From the Director
Greetings from the Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession. Our first newsletter of the 2019 calendar year has lots of exciting news to report. To begin, our work on the Dubai International Financial Centre Courts was presented at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession in late February.
We also had a chance to share our research on the state of access to justice in India at Durham Law School (UK), a fabulous institution with which we hope to have more collaboration in the years ahead.
In addition, we welcomed back to Maurer our colleagues from Russia – Professors Katya Ospiova and Tatiana Volchatskaya (Baltic Federal University – Kaliningrad) – who provided a wonderful lecture on the state of the Russian legal profession to our students. They also continue to work closely with Professor Carwina Weng and Stewart Center Coordinator, Ms. Lara Gose, on our ongoing project examining curricular and pedagogical innovation in Russia.
And regarding our Stewart Fellows Internships Program, this summer we will be adding a new country to our list of exciting markets where our students are able to intern: Ghana. More on this development in our next newsletter where we will feature our 2019 Stewart Fellows Class.
In the meantime, please also see below some of the fantastic work that our Stewart Center faculty have been doing over the last several months. Best wishes for the rest of the spring semester,
Sincerely
Jayanth Krishnan
Milt & Judi Stewart Professor of Law
Director, Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession
IU Maurer School of Law
Stewart Center faculty news
- Professor Pamela Foohey (along with co-authors Robert M. Lawless, Katherine Porter, and Deborah Thorne) recently published two articles relying on data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, which is a long-term project studying people who file bankruptcy. "No Money Down" Bankruptcy, 90 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1055 (2017), addresses how attorneys' fees affect when and what chapter under which people file bankruptcy. Life in the Sweatbox, 94 Notre Dame L. Rev. 219 (2018), focuses on how long people struggle with their debts before deciding to file bankruptcy, including how attorneys and other legal system actors can help struggling households on the road to bankruptcy and after they file. These two articles served as the basis for a recent symposium at Emory Law School hosted by the Emory Bankruptcy Development Journal about access to justice in the context of consumer bankruptcy. Professor Foohey spoke at this symposium, as well as contributed an essay to the symposium issue, Access to Consumer Bankruptcy, 34 Emory Bankr. Dev. J. 341 (2018).
- Professor Joseph Hoffmann continues to work in the area of comparative criminal law. In Summer 2018, he supervised the first-ever group of Stewart Fellows in Poland — two at the Office of the Polish Ombudsman, and two with the prominent global law firm of Wardynski and Partners. In August, Professor Hoffmann and the IU Maurer School of Law hosted the biennial Bradley-Wolter Colloquium, bringing together more than twenty scholars from around the world to discuss issues such as prosecutorial and judicial discretion, victim consent, the extraterritorial application of criminal laws, and criminal liability for harms caused by artificial intelligence. Prof. Hoffmann recently published two book chapters — one on judicial independence that was published in France, and one on criminal justice reform in Japan. In January 2019, he was a featured participant at a conference on U.S., Italian, and Mexican comparative criminal procedure hosted by the University of Illinois.
- Professor Carole Silver (Faculty Affiliate – home institution: Northwestern) recently published an article with Swethaa Ballakrishnen about the experiences of international students who study law in the United States. The article, “Sticky Floors, Springboards, Stairways & Slow Escalators: Mobility Pathways and Preferences of International Students in U.S. Law Schools,” was part of a symposium held at the University of California Irvine School of Law, and appeared in the U.C. Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law. Professor Silver chairs the Standing Committee on International Trade in Legal Services for the American Bar Association, which addresses matters related to inbound and outbound international practice. She also recently spoke at the 46th annual Securities Regulation Institute in San Diego, as part of the ethics session titled “Hot Topics in Ethics: Cryptocurrency, #MeToo, and More.”
- Professor Jeffrey Stake is currently working on a casebook on trusts and estates, which contemplates examining the tension between focusing on the wishes of decedents and doing what is in the best interests of society. He is scheduled to present a paper at the annual meeting of Association of Law, Property, and Society at Syracuse University in May. This talk will be based on his recently published article in the Arizona State Law Journal, which examines the biological biases in beneficence.