Times of Reckoning: Confronting the Legacies of Mass Abuse through Transitional Justice

Friday, October 12, 2018
Kline Institute of Trial Advocacy

The symposium organized by Drexel Law Review will gather together leading transitional justice scholars and practitioners in the field and be structured around three panels: transitional justice in context; memorialization of transitional justice; and the role of foreign courts in transitional justice.

• Transitional Justice in Context: Transitional justice can occur in a multitude of contexts. Transitions have occurred post-authoritarian, post-conflict, or post-apartheid context. Transitional justice measures in post-conflict countries might need to look different from measures enacted in countries with relatively peaceful transitions. Political context can also shape transitional justice. Countries with more limited within-regime changes constitute different institutional challenges than those where a complete regime change has occurred. This panel will explore how context informs what transitional justice measures can or should be taken and their prospects for success.
• Memorialization of Transitional Justice: There is significant variation in how transitioning societies decide to memorialize past injustices and address layered historic allegacies. When past abuses link to present ones, how do contemporary struggles color a society’s understanding of its legacies of mass abuse? How do those in power shape, or even distort, a transitioning society’s understanding past abuse? What are the various forms that memorialization might take, such as memory houses, journalism, archives, art,and museums? This panel will explore these questions with any eye towards understanding how expression of the past can shape a society’s outlook on its future.
• The Role of Foreign Courts in Transitional Justice: In recent times, foreign courts have adjudicated numerous cases involving human rights abuses that occurred in transitioning countries. Spanish courts exercised universal jurisdiction over crimes that occurred in Chile, El Salvador, Rwanda, Argentina, West Sahara, and Guatemala. The U.S. Department of Justice have recently prosecuted a number of alleged war criminals for immigration fraud, including a recent case in Philadelphia against Jungle Jabbah who was sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment for falsely telling US authorities that he never belonged to an armed group. These cases raise a number of questions that this panel will explore: What role should foreign courts play in transitional justice? Does the foreign policy of the countries where these courts sit influence their adjudication of these cases? Is there something inherently problematic about a foreign court passing judgment on crimes that occur in other contexts?

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October 2017:
Race & Policing: Defining the Problem and Developing Solutions

From the days of slave patrols to 2017, race has played a predominant role in shaping police policy and conduct, scholars and practitioners said during a symposium sponsored by the Drexel Law Review on Oct. 17.

“Race & Policing: Defining the Problem and Developing Solutions” featured perspectives of legal scholars, former prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys on an enduring practice of basing criminality on skin color and substantial reforms that are needed to reverse injustice.

The daylong symposium started with remarks by Dean Daniel Filler, a former public defender who observed the power police hold to distribute the most vital commodity in society.

“The police have the capacity to distribute freedoms on a daily basis by the choices they make,” Filler said, adding that he is proud that Kline students chose to take on a topic “at the core of what we should talk about at the law school.”

The first panel, featuring Professor Rashad Shabazz of Arizona State University, Kevin Harden, an attorney with Ross Feller Casey and a former prosecutor, and Howard University School of Law Professor Justin Hansford, set the stage by describing the dynamics in broad terms.

Shabazz discussed geographic, demographic and economic shifts creating, over decades, segregated communities in American cities that became ripe for aggressive policing. Meaningful solutions, Shabazz said, will only come from decriminalization, disarmament and creation of sustainable urban communities.

Harden argued that integrating the law enforcement community has not addressed underlying problems.

“Systems can become inherently racist through policy,” Harden said, calling for a response akin to surgery in place of chemotherapy. “We have to cut the cancer. Police force is a lethal level of treatment into our communities with the hope that they will survive.”

Hansford challenged the notion that the courts have vigorously upheld civil rights, noting that key U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s turned on technicalities rather than rights enshrined in the constitution. Hansford contrasted the placid behavior of police at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia just months after hundreds of arrests were made during protests against the shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

A second panel with attorney Susan Shah of the Vera Institute of Justice, Professor Tryon Woods of the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and Professor Khalil Saucier of Bucknell University linked current dynamics with their historic roots.

Noting the status of the U.S. as the world leader in incarceration, Shah said that poverty itself has driven criminalization, with individuals to be locked up for failing to pay child support. Police training is part of the problem, Shah said, adding that military tactics take the place of techniques that would de-escalate conflict.

Woods contrasted the 1900 ruling in John Bad Elk v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an individual’s right to use force to resist an unlawful arrest, with the 2016 shooting of Randallstown, Maryland resident Korryn Gaines, whom police killed after storming her home to serve a warrant for a traffic stop.

“Black people are disqualified from self-defense,” Woods said.

Bucknell University Professor Khalil Saucier discussed breed-specific legislation against pit bulls as a “gateway to a form of punishment” in its ability to give police a new enforcement tool in urban communities.

In the keynote, Professor and Associate Dean Tamara Lawson of the St. Thomas University School of Law explored the dearth of criminal charges and convictions in the face of police brutality.

Professional athletes who’ve stirred controversy by “taking a knee” could be responding either to police misconduct or to inaction by prosecutors, said Lawson, who served as a deputy district attorney in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Payouts such as those made by U.S. cities in civil police misconduct cases that tallied some $1 billion from 2010 and 2014 fail to deliver justice, Lawson said, noting that taxpayers bear the financial burden for these wrongs and that the officers involved are shielded from punishment or other consequences.

Prosecutors with the will have the means to go after criminal conduct by police, Lawson said, noting that they have become much more aggressive in pursuing cases involving domestic violence, drunk driving and rape, from which they blanched in prior decades. 

“We changed our level of consciousness,” Lawson said. “You don’t hear prosecutors say ‘We don’t do rape cases because they’re hard.’”

In the symposium’s third panel, John Marshall Law School Professor andré douglas pond cummings, Defenders Association of Philadelphia Chief Defender Keir Bradford-Grey and Kline School of Law Professor Donald Tibbs discussed ways to change the paradigm of race and policing.

Cummings said law enforcement training and hiring should be changed to alter the dynamics between those policed and those who police. Private and for-profit prisons should be abolished, cummings said.

While police label communities with a large population of African Americans as “high crime” neighborhoods, Bradford-Grey cited statistics that show the opposite. Of the 70 percent of stop-and-frisk searches, which occur in black neighborhoods, Bradford-Grey said, only 8.7 percent produce contraband. Notably, she added, 15.7 percent of the searches that occur in non-black neighborhoods are productive.

A Police Accountability Unit created by the Defender Association has been a “game changer,” she added, since it allows accurate data to replace erroneous assumptions about activity in heavily policed neighborhoods.

Tibbs said that the deaths of unarmed black men including Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Sam DuBose, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner “seem to be less a new phenomenon than a continuation of a brutal past.”

Yet, Tibbs noted, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, establishing standards for the treatment of suspects held in pretrial detention, departed from the customary deference typically given to law enforcement officials.

The court’s 2015 ruling required an “objective standard” to be used to decide if excessive force had been used.

“In Kingsley, the Court was clear to remind prison officials that, even when incarcerated, ‘Black Lives Matter,’” Tibbs said. "Perhaps, in these multitude of cases where the police are acquitted or not held accountable for their actions, which fall into the grey area of them 'acting under color of law' while perhaps violating someone’s constitutional rights, the juries, prosecutors and judiciary should take a lesson from Kingsley."

October 2016:
20 Years after the 1996 Immigration Laws: Revisiting an Experiment in Comprehensive Severity

The Drexel Law Review Symposium on Oct. 14 assembled some of the nation’s leading scholars and advocates in immigration law to explore laws passed in 1996 that sparked greater detentions and deportations of noncitizens and erected barriers to asylum.

“20 Years After the 1996 Immigration Laws: Revisiting an Experiment in Comprehensive Severity” explored the political and social climate that produced the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, assessed their impact and explored strategies for responding to the laws and addressing violations of human and constitutional rights that have resulted.

The laws aimed to remedy perceived abuse by asylum seekers, said Columbia Law School Professor T. Alexander Aleinikoff, who previously served as the United Nations deputy high commissioner for refugees and as executive associate commissioner for programs at the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But the laws featured “stealth provisions” that were not in either the early House or Senate versions but were folded into the legislation, which was adopted as part of an omnibus budget vote, said New York University School of Law Professor Nancy Morawetz.

“There’s a temptation to think it was intentionally severe,” Morawetz said. “But the specifics were not what could fairly be called congressional intent.”

The laws also permitted secret evidence and made provision of "material support" to a terrorist organization as a basis for deportation, University of South Carolina School of Law Professor Wadie Said said, adding that support in the form of speech has also been criminalized.

Stanford Law School and Yale Law School Professor Lucas Guttentag, who founded and led the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, discussed the stripping away of the federal judiciary's jurisdiction over administrative actions.

The laws’ expedited removal process deprives noncitizens of opportunities to apply for asylum unless they pass a screening process that effectively allows Border Patrol officers to act as judges, said Eleanor Acer, senior director of Human Rights First’s Refugee Protection program.

U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have narrowly interpreted the criminal grounds of deportability have had a limited impact, University of Georgia School of Law Professor Jason Cade said.

“In the absence of executive or legislative change, we’re seeing the court throw a bucket on a raging fire,” Cade said.

The laws created a hybrid civil and criminal process in which the administrative or civil process of deportation is intertwined with criminal matters that can prompt removal from the U.S., University of Miami School of Law Professor Rebecca Sharpless said, explaining that the courts have struggled to define the circumstances under which it should defer to executive branch interpretations of matters involving hybrid statutes.

In the keynote, America’s Voice Founder and Executive Director Frank Sharry traced the genesis of the 1996 laws amid a political climate that grew increasingly hostile to immigrants, forcing reform advocates to compromise on issues like mandatory detention and court stripping in order to defeat asylum restrictions and refugee caps.

“When this bill passed, I didn’t realize exactly what was to follow,” Sharry said, calling the outcome an “$18 billion enforcement machinery that’s a larger federal investment in the criminalization of immigrants than all of the other federal crime fighting programs combined.”

While President Obama pledged to make detention more civil and humane, the system has made only minor and modest improvements, reducing the number of families and individuals with mental health impairments in detention said Alison Parker, director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program.

Grassroots activists are helping to address issues that contribute to the detention of noncitizens, including the school-to-prison pipeline, said Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law Professor Caitlin Berry.

As a sanctuary city, Philadelphia is working to broaden rights for immigrants, said City Councilwoman Helen Gym, who introduced a bill to join other cities in demanding revisions to the 1996 immigration laws.

“Legal strategies to address what’s happening will ultimately falter if they’re not matched by organizing for justice,” Gym said. “People are going to demand change and they’re going to move it.”

Yale Law School Professor Michael Wishnie agreed, noting that state and local measures are being challenged and will continue to come under scrutiny as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals undergo implementation state by state.

University of Washington School of Law Professor Angélica Cházaro said Obama’s 2014 Executive Action on Immigration increased categories of misdemeanors that make up the majority of criminal convictions and significantly hiked the number of people who are “easy pickings” for detention and removal.

Reforms aimed at addressing mass criminal incarceration have yet to benefit the immigrant population, said University of California, Irvine School of Law Professor Annie Lai, noting that even pardons and expungements do not protect immigrants’ status.

Family law and other areas of law offer potential avenues for relief, Widener University Commonweatlh School of Law Professor Jill Family said, noting that the “best interest of the child” standard that’s missing from immigration matters could protect families on the brink of separation.

University of California, Irvine School of Law Professor Jennifer Chacón said the 1996 immigration and welfare reform laws were designed to create bright lines rules between citizens and everyone else, but have actually weakened the power of federal citizenship and given states and localities enforcement authority.

“Race, class and geography do more work in determining who will suffer more severe consequences,” Chacón said, urging activists and grassroots organizers to name the problems and solutions.

Though the laws have yielded difficult and traumatic circumstances, Drexel Kline School of Law Professor and symposium organizer Anil Kalhan said, the scholarly and advocacy communities have launched "a lot of inspiring creativity."

October 2014:
Symposium Shines Spotlight on Expert Witnesses

The symposium touched on the admissibility of communications between attorneys and experts, distinctions between hearsay and inadmissible evidence underlying an expert opinion, the role of forensic science in criminal cases and qualities that make a strong expert witness.

"The use of expert witnesses is ubiquitous in the law," said Professor David DeMatteo, who organized the symposium with Professor Gwen Roseman Stern. "Statistics suggest that most attorneys at some point in their careers will have a need to hire or confront a witness."

Sessions focused on the impact of the landmark Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in Barrick v. Holy Spirit Hospital and the controversy surrounding Rule 703 of the Federal Rules of Evidence featured an innovative format, in which Kline & Specter partner Andrew J. Stern squared off against O'Brien & Ryan partner Elizabeth Duffy in hearings involving a simulated medical malpractice case over which Judge Mark I. Bernstein of the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania presided. (Complete program and speaker biographies.)

Stern argued that correspondence between an attorney and an expert witness was discoverable, citing unusual circumstances including the disappearance of a nurse who could not be cross examined and who left no written record of observations that allegedly led the defendant physician to discharge a patient from the hospital in the simulated case.

Duffy countered that "the Barrick court concluded there's a bright line rule" protecting communications between counsel and experts, and that only a case asserting bad faith might warrant an exception.

Stern and Duffy also grappled with the basis of expert opinions allowed under Rule 703. While Duffy said experts commonly base opinions on inadmissible evidence such as a nurse's undocumented remarks to a doctor, Stern argued that the expert in this case was asserting hearsay as a fact that would likely prejudice a jury against a brain-dead plaintiff who could not speak for himself.

While a jury can determine the credibility of a hearsay statement, Bernstein agreed that Rule 703 is problematic, since it implies that information can be introduced as the basis for an expert opinion without implicitly asserting its truth.

Gregory Cowhey, a McGladrey principal who has testified in myriad fraud and business cases said the hallmarks of a good expert witness are an engaging personality, credibility and humility. However, it is easier for a good advocate to damage the credibility of expert witnesses on the stand than it is to get them disqualified from testifying, Cowhey said, citing studies that document the low rate of successful challenges in most jurisdictions.

A panel featuring Cowhey, DeMatteo, psychologist Gerald Cooke and Judge Elizabeth T. Hey, a U.S. Magistrate in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, focused on the roles and responsibilities of witnesses. Although few rules governed the conduct of expert witnesses 30 years ago, there are vast volumes of ethical codes and guidelines today, Cowhey said. Serving as an expert witness introduces distinct ethical concerns, Cooke and DeMatteo said, noting the responsibilities of psychologists in legal proceedings are different than for clinicians treating patients. Hey discussed shifts that have occurred in information that the courts require experts and attorneys to disclose.

The symposium closed with a panel focused on the role of the confrontation clause with regard to forensic science, featuring criminal defense experts Michael Avery and David Rudovsky and Assistant U.S. Attorney David Troyer of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

In the Supreme Court's Melendez-Diaz and Bullcoming cases, Avery said, the majority held that relying on testimony by laboratory analysts who did not directly handle evidence violates the defendant's right to be confronted with opposing witnesses.

Avery said, however, that the Supreme Court has yet to definitively decide what to do when an analyst who conducts a forensic study is unavailable to testify and the state wants to call a substitute witness who offers an independent view of the evidence. In Massachusetts, he added, the court has permitted substitutes to testify if they voice an independent position.

That may leave them vulnerable to defense challenges, Rudovsky, said, since a substitute analyst won't know if the primary analyst handled materials and equipment correctly. A criminal defense attorney needs to know more about forensic science than the expert witness does.

"You have to know exactly what the science is whether you're questioning the original or the substitute analyst," Rudovsky said. "You won't know where the flaws are unless you understand the science."

When confronted with an unavailable forensic analyst, the U.S. Attorney's Office has materials retested, Troyer said. If no samples are available to retest, the case is dismissed, he said.

Troyer said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in Bullcoming outlined topics that were not at issue in the case, which suggests that a different outcome is possible in the future.

"That's a message to all you trial lawyers," Troyer said, "'Next time, raise this issue, and we might decide it differently.'"

October 2013:
Drexel Law Review Symposium Examines Landmark ERISA Law through Historic Prism

Strategists in the quest to secure workers' pension funds recounted efforts to woo industry and union leaders and quell Congressional turf wars that surrounded the passage of the Employee Retirement Security Act at a symposium hosted by the Drexel Law Review on Oct. 25.

Nearly a decade in the making, ERISA was "a legislative miracle" and "a magnificent piece of social welfare legislation" that has affected the lives of "literally millions of people," said Professor Norman Stein.

A leading authority on pension law, Stein organized the conference with James Wooten, a professor at SUNY-Buffalo Law School and the author of "The Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974: A Political History."

The symposium, in which panels of scholars and practitioners elicited remarks from leaders of the battle to pass ERISA, compiled an oral history of the legislation in time for the 40th anniversary of its passage.

Prior to ERISA, employees would work a very long time reasonably expecting to get a pension and then ended up getting nothing, said Frank Cummings, the former chief of staff to Senator Jacob Javits, who wrote an initial draft of the law. The trick was figuring why this was happening, Cummings said, adding that varying retirement ages and rules, a lack of recourse for under-funded pensions and scant fiduciary standards were principal culprits.

Daniel Halperin, Stanley Surrey Professor of Law at Harvard University, who served at the U.S. Dept. of Treasury prior to ERISA, said there were really few protections for employees and that minimum funding rules were inconsequential and did not address past-service liabilities.

Beyond the technical obstacles, ERISA also lacked political support, Cummings and Halperin stressed. ERISA "didn't have the support of anybody but the people," Cummings said, adding that the press did not pay much attention to it either until Cummings and Javits held hearings that revealed horror stories of individuals losing their pensions.

Calling Javits "the mastermind," former Department of Labor Solicitor William Kilberg recounted that the lack of support for reforms within the powerful Department of Commerce should have doomed ERISA.
"This is a bill that never should have come to being," Kilberg said.

Once passed, Congressional tax and labor committees competed for jurisdiction over ERISA's administration, said Robert Nagle, who was general counsel to the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare during the early 1970s and later the executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the organization created to provide insurance for defined benefit plans.

Even when broad support emerged for ERISA's reforms, no one could agree on who would administer the law, Wooten said.

Eventually, the law gave responsibilities to both the Treasury and Labor departments and the newly formed PBGC, but opened the door to bureaucratic confusion and necessitated enactment of Reorganization Plan Number 4, a blueprint for allocating primary regulatory authority for different aspects of the state to Treasury and Labor, according to Alan Lebowitz, who is now deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Labor.

"The concepts were very new and somewhat vague," Lebowitz said during a panel facilitated by Assistant Secretary of Labor Phyllis Borzi and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury Mark Iwry.

"It's hard enough within a single agency to sort through all the ideas people have," said Lebowitz, who worked for the Internal Revenue Service (part of the Treasury Department) at the time.

The skeleton of the reorganization plan was mapped out on a napkin over a Chinese food lunch between Dianne Bennett, who served as an attorney for Treasury, and Ian Lanoff, who then served as administrator for Pension and Welfare Programs at the Department of Labor.

The reorganization plan had a lasting effect, Borzi said, noting that it created a model for inter-agency cooperation that continued with the implementation of other reforms, such as the COBRA insurance program and the Affordable Care Act.

"We coordinate. We talk to each other," Borzi said. "Is it a time consuming process? Yes."

Educating the public about the complex issue of pensions is a challenge, New York Times reporter Mary Williams Walsh, former Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Schultz and former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston said during a lunch time discussion.

Journalists face increased pressure to be the first to report issues, Schultz said, and reporters must trim their stories ever shorter, Walsh added, identifying trends that discourage in-depth and accurate reporting on policies that affect millions upon millions of workers and retirees.

The tendency to refer to pensions in terms of "benefits" or "gratuities" obscures the fact that pensioners have earned the money, Johnston said.

"These are not welfare programs," he said. "We need to get away from language that describes these as 'contribution' or 'benefit. It's compensation."

Former PBGC General Counsel Henry Rose and former PBGC Executive Director Robert Nagle joined Cummings in a discussion of the origins of ERISA's definition of fiduciary, which was facilitated by University of Michigan Professor Dana Muir, O'Melveny & Myers Partner Bob Eccles and Stris & Maher Partner Peter Stris.

The important role of fiduciaries received scant attention from lawmakers in the House and Senate, who jockeyed with competing bills that focused on funding and termination of pension plans, Cummings said. He noted that fiduciary responsibility applied not just to investment and asset management, but the array of responsibilities that would be typical of a trustee.Congress focused less on the penalties fiduciaries would face for improperly administering a plan and more on how to actually administer it, Cummings said. However, if the Senate's version of the final bill had prevailed, myriad lawsuits alleging under-funding and fiduciary misrepresentation could have been avoided, Nagle argued.

The discussion featured a spirited debate between Mueller and Damon Silvers, the director of policy and special counsel for the AFL-CIO, about approaches to funding. The law also could have done a better job with funding rules, Jeremy Gold, a consulting actuary suggested as he helped moderate a panel exploring the tax and minimum funding standards of ERISA. Russell Mueller, a past staff member actuary on the U.S. Houses Committee on Education and Labor who was involved in the early drafting of ERISA, agreed. However, Mueller argued, ERISA was remedial legislation, designed to address major pre-ERISA problems.

Although ERISA offered a real effort to offer remedies to pension participants, its enforcement provisions too had issues, Howard Shapiro, a seasoned ERISA litigator and partner at Proskauer Rose said while moderating a panel on benefit disputes and enforcement. Cummings, however, suggested that preemption was a greater issue for businesses and labor than remedies. Nagle noted broad preemption was introduced late in the stage and perhaps should have caused the drafters to refocus on federal remedies given that state remedies would now be foreclosed.

Despite its shortcomings, ERISA achieved a radical change in pension administration, Professor Norman Stein said. Understanding ERISA requires a perspective on how issues arose and how lawyers and the law dealt with them, Steven Sass, director of the Financial Security Project, Retirement Research Center at Boston College said. Cummings stressed that ERISA was designed to address the problems that we were facing at the time, not to anticipate problems that would arise in the future.

Calling the symposium "an amazing gathering," Iwry said it was effective at "capturing incredible war stories and real history" of those who grapple with congressional turf, power struggles and their aftermath in the ongoing work of government.

October 2012:
Symposium Highlights Trends in Teaching International, Transnational Law

Scholars explored emerging themes in education focused on international law at a daylong symposium, "Building Global Professionalism," sponsored by the Drexel Law Review and the International Law and Human Rights Society on Oct. 12.

The symposium started with an overview of emerging trends by Larry Catá Backer of Penn State, Jorge Luis Esquirol of Florida International University, Vasuki Nesiah of New York University and Fernanda Nicola of American University.

Summer-abroad programs, transnational legal clinics, LLM programs for foreign practitioners and specialty courses and programs focused on international issues each pose potential challenges, Esquirol said. He noted, for instance, that summer-abroad programs can give students "a bubble-like experience" that bolsters preconceptions about foreign law and that transnational clinics can allow U.S. laws to eclipse those of localities.

To some degree, Nesiah said, the growth of international programs reflects a desire by law schools to position themselves competitively and generate revenues. Private universities have enormous advantages in this regard, she added.

Law schools face pressures to prepare students for professional practice at the expense of more scholarly activities, Nicola said, adding that protecting the rule of law should remain a core mission. While critics cite a waning influence of the U.S. legal system abroad, she said the widespread translation of American casebooks and citations of U.S. opinions by the European Court of Human Rights suggest the enduring power of American legal thinkers.

Backer distinguished between nationalist and internationalist models, noting that the former aims to promote U.S. models and market-driven competition to shape other legal systems while the latter seek to build a shared consensus between nations. Since those who favor production of wealth and efficiency will back nationalist models, he said, they carry more influence.

Sarah Paoletti of the University of Pennsylvania, Elisabeth Wickeri of Fordham University and Richard Wilson of American University explored efforts to globalize experiential learning. Paoletti discussed strategies for developing clinical programs that enable students to hone cross-cultural skills and avoid adverse impacts for clients. Given the human rights abuses in countries like China, Wickeri said, it is important to choose cases carefully and to partner with non-governmental organizations that know the lay of the land. Citing a case in which students helped gain the release of 22 men from a Mexican prison, Wilson noted that international clinics have the potential to advance human rights and that some programs grew from indigenous efforts.

Martin Flaherty, professor and co-director for the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham University was the event's keynote speaker. Flaherty's presentation addressed the responsibilities of law schools operating in authoritarian regimes.

Major legal institutions are creating and promoting law programs in areas governed by authoritarian regimes while ignoring the human rights violations taking place under those regimes, Flaherty said. Flaherty claimed that it is incumbent upon institutions to establish and defend their core academic values while abroad. While Flaherty recognized that, in some instances non-action may be appropriate where challenging a regime could do more harm than good, he stressed that institutions must at least educate themselves about potential human rights violations and recognize their existence so that they are prepared to properly address any problems from within should the opportunity arise.

Following Flaherty's keynote presentation, a panel of speakers discussed law school programs that use comparative approaches to legal education in "Learning and Working Across Legal Systems."
Panelist Kerstin Carlson from the American University of Paris, spoke about the cultural importance of law, arguing that effective practitioners abroad must be aware of cultural nuances as well as technical ones to succeed.

Raquel Aldana from the Pacific McGeorge School of Law claimed that one of the most important benefits of educating American law students abroad is that a first-hand encounter with the legal struggles of those abroad fosters the students' "critical self-reflection" and ensures that they are adequately prepared to engage new legal environments. Alana Klein, assistant professor of law at McGill University in Canada, added that teaching the competing systems of Canadian law had a similar effect on McGill's students.

Holning S. Lau found similar benefits when teaching his Law and Sexuality class at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Lau's class investigates sexual orientation law through the lens of foreign legal systems and cultures that have addressed similar issues.

Villanova University School of Law Professor Diane Penneys Edelman echoed Lau's sentiments explaining that writing assignments which involve international legal issues foster unique perspectives on U.S. legal principles. Similarly, Leighanne Yuh, from Fordham University School of Law, noted that Fordham's Korea program invites students to approach U.S. law from a different perspective.

Australian National University College of Law Professor Katherine Hall joined the panel via Skype. Hall emphasized that legal practice is becoming more and more global and, thus, in some ways, global lawyers, who are not tied to any specific government, must recognize that their responsibilities go beyond the international legal issues they investigate and influence the behavior of their multi-national corporate employers.

Professors Anil Kalhan and Pammela Quinn Saunders from the Earle Mack School of Law closed the day's events with a discussion that provided an overview of the various panels throughout the day. Before panelists and guests proceeded to a post-event reception, Saunders thanked Kalhan and the school's students for organizing such an intellectually enriching event.

January 2010:
Legal Scholars Headline Conference on Business Improvement Districts

Scholars from some of the nation's top law schools and more than 150 lawyers, community leaders and public officials came to the Earle Mack School of Law on January 22, 2010 for a conference exploring the emerging role of Business Improvement Districts.

The symposium, entitled Business Improvement Districts and the Evolution of Urban Governance, provided an unprecedented opportunity for leading scholars and economic development professionals, elected officials, and students to examine the
ways that BIDs—private organizations authorized to levy assessments and spend these revenues—shape urban economic development initiatives.

"This event brought together four of the preeminent government scholars in the United States to shine a light on this critical issue," said Daniel M. Filler, senior associate dean for academic and faculty affairs at the law school. The conference featured Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School, Gerald E. Frug of Harvard Law School, Nicole Stelle Garnett of the University of Notre Dame Law School and Richard C. Schragger of the University of Virginia Law School, who discussed the potential opportunities and drawbacks associated with BIDs. Scholars from Drexel and nine other universities and colleges presented case studies of the unique and shared experiences of the city's 16 BIDs.

Paul Levy, president and CEO of the Center City District, gave a morning address outlining the important role of BIDs locally, nationally, and even internationally. He applauded the goals of the conference, thanking Drexel University for sponsoring the conference and noting that "this is the first meeting of this sort in Philadelphia. There's been no really good organized effort between the universities, the city, and BIDs."

Drexel president John Fry, then-president of Franklin & Marshall College and former executive vice president and chief operating officer of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a keynote address outlining the role of BIDs in spurring revitalization of both West Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Fry discussed the economic development initiative that he helped launch in 1996 that fueled an economic renaissance in the neighborhoods surrounding the Penn and Drexel campuses. Early support for the initiative came from the late Drexel University President Taki Papadakis, who Fry said "showed incredible leadership" by committing funds to the redevelopment effort.

Professor Richardson Dilworth, director of Drexel's Center for Public Policy and an organizer of the event, said BIDs play an important role in cities. "Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, with hundreds of commercial corridors that have their own specific identities," he said. "BIDs are an opportunity to express that identity."

June 2008:
National Conference Covers Patient Care, Pandemics and Health Policy Reform Paradigms

Nearly 200 scholars discussed medical research gone awry, prospects for reforming the health-care system and emerging issues in bioethics, among other topics at the 31st Annual Health Law Professors Conference at the Earle Mack School of Law.

The conference, held June 5-7 and sponsored by the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics, brought together professors who teach in schools of law, medicine, public health, health-care administration, pharmacy, nursing and dentistry.

The annual event allows professors to keep abreast of current trends and translate complex scientific and policy issues into lively topics of discussion, said Barry Furrow, professor of law and director of the Health Law Concentration at the Earle Mack School of Law.

"How do you teach this stuff and bring it to life for students," Furrow said. "How do you give it context and personality?"

A plenary session on health policy addressed the mix of political and economic factors that impinge on efforts to promote universal health insurance and improved patient care.

"The political history has been all about coverage, all about insurance restructuring," said Bill Sage, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin, a physician and a policy advisor to former President Bill Clinton. "What we really need to embark on is changing the way that people get their preventive care, they way that people engage in health as community projects, as school projects and the way that, if they do get ill, the health care system responds."

Sidney Watson, of the Saint Louis University School of Law, said reforms will only come about if advocates "bust myths" and educate policymakers and voters about the legitimate need for public funding.

Contending the current system improperly limits services that some patients can receive, Ani Satz, associate professor at Emory University School of Law and Rollins School of Public Health outlined a new paradigm for change. Satz proposed a system that would cover all services without restriction while placing an annual or lifetime cap on health care expenditures incurred by any one patient.

Another session addressed issues in biomedical research, including dilemmas faced by researchers who unexpectedly discover medical conditions in human subjects that fall outside the scope of their studies. "The incidental findings problem sounds incidental," said Susan M. Wolf of the University of Minnesota Law School. "It is anything but. It goes right to the core of our thinking about researchers and clinicians. It challenges the line between them."

Researchers have very little guidance for addressing this critical ethical issue, Wolf said, adding that vast volumes of data that accumulate through genomic research will only increase the need to create protocols.

The conference culminated with a reception and dinner at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Wendy Mariner, professor at Boston University's schools of law, medicine and public health, received the Jay Healey Distinguished Health Law Teaching Award. Clark Havighurst, professor emeritus at Duke Law School, was honored with a lifetime achievement award in teaching.