Legal Profession Blog

Call for Papers for January 2014 AALS Section Meeting

From the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility, per Barbara Glesner-Fines and John Sahl, is the call for papers for the next section meeting as part of the AALS Annual Meeting, this January in New York City.  Barbara reports, We are trying to get the word out broadly so we can have a diverse pool of papers from which to select a panel member. Sounds like a great goal. The subject is The Lost Lawyer and the Lawyer Statesman Ideal: A Generation Later – The Shifting Sands of the Profession’s Identity. The full description and criteria are here: Download Call for Papers  [Alan Childress]

Touro Law Hosts Speaker 3/20 on Orthodox Jewish Lawyering and Change in the Profession

Touro Law Center's Jewish Law Institute features Nathan Lewin as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series, on Tuesday, March 20, at 5:30 pm.  Lewin, a renowned advocate of religious freedoms and frequent arguer before the U.S. Supreme Court, will deliver a lecture, "The Legal Profession and the Orthodox Jewish Lawyer: Change Over Half a Century." It is open to the public and more information is linked here.  [Alan Childress]

Welcome To Jim Jones

Georgetown Law has announced a significant addition to its Center for the Study of the Legal Profession:

Georgetown University Law Center Dean William M. Treanor is pleased to announce that James Jones, former chair of the Hildebrandt Institute and managing partner of Arnold & Porter, will assume the role of senior fellow with Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, beginning in January 2012.

"Jim Jones is one of the world’s leading thinkers about trends in law practice and the legal profession," said Dean Treanor. "His affiliation with Georgetown will enhance our ability to anticipate changes in the legal profession, strengthen our efforts to prepare students to meet the challenges they will face and enrich the research that we do on a profession undergoing profound changes."

Jones has served over the years in a variety of leadership positions in the legal industry. He spent more than 20 years at Arnold & Porter, serving as managing partner of the firm from 1986 to 1995. From 1995 to 2000, he was vice chairman and general counsel of APCO Worldwide. Since 2001, he has been at Hildebrandt International (later Hildebrandt Baker Robbins), a leading consultant to law firms and legal departments around the globe. For the past four years, he served as Hildebrandt's managing director. Since 2000, Jones also served as chair of the Hildebrandt Institute, the division responsible for executive education and research activities. Jones received his J.D. from New York University in 1970.

Jones has served since 1993 as chair of the Pro Bono Institute. He was also instrumental in the creation of TrustLaw, a project of the Thomson Reuters Foundation designed to promote pro bono collaboration between leading law firms and major NGOs throughout the world. He is an author and frequent speaker on topics relating to the "business of law" and has been a regular speaker to student audiences at Georgetown on trends in the legal profession.

On his new relationship with Georgetown Law, Jones said, "I am delighted to be affiliated with the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. Under the able direction of Mitt Regan and Jeff Bauman, the Center and its talented members have already made a positive impact on the legal profession through insightful research and publications, as well as well-focused educational programs. I look forward to contributing to the Center's success in the future, particularly in the area of executive education."

The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession was created in 2007 to promote interdisciplinary scholarship on the legal profession informed by the dynamics of modern practice; provide students and faculty with an understanding of the opportunities and challenges of a 21st century legal career; and furnish members of the bar, particularly those in public and private decision-making positions, broad perspectives on trends and developments in law practice.

(Mike Frisch)

Nominations, Submissions for Great Writing on the Legal Profession During 2010

A timely annoucement from Samuel J. Levine at Touro:

Submissions and nominations of articles are now being accepted for the first annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility.  To honor Fred's memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2010. The prize will be awarded at the AALS Professional Responsibility Section program at the 2011 Annual Meeting in San Francisco in January 2011. Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: slevine@tourolaw.edu. The deadline for submissions and nominations is November 1, 2010.

[Alan Childress]

Rotunda to Speak at Akron Law as Miller-Becker Lecturer on 10/29/10

The second Miller-Becker Center for Professional Responsibility Distinguished Lecture in Professional Responsibility is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 29, 2010, at 4:00 P.M. at the University of Akron School of Law.  Ronald D. Rotunda, the Day & Dee Henley Chair and Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, of Chapman University School of Law, is the Distinguished Lecturer and his presentation is entitled Lawyers: Why We Are Different and Why We Are the Same. Rotunda's presentation, in part, asks: “To what extent do the ethics rules make lawyers different from other professionals?" He is shown right.

This is right on the heels of a great new contribution to the field by the center: its first symposium law review issue on the legal profession, this one on the topic of Lawyers without Borders and Practicing Law in the Electronic Age, 43 Akron L. Rev. 1-1105 (2010), and featuring articles and essays by excellent scholars in those areas. I really appreciate that they mailed one to me and lots of other teachers of legal ethics, and I have it sitting on my desk. Well done.

[Alan Childress]

Conference: Business Complexity and the Global Business Leader

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Suffolk University's Institute for Executive Education and Sawyer Business School are sponsoring a conference entitled Business Complexity and the Global Business Leader, to be held at Suffolk's Boston campus, October 18-20, 2010.  Here's a description of the aims of the conference:

Global leaders are faced with business complexity of unprecedented scale and interconnectedness. The goal of the conference is to bring together academicians and business leaders from around the world to expand our thinking and learning in a new era of business incorporating complexity science. The conference is organized around three main themes: corporate longevity/sustainability; innovation; and self-organization.

The website includes a call for papers with a full draft deadline of July 30, 2010.  Papers should address the corporation as a complex adaptive system that evolves within a complex global business ecosystem, covering one or more of the conference themes: corporate longevity, self-organization, and innovation. Papers will be reviewed by the conference paper review committee with acceptances to be announced by September 24, 2010. All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and posted on the conference's web site.

There's also an interesting and eclectic lineup of keynote speakers, including Geoffrey West (pictured above), theoretical physicist and the past president of the Santa Fe Institute, Phil Budden, Britain's Consul General to New England, and Juan Perez Mercader, of the Spain's Centro de Astrobiology and Harvard's Origins of Life Initiative.

5th Annual Conglomerate Junior Scholars Workshop

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

I can tell you that one of the most difficult things for an aspiring professor to do is actually to get a paper read!  Hence, if you write in the area of business law, I strongly recommend that you give serious thought to submitting a paper to Conglomerate's Junior Scholars Workshop, now in its fifth iteration.  The deadline for submissions to Christine Hurt (Illinois) (achurt@illinois.edu) is June 26, 2010, and the presentations will begin July 19, 2010.

Emory Transactional Skills Conference - Reminder!

Just a quick reminder that Emory Law School's conference, Transactional Education: What’s Next?, is being held on June 4 and June 5.  Additional information is available by following the link or contacting Edna Patterson at (404) 727-6506 or edna.patterson@emory.edu.  [Jeff Lipshaw]

Center on the Profession at Akron Law Features Adam Liptak on April 6

Posted by Alan Childress

Kicking off some of the great legal profession and ethics work now being done at the new U. Akron Joseph G. Miller and William C. Becker Center for Professional Responsibility is their inaugural offering in the Distinguished Lecturer Series on Journalism and the Law.  And it is none other than Adam Liptak of the NYTimes [right] so you know it will be interesting; his topic is Covering the Roberts Court in the Obama Era: A Reporter's Reflections.  I suspect we may hear about the Chief's fairly public complaint of feeling ambushed-ish at the State of the Union -- and on Justice Scalia's Not True heard round the world (and yes he does think it is round), for which I am grateful he did not take the oratorical lead from our Vice President yesterday in mouthing those words. Details from the center's website:

"April 6, 2010 at 4 p.m. Free and open to the public, however registration is required. One hour of free CLE credit will be offered."

More on the new Miller-Becker Center here.   Thanks, U of Akron, and well done.

Also coming April 23 is Ohio State's Nancy Rogers.  {oops--edited to note that she came last year and this is not 2009! If either Miller or Becker has invented a time machine, they are wasting it on transporting Nancy Rogers, as good as she is.  I am just saying.}

Future Ed: New Business Models for U.S. and Global Legal Education

New York Law School
April 9-10, 2010

Harvard Law School
October 15-16, 2010

Got an idea about the future of U.S. legal education? Think it’s time to go clinical? Or global? Or virtual? Should law be combined with other fields of study at the graduate or undergraduate level?

There is no shortage of commentary about the challenges facing American law schools. Driven by the Carnegie Foundation’s highly critical 2007 report and the dramatic downturn in large firm associate hiring, law school deans and administrators are scrambling to predict the future and position themselves within a rapidly changing market. But what is the likely shape of the future market—or markets—for legal education? What are the most promising models for delivering education and training in those markets? And how do we get there from here?

New York Law School and Harvard Law School are hosting a year-long contest of ideas about legal education (website here). The goal is to come up with operational alternatives to the traditional law school business model and to identify concrete steps for the implementation of new designs. The kickoff event is a two-day conference for educators, employers, and regulators at New York Law School on April 9-10, 2010, to identify problems, innovations and constraints, and to organize working groups to develop designs and strategies for implementation. Working groups will refine their ideas and reconvene for a second meeting at Harvard Law School on October 15-16, 2010. Final designs will be presented, with commentary, at New York Law School in April, 2011. 

Interested? Questions? Please email futureed@nyls.edu.

[Posted by Bill Henderson]

Conference on Lawyer Marketing Through Online Social Networks

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Suffolk University Law School is hosting a program entitled Avoiding the Ethical Minefield of Online Social Networking and Marketing:  Do You Know Who Your Friends Are? on Thursday, March 11, 2010 from 4:00 - 6:30 p.m. at 120 Tremont Street in the heart of downtown Boston.  Featured speakers include Legal Ethics Forum luminaries, colleague Andrew Perlman (Suffolk) and John Steele (Visiting, Indiana - Bloomington) and James Sokolove of the ubiquitous television commercials advertising for mesothelioma (a particular kind of asbestos-related cancer) plaintiffs.  Also a chance to pick a couple of those hard-to-come-by "ethics hours" for CLE.

Flanders on the Need for Ethics Instruction in Law School

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

My co-author (of the soon-to-be published ABA book, Becoming a Law Professor, with Brannon Denning), Marcia McCormick, passed along this link to a column in National Jurist by her St. Louis U. colleague Chad Flanders (right).  I'm sympathetic to the position that much of law school (as well as legal scholarship) hits the low-hanging and not very interesting fruit on these issues - that many of the ethical issues facing lawyers go beyond the Model Rules (which are almost all directed essentially to litigation in any event), and often involve choices made in good faith by ethically-inclined people among several less-than-perfect alternatives.

Emory Transactional Skills Conference - Reminder Notice!

Emory University School of Law’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice is delighted to announce its second biennial conference on the teaching of transactional law and skills, Transactional Education:  What’s Next?  The conference will be held at Emory Law on Friday, June 4 and Saturday, June 5, 2010.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

We are accepting proposals immediately, but in no event later than 5:00 p.m., February 1, 2010. We welcome proposals on any subject of interest to current or potential teachers of transactional law and skills.  Details follow the fold.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONS

To submit a proposal, please click here.  Once again, the deadline is 5:00 p.m., February 1, 2010.
Emory is delighted to once again host this Conference, and we look forward to seeing you in Atlanta June 4th and June 5th.

Cordially,

The Steering Committee

Tina L. Stark, Chair, Emory University School of Law
Danny Bogart, Chapman University School of Law
Deborah Burand, University of Michigan Law School
Joan MacLeod Heminway, The University of Tennessee College of Law
Jeffrey Lipshaw, Suffolk University Law School
Jane Scott, St. John’s University School of Law

PANELS

Each panel will be 90 minutes long.

1. Contract drafting – the “building block” for all transactional lawyering

·         The five basic contract concepts as the foundation of contract drafting (representations and warranties, covenants, conditions, discretionary authority, and declarations)
·         How to draft the different parts of a contract (introductory provisions, definitions, etc.)
·         Writing clearly and without ambiguity

·         Advanced contract drafting issues (syllabus, teaching methods, etc.)

2. Teaching transactions in an international setting

·         The basic framework of contract law in civil law jurisdictions
·         The drafting of contracts in civil law jurisdictions
·         Business transactions in accordance with Islamic law
·         Simulations as a mode of teaching
·         Integration of international issues into transactional skills courses
·         Cultural issues affecting the negotiation of international transactions
·         The use of clinics to teach international transactions
·         How non-U.S. law schools are teaching transactional skills

·         Teaching foreign LLM students about drafting in a common law country

3. Teaching contract drafting for the first time from a legal writing professor’s perspective

4. Teaching transactional skills in a doctrinal course
·         Business Associations
·         Contracts
·         Corporate Finance
·         Employment Law
·         Intellectual Property
·         Property

·         Other courses

5.  Teaching accounting from a transactional perspective

6.  Teaching ethics from a transactional perspective

7. Teaching transactional skills other than contract drafting

·         Problem solving
·         Negotiation
·         Interviewing and counseling
·         Written communication:  memoranda to superiors and clients
·         Judgment

·         How, if at all, does pedagogy differ from that used when teaching these skills in the litigation context

8. Teaching transaction-related tasks

·         Project management
·         Due diligence
·         Third party opinion letters

·         Drafting of resolutions

9. Transactional training techniques (including technology such as clickers and Google Docs)

10. Curricular Issues

·         Field placements/externship programs
·         The role of adjuncts in a transactional skills curriculum

·         Interdisciplinary courses, including JD/MBA courses

11. Transactional Centers and Certificates

·         Why have a center
·         How to start and then run a center

·         What is a transactional certificate program

EXERCISE SHOWCASES

We will also reserve several panels as “Exercise Showcases.”  Each will be 90 minutes long. At each of these panels, professors will each take approximately 15 minutes to demonstrate an exercise he or she uses to teach a transactional skill or task or a principle of doctrinal law.  In addition, we hope that each of the other panels, when appropriate, will take the opportunity to showcase an exercise. 

LUNCH ROUNDTABLES

At this conference, we will introduce Lunch Roundtables. They will be 40 minutes long.  These will be informal group discussions of topical issues. If you would like to lead a Roundtable, please submit a proposal as you would if you were proposing a panel.

ONLINE DATABANK OF TEACHING MATERIALS

As transactional education has expanded, the need for high quality training materials has continued to grow. Unfortunately, we do not yet have enough textbooks that adequately address our needs. As a result, professors labor to create materials for their courses. Currently, gaining access to these terrific teaching materials is generally by word of mouth or a request on a listserv. One goal of this conference, therefore, is to create a databank of teaching materials available to professors and practitioners. The databank will be known as The Emory Exchange for Transactional Training Materials. It will store (for eligible users) syllabi, PowerPoint slides, exercises and other transactional teaching materials that professors and practitioners submit. Our hope is that the Exchange will facilitate the growth of transactional education by being a source of high quality teaching materials.  If you would like to submit materials separately from submitting a proposal for the conference, please click here.

REGISTRATION AND HOTEL INFORMATION

Information on registration and hotel reservations will be distributed in early 2010. To keep the costs for registrants as modest as possible, speakers must pay the registration fee and for their own travel expenses.

[Jeff Lipshaw]

Conference Announcement on Law Firm Evolution; Timely WSJ Article Begging the Question: "Do Lawyers Evolve Sufficiently to Use the Technology Placed at Their Fingertips?"

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Carole Silver (Georgetown) passed along an announcement for  “Law Firm Evolution:  Brave New World or Business As Usual.”  The conference will take place at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, beginning with an evening reception on March 21st and running through lunch on March 23rd.  Speakers will include Richard Susskind (author of “The End of Lawyers?” and “The Future of Law”), but more importantly, friends like our own Bill Henderson, David McGowan, Michele Beardslee, co-author Larry Ribstein, and Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp.  Other notables:  Jeff Lehman, former dean of the Michigan Law School, Cornell president, and current dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law, David Wilkins, and Aric Press of the American Lawyer.

All of which segues nicely into an article entitled "Using Web Tools to Control Legal Bills; Big Law Firms Turn to Technology to Provide Clients With Real-Time Expenses, Automate Tasks" from the Wall Street Journal this morning which trumpets "new technology" about which I was harping during the law firm beauty contests our staff held for purposes of choosing "preferred providers" back at the beginning of this decade (which began on 1/1/2001 and doesn't end for another year).  Pardon my occasional slip into facetiousness, but what follows ain't a technology issue, except as it relates to the technology extant in the six inches between a lawyer's ears. 

Let me provide some background here.  In 1998, my old law firm, Dykema Gossett PLLC (now Dykema "A Firm Unlike Any Other") installed billing software that allowed any human being (I include lawyers) to open a program in the morning, keep it open, and, without resorting to paper time sheets, memory, Post-It notes, or scrawls on one's body (like that guy in Memento), to record one's billables in, as we have come to say, REAL TIME.  The upshot of this was the potential of fine grapes in/fine wine out:  somebody could actually tell a client in REAL TIME how much a matter was costing. 

Fast forward a couple years to about 2002.  I'm now the general counsel of a public company.  Put aside whether it's a good thing for society - public companies report their earnings every three months, and whether they give "guidance" or not, securities analysts make models in which they predict what those earnings will be.  On the inside, the company knows what those estimates are and, all other things being equal, tries not to rub too many analysts' noses in the dirt by surprising them on the downside.  In short, you can't rule out contingency and surprise, but the whole point of having information available to management about sales, costs, trends, weather, the macro-economy, etc. is to plan for it.

Now consider a law firm managing some major matters for that client.  During the beauty contest, the GC will say:  "Look, I need you to understand how important financial management is, wholly apart from the quality of your work.  X dollars in absolute terms equals Y cents per share, and if you surprise me with bills or accruals in the last month of a quarter or a year that can be X or more, you've actually affected our relationship with our shareholders."  This is because the GC knows how law firm billing cycles work.  Associate Miguel does twelve hours of work on November 3.  This work doesn't get rolled up into a "pre-bill" for review by the relationship partner until some time after the end of the month, say December 8.  The final bill comes out a couple weeks later, say, December 23.  Which means that there's almost a sixty day lag between when the firm does the work creating an accrual, since the company owes the firm for the work, and when the firm finally tells the company how much it owes.  If the company finds out on December 23 that, indeed, the firm ran up multiples of X dollars in the preceding sixty days, the GC finds herself in an extremely uncomfortable conversation with the CEO and CFO, not because the work didn't need to be done, but because the management of the information relating to the work was so badly butchered.

So we manage this, understanding as we do it's partly science and very much art.  Every quarter we hold a reforecast meeting on each legal matter.  In November, we tell the law firm we want an estimate of an accrual through December 31, meaning all the work that has been completed and is waiting to be billed ("WIP") and everything the firm thinks it needs to do through December 31.  The firm says "oh, no problem, we have a system just like the one you used at Dykema A Firm Unlike Any Other."  And the GC says, that's great, do you have a culture in which the lawyers actually put their time in every day so that we get fine grapes in and fine wine out?  And the answer is almost always, despite the slickness of the Power Point, "well, it's hard to get the lawyers to do that."  Garbage in, garbage out.  So the GC pounds his fist on the table and says, "I want to be able to call you at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, and know exactly how much time we've invested in each of our matters through the close of business on Thursday, and I want you to be able to get the report back to me within an hour."  (By the way, this should be music to the managing partners' ears because it means that time gets billed, bills get sent, bills get paid, and partners make money.)

Well, read the WSJ story.  Foley & Lardner can do that now.  Indeed, I shouldn't be facetious.  The firm can look at a matter by activity, suggest it's being handled inefficiently, and recommend alternatives, such as bringing it back in-house.  No doubt the technology is better.  But garbage in/garbage out (or as we used to say, the human interface) is still going to be an issue, and only leadership and culture change that.

P.S.  As long as I'm ranting (albeit with ten fingers on a keyboard that I will post in REAL TIME), I can still remember an old partner, who was OLD circa 1980 or 1981, who produced documents as follows:  he would write them out long hand, then call in his secretary and dictate to her from what he had written.  Then she would go to her IBM Selectric typewriter and type out what he had dictated in OCR (optical scan) format, which was then fed into a mainframe computer, which then turned out a draft, which she reviewed, then sent back for a final, which she then gave to him, which he marked up with a pen, gave it back to her, and so on.  I have to believe the cycle time for the production of a moderate length brief was three weeks.

Conference on Transactional Education - Emory Law School, June 4-5, 2010

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Emory University School of Law’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice is delighted to announce its second biennial conference on the teaching of transactional law and skills, Transactional Education:  What’s Next?  The conference will be held at Emory Law on Friday, June 4, and Saturday, June 5, 2010.

We are accepting proposals immediately, but in no event later than 5:00 p.m., February 1, 2010. We welcome proposals on any subject of interest to current or potential teachers of transactional law and skills.

To find out more information about the conference or how to submit a proposal, visit the conference website.

The Steering Committee

     Tina L. Stark, Chair, Emory University School of Law

     Danny Bogart, Chapman University School of Law

     Deborah Burand, University of Michigan Law School

     Joan MacLeod Heminway, The University of Tennessee College of Law

     Jeffrey Lipshaw, Suffolk University Law School

     Jane Scott, St. John's University School of Law

Everything You Wanted To Know About Bar Admission But Were Afraid To Ask

I moderated a one-hour discussion about the bar admission process on November 11 at Georgetown Law. The one-hour session addressed character and fitness issues and strategies for passing the bar exam. Four recent graduates discuss their experiences and provide insights that may be of interest to law students who are interested in the admissions process.

The video of the session is linked here. Thanks to the panelists Kevin Scott, Ron Cluett, Maeve McKean (all Georgetown grads) and Adrienne Biddings (University of Florida College of Law and currently a fellow in Georgetown's Institute for Public Representation) for their valuable participation in this discussion. (Mike Frisch)

New Ethics Journal Release

The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics latest volume (Fall 2009) has just hit the streets. The title of the volume is Symposium: Empirical Research on the Legal Profession: Insights From Theory and Practice. Included is an article co-authored by our own Bill Henderson. We will provide the link as soon as it is on line.

The symposium was held at Georgetown Law in March 2009. Kudos to the authors and student editors for this notable contribution to our understanding of current trends affecting the legal profession. (Mike Frisch)

Call for Papers: Northwestern U Holding Conference on Law of the Entrepreneur June 2010

                                            CALL FOR PAPERS

SEARLE CENTER - THIRD ANNUAL RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM ON THE ECONOMICS AND LAW OF THE ENTREPRENEUR

Northwestern School of Law    --    Thursday, June 17th, 2010 Friday, June 18th, 2010

The Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth is issuing a call for original research papers to be presented at the Third Annual Research Symposium on The Economics and Law of the Entrepreneur at Northwestern University School of Law. The Symposium will run from approximately 12:00 P.M. on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 to 3:00 PM on Friday, June 18th, 2010. The goal of this Research Symposium is to provide a forum where economists and legal scholars can gather together with Northwestern's own distinguished faculty to present and discuss high quality research relevant to the economics and law of the entrepreneur.

Papers for the conference should be submitted to the following email address: d-gundersen@law.northwestern.edu .   Potential attendees should indicate their interest in receiving an invitation at: searlecenter@law.northwestern.edu .  Authors will receive an honorarium of $1,200 per paper to cover reasonable transportation expenses. Government employees and non-US residents may be reimbursed for travel expenses up to the honorarium amount. Authors are expected to attend and participate in the full duration of the symposium. If more than one author attends the symposium, the honorarium or travel reimbursement will be divided equally between the attending authors. The Searle Center will make hotel reservations and pay for rooms for authors and discussants for the night of Thursday, June 17th.

[Alan Childress]

New Institute on Law in Latin America and Related Civil Jurisdictions to Hold Conference in Madrid Nov. 11

Posted by Alan Childress

A prof of the law school of Monterrey Tech, Carlos Gabuardi (who is also a Tulane law grad with a PhD from us in comparative law), shown below with a hopefully wise Latina Justice, passes along this announcement of a relatively new Center and its second program to be held Nov. 11, 2009, in Spain.  Congrats, Carlos, and much success as the Director.  Here is an intro.

The Center for Legal Innovation, Development and Research for Latin America has been established thanks to the generous support of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Monterrey Tech), through the Cátedra Eduardo A. Elizondo, and  the Spanish law firm Garrigues to the purpose of having a forum for discussing those issues that may have legal relevance for the Latin American region.

There are three concrete and interrelated actions, which are being implemented to this purpose:

     1.    Selecting 100 legal minds of the utmost prestige throughout Ibero-America, Haiti and Quebec (the Group of the 100).  This group of jurists shall be the heart of the Center for Legal Innovation, Development and Research for Latin America.

     2.    Establishing a web-based forum based upon an Internet portal with State of the Art technology for the permanent discussion of the initiatives generated within the forum by the Group of the 100.

     3.    Having an annual meeting of the Group of the 100 of the Garrigues – Monterrey Tech Center for Innovation, Development and Research for Latin America.

Further info on the Center is linked here in a Word document:  Download CENTER - 2009 doc.  And on attending the program in Madrid, just ask Carlos.  Contact info for Carlos Gabuardi is at this link, and his bio is here.

Call For Papers: Law & Society Ass'n in Chicago May 27-30, 2010

Posted by Alan Childress

Here is the Law & Society Association's announcement (and a link to conference info here):

Call for Participation --  Due Date: December 8, 2009

The 2010 Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association Thursday, May 27 through Sunday, May 30, at the Renaissance Chicago Hotel.

Theme:  AFTER CRITIQUE:  What is Left of the Law and Society Paradigm?

Born out of disillusionment with the failures of liberal legalism to deliver social justice or equality, law and society scholarship at the time aimed to expose those failures and challenge liberal legalism’s legitimating premises. Twenty years after the founding of LSA, during the decade of the 1980s, the critical impulse of law and society scholarship was itself put under the microscope by some who turned critique inward, calling out law and society scholars for embracing empty empiricism or for their complicity with legal and political elites. In this period, meta-debates raged over theoretical, methodological, and political questions.

More recently events in the academy and the world seem to have squelched our appetite for critique either of the legal order itself or of the premises and purposes of our own scholarship. In an era when the rule of law has come under sustained attack, can we go beyond celebrating it and allying ourselves with its projects? At a time when there are no dominant theoretical or methodological perspectives in the academy, should we turn away from epistemological questions and just get on with our work?

The theme of the 2010 LSA Meeting–After Critique–invites us to consider the law and society enterprise today and to think about its future direction. We want to reflect on the various ways that law and society scholarship has been and should be engaged with the threat of terrorism and governmental responses to it, national and global attacks on the rule of law, questions of sovereignty and sovereign prerogative, the contemporary situation of identity politics, and the collapse of the global economy and the crisis of neo-liberalism.

This year there is a new option:  the Work in Progress Paper.  For info on this and any other question, contact Judy Rose.