issues confronting the global community. According to Law School Dean Michael Fitts, who provided an introduction, the Holt Lecture aims to bring “luminaries in the field of international law” to Penn Law in order to prepare students for global leadership roles.

Slaughter affirmed “To be a global leader in the government, civic or corporate sector—all three are essential for tackling global problems—is a far more complex task today than it has ever been.” She explained, "It requires more knowledge and a greater understanding of more actors in an interconnected world.”

She then proceeded to outline her talk, which had as its central proposition the understanding that the 21st century is “an era in which foreign policy is changing fundamentally.”

“Intellectually, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift moving from a world in which states are the primary and only actors to a world in which you also have to focus on societies,” Slaughter said, adding that while state-to-state relations constitute the principal framework through which modern decisionmakers continue to evaluate the world, unprecedented changes are occurring.

In the past, she explained, policymakers conceptualized the international arena as a “world of billiard balls [or a] chess game in which each country is seen as a unitary actor,” and gave little consideration to the domestic situation within each country.

“We’re still in a world in which you reduce other countries to the size and sources of their power and their governments,” she said. “We still have to think of countries in terms of government-to-government relations, but we’re also now in a world in which societies are increasingly autonomous actors.”

According to Slaughter, the so-called “billiard ball” concept has now become transparent, enabling policymakers to see the relationship between a given government and its society. To extend the metaphor further, Slaughter characterized the newly formed “glass ball” as a “cell” wherein “all the actors in that society are interacting with actors in yours,” resulting in the need to “look at other governments and societies” alongside one’s own.

Citing the ongoing “story of the Middle East” as a positive dimension to interlinked societies, Slaughter exhorted her audience members to “shift [their] mental model of diplomacy and foreign relations” to include not merely government-to-government relations but society-to-society and government-to-society dynamics as well.

To underscore the significance of development, Slaughter enumerated the six most pressing concerns facing the United States government: the proliferation of nuclear and biochemical weapons; terrorist networks and the spread of violent extremism; the health and stability of the global economy; climate change; global pandemics; and resource scarcity.  She asserted that “development is critical to resolving all but possibly the first.”

With regard to combating terrorism, Slaughter maintained that “[pouring] money into countries”—as had been proposed by several members of the Clinton administration—was not of itself an adequate response to the spread of violent extremism.

“Terrorist networks flourish in undeveloped countries with governments that prefer to point fingers at outside threats or challenges rather than focus on their people,” she said. “Focusing on a developing agenda helps to address this long-term—we want to help the country get to a place where it can be stable and provide basic services on its own to its own people.”

Likewise, Slaughter argued, where the global economy is concerned, “development is a strategic and moral imperative.”

“If individual countries within regions can make the leap from even lower-middle income countries they become anchors for an entire regional economy,” she elaborated. “Countries starting to take off have enormous ripple effects within the region.”

Slaughter observed that while development is evidently central, because its solutions tend to be “longer-term, frustrating and complex” they are frequently ignored in favor of resolving issues that can be improved simply by communicating with other governments.

“We have to be putting as much emphasis on the development side of foreign policy as the diplomatic side,” she said.

Slaughter added that despite remaining “peripheral” to serious foreign policy, “women’s issues are, in development terms, by far [the] best investment” given that funding to women’s groups “reverberates through [the individual woman’s] health, her family’s health and food security [within communities].”

Moreover, she said, “engaging women in peace processes improves prospects of settlement,” though as of now most negotiations never consider including women.

Slaughter professed that youth and entrepreneurs, in addition to women, comprise crucial segments of society—among others—development strategies must target.

“Sixty percent of the Middle East are under 30,” she said. “If we’d been developing relationships [with youth groups] we might be in a different place with regard to how some countries think of the U.S.”

She commended Obama administration’s approach to fostering relations with entrepreneurs in the Middle East. “They’ve targeted members of society who are change agents and represent a spirit of dynamism that needs to be cultivated across those countries,” Slaughter said.

Emphasizing the necessity of employing technology as a means of social and economic empowerment in developing countries, Slaughter explained that the United States, as a “leading technology nation,” can help develop technologies to monitor elections, reduce corruption, revamp existing financial institutions and improve overall quality of life.

She recalled a “tech delegation” she had led to Liberia and the Sierra Leone comprised solely of female executives in technology industries who spoke with governments and women’s groups on how mobile technology can be used to reduce maternal mortality rates.

Affirming that the “use of technology as part of diplomacy focuses on individuals in society,” Slaughter likewise stressed the importance of preserving web access for citizens of developing countries. “In the 21st century, the internet is where we live a growing portion of our lives,” she said. “If you’re going to enjoy basic freedoms, you have to have the freedom to connect to the world.”
 
Slaughter concluded by evoking the potential and possibility inherent in the emerging 21st-century model of international relations and encouraged audience members to contribute to global development initiatives.

“For anyone who wants to be involved as a global leader or citizen, there are more opportunities now than ever before,” she said. “You have the option through NGOs, the private sector, or state and local governments to be part of networks that tackle these larger problems.”

Part 4 of a four-part series about the 2011 Sparer Symposium. 

By Jenny Chung C’12

The 2011 Edward V. Sparer Symposium concluded with remarks from Sister Mary Scullion, co-founder, executive director and president of Project H.O.M.E., who characterized the legal profession as a “powerful tool for social progress and securing fundamental liberties and opportunities” in spite of the many challenges and difficult choices it currently faces.

“The legal system was established with the highest ideal of preserving democracy, human rights and helping society realizing the greatest well-being,” she said.

Despite this, many lawyers prioritize “selling their talents to the highest bidder” over achieving genuine justice, Scullion said, at times resulting in instances in which “the law blunts human rights and individual liberties.”

She cautioned those in attendance against “committing adultery of the brain”—a far more egregious offense than its fleshly counterpart—and encouraged them to “use [their] gifts for social and economic justice,” an ideal “more difficult to come by than it sounds.”

Scullion then commended the audience for its efforts toward aiding the impoverished and homeless, which she termed “invaluable contributions.”

“Because of your commitment, hard work and intelligence, we have seen important victories in securing the right to shelter for Philadelphians, and winning the right to vote for people who are homeless,” she said.

One such triumph, Scullion said, occurred on Fairmount Avenue, where Project H.O.M.E. had attempted to develop a residence for formerly homeless men and women. Both community groups and political forces had initially opposed the project.

“The fight went on for four years in courts, on streets and in the arena of public opinion,” she said. “This wasn’t a fight over a building in a particular neighborhood: it was a fight for civil and human rights.”

With the assistance of a legal team in Philadelphia along with other allies, the group won a decision in its favor based on the Federal Fair Housing Act. The results of this landmark fair housing case enabled 1515 Fairmount Avenue to serve as a home to 48 men and women.

Ironically, Scullion observed, after the project was under way the neighborhood around the building experienced significant rises in property values.

“Those who once vigorously opposed us are now supporting a second development in the same area,” Scullion said. “But without the law and without such talented lawyers as the graduates and teachers at Penn,” she added, the victory could not have been realized.

Calling for the legal community to “reframe the discussion around homelessness,” Scullion maintained that while it may be tempting to perceive homelessness as “intractable” and an “inevitable part of the urban landscape,” she is confident it can be resolved.

“We know the kinds of programs and services that work. We know that there are no throwaway people or children, and with your leadership and talent we believe collectively we can make America the land that it beckons us to be—a land of meaningful opportunity for every single person to succeed,” she said. “As our communities become more divided and segregated economically, we must figure out new ways to use our legal talents and skills to provide more inclusion and opportunity for every child to get the type of education you’ve gotten.”

Flickr: 2011 Public Interest Week Pictures

Part 3 of a four-part series about the 2011 Sparer Symposium. 

By Jenny Chung C’12

According to School of Social Policy and Practice Professor Dennis Culhane, approximately 150,000 people are chronically homeless across the United States. 

Culhane spoke as a panelist at “In Search of Shelter: Local and National Strategies for Alleviating Homelessness,” during which he named Housing First programs as a highly effective solution to reducing the prevalence of homelessness.

“Intervention costs less to the taxpayer than having people continue to be homeless,” he said, citing the reduced hospitalization and incarceration rates of Housing First participants as evidence of the programs’ efficacy.

Culhane added that federal and local governments must allocate resources toward solving homelessness directly rather than keeping the homeless population in shelters.

Under the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act, he said, communities will be rewarded for keeping the average length of a shelter stay as low as possible by offering shelter residents temporary rental assistance with the expectation that many will find employment. 

Dr. Ralph da Costa Nunez, President of the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, however, argued that rapid rehousing should not be regarded as an ideal solution.

“We’re really talking about poverty, not just housing issues,” Nunez said, adding that the problems afflicting low-income families—for instance, employment challenges and domestic violence—make “maintaining a home extremely difficult.”

Advocating the transformation of shelters into “communities,” Nunez contended that “[telling] a family coming into a shelter the first thing we do is give you housing” can be viewed as “a crime.”

He maintained that New York, the “capital of homelessness in the U.S.,” is currently on its third rapid rehousing program after the previous two had failed.

While “rapid rehousing is becoming the buzzword of the day,” he said, reconceptualizing shelters is substantially more likely to reduce the incidence of homelessness. “Shelters need to move to a new stage and no longer offer just services, but be developed as community resources.”

Nikki Johnson-Huston, who had been homeless for part of her childhood and is now an attorney at the City of Philadelphia Law Department, spoke to the difficulties of long-term planning while homeless.

“You’re thinking hour by hour, day by day,” she said, adding that poverty issues present another obstacle to those attempting to lift themselves out of homelessness.

According to Dr. Edward J. Speedling, Manager of the Homeless Veterans Internship Program at Project H.O.M.E., rehabilitating the homeless hinges on helping individuals find meaningful work and contributing to their ability to become self-sufficient.

“We are very aware that the journey back from homelessness entails rebuilding the foundations of people’s lives to reclaim independence and dignity,” he said, “especially those whose lives have been impaired by addiction, mental illness or both.”

Project H.O.M.E., which currently houses over 300 residents in nine residences, employs a model that “uses the restorative powers of work, education and community to help formerly homeless veterans remake their lives,” Speedling said. The program assesses participants’ skills and interests upon entry in order to match them with employers offering training and internships later on.

President and CEO of People’s Emergency Center Farah Jimenez affirmed that “defining success” in the field of homelessness programs is based on “understanding the model of providing services.”

She outlined two models—the first based on securing permanent housing for families, the second on assuming greater involvement in the lives of families such that once they obtain permanent housing, they enjoy a greater likelihood of success.

According to Jimenez, People’s Emergency Center can be understood in terms of the second model. “A lot of the families we are now seeing in shelters are young women who have aged out of foster care or grown up in public housing—they find themselves in a shelter but haven’t been given any model of parenting,” she said. “Our focus is on teaching them parenting skills.”

Nunez, another proponent of the “recovery” model, asserted that while “shelters cost a lot of money, prisons and foster care cost even more.”

“The sentiment that ‘no child should live in a shelter’ is very true—that’s why no shelter should be a shelter,” he said, adding that “shelters have become the front lines of the war on poverty in America.”

In response, Culhane argued that there has been a significant lack of data indicating transitional housing is more effective than permanent housing, and that poverty cannot be addressed by placing people into homeless shelters.

“We have to make mainstream social welfare systems more effective—not grow the homeless system,” he said.

As the dialogue approached its conclusion, Speedling highlighted the need for public-interest lawyers and other concerned individuals across Philadelphia to contribute to anti-poverty efforts.
“These issues are really destroying the fabric of this city,” he said.

Flickr: 2011 Public Interest Week Pictures

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 Lisa Pang C'13

A crowd of law students gathered in Penn Law’s Bernard Segal Moot Court Room on March 31 to hear Iowa Supreme Court Justice Brent Appel discuss the process, historical precedents, and current challenges faced in maintaining fair and impartial courts in American society.

Justice Appel was appointed Iowa's First Assistant Attorney General in 1979, Deputy Attorney General in 1983, and Supreme Court Justice in 2006. He served on the court responsible for the controversial decision to legalize gay marriage in Iowa. “Those who are opposed to fair and impartial courts are more vocal, those who support them have been largely silenced,” he told the audience.

Appel explained that the theory of fair and impartial courts held a strong historical precedent in the United States: “Most colonial judges held their judges at the pleasure of the crowd and the king,” Appel said. But around the time of the Constitutional Convention, attitudes towards judges changed: “The Founders rejected politically irresponsible judges,” he noted, adding, “The powers of government can be limited through no other way than through medium of courts of justice…Without this all reservations of particular rights and privileges will amount to nothing.”

At the same time, several movements were made towards checking the freedom of justices, especially during the impeachment of Samuel Chase, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1796, Appel said. However, in Chase's case it was determined that he could not be impeached on the basis of his opinions on the bench--a decision that has been used as a historical precedent to preserve the court’s decision making independence.

Appel also addressed how the system of appointing justices influenced the court’s autonomy. For example, until 1962 Iowa elected its judges, which according to Appel led to independent and fair-minded judges sitting on the bench. As a result of calamities like the Great Depression, however, “All the Republican judges were swept out of office,” he said.

To avoid such situations, Iowa adopted the merit selection system, in which a committee comprised of lawyers and judges reviews applications and nominates three candidates for a retention vote. Appel voiced his support of the system: “I think the manner of selection in Iowa which involves a larger committee decision and nomination has considerable merit,” he said.

Appel further highlighted judicial independence “as a lynchpin of citizens’ rights,” pointing out that “The Soviet Union had no fair and impartial court. In Nazi Germany, previously independent judges were required to take a new set of oaths.” He described attacks today on the judiciary as “currently pretty strong. We are said to be arrogant and elite,” Appel asserted, “not responding to the popular will… legislating from the bench.”

These attacks are not at all new, he said, “So it’s déjà vu all over again.” But, he noted, there are factors present in society now that are more challenging to fair and independent lawyers. “Society disparages critical thinking and encourages emotional response… impartiality is a sign of weakness,” Appel said.

Appel decried the use of “labels as a substitute for analysis,” arguing that in order to counteract such a mentality, it is vital to educate the public about judges' and justices' work within precedent and statutes instead of within their own personal precedent.

In addition, Appel decried what he termed “the chronic underfunding of the judiciary.” The judiciary, he asserted, is overwhelmed in terms of time and resources, and making responsible decisions under such conditions is a challenge. Underfunding “is a silent killer for fair and impartial courts,” he warned.

Appel closed by emphasizing the importance of lawyers. “You have chosen an honorable profession,” he told his audience. “Diligence makes a difference. When I talk to graduating students, I always say ‘some of you may have had great grades….when you get to the court room, none of that matters, what matters is who’s prepared and who's diligent and who is willing to zealously represent the client.'”

The event was organized by Penn Law's chapter of the American Constitution Society, the mission of which is “to promote progressive interpretations of the Constitution and the judiciary,” explained Anna Carlsen L’12, the Penn Law membership chair. “We hold events like this to bring in progressive judges to learn about the issues, ways to disseminate knowledge, and how we can work for change.”

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.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School has launched RegBlog, a website that provides news, analysis, and opinion on regulation. RegBlog is a special project of the Penn Program on Regulation, an interdisciplinary, University-wide program that analyzes regulatory policy problems and alternative strategies for solving them.

“RegBlog capitalizes on expertise and energy from across the University community – students, faculty, and alumni – to encourage intelligent dialogue about important policy issues and the complex regulatory process,” said Cary Coglianese, Edward B. Shils professor of Law and professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Program on Regulation. “The website fills a unique need for balanced, penetrating coverage of regulatory issues for the general reader as well as the scholar and practitioner.”

RegBlog features news and analysis on policy developments, regulatory actions, court decisions, and cutting-edge research related to regulation. The website tackles issues such as the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, food safety in an era of global trade, constitutional challenges to health care reform, and governmental transparency. Each Monday the website publishes a Regulatory Recap which compiles some of the most important regulatory stories from the previous week.

RegBlog is written and edited by over 20 students and several alumni from across the University of Pennsylvania.  Professor Coglianese serves as the faculty advisor, overseeing the overall work and contributing original content. The website also features guest posts by leading academics and practitioners. Initial guest contributors include Penn Law Professors Theodore Ruger and David Skeel, along with Abigail Slater, a senior attorney with the Federal Trade Commission.

In addition to serving as a much-needed resource for readers, RegBlog offers students a unique opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration and real-world impact. “The website gives students a chance to contribute original content,” said RegBlog Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Mincer L’12. “There is no better way to learn how to analyze complex  issues and write high-quality, interesting, professional work than to do it nearly every day, discuss it with other students, and receive direct feedback from a top Penn Law professor.”

RegBlog’s 2010-2011 Board comprises seven graduate students from the Law School and School of Arts and Sciences.  The website’s team of writers includes a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology at the School of Medicine, graduate students in bioengineering, environmental science, governmental administration, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning, and several JD and LLM students at the Law School.

“One of the strengths of RegBlog is that students in various departments of the University can contribute posts that are relevant to their fields of study,” said RegBlog Executive Editor Steve Gillard, who is pursuing a Masters in Environmental Studies. “This is because RegBlog prides itself on writing pieces about diverse regulatory issues and making them accessible to people who do not have a law degree.”

RegBlog is an outgrowth of a blog that Professor Coglianese created in 2009 as a project of the Penn Program on Regulation. The new RegBlog is designed to draw on the cross-disciplinary strengths of the University of Pennsylvania to provide a distinctive destination website for regulatory news and analysis.

To read RegBlog, go to http://www.regblog.org.

Somewhere in Bangkok, an Iraqi man named Yusuf* lives in limbo, a visitor who has overstayed his visa, unable to return home and not yet permitted to join his sister, Amal*, in Chicago. He cannot go back to Iraq because he is a marked target; his sister’s work as a translator and caseworker for United States forces put her entire family at risk from anti-American terrorist organizations. Though Amal was able to receive refugee status and immigrate to the United States, Yusuf’s relocation has progressed much more slowly.

Yusuf’s case is one of over 200 being handled by the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), a national organization that helps Iraqis who were formerly employed by American and international forces in Iraq, and their families, to enter the United States through Special Immigrant Visas. Students in the Penn Law branch of IRAP are currently working to secure Yusuf’s relocation to the United States.

University of Jordan law students Dana Abu Al Ghanam and Sultan Abu Dalhoum confer with Katie Flannery L'13 about a case

Penn’s IRAP, a Toll Public Interest Center student group, was formed in February 2010 as an offshoot of the Penn Law Immigrant Rights Project. The project consists of more than two dozen students and seven attorneys who work together on ten cases. Currently each attorney supervises students who work in teams of two or three to develop strategy, draft memos, and prepare paperwork and client statements for the government.  This semester, IRAP also began working with the local Iraqi community in Philadelphia. Under the supervision of Professor Fernando Chang-Muy, students are helping Iraqi refugees complete Green Card applications, apply for the refugee benefits to which they are entitled, and file taxes.

Learning Beyond the Classroom
Many of the skills students develop through their work with IRAP can be difficult to hone in the classroom. Andrew J. Soven L’95, an advising attorney from Reed Smith, said the cases teach students patience and persistence. “The reality [is] that things in the real world take much longer than you’d often like them to. In particular, it can be frustrating dealing with government agencies and levels of review each application takes. Nothing happens quickly on something like this.”

Certain skills, including interviewing and working with victims of trauma, require training sessions like those sponsored by Penn Law’s Students Against Gender-Based Exploitation Project (SAGE).  In February, IRAP hosted a training session for students and attorneys taught by Miriam Marton, a Skadden Arps pro bono attorney with experience – first as a psychologist and later as a lawyer – working with refugees and asylum seekers who suffered trauma.

“Most of our clients have been through tremendous suffering, and they feel, quite rightly, betrayed,” explained Kathleen Norland L’12, executive director of IRAP at Penn Law. “One of the challenges of an interview, then, is to acknowledge and respect that suffering and betrayal, but at the same time ask questions that will bring to light the details and facts that make a convincing statement.”
 
The work can be grueling, but the payoff for students and their clients can be tremendous. “This project gives students the unique opportunity to work on a real case, 3-on-1 with a supervising attorney,” said Becca Heller, co-founder of IRAP. “This is a way to connect with someone who really needs your assistance. Even as a first year, you can help. There aren’t a lot of options available to clients, so you are the last hope, but there is something concrete you can do for them.”

Khurram Nasir Gore, a supervising attorney at Reed Smith, agreed. “The Penn Law students have an opportunity to deal with individuals with significant problems that are purely legal at this point. [Our clients] should be rightly entitled to come to the U.S. because of service to the [U.S.] military, and they can’t. The entire roadblock is legal.”

Penn Law students help represent clients before United Nations and United States agencies, explain the legal process, and prepare clients to respond appropriately to questions. “It’s a tiring and stressful process for the individuals trying to secure Special Immigrant Visas,” Gore said.

In addition, students are working in a new area of law. “No one has tried to provide individual legal representation to a refugee population before,” asserts Heller. “This is a new area of law related to resettlement proceedings. It qualifies as an administrative adjudication. We must make sure the system is fair, certain procedural guarantees are in place, and there is a transparent appeals process.”

Supervising attorneys have been impressed by the skills and experience Penn Law students bring to the project. “Penn Law students have diverse backgrounds,” observed Gore. “One is an MBA/Law student and brings his own perspectives because of that. Others bring their previous pro bono and volunteer experiences.”

Soven, one of the attorney advisors from Reed Smith, continued, “The Penn Law students are really sharp and motivated. I’ve been particularly impressed by how global the students’ interests are. They’ve traveled to the Middle East and been involved in other international projects.”

Penn and University of Jordan law students receive instruction in refugee law in Amman

While in Amman, the Penn Law students also worked with University of Jordan law students to handle the intake of seven new clients for IRAP National. One of the new clients was assigned to two of the Penn students who traveled to Jordan. They are currently drafting a Request for Review of the client’s resettlement rejection and filing a Workers’ Compensation claim on his behalf under the Defense Base Act, which extended workers’ compensation to employees injured while working for the U.S. military in Iraq.

According to Norland, students made great progress on the cases during the Jordan trip. “In one case, we knew that our client had been detained by U.S. forces, and that this was probably the reason her application had been rejected,” she said. “But we didn't know any of the details of her detention and she was reluctant to discuss these details by phone or email. During a long face-to-face interview, she shared with us the details of her arrest and detention, and these specific facts will, we hope, help convince USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] that she does not pose a security threat to the United States.”

Gola Javadi L’13 described another advantage of meeting with clients in person. “I found that by working with our Iraqi refugee clients directly, I was able to appreciate the global impact of our education and assistance much more fully,” she said. “Personally interviewing clients who depend so profoundly on our assistance was a very humbling and inspiring experience, and has connected me to my client’s case in a way that I was unable to appreciate while working from Philadelphia.”

Gore, the Reed Smith supervising attorney, noted the importance of IRAP’s refugee work. “It’s a cause U.S. citizens should be concerned about, especially when Iraqi citizens risked their lives to support the U.S. military and later found themselves refugees.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

By Sophie Jeewon Choi C’13

Kenneth A. Richieri, senior vice president and general counsel of the New York Times Company, opened the Penn Intellectual Property Group’s 4th Annual Symposium on Copyright Law on March 22 with a keynote address that offered a practical perspective on copyright issues for news and information providers. Richieri addressed an audience of faculty, students, attorneys and community members gathered in Penn Law’s Levy Conference Center. 

According to Richieri, news and information providers face a unique situation in protecting their copyrights because of the ambiguous distinction between the facts they report and the expressions they use. “Copyright protects expression, not facts,” he explained. “Creative works, things like novels, movies [and] songs, receive the highest protection because they’re one hundred percent expression.”

News providers also face a new challenge with the development of digital media. “The Internet world has severely changed the economic play in a very material sense,” Richieri said, adding that the changes are in large part due to the nature of Internet search engines. “For news articles, this generally means headlines, and the first sentence or so, limited to 40, 35 characters,” he said. Because the search results are considered informative, such headlines are not protected by copyright and are considered a fair use case.

The growing use of “apps” and user interfaces complicates the issue further. “Apps are often designed to allow the user to change his or her experience,” Richieri pointed out. “The changes can be relatively simple, like fonts or something like that, or more complex, like organization or presentation.” Richieri emphasized, “[Such changes] have very serious economic consequences.” For clients looking for guidance in developing apps given the complex copyright environment, he said “there is no easy or uniform answer.”
 
Following the keynote address, the Symposium included three panel discussions. The first discussion, moderated by Penn Law Professor R. Polk Wagner, was titled “Music Licensing and Distribution.” Panelists Bruce Rich, a senior partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP who heads the firm’s IP & Media practice, Jeff Farmer, in-house counsel and vice president of Legal Affairs at Lime Wire LLC, and Roger Cramer, counsel to Selverne & Company PLLC, explored contemporary copyright issues in the music industry in the face of changing technologies. They covered a wide range of issues, including the protection of artists and the streaming and downloading of music online.

The second panel, titled “Open Source and Derivative Works,” was moderated by Penn Law Professor Christopher S. Yoo and focused on copyright issues surrounding software development. The panelists included Van Lindberg, associate at Haynes and Boone, Aaron Williamson, counsel at Software Freedom Law Center, and J. (Jay) T. Westermeier, counsel at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garret & Dunner LLP. They spoke of the unresolved discourse on the open source movement and copyrights of adapted work.

Penn Law Professor Shyam Balganesh moderated the final panel, “Copyright and Authors,” with panelists Nina Paley, author, director, cartoonist, and an artist-in-residence member of QuestionCopyright.org, and Marcia Paul, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP who concentrates on media and intellectual property litigation and counseling. Drawing on their professional experiences, the two panelists shared their perspectives on copylefts and the necessity of copyright laws.

Attorney John Papianou, who attended the Symposium, said of the discussions, “I thought [Nina Paley’s] challenging the copyright laws was very interesting.” Charlene Kwuon, an online cartoonist and writer, also commended the final panel. “I thought it was great that they were actively pitted against each other,” she said. “It made the arguments for or against copyrights feel very active.”

Coy Burcell, a corporate and health law attorney in the audience and the associate director of Penn’s Office of Research Services, said, “I thought they were all great presentations. They were all interesting. I think it’s remarkable to get the different panels and the speakers to all come to this event.”

Flickr: Penn Intellectual Property Group Symposium: Copyright Law in the 21st Century Pictures

Earlier this semester James H. Borod L’11, Michael B. Kind L’11, Sarah L. Smith L’11, and Kimberly R. Upham L’11 stood before notable judges Hon. Jose A. Cabranes, Hon. Karen Nelson Moore, and Hon. Stephen R. Reinhardt in the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theatre, ready to stake their claims to the 2011 Edwin R. Keedy Cup. The judges posed challenging questions from the bench, to which the students provided well-researched, knowledgeable answers. Ultimately, the moot court team of Borod and Kind won the debate of the case, Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, a challenge to the Legal Arizona Workers Act of 2007.

Transcript: The Road to the Keedy Cup Finals
Professor Anne Kringel: The Keedy Finals are the culmination of a year of argument that the students who are participating have been doing. They start out in their second year, in the Keedy Preliminaries, and they write a brief and they give three rounds of argument. And from that, the top four people end up being our Keedy finalists when they’re third years. And we stage it as an actual Supreme Court case– we use a pending case, and the advocates pretend that they are the advocates before the Supreme Court, and they play those roles. And the judges take that very seriously too – the judges are usually actual sitting judges, and they play the role of Supreme Court judges, and ask the students really difficult questions.

The Competition
Michael Kind: The thing that is preempted is criminal and monetary sanctions. However, the graduated …
Hon. Stephen R. Reinhardt: Well why?  Why is that – why are the monetary sanctions preempted?
Kind: The house report explains that it’s civil fines.
Reinhardt: Well, I don’t care about the house report, particularly, I follow Justice Scalia. I read the statute. 
Kind: Sure.
Reinhardt: And the statute – what is preempted by this statute? If you can do anything through a licensing provision.

Kimberly Upham: IRCA created a term of art, “unauthorized alien,” and that would be the correct system in which to incorporate the standard.
Hon. Karen Nelson Moore: What is the most fundamental difference between those two standards?
Upham: Your Honor, the fundamental difference between those two standards is that under IRCA, a worker may, in fact, be authorized, even though they are an illegal alien. The Attorney General may authorize a worker under IRCA, under its provisions.

The Students
Kind: I think a lot of schools have events like this, but Penn has some great appellate advocacy programs and some legal writing programs. Ever since 1L year, I’ve been preparing in this type of way. We’ve had oral arguments, we’ve been required to write briefs and do oral arguments. Then, second year, I took Appellate Advocacy class. So Penn definitely makes the curriculum adaptable for learning these types of skills, and I think that that’s a very important thing to do. It’s something that we’re probably all going to have to use one day when we graduate school, and it’s about more how we interact with the world and not necessarily just books. And I think Penn does do a great job of emphasizing that in part of the curriculum.
Sarah Smith: They let me get through the first minute, my introduction, which is all you can really ask for in this type of competition. And then they decided to go in for the questions, and that’s about what I was anticipating.
Upham: It was a great opportunity. I had a great partner. Sarah and I really enjoyed working together. And it’s a great experience to moot a case in front of real circuit judges. I think it gave me a little taste of what, hopefully, my career will be like someday. 
James Borod: There were definitely some questions we hadn’t talked about or thought about before. And it’s one thing, certainly, to do in a classroom here in front of three people – it’s a little bit scary to do in front of a much larger audience.

Reinhardt: We all enjoyed it, and we hope you enjoyed us as much as we enjoyed you. So thank you very much. The court will stand in recess.

This transcript was edited for length.

Named for its founder, the late Dean Edwin R. Keedy (1880-1958), the Keedy Cup competition is the culmination of the Law School's intramural brief writing and oral advocacy moot court tournament. All second-year students are eligible. After three rounds of competition, the four students who score the highest are selected to become the Keedy Cup participants. In their third year, the participants, randomly paired in two teams, argue a current Supreme Court case before an esteemed panel of jurists. The competition is organized by the Law School’s Moot Court Board, whose members, along with the members of the National Moot Court Competition Team, were runners-up after the three rounds of competition in the second-year moot court competitions.

This year Penn Law’s Public Interest Week coincides with Sunshine Week, a national effort to promote dialogue about open government and freedom of information. We sat down with Director of the Penn Program on Regulation and Penn Law Professor Cary Coglianese to discuss how information technology affects the transparency of the federal rulemaking process. 

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.

By Tanya Barrientos. Reprinted from the Penn Current.

During his nearly 50 years in public life—30 of them as a U.S. Senator—Arlen Specter has not only witnessed some of the most historic events in modern history, he has played a role in them.

He’s been part of the national dialogue since as early as 1963 and 1964, when he served as assistant counsel to the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (better known as the Warren Commission). It was Specter who developed what came to be called “the single bullet theory,” asserting that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the shooting in Dallas. The theory was controversial then, and it remains controversial today. But controversy has never been something Specter has tried to avoid. In fact, it’s been one of the hallmarks of his notable career.

As the longest-serving U.S. Senator in Pennsylvania’s history, Specter has participated in the confirmation hearings of 14 Supreme Court nominees—including the intense questioning of nominee Robert Bork (whose nomination was rejected) in 1987, and the contentious questioning of Anita Hill, who in 1991 accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The Senate approved Thomas’ nomination by a vote of 52 to 48. In his memoir, “Passion for Truth,” published in 2000, Specter comes about as close as he ever might to an outright apology for the Hill incident, writing that he “didn’t understand the explosive nature of the [sexual harassment] issue” back then.

During his five consecutive terms in the Senate, Specter served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including as chairman from 2005 to 2007; he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1995 to 1997 and was a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

In 2010, Specter lost his run for re-election. In September of this year, he will return to his alma mater as an adjunct faculty member at Penn Law School, where he will teach a course on the relationship between Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing on the separation of powers and the confirmation process. The former senator recently talked with the Current and Penn Law about having grown up in the same small Kansas town as retired Senator Bob Dole, his days as a Penn undergrad, his entry into politics and what he hopes to impart to a new generation of lawyers. 
 
Q. Your association with Penn goes back to your days as an undergraduate. How did you decide on Penn back then?
A. My beginning association with Penn was as a student in the College. I graduated from Penn in 1951, was on the debating team and I was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. I came to Penn because my family moved to Philadelphia. We were living in Russell, Kansas, a little town of 5,000 people, and when my sister Shirley was of a marriageable age, there was only one Jewish boy in town and that was me, her brother. So the family moved to Philadelphia so she could meet and marry a fine Jewish boy and raise a fine Jewish family, which she did. I had been attending the University of Oklahoma and I decided to come with the family and that brought me to Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.

Q. Russell, Kansas is the same town former Senator Bob Dole is from. Did your families know each other?
A. Our families were friends. My father had a junkyard in Russell and my father weighed his junk on Doran Dole’s [Bob’s father] scale. He ran the local granary so he had the biggest and only scale in town that could weigh a big truck. Bob’s brother Kenny and my brother Morton were contemporaries and were friends, and of course I got to know Bob very well in the Senate.

Q. What are some of your most vivid memories about your College days? You said you were on the debate team, did that spark your interest in politics?
A. The debate team took on Oxford in 1949. …We debated the team on the question that, Resolve: The British Empire was decadent. We won the debate on the judges’ balloting, and afterwards my father walked up to me and said, ‘Arlen, do you think it was very polite that those two young fellows came all the way from Great Britain and you beat them?’ and I said, ‘Yeah Dad, that’s debating.’

Q. Any other memories you hold dear?
A. Sure, the fraternity house was lively on Saturday nights. I took Joan [Specter’s wife of 55 years] to a party there on our first date in the fall of 1949.

Q. After law school why did you decide to live in Philadelphia?
A. I was in the service for two years. I was in the Air Force ROTC at Penn. The Korean War was on and I spent two years stateside with the OSI [Office of Special Investigations]. I went to law school at Yale and I had an interest in settling in Denver, where I worked for a law firm between my second and third years of law school. I was doing very well, until they found out I was Jewish. They didn’t hire Jewish fellows. I liked Philadelphia a lot and had a number of offers here, so I joined a very fine firm here— Barnes, Dechert, Price, Meyers and Rhoads—and I married a Philadelphia girl, and I’ve been here ever since.

Q. So Philadelphia came through for you when it came to battling anti-Semitism?
A. Well, anti-Semitism, like racism, bubbles just a little bit below the surface. I’m glad to say I think those days are over. Law firms all over the country and all over the world are hiring talent now. I think we are over that, but when I was in law school it was a problem. And I talk about it because I think it’s important for people to recognize it, and not to pretend that it never happened.

Q. In your final floor statement in the Senate, you said ‘partisan gridlock’ and ‘abuse of the Senate rules’ have damaged what you called the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body.’
A. The tradition is to have a farewell address, but I used the opportunity to make what I called a closing argument, to try to bring about some changes. It used to be that the Senate was a place where any senator could offer virtually any amendment at virtually any time and get a vote. So, with unlimited debate you could bring up new ideas and debate them. It’s a pretty good forum for attracting public attention and really doing something constructive. And then there was a rule that was abused by majority leaders of both sides where they would offer amendments so that no further amendments could be offered. They called it ‘filling the tree.’ It was a procedural device, and when it was done by Republicans, the Democrats would object that they didn’t have a chance to offer amendments and they would filibuster. The filibusters were very abusive. To break a filibuster you need 60 votes and it takes about three days of the Senate’s time.

At the same time there was a lot of partisanship over judges, because the cultural wars have been fought out at times in the federal courts on questions like a woman’s right to choose, school prayer, embryonic stem cell research. And the political parties have been controlled by the fringes. They control the primary process. For example, an excellent senator like Joe Lieberman couldn’t win a primary in Connecticut [in 2006]. I couldn’t win a Republican primary in Pennsylvania [in 2010]. Bob Bennett [former Republican Senator] of Utah had a 93 percent conservative record and he couldn’t win a primary in Utah. [Republican Senator] Lisa Murkowski in Alaska lost her primary, and she was opposed by members of the Republican caucus. People that she sits with every Tuesday for lunch, and with whom she talks about party affairs, felt she wasn’t sufficiently conservative. I called that in my speech sophisticated cannibalism, and I made a mistake; I should not have called it sophisticated. It’s just raw cannibalism. The fights between the parties have descended to a level where right now it appears we are going to have two years of chaos, until the decision is made about who is going to be elected president in 2012.

Q. Of all the places you could teach, why did you choose Penn Law, and how will you incorporate your Senate experience into your course on the separation of powers?
A. I chose Penn because it’s one of the best law schools in the country. ... And I know a lot of the people at Penn, including one of the distinguished visiting professors named Shanin Specter [Arlen Specter’s son]. I taught at Penn in 1969, 1970 and 1971, so I know the Law School and it’s a terrific place. I have keen interest in developing ideas about the Supreme Court for the next generation of lawyers. I think it’s very important for people who have been fortunate enough to have had the kind of experiences as I’ve had to share the experiences with other people.

Q. One of the areas you will be delving into in your teaching is the relationship between Congress and the Supreme Court, as well as the confirmation process. Why focus on that?
A. I think the Supreme Court needs to be better understood, and one of the ways to have it understood is to televise the court, which is something I’ve been trying to do for virtually my entire Senate career. The supreme court of Great Britain is televised, as is the supreme court of Canada, the state supreme courts, the U.S. Senate and the House; but the U.S. Supreme Court has resisted. … One of the grave problems of the confirmation process is that [Supreme Court] nominees make a lot of statements that are really close to commitments—you can’t sue them for deviating—but there is such a practice of totally ignoring the statements that there really needs to be a way to deal with it. For example, [Chief Justice John] Roberts wrote a concurring opinion joined by [Justice Samuel] Alito in Citizens United [v. Federal Election Commission] that is a 180-degree U-turn from the questioning in the confirmation hearings on following precedents stare decisis and on being deferential to Congressional findings of fact. And, the Supreme Court decides all the cutting issues of the day. They need to be understood. I think the legitimacy of the Supreme Court really is under attack at the moment. Not too many people know it, but their decision in Bush v. Gore was disgraceful. I use that word knowingly. [Justice Antonin] Scalia said irreparable damage would be done to President Bush’s legitimacy if the votes were counted, which made absolutely no sense. ...And there’s Citizens United, and they’ve just made a mockery of the statute which governs changes in the rules of civil procedure, but that’s a long story. …Those are some of the thoughts on my mind, just some.

Q. Penn President Amy Gutmann has said she hopes that your presence on campus will encourage more students to pursue careers in public service.
A. I’m pleased to hear that she said that. I’ve long contended that government does not have the best and the brightest. … When I came out of law school I became a committeeman to try and work through the political ranks. Being hired in the district attorney’s office was political at the time. But once I got to City Hall I found the level of professionalism was much inferior to what there was at the big law firms. I’ve always tried to bring people into government. When I was elected DA, I had a special recruiting policy. I went to all the big law firms to try to secure a young lawyer for two years to get his services and to get experience for him. ... I’ve spoken at countless colleges and high schools and I’ve always carried the theme of ‘get involved,’ and when I interact with the [Penn Law] students I’ll be carrying that message forward. Of course my whole career has been a statement to that effect.

By Sophie Jeewon Choi C’13

Jeremy Nowak, president of The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a community development financial institution, addressed faculty, students, attorneys and community members gathered in Penn Law’s Levy Conference Room March 2, kicking off 2011’s Law and Entrepreneurship lectures presented by Penn Law’s Institute for Law & Economics (ILE).

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.

Engaging Globally at Penn

From the environment to the economy to security, international challenges are defining the 21^st century. Lawyers today are called upon as leaders to address some of the most daunting global problems – challenges ranging from the rapid flow of capital across borders, to combating international terror groups while maintaining civil liberties, to regulating technology that defies traditional notions of physical borders.

“The global environment has created not only unprecedented challenges but also unprecedented opportunities in the law,” said Eric Feldman, Deputy Dean of International Affairs and a Professor of Law specializing in Japan at Penn Law. “The faculty at Penn Law is at the forefront of international legal scholarship and practice that will make a real difference in the world. As experts in our fields, we are consulted by people and institutions on every continent and regularly participate in bilateral and international engagements across a wide range of topics. As teachers, we are committed to preparing law graduates who understand and can adeptly navigate the global landscape.”

Penn Law has unsurpassed strengths in the legal systems of the world's most important and dynamic regions, including East Asia, South Asia, and the European Union, as well as outstanding breadth and depth in the fields of international economic law and human rights. An historical leader in teaching international and comparative law, the Law School has built upon this foundation over the past several years to create an International Program offering unrivalled opportunities for students.

“Penn Law’s curriculum is infused with global analysis at all levels of study,” said Amy Gadsden, Associate Dean of International Affairs at Penn Law. “Our students engage in rigorous legal studies with one of the nation's most outstanding law school faculties. Our professors and scholars bring diverse training, research interests, and scholarly work to instill a broad global view of the role of law in society into all their courses.”

In recent years, Gadsden noted, “we have focused on developing more programs that give students firsthand experience with what it means to practice law in an international or foreign setting. Whether interning in a Japanese law firm, working at an NGO in Namibia, or meeting with regulators in Italy, Penn Law students are applying what they are learning in the classroom to real world settings abroad and raising questions in class based on real life encounters overseas. ”

For students seeking to pursue international or comparative legal studies, the Law School provides:

• An international and comparative law program that offers more than 20 courses each year and myriad opportunities for research and international experience.
• Access to world-class faculty and visiting international legal scholars recognized globally as leaders in their fields; in recent years the Law School has welcomed senior academics and practitioners from China, Japan, Germany, France, Nigeria, Denmark and India through the Bok Visiting International Professor Program. 
• Joint degrees and certificate programs, including the JD/MA in International Studies with the Lauder Institute at Wharton, the JD/LLM with Hong Kong University, and the JD/MA in Global Business Law with Sciences Po/Paris I; and Certificates of Study in such fields as East Asian Studies, Middle East and Islamic Studies, International Business and Law; and other options.
• The Transnational Human Rights Legal Clinic, engaging students in direct legal representation of individual and organizational clients before a variety of international and domestic venues.
• The International Summer Human Rights Fellowship and Mead Fellowship programs, supporting Penn Law students engaged in human rights and rule of law work in areas as diverse as South America, Central Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.
• The Penn Law International Internship Program , which places students in local law firms in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, and career planning resources;
• Dozens of events, conferences, and symposia each year;
• The Global Research Seminar, an intensive international research course where  students and faculty investigate real-world contemporary legal challenges by meeting with experts and stakeholders during an overseas research trip.
• Study abroad opportunities with Penn Law’s seven formal partners: Bucerius Law School in Hamburg; ESADE Law School in Barcelona; Hong Kong University, Sciences Po/Paris I in Paris; Tel Aviv University Law School; Tsinghua Law School in Beijing; and Wasada Law School in Tokyo.
• International and comparative law journals and student groups.

Penn Law's uniquely cross-disciplinary faculty and academic programs provide students with extensive links to the international and foreign area studies resources of the University’s other elite professional schools, including Wharton, Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, and Penn’s specialized centers and institutes. These resources allow students to prepare for the increasingly global legal environment by providing an understanding of the economic, political, social and philosophical contexts of foreign and international law. 

 Penn Law’s proximity to New York City and Washington, D.C. enables the Law School to attract to campus leading scholars, practitioners and public figures in international law and related fields .

“When I entered law school, my goal was to practice corporate law internationally,” said Jill Concannon L’03, an Associate at White & Case, London. “Although I didn’t know it when I chose Penn, Penn Law was the absolute best place I could have chosen to launch my career, which has taken me from London, to Hong Kong, and back to London again, where I’m currently based.”

“Whether a student seeks to focus on human rights or international banking, Asian law or Islamic legal codes, Penn Law provides the intellectual and institutional resources necessary for a student to take advantage of a rich academic program while enhancing their professional expertise,” said Michael Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. “There has never been a more exciting time to pursue international legal studies at Penn.”

By Jenny Chung C’12

Mike Feinberg C’91, cofounder of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the largest charter school network in the nation, addressed an audience of students from Penn Law, the Graduate School of Education, the Fels Institute of Government and the Wharton School of Business at the Levy Conference Center Feb. 23, saying that education reform is critical so that “demographics don’t have to define one’s destiny,” for low-income students.

Comparing the prevailing problem with education reform to a “kindergarten soccer game” in which players are constantly looking to “move on to the next new shiny thing,” Feinberg cautioned against prioritizing quick fixes over incremental, long-term solutions. “There’s no 100-percent lever to pull, but there are 100 one-percent levers,” he said. “Unfortunately we keep looking for the one lever that will transform [the current system].” 

Feinberg identified school leadership as the “critical path” to facilitating education reform. “Any school will work well if there’s great teaching, and more of it,” he said. “It’s the secret sauce—what goes into the culture will motivate kids, parents and teachers.”

After joining Teach for America (TFA) upon graduation from college and completing three years as a bilingual teacher in Houston, TX, Feinberg collaborated with fellow TFA alumni Dave Levin to launch KIPP, a national network of free public schools that has since garnered national acclaim for preparing students in underserved communities for success in college.

With 99 schools in over 20 states, the program currently serves 27,000 students nationwide. Eighty percent of KIPP students come from low-income families, and 85 percent of KIPP alumni enroll in college.

To bring “great teaching” and qualified leadership to KIPP classrooms, the program hires outstanding instructors from around the country, provides them with one year of training and equips them with the resources to found a school of their own based on the KIPP definition, which encompasses five key tenets.

The first, according to Feinberg, is “more time on task.” While the average school day lasts for seven hours and the school year about half a year, KIPP offers 9.5-hour school days and holds classes both on Saturdays and throughout the summer. Although “more time in the classroom may not guarantee success,” Feinberg asserted that it “sets students up for success” by ensuring two solid hours of language arts and math courses a day while leaving time for other subjects like history and fine arts. The time constraints imposed by a typical school day, he said, pressure teachers and principals to be “miracle workers… especially if kids come to school already two grade levels behind.”

Feinberg then emphasized the necessity of empowering parents and teachers to choose their commitment to a given school. “Choice does exist, but only for people with resources,” he explained. “Low-income kids and families are often locked into one choice, and if they don’t have a choice there’s a monopoly [in the school system].”

According to Feinberg, once a school district establishes a monopoly over the education options in a community, it no longer has the incentive to improve.

“Within public education, it’s important to break that monopoly mindset,” he said. “If people have true choice, that’s a game-changer… schools have to realize students and parents are customers they’re there to serve, and who have options.”

In addition, Feinberg asserted, for effective reform to occur, schools must grant staff members the freedom to implement necessary changes without facing bureaucratic limitations. With such freedom “comes accountability for results,” he said, stressing the importance of the “human” resource. “The basic premise is that people make a difference, and we often lose sight of that at the policy level. We start thinking, what little gizmo can we invent to improve education in the classroom? That makes sense for cooking popcorn, not for teaching children how to read.”

He named “high expectations” and a “focus on great results” as the final two pillars of the KIPP approach. “Is college for every single child? Not necessarily,” Feinberg said. “But the skills necessary to go to college are for everyone. Let’s have the doors of opportunity all open—if [students] choose to do something else, let’s give them the skills to do that.”

Feinberg voiced his confidence that while public education currently confronts a wide range of issues, they are “fixable if we have the political will.” He likewise called for a “mindset shift” at the societal level: “We have different expectations of our kids depending on which zip code they live in, and that’s what needs to change.”

He then read excerpts from one of children’s author Dr. Seuss’s lesser-known works, On Beyond Zebra, to the audience. The book, which details the adventures of a boy who goes “beyond the letter Z” in the alphabet, contains valuable inspiration to those working to effect education reform. “If we want extraordinary results, we can’t do regular work and planning,” Feinberg said. “Let’s push it beyond ‘Z’.”

The current education infrastructure, he pointed out, offers no real incentive for change. “The only people who would benefit from change are the children, and they don’t have a voice,” said Feinberg. “We have to question whether the public education system exists to serve the children or the adults.”

Feinberg concluded by encouraging students with advanced degrees across all disciplines to get involved with education reform. “Take your legal, policy or business background and come teach—there’s a need for everyone to jump in and help,” he said.

Amy Feinman L’12, said Feinberg “really spoke to the different types of graduate students in the audience,” and effectively “put charter schools in perspective within the grand scheme of education reform and promoted collaborative efforts among students and practitioners to move them forward.”

Erin Staab L’12 added that the speaker “did a great job explaining his goals, initiatives and where education reform can go and where we can help it.”

Both Staab and Feinman helped organize the event on behalf of the Leaders in Education Advocacy and Reform Network (L.E.A.R.N.), a student group which aims to create a cross-disciplinary discussion among law and business students about the role they can assume in education reform. Comprised of three core components—community outreach, pro bono initiatives and career-based initiatives—the group enables students from Penn’s graduate and professional schools to assist local schools, provides a venue for law students to perform pro bono work for parents and students and holds events designed to help students at Penn Law navigate their future career paths.

Penn Law's International Human Rights Advocates student group sponsored a discussion on Dec. 1 with Visiting Scholar Mehdi Zakerian, a leading scholar on human rights in the Islamic world. Among numerous topics, Zakerian spoke about anti-human rights attitudes among Iranian students, the international effects of social media on human rights activism, and the risks facing human rights activists in Iran.

Zakerian joined Penn Law as a visiting scholar earlier this semester and will be in residence through summer 2011. He was originally scheduled to arrive at the Law School in 2008, but was detained by Iranian authorities after he applied for a passport to leave the country.

Click any photo below to view a slideshow.

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

In The Right to Remain Silent, Professors Charles Weisselberg and Stephanos Bibas debate the state of the right to remain silent after the Supreme Court’s decision in Berghuis v. Thompkins, which held that a suspect in custody must affirmatively state her intent to remain silent in order to invoke that right. Professor Weisselberg recounts the interrogation of Mr. Thompkins and argues that the majority in Thompkins rejected the fundamental underpinnings of Miranda’s prophylactic rule and established a new one that fails to protect the rights of suspects. Professor Bibas argues that the Court’s holding reflects a proper rejection of Miranda’s “failed experiment,” which ignored the Fifth Amendment’s compulsion requirement and did not establish adequate safeguards for the innocent suspects who need them. He posits that the tougher question is how to reform the system so that it does protect those parties, and he further suggests that videotaping all interrogations would go a long way toward ensuring confessions that are free from compulsion.

Read the debate at the PENNumbra website.

Merion, PA – The University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty gathered here in September for their annual retreat, a tradition designed to renew the intellectual vitality and camaraderie of the Law School’s academic community. The retreat included scholarly panel discussions on a range of legal topics, from gay rights, to the use of empirical research in the law, to health law, the financial crisis, and copyright law beyond fair use.

“The idea of a day devoted to intense academic discussion and to building social connections with colleagues makes our faculty retreat a unique Penn Law institution,” said Dean Michael Fitts. “The retreat allows us to come together as a group for an entire day to discuss and debate some of the most significant issues that lawyers face today, and to do so in a relaxed setting. Everyone comes away with a renewed appreciation for our community's energy, intelligence and cohesiveness, even as we represent incredibly diverse intellectual perspectives."

Click any photo above to view a slideshow of the retreat.      Click above to view a video of the retreat.

Kenneth R. Feinberg will deliver the University of Pennsylvania Law School's Irving R. Segal Lecture in Trial Advocacy, entitled Unconventional Responses to Unique Catastrophes: Tailoring the Laws to Meet the Challenges, on Tuesday, Oct. 12 at 4:30 p.m.

Feinberg will draw on recent examples – from the Federal September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, to TARP Executive Compensation, to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility arising out of the BP Gulf Oil spill – to demonstrate how the law can be applied to provide unconventional responses to national tragedies. In doing so, he will describe how basic legal principles may be flexibly and creatively applied to achieve justice in some of the most complex and challenging circumstances.

Feinberg is one of the country’s most prominent lawyers, and has played a key role in resolving many of our nation’s most challenging and widely known disputes. He currently serves as administrator of the $20 billion BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill compensation fund, and in 2009 was appointed as the Wall Street “pay czar,” overseeing compensation for executives at firms that received federal bailout funds. He is perhaps best known for serving as special master of the Federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. He has also served as special master in Agent Orange, asbestos personal injury, wrongful death, Dalkon shield, and DES (pregnancy medication) cases.

Feinberg headed the alternative dispute resolution program for resolving insurance claims arising out of Huricane Katrina and other hurricanes in the Gulf region. He served as distribution agent for the $800 million AIG Fair Fund and as fund administrator for the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund following the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech. In his capacity as an arbitrator, Feinberg helped determine the fair market value of the original Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, and legal fees in Holocaust slave labor litigation.

Feinberg has been appointed to two presidential-level commissions, and has had a distinguished teaching career as an adjunct professor at law schools, including the University of Pennsylvania. He was named “Lawyer of the Year” in 2004 by the National Law Journal, and has been named repeatedly by the Journal as one of “The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.”

Feinberg is a partner at Feinberg Rozen, LLP, which he founded in 1992. He previously served as a law clerk for the New York State Court of Appeals from 1970 to 1972; assistant United States attorney, Southern District of New York from 1972 to 1975, special counsel, United Sates Senate Committee on the Judiciary from 1975 to 1980; administrative assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy from 1977 to 1979; and partner at Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler from 1980 to 1993. He received his BA cum laude from the University of Massachusetts in 1967 and his JD from New York University School of Law in 1970.

The Segal Lecture will be held at the Law School's Levy Conference Center, and will be followed by a reception in the Great Hall. The Lecture is open to the public and attendees are eligible to receive one CLE credit. Seating is limited, and early registration is strongly encouraged. To register or for further information, contact Dori Pavel at dpavel@law.upenn.edu.

Elizabeth (“Liz”) Slusser Kelly, who through her leadership transformed a once-moribund Biddle Law Library into a modern space for research and the centerpiece of Tanenbaum Hall, died on July 14 at the age of 72.

Students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School routinely devote their summers to public interest work, from advocating for human rights in Botswana to defending indigent clients in Philadelphia. But obtaining funding for such work can be a challenge, especially this year as organizations that typically fund summer pro bono and legal services internships face unprecedented budget shortfalls.

University of Pennsylvania Law School graduates will join the cadre of leading public interest and government attorneys this fall as they embark on fellowship, scholarship and honors program opportunities throughout the U.S. and abroad. They will include five Department of Justice Honors Program attorneys, two Equal Justice Works Fellows, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, an Independence Fellow and a Skadden Fellow. In addition, several Penn Law graduates will be selected for public interest fellowships that the Law School itself has developed. The recipients of these career-launching Penn Law fellowships will be announced later this month. 

With the help of the President, Democrats in Congress were able to pass historic health care reform legislation in spite of—and thanks to—the significant structural obstacles presented by the Senate’s arcane parliamentary rules. After the passage of the bill, the current political climate appears to require sixty votes for the passage of any major legislation, which many argue is unsustainable. The potential for more vacancies on the Supreme Court has only added to the sense that a confrontation is inevitable.

In Is The Filibuster Constitutional?, Professors Josh Chafetz and Michael J. Gerhardt debate the constitutionality of the Senate’s cloture rules by looking to the history of those rules in the United States and elsewhere. Opening the debate, Professor Chafetz argues that the cloture rules represent an unconstitutional principle of entrenchment and highlights the absurdity by analogy to a hypothetical law requiring a supermajority to unseat an incumbent senator, which would surely not be tolerated. He finds the filibuster to be “strikingly similar” to such a rule and therefore unconstitutional. Chafetz concludes that historical practice fails to justify dilatory tactics and that any constitutionally conscientious senator has a duty to reject the filibuster as it currently operates.

Of the more than 130,000 comments submitted on the greenhouse gas auto emissions rule, the University of Pennsylvania Law School Environmental Law Project’s* comment was singled out and discussed several times in yesterday’s final rule document, issued jointly by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the EPA. The rule sets the first-ever national greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards for all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. It is a key piece of the Obama Administration’s climate and energy agenda.

It is critically important that the United States adopt policies that address global climate change and reduce its oil consumption. These proposed rules constitute a strong and coordinated federal fuel economy and GHG program for passenger cars and light trucks. Since the proposed rules will provide regulatory certainty and consistency for the automobile industry while reducing greenhouse gas emissions based on technologies that can be incorporated at reasonable cost, the proposal represents an important effort to improve fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

 

However, the proposal is not without its flaws. Namely, the proposal fails to gradually reduce the disparity between efficiency requirements for 2012 and 2016 MYs. Additionally, the policy does not create mechanisms whereby minimum reductions are ensured, nor does it address the fiction of “zero emissions” electric vehicles. Finally, the proposal fails to make a complete lifecycle impact analysis, and therefore may overlook deleterious consequences of its implementation. Thus, the proposal, while timely, would benefit from an enhanced discussion of these among other potentially problematic omissions.

Read the entire comment at regulations.gov. 

“If I have raised more problems than I have settled, that is the prerogative of a judge giving a lecture,” Judge Henry Friendly unapologetically concluded during his 1975 Owen J. Roberts Lecture in Constitutional Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Thirty-five years later, Judge Friendly’s onetime clerk, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boudin, will have his own opportunity to raise more questions than answers.  During the 2010 Roberts Lecture, titled “Judge Friendly and the Craft of Deciding Cases,” Judge Boudin will discuss his former mentor’s judicial philosophy and scholarship and describe how judges decide cases and craft opinions.

University of Pennsylvania Law School students’ work on the Supreme Court case, Padilla v. Kentucky has resulted in the Court ruling in their favor. The Supreme Court decision means that lawyers must tell non-citizen criminal defendants whether pleading guilty to a crime could lead to their deportation.

In October, students were at the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments in the case. “Penn is very fortunate to be partnered with excellent lawyers who allow us to leverage our own abilities and for our students see top notch advocacy at work,” Bibas says. “It’s great for the students to be able to watch the laws as they’re being made. It’s a capstone to their third year of legal education. It’s something they can get here that not many law students have an opportunity to do.”

Health care reform has been and continues to be one of the highest priorities in the Obama Administration’s domestic agenda. The proposals for reform played a major role in the debates leading up to President Obama’s election and dominate the Administration’s, and Congress’s, current domestic activities. While most policymakers seemingly agree that reform is necessary, there is much disagreement about the particulars of the appropriate reform. One of the more contested features is the so-called individual mandate—a federal requirement that every American possess a certain level of health insurance.

Read the full debate at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review PENNumbra website. 

Tuesday, March 16:

The celebration continued on Tuesday with a luncheon to bring together public interest alumni and scholars with students who seek to follow in their footsteps. Many alumni stayed for the afternoon to share practical tips and offer inspiration to students eager to learn more about public interest lawyering. Nan Aron delivered the Honorary Fellow-in-Residence Lecture, examining efforts to make the justice system more responsive and effective for vulnerable people and groups. As the day concluded, students, faculty and guests gathered with Ms. Aron and Dean Fitts for a reception in the Great Hall.

Monday, March 15:

The University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Toll Public Interest Center kicked off its week-long celebration of public interest and pro bono service with an open house and the arrival of Honorary Fellow-in-Residence Nan Aron today. Aron, a nationally recognized expert on public interest law, moderated a lunch discussion with Penn Law students and will continue to meet with and mentor students throughout the week. Aron will also speak at the Public Interest Alumni Lunch, present at the Annual Honorary Fellow Lecture and teach a seminar for students interested in starting their own legal nonprofit organizations.

The Toll Public Interest Center will host workshops, discussions and networking events throughout the week, and will close the celebration on Friday with the 29^th Annual Sparer Symposium. The full schedule of Public Interest Week events is available here.

Check back each day for updated news and photos from Public Interest Week 2010.

Originalism may be preoccupied with the views of Americans who died centuries ago, but the debate over its merit as an approach to constitutional law is lively as ever.

Over 100 students, professors and members of the bar attended a federal judges panel on Tuesday, Feb. 2, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Chapter of the American Constitution Society (ACS). Penn Law Professor Catherine Struve moderated the discussion, which included judges from four federal courts: Hon. R. Guy Cole, Jr. of the Sixth Circuit; Hon. Gene E. K. Pratter of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit; and Hon. Marjorie Rendell of the Third Circuit.

Penn Law’s ACS Chapter was formed in 2001 with the goal to help revitalize and transform contemporary debate about the role of law in society. This is the seventh consecutive year that the Chapter has organized a federal judges panel.

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.