Newsletter: Vol. 7, Issue 1, March 2021
From the Director
Best wishes from the Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession. Since our last newsletter, we have seen a world that continues to battle the coronavirus (although with hopeful days soon ahead), and the United States remaining a polarized country, notably highlighted by the unlawful, egregious, and violent January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Thus, our Center’s mission of promoting global understanding, engagement, and the rule of law is now as pressing as ever. To that end, the news below highlights some of our recent work over the past several months. Please stay safe and well.
Jayanth Krishnan
Milt and Judi Stewart Professor of Law
Director, Milt and Judi Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession
New paper analyzes non-citizens' access to effective counsel
In February, a new immigration paper was released that reviews every publicly available judgment delivered by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals on ineffective assistance of counsel. The results reveal that the BIA’s holdings often are summarily issued and lack detailed explanation, with the government prevailing against noncitizens in most instances. Because judicial review of these holdings is not uniform across the circuits, the study calls upon all Article III circuit courts to affirmatively opt to review these ineffective assistance cases independently, especially before the finality of a negative immigration order takes effect. The paper will be published in the University of Illinois Law Review.
Center collaborates with colleagues abroad and domestically
In November, the Center was part of a global conference hosted by our partner in India, the O.P. Jindal Global University, which focused on the changes to legal education during COVID-19. The three-day event brought together over 170 academics, lawyers, judges, and policymakers from six continents. The Law School's dean, Austen Parrish, participated as one of the keynote speakers, as did Professors Christiana Ochoa (pictured) and Professor Krishnan.
Working with the Law School's Graduate Legal Studies Office, the Center sponsored two separate global lawyering roundtables. In October, Ahmad Alamri, a lawyer and lecturer at King Saud University and an SJD candidate at the Maurer School of Law, presented a paper on the need for Saudi Arabia to adopt a new and rigorous legal ethics framework to govern the Saudi bar. The following month, Dr. Sharaf Alsharaf, SJD ’20 (Kuwait University), discussed the role of investment and arbitration lawyers and their strategic decisions on where to settle disputes in the Middle East.
Relatedly, Center faculty remain active in mentoring and advising graduate students from abroad who are pursuing their doctoral studies During just the course of the last twelve months, several SJD degrees were earned by students of Center faculty, including by Alsharaf, Saleh Alsheha, Yin-Song Hsu, Minsung Kim, Kalyani Unkule, and Saad Alrowaished.
And the Center continued to support the Law School's Asian Pacific American Law Student Association (APALSA), which, together with Northeastern University Law School’s APALSA board, co-hosted a panel on the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard affirmative action case that is currently being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. APALSA’s October event featured Jin Hee Lin, Senior Deputy Director of Litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; Ivy Yan, a student at Harvard Law School; and Professor Nancy Zisk, Charleston Law School.
Individual highlights
Several of the Center’s colleagues have been extremely productive on work relating to the bar, bench, and law-and-society more broadly. Here is a sample of their influential work.
- Research Fellow Vitor Dias recently published an article (with Alisha Kirchoff) entitled “The Overlooked Story of the Immigrant Lawyer Experience in the United States” in the International Journal of the Legal Profession. He is also analyzing how racism in American law firms continues to affect Black lawyers' careers during the 2000s. This project is part of a book organized by Professor Ethan Michelson and other scholars at the American Bar Foundation, which is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Mr. Dias is also writing on how climate change disproportionately affects minority communities in Brazil and the role of lawyers in delivering justice for the victims of environmental hazards. He will present this work at the 2021 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, where he is a founding co-organizer of the Collaborative Research Network on Law and Climate Change.
- Prof. Pamela Foohey, as a member of the American Bankruptcy Institute’s Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, has been assisting in recent months with the development of programming to increase diversity within the bankruptcy profession. The American Bankruptcy Institute is an association of over 12,000 judges, attorneys, accountants, researchers, and other bankruptcy professionals that is designed to educate its members, Congress, and the public on bankruptcy issues. The Diversity and Inclusion Working Group recently hosted a program for practitioners and judges focusing on the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion on career trajectory and mentorship. The Group is also crafting a workshop to be offered to law schools across the United States designed to foster excitement among students about consumer and business bankruptcy as career prospects.
- Prof. William Henderson continues to write for and edit Legal Evolution, an online publication that chronicles legal industry innovation. Authors include lawyers and allied professionals from a wide range of practice settings. Article content is more substantial and multidisciplinary than in the legal press or bar journals, but more accessible than law reviews. Online traffic and subscribers have continued to grow since its founding in 2017. On the service side, Professor Henderson is helping build e-learning for the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP, “I-flip”) The modules, which focus on the “Top-of-the-T” disciplines of data, tech, process, design, business operations, are designed for use by both law students and mid-career professionals.
- Prof. Shana Wallace presented at the California Bar Association’s 30th Annual Golden State Institute program on recent antitrust developments and testified before the Indiana General Assembly on proposed legislation regarding the antitrust implications of imposing pricing regulations in the beverage industry. Prof. Wallace also co-authored an amicus brief on the availability of disgorgement as a remedy in government enforcement actions in Liu v. SEC, 140 S. Ct. 1936 (2020). Additionally, the teams she has coached over the past several years in the George Mason’s Global Antitrust Institute’s Moot Competition have brought distinction to the school. One team advanced to the quarterfinals, one made it the finals, and this year's team won the overall competition overall. Prof. Wallace has also supervised a half-dozen antitrust directed-reading and directed-research students, with several of those students going on to publish their pieces as student comments. One of those students won the ABA Antitrust Section’s Best Student Writing Award.