 |
|
|
Greetings from the Center on the Global Legal Profession! As summer rapidly comes to a close, we wanted to update you on the work the Center has been doing since we last wrote.
In June, the Center was invited to participate in a workshop at Goethe University in Frankfurt on the state of human rights and the legal profession in Africa. Professor and Center Director Jayanth Krishnan presented recent work on the state of legal aid and the rights of the marginalized in Lagos State, Nigeria. Mr. Kunle Ajagbe, who is a prominent lawyer in Lagos, will be co-authoring the full study.
In August, Professor Krishnan traveled to India, where the Center co-hosted a major public event with O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) on the liberalization of India's legal services sector to foreign law firms. The Center's 2016 Texas Law Review piece on this topic served as the impetus for this event. This Center-JGU program drew a huge audience, made international news, and featured the United States' Ambassador to India, the Honorable Richard R. Verma, as the keynote speaker. Following Mr. Verma's speech, a vibrant panel discussion was held that featured a group of India's key stakeholders from the bar and government to discuss the potential entry of foreign firms into the country. The event is available to watch online.
Finally, the Center's signature Stewart Fellows Program saw its 21 Maurer interns from eight countries return for the start of the fall semester. The program continues to grow and thrive, thanks to the generosity of Milt and Judi Stewart and benefactors in the U.S. and around the globe.
We are pleased to welcome Professor Shana Wallace to both the Law School and the Center. She joins us from the Department of Justice where she specialized in antitrust litigation. Professor Wallace will be teaching The Legal Professions course this spring. She is currently teaching a course on complex litigation.
The rest of our faculty and affiliates have been busy, too. Here are some of their recent accomplishments. As always, visit our website or contact us to learn more.
|
|
In May, Professor Buxbaum served as the scholar-in-residence at WilmerHale in London, working on a project on transnational antitrust law. At the end of May, as academic director of the IU Europe Gateway, she accompanied Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie, Vice President for International Affairs David Zaret, and the rest of an IU delegation on visits to partner universities and other institutions in Italy and Poland. On June 3, Buxbaum participated in a conference to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Institute for Foreign and Private International Law at the University of Heidelberg, giving a paper titled "International Economic Regulation: From Conflict of Laws to Transnational Law." Over the course of June and July, she taught a class on transnational law as a visiting professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, and on July 1-2 she participated in a conference on transnational law at King's College, London. There Buxbaum presented "The Regional Turn in Transnational Law."
|
|
|
Kenneth Dau-Schmidt
In July 2015, Professor Dau-Schmidt traveled to India with fellow Indiana Law Professor Kevin Brown for a series of conferences comparing the African American experience with the Dalit experience, including a conference at AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna, Bihar, India and another at The National Law School of India in Bengaluru. Based on that experience, Dau-Schmidt is now writing a book chapter entitled "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?: The Struggles of African American Males in the Global Economy of the Information Age."
|
|
Ethan Michelson
In early June, Professor Michelson presented findings at the Law & Society Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans from his analysis of all three waves of the "After the JD" survey on the careers of lawyers in the US between 2000 and 2012. He found persistent gender and racial inequality in terms of both exits from law firms and completing the transition from associate to partner. However, the mechanisms behind these patterns appear to be distinct. Whereas women are more likely to "opt out" of law firms for family reasons (most commonly in anticipation of childbirth), minorities are more likely to be driven out. A silver lining in these otherwise grim findings is a real measure of gender convergence in terms of willingness to take parental leaves (men have become increasingly willing) and the effect of parental leaves on the careers of men and women (they are are similarly damaging to both men and women). Professor Michelson also continues to pursue his China research. In addition to plans to launch a new survey of Chinese lawyers in the fall of 2016, he is also collaborating with colleagues at Columbia University, UC-Berkeley, and UC-San Diego on the analysis of Chinese court decisions. After recently completing four-year terms as director of graduate studies in the Department of Sociology and director of the IU Center for Law, Society, and Culture at the IU Maurer School of Law, Professor Michelson is taking a one-semester sabbatical in the fall 2016 semester.
|
|
Christiana Ochoa
In June, Professor Ochoa visited Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, representing the Center and the Law School. She visited several law firms in each country as well as other law schools, including partner institutions FGV-Rio, FGV-SP, and UNIRIO. She also met with 2016 Stewart Fellows Alex Spindler and Molly Morgan, at Marval in Buenos Aires, and Vladimir Arrieta at Votorantim and Demarest in Sao Paulo. In August, she gave a major public lecture on law and development in Vanuatu, an island nation in the south Pacific Ocean, as well as two talks on LL.M. opportunities at Indiana Law. All three of these lectures took place in New Delhi.
|
|
Professor Reuter's project on an empirical analysis of the legal work of students in field placements has been selected for presentation at the NYU Law School Clinical Writers' Workshop in September. She is collaborating with Jodi Balsam of Brooklyn Law School. Their analysis is aimed to measure the variety, complexity, and responsibility levels of student legal work in their field placements and how that might vary depending on the class year, GPA, placement setting, gender, and/or race of the students.
|
|
Carole Silver
Professor Silver's recent work examines global lawyer regulation. This regulation challenges the definition of what is under review and complicates the job of determining the scope of relevant investigation. The resulting messiness relates to foundational issues of what 'global' means, who is considered a 'lawyer,' and even what constitutes 'regulation.' In addition and equally relevant, an increasingly diverse set of actors and organizations are involved in producing legal services in a global context. On one hand, simply describing the identities and the scope of services provided by these actors and organizations guides policymakers interested in considering what they know and should know about the focus of their policymaking and regulatory efforts. On the other hand, understanding how regulation shapes the conduct of participants in the global market for legal services would offer insight relevant to thinking through the appropriate balance between overly burdensome regulation that is certain to undermine competitiveness and an approach that is so superficial as to result in exposing the public to risks from activity and actors who fall outside of the regulatory boundaries. In a new paper, "What We Know and Need to Know About Global Lawyer Regulation," Professor Silver intends to provide a foundation for policymakers interested in global lawyer regulation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
