Mark Barenberg organized and spoke at a conference on Global Labor Unions held at the Law School in February. The conference was the first of its kind at a North American law school, bringing together labor lawyers, corporate lawyers, and trade unionists from around the world, including India, Indonesia, Kenya, Uruguay, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. His talk focused on private efforts among global networks of advocates to constrict or expand workers' right of association. In March, Prof. Barenberg spoke at the University of Chicago about alternative strategies for monitoring global sweatshops. In April, he addressed a workshop convened by the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., on compliance with workers rights in China and its impact on global trade. Throughout the spring, Prof. Barenberg worked on two projects to develop codes of conduct, one for farm workers and growers in Florida, and another for global factories and a coalition of several state governments that purchase from them. He also drafted a bill, introduced in Congress, that would require disclosure of working conditions in overseas workplaces that supply U.S. corporations.
Vivian Berger, Nash Emerita Professor of Law, participated in a program before the Departmental Disciplinary Committee (New York State Appellate Division, First Department) on the mediation of attorney-client disputes in March.
John C. Coffee, Jr., the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance, will deliver his second Anton Phillips Chair Lecture at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands in June, and also taught classes in Paris on recent developments in SEC enforcement and M&A developments. Earlier in April and May, Prof. Coffee delivered papers on the federal securities class action at the annual meeting of the Institute for Law and Economic Policy in the Bahamas and at a Class Action Symposium at the University of Missouri Law School. He also spoke on the duties of not-for-profit directors after Sarbanes-Oxley at the annual America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) conference at Amelia Island, Fla., and was a panelist at a Brooklyn Law School Symposium on New Models for Securities Law Enforcement. Throughout 2006, Prof. Coffee has been commuting to Canada to serve as a member of the nation's Task Force on Modernizing Securities Regulation, which will present its report in late 2006. Prof. Coffee delivered the 2006 Clarendon Lectures In Management Studies at Oxford in May. The three lectures were titled "The Silent Watchdog: Why the Gatekeepers Failed at Enron, WorldCom - and Elsewhere?" "The Prospects for Reform: How Can Gatekeepers Be Induced to Serve Investors Faithfully?" and "Litigation and Corporate Governance: The Costs and Benefits of the American Reliance on the Attorney as Bounty-hunter." Created a decade ago, the lectures are jointly organized by Oxford University Press and the Saïd Business School, at the University of Oxford. Leading international academics are invited to give a series of lectures on a topic related to management education and research. The lectures form the basis of a book subsequently published by Oxford University Press.
Ariela Dubler taught one session of a semester-long colloquium on marriage in law and literature at the University of Virginia. The readings for the session centered on her recent essay on McLaughlin v. Florida and its relationship to current debates about the legal regulation of same-sex relationships. In addition, while at the University of Virginia, Prof. Dubler delivered comments on the role of the family in immigration law at a conference on Immigration, Families, and the Law.
Elizabeth F. Emens presented "Beyond the Individual: Third-Party Benefits of Workplace Accommodation" at the AALS annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in January. In February, she spoke at the Disability, Narrative and the Law Conference at Ohio State University and gave a talk titled "Name Change: The Future of Default Rules for Spousal Names" at the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law Symposium on Sexuality and the Law. She gave the same talk in March at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, where she was the 2006 Quinney Legal Theory Scholar. In April, she presented "Bound: The Imaginative Surplus of Contractual Intent" at a conference at Keele University in the United Kingdom.
Jeffrey Fagan, Professor of Law and Public Health, will speak at an AALS conference in June on "Criminal Law and Procedure: Lessons from Other Disciplines and New Perspectives," on the controversies surrounding new research on the deterrent effects of capital punishment. He also testified on these issues in the U.S. Senate in February before the Subcommittee on the Constitution (Committee on the Judiciary). He presented a paper on capital punishment at a symposium called "Punishment, Law & Policy" at the University of Texas School of Law and at a faculty workshop in April at the University of Virginia School of Law. In March, he presented "The Political Economy of the Crime Decline" at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania honoring former Attorney General Janet Reno. In April, he debated former New York City and current Los Angeles Police Commissioner William Bratton on the impacts of "broken windows" theory on urban crime problems, at the Police Executive Research Forum annual meeting in San Francisco. Prof. Fagan continues his research in Chicago, in collaboration with the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, on the suppression of gun violence and gun trafficking.
Robert Ferguson lectured at the Columbus University School of Law of Catholic University of America as part of a series in law and literature in April, on "Stories Can Punish: Treason and the National Imagination in the Trial of Aaron Burr." The talk focused on the trial of Aaron Burr. Though acquitted of treason, Burr was still destroyed by the losing argument in the case, and he ended up as the prime villain of story and song throughout the nineteenth century. Why, conversely, do writers think better of Burr today? The question is worth asking because this case from 1807 is simultaneously a movable feast and a permanent touchstone in American law, one often cited in controversies today. Prof. Ferguson was also a respondent in February to the Lionel Trilling Lecture by Gordon S. Wood, the leading historian on the history of the American Revolution, on the topic, "Does History Teach Lessons?"
Merritt Fox, the Michael Patterson Professor of Law and co-director of the Center for Law and Economic Studies, delivered remarks titled "Due Diligence after WorldCom" at the ALI-ABA Corporate Governance Institute at Fordham Law School in December. In February, he presented a paper on Russian corporate governance at Vanderbilt Law School. In March, Prof. Fox delivered the 2006 Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt Business Law Forum Annual Lecture at Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, titled "Promoting Innovation: the Law of Publicly-Traded Corporations." He presented an earlier version of this paper at the RIETI-CARF Policy Symposium in Tokyo the previous month. Also in March he presented "After Dura: Causation in Fraud-on-the-Market Actions" at the University of Amsterdam, which he had also presented earlier last October at a Georgetown University Law Center conference.
Richard N. Gardner appeared on the Charlie Rose Show in April to discuss his recently published Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War (Rowman & Littlefield), which also was the subject of a favorable review in the March 9 edition of the New York Review of Books. He was a guest of the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress in February, and gave an interview with NPR's Diane Rehm, also in April. Prof. Gardner has spoken about the book to Columbia alumni in London and Rome, as well as in Washington and New York. He has also discussed the compelling memoir of his years as Ambassador to Italy at meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association in New York, and during events at the World Affairs Councils of Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Philip Genty moderated a panel on Prison and Punishment at the Symposium on Sexuality and the Law sponsored by the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. Former Associate-in-Law Alice Ristroph LLM ‘05 was one of the panelists. In March, he visited Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem and presented a lecture on moot court programs and interactive teaching and acted as facilitator for a mock trial exercise designed by the students. In April, he served as resource person for a two-day training conference in Belgrade and Montenegro for clinical law faculty from four Serbian universities. From there he traveled to Budapest to observe oral arguments in the Sixth International Asylum Moot Court Competition and conduct a post-competition teaching session with the participants.
Ronald Gilson published a paper titled "Controlling Shareholders and Corporate Governance: Complicating the Comparative Taxonomy" in 119 Harv. L. Rev. 1641 (2006) which won the European Corporate Governance Institute's De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek Prize for best working paper in law for 2005. Prof. Gilson also lectured on "Catalyzing Corporate Governance" at the University of Melbourne, which will appear as "Catalyzing Corporate Governance: The Evolution of the U.S. System in the 1980s and 1990s" in the May 2006 issue of the Company and Securities Law Journal. In May, he lectured at a Cornerstone Research conference in Nevis, West Indies on "Freezing Out Minority Shareholders." Prof. Gilson is the co-organizer of the June session of the Transatlantic Corporate Governance Dialogue in Brussels, sponsored by the American Law Institute and the European Corporate Governance Institute, on "Controlling Shareholders and Corporate Governance: Better Monitors or More Self-Dealing?"
Jane C. Ginsburg, the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law and co-director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, gave the the inaugural Emmanuel College International Intellectual Property Lecture on "Une Chose Publique? The Author's Domain and the Public Domain in Early British, French and US Copyright Law," at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, in May. Also in May, she and Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss ‘81 presented the current draft of "Intellectual Property - Principles Governing Jurisdiction, Choice of Law and Judgments in Transnational Disputes" to the ALI Membership at the annual meeting. In April, Prof. Ginsburg participated in a colloquium organized by the Netherlands Royal Academy of Science and the Arts on Open Content: New Models for Accessing and Licensing Knowledge.
Harvey J. Goldschmid '65, Dwight Professor of Law, in February, participated in a conference sponsored by the Mutual Fund Directors Forum, in D.C., and was keynote speaker at Columbia's State Attorneys General conference. In March: He participated in three panels at The SEC Speaks, in D.C.; gave a keynote "On Post-Enron Corporate Regulation" at Berkeley's Center for Law, Business and the Economy; and as 2005-06 Citigroup Distinguished Fellow in Ethics and Leadership, at NYU's Stern School, gave the keynote presentation on "New Challenges after Three Years of Securities Law Reform." In April, Prof. Goldschmid lectured at the SEC's International Institute for Securities Market Development and at U. Penn's Institute for Law and Economics (ILE). In May, he was named Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Greenwall Foundation, and spoke on "My Time at the SEC: A Tentative Appraisal" at A Ten Year Retrospective on Litigation Reform, the Columbia- and ILE-sponsored conference held in his honor; its papers will be published in the Columbia Law Review.
Jack Greenberg ‘48 spoke on a panel on civil rights litigation campaigns at the AALS meeting in January. He spoke in March at the Thomas Jefferson Law School in San Diego on the subject of reparations.
Benjamin L. Liebman, director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies, presented two lectures in Beijing in December at the International Seminar on Media Law organized by the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He also lectured on the same topics at Jilin University, in Changchun. In January, he gave a presentation titled "The Globalization of American Law? Evidence from China" at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools annual meeting and spoke on a panel on Sino-U.S. Legal Cooperation at New York University Law School. In March, Prof. Liebman delivered the 2005-06 Clarke Lecture at Cornell Law School. His lecture focused on the growth of defamation litigation in China and its implications for China's legal evolution. In May, he presented "Changing Media, Changing Courts?" at a conference on the Chinese media at the University of California at San Diego. He also presented a paper that month on the changing relationship between courts and other state institutions in China at a conference hosted by the Fairbank Institute at Harvard.
Ed Lloyd, Evan M. Frankel Clinical Professor in Environmental Law, received the Environmental Legacy Award from the New Jersey Environmental Lobby in April for his distinguished advocacy.
Clarisa Long, the Shaye Professor of Intellectual Property Law, presented an empirical study of trademark law and taught an intensive course on intellectual property law in February at the University of Illinois School of Law. In May, she was the featured speaker in an Intellectual Property Innovations speaker series in Washington, D.C.
Gillian Metzger ‘95 presented "Congress, Interstate Relations, and Article IV" to faculty workshops at the University of Virginia Law School and at Columbia.
Curtis J. Milhaupt ‘89, Fuyo Professor and director of the Center for Japanese Legal Studies, traveled twice to Beijing during the spring semester. In January, he discussed the rise of hostile takeovers and related corporate law developments in Japan with a group of scholars from the Institute of Law at the China Academy of Social Sciences. In April, he participated in the International Summit of Company Law Reform at the China University of Political Science and Law. Prof. Milhaupt was the guest of honor at bi-coastal "kompa" (end-of-semester parties for seminar students and teachers at Japanese universities), organized by Japanese LLM students and visiting scholars at both Columbia and UC Berkeley, where Prof. Milhaupt was a short-term visiting professor in the spring. While at Berkeley, Prof. Milhaupt gave several lectures to students and faculty, including a presentation on an early draft of his forthcoming book with Katharina Pistor, Law and Capitalism.
Henry Monaghan, Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law, served as a panelist at a summit convened during the New York State Bar Association's annual meeting, where he discussed the nomination and confirmation process for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ed Morrison presented "Selecting Bankruptcy: An Empirical Study of Small Business Distress" at Georgetown's Law and Economics Workshop and the Harvard/University of Texas Conference on Commercial Law Realities. The paper uses unique data from Dun & Bradstreet to determine why few ailing businesses use bankruptcy law to reorganize or shut down.
Alex Raskolnikov, co-chair of the Transactional Studies Program, presented "Crime and Punishment in Taxation: Deceit, Deterrence, and the Self-Adjusting Penalty" at the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium and the Tax Policy Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In the paper, he argues that the existing system of tax penalties fails to take into account taxpayer attempts to hide their aggressive transactions. This is both inefficient (because taxpayers are encouraged to waste resources in order to conceal their tax avoidance) and unfair (because opportunities to conceal vary greatly among taxpayers). As a partial solution, he proposes a new type of penalty that would be automatically higher when the likelihood of detecting tax avoidance is lower and vice versa. This self-adjusting penalty is likely to reduce variations in the expected penalties for various forms of avoidance and evasion and improve deterrence. Also, Prof. Raskolnikov gave a lecture titled "Challenges in Taxation of Financial Innovation" at a meeting of the Japan Tax Association.
Catherine Sharkey was named executive committee member of the AALS Section on Torts and Compensation Systems. Her empirical research on the effects of the imposition of caps on punitive damages on jury awards was selected for the 2006 AALS Plenary Session: Showcase for Exemplary Empirical Projects. She also presented "Crossing the Punitive-Compensatory Divide" at the Law and Economics Workshops at University of Chicago, at Tel Aviv University, at the law faculty workshop at Fordham, and at the University of Nebraska Law-Psychology Program: Civil Juries and Civil Justice. Prof. Sharkey presented "Backdoor Federalization" (co-authored with Sam Issacharoff) at the UCLA Class Action symposium and at an American Enterprise Institute conference on The Political Economy of Preemption. She also presented the paper at the American Law & Economics Association (ALEA) annual meeting, at faculty workshops at Berkeley, Columbia, and Roger Williams, and at a meeting of the NYC Torts Theory group. She presented "Preemption by Preamble: Federal Agencies & the Federalization of Tort Reform" at the Clifford Symposium at DePaul Law School and at a Chicago-Kent Law faculty workshop and gave a talk on "Trespass in an Electronic Age" at the Economic Torts Conference at Arizona Law School and at a "10-10" Columbia Law faculty lunch. Prof. Sharkey was also invited to participate in an international products liability workshop in Tokyo called "The Role of the Legal System for a Safer Society: Investigation, Safety Standard Setting and Compensation," sponsored by the Japan Science Agency, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Prof. Sharkey was also named senior editor of the new peer-reviewed Journal of Tort Law, which aims to be the premier publisher of original articles about tort law. The Journal is committed to methodological pluralism, and welcomes, among other approaches, comparative, doctrinal, economic, empirical, historical, philosophical, and policy-oriented analyses of issues in or related to tort law.
Jane Spinak, the Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor of Law and director of Clinical Programs, spoke about family court reform at a Policy Forum on Child Welfare Innovation titled "Reinventing Children's Services" held at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. in February. Her presentation proposed that recent federal and state reforms that have given family court increased jurisdictional authority over child welfare agencies may not be the right approach to court reform nor to improving child welfare services for children and families. In April, Prof. Spinak participated in the 37th annual New York Fair Trial/Free Press Forum, where lawyers, judges, reporters, and other press representatives responded to a hypothetical that focused on whether there is any privacy in high profile cases, including when children are involved.
Peter L. Strauss, the Betts Professor of Law, described the new curriculum of McGill University's Faculty of Law to a plenary session at the January meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, "Transsystemia - Are we approaching a new Langdellian moment? Is McGill leading the way?" The talk will be published in the Journal of Legal Education and the Canadian Journal of Legal Education. Drawing on materials from his most recent book, Legislation: Understanding and Using Cases and Statutes, Prof. Strauss assisted Professor David Vladeck ‘76 of Georgetown University Law Center in the briefing of Arlington Central Sch. Dist. Bd. of Ed. v. Murphy in the United States Supreme Court. In May, he participated in an all-day conference on the Role of Science in Rule-making at American University, giving a paper on judicial review, and led a day's discussion of "Administrative Law in the United States: History and Practice" for 25 Vice Ministers of the Chinese government attending a program at the Yale Law School's China Law Center.
John Fabian Witt presented papers on the history and development of American tort law and the American plaintiff's bar at the New York Law School Conference on the Plaintiffs' Bar and at DePaul University's Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Social Policy, where he was a fellow panelist with Prof. Catherine Sharkey. In January, he gave a presentation on the star-crossed friendship of Melvin Belli and Roscoe Pound at the Yale Legal History Workshop. In his capacity as chair of the 2006 Program Committee for the 2006 American Society for Legal History Meetings, Prof. Witt has assembled a program that includes Professors Barbara Black, Ariela Dubler, Philip Hamburger, and James Whitman (of Yale Law School who will be a visiting professor at Columbia next spring). The event will take place in Baltimore in November.
"Corporate Social Responsibility and Non-governmental Advocacy" in Non-Governmental Politics (ed., Michel Feher) (Zone Books, 2006) on the politics of non-governmental activism
Prof. Vivian Berger '73
"Big Victory for Charities" in the National Law Journal (Jan. 16, 2006) about how the U.S. government will no longer require that charities and other not-for-profits check terrorists lists in order to certify that they are not employing or giving money to suspected terrorists
"Faculty-Student Sex: Any Real Remedy?" in the National Law Journal (Apr. 17, 2006) about the ineffectiveness of remedies for faculty-student sexual harassment
Prof. Ariela Dubler
"Immoral Purposes: Marriage and the Genus of Illicit Sex" in the Yale Law Journal
"From McLaughlin v. Florida to Lawrence v. Texas: Sexual Freedom and the Road to Marriage" in the Columbia Law Review
Prof. Elizabeth Emens
"The Sympathetic Discriminator: Mental Illness, Hedonic Costs, and the ADA" in the Georgetown Law Journal
"Aggravating Youth: Roper v. Simmons and Age Discrimination" in the Supreme Court Review.
Prof. Jeffrey Fagan
"Developmental Trajectories of Legal Socialization among Adolescent Offenders" in 96 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (2006) (with Alex Piquero)
"Capital Homicide and Capital Punishment: A Market Share Theory of Deterrence" in the Texas Law Review (with Franklin Zimring and Amanda Geller)
"Death and Deterrence Redux: Science, Alchemy and Causal Reasoning on Capital Punishment" in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (in press, 2006)
"Neighborhood, Race, and the Economic Consequences of Incarceration in New York City, 1985-1996" in The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America (R.D. Peterson, L.J. Krivo, & J. Hagan, eds.) (with Alex Piquero and Valerie West) (NYU Press, 2006)
"Adolescents, Maturity, And The Law: Why science and development matter in juvenile justice" in the American Prospect 16(9) 8 (2005)
Prof. Merritt Fox
"Understanding Dura" in 60 Bus. Law 1547 (2005)
Prof. Ronald J. Gilson
"Controlling Shareholders and Corporate Governance: Complicating the Comparative Taxonomy" in 119 Harv. L. Rev. 1641 (2006)
"Takeovers in the Target's Boardroom: Burke versus Schumpeter," 60 Business Lawyer 1419 (2005)(with R. Kraakman)
"Understanding MACS," 21 Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 330 (2005) (with A. Schwartz)
Prof. Jane Ginsburg
Copyright: Cases and Materials (with Prof. R.A. Gorman) (Foundation Press, 7th ed. 2006)
"Inducers and Authorisers: A Comparison of the US Supreme Court's Grokster decision and the Australian Federal Court's KaZaa Ruling" (with Prof. Sam Ricketson) in the Media & Arts Law Review
"An Idea Whose Time Has Come - But Where Will it Go?" Reply to Arthur R. Miller in "Common Law Protection for Products of the Mind: An 'Idea' Whose Time Has Come" in119 Harvard Law Review Forum 65 (2006)
Prof. Benjamin Liebman
"Innovation through Intimidation? An Empirical Account of Defamation Litigation in China" in47 Harvard International Law Journal 33 (2006)
Introduction: Celebrating Stanley Lubman in 19 Journal of Asian Law (with R. Randle Edwards)(Spring 2006)
Prof. Clarisa Long
"Dilution" inthe Columbia Law Review
Prof. Gillian Metzger '95
"The Story of Vermont Yankee: A Cautionary Tale of Judicial Review and Nuclear Waste" in Administrative Law Stories (Peter Strauss, ed., 2005) (Foundation Press)
Prof. Curtis Milhaupt '89
"Historical Pathways of Reform: Foreign Law Transplants and Japanese Corporate Governance" in Corporate Governance in Context: Corporations, States, and Markets in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. (Klaus Hopt et al. eds.) (Oxford University Press 2005)
Prof. Ed Morrison
"Serial Entrepreneurs and Small Business Bankruptcies" (with Douglas G. Baird) in Columbia Law Review
"Financial Contracts and the New Bankruptcy Code: Insulating Markets from Bankrupt Debtors and Bankruptcy Judges" (with Joerg Riegel) in the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review
"Adversary Proceedings: A Sideshow" (with Douglas G. Baird) in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal
Prof. Morrison's essay appears in this book edited by Douglas D. Evanoff & George G. Kaufman: Systemic Financial Crises: Resolving Large Bank Insolvencies
Prof. Alex Raskolnikov
"Crime and Punishment in Taxation: Deceit, Deterrence, and the Self-Adjusting Penalty" in the Columbia Law Review
Prof. Catherine Sharkey
"Dissecting Damages: An Empirical Exploration of Sexual Harassment Awards," in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2006)
First Amendment Law: A New Case Book and a Novel Approach
A frustration with First Amendment casebooks led Professor Vincent Blasi to publish Ideas of the First Amendment (Thomson/West, 2006), his new book on the topic, organized around seven seminal essays.
In his 25 years of teaching, Prof. Blasi discovered that the casebooks he'd been using, organized along conventional doctrinal lines, presented a wealth of modern opinions, but were heavily edited due to space constraints. "This led to a breathless pace of coverage, which precluded a rigorous, patient, detailed critique of the basic doctrinal ideas," he says. "Given the rich rhetoric surrounding the idea of free speech, I yearned to do more to teach the art of persuasion in a systematic fashion."
Fourteen years ago, he began organizing course materials around what he viewed were seven of the most powerfully written and historically important articulations of the reasons for a strong free speech principle. These included John Milton's Areopagitica, James Madison's Virginia Report (in opposition to the Sedition Act of 1798), Alexander Meiklejohn's Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government and Learned Hand's opinion in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten. This innovation allowed him to devote up to two weeks to dissecting the argumentative structure and rhetorical moves of each of these essays.
"I then tested each author's argument by asking how it might be used to analyze several of the most important modern issues of First Amendment interpretation, including libel, the publication of classified documents, campaign finance regulation, obscenity, racial hate speech, and commercial advertising," he adds.
The result was an increase in student engagement, in the spontaneity and sophistication of class discussion, and in the quality of the writing. Several students have said that Prof. Blasi's book, with its emphasis on the art of argumentation, turned out to be one of the most practical courses they had in law school. "Fourteen years made it a long time in coming, but I'm very pleased with the response," he says.
Two Book Series Will Bear Law School Name
The inaugural volumes of a new book series bearing the Columbia Law School name have just been published.
The first series, Columbia Studies in WTO Law and Policy (Cambridge University Press), is based on the annual WTO Law seminar offered by Professors Petros Mavroidis and George Bermann '75 LL.M., who also serve as series editors. That seminar assembles world-wide experts in law, economics, politics, and government to explore the most pressing issues within the contemporary international trade regime. The just-published inaugural volume in this series is titled Trade and Human Health and Safety.
As seminar themes change in two-year cycles, a new volume in the series will appear every two years. The next volume scheduled to appear will be on WTO Law and Developing Countries.
The second series, The Columbia-London Law Series, grows out of the annual Columbia Law School-University of London faculty workshops. Each workshop and the resulting volume in the series treats an issue of great topical importance and is co-edited by a member of the Columbia Law faculty and a professor from a college of the University of London. The first volume in the series, published by Hart Publications, is Party Funding and Campaign Financing in International Perspective. Some of the future volumes will be edited by Professors Jeff Fagan and Debra Livingston (criminal law) and Katharine Franke (intellectual property, memory and archives). The general editors of the series are Professors George Bermann and Terence Daintith (of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London).
Gatekeepers: The Professions and Corporate Governance John C. Coffee, Jr. (Oxford University Press, May 2006)
While much debate and investigation of corporate collapse has focused on boards and directors, little attention has been given to the role of those who inform and advise them: the gatekeeping professions who play a vital and influential role in modern business. In the book, Prof. Coffee explains how the professions have evolved, performed, and changed their behavior over the past century. He argues that all boards of directors are prisoners of their gatekeepers and only if the board's agents properly advise and warn it, can the board function efficiently. This well-informed, accessible, and challenged account is vital reading to those who wish to understand the contemporary business landscape and why "the dogs didn't bark" for Enron and WorldCom.
Law Stories
Columbia Law School has more contributors to Foundation Press's Law Stories series than any other law school. Of the fourteen books so far issued, four have been edited by Columbia faculty, the most recent being Family Law Stories. It is edited by Professor Carol Sanger; faculty contributors include Professor Andrea Dubler and Suzanne Goldberg. Prof Sanger is also a contributor to the upcoming Contracts Law Stories. More on these books will appear at a later date.
Who Controls the Internet? : Illusions of a Borderless World Tim Wu (with Jack Goldsmith) (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Is the Internet erasing national borders? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Internet?
This book tells the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. The authors cover Google's struggles with the French government, Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime, and other examples of conflict. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Mr. Goldsmith and Prof. Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. The experiences of past years, however, will not destroy the governmental rule. The Internet will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, but will not diminish the fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance. Publisher's Weekly called the book "a timely chronicle of a history still very much in the works."
The Japanese Legal System: Cases, Codes and Commentary Curtis Milhaupt ‘89 (with J. Mark Ramseyer and Mark D. West) (Foundation Press 2006)
This casebook on Japanese Law was designed for ease of use and theoretical versatility. Heavily-edited cases, statutes, and articles canvass a wide range of intriguing problems and theoretical perspectives. It facilitates a variety of analysis and approaches to a given question-whether sociological, anthropological, or based on law and economics and allows for in-depth coverage of a diverse range of substantive areas of law, from torts, criminal law, and contracts to employment and corporate law.
The Federalist (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, with an introduction by Robert Ferguson) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series, 2006)
It is hard to believe that these 85 essays, written mostly in haste, have achieved their deserved immortality, having become the benchmark of American political philosophy. Most of the "papers," as they are also called, were published in periodicals as the vote on approving The U.S. Constitution drew near. Without them, the Constitution most likely would not have been ratified and America might not have survived as a nation. Prof. Ferguson's elegant introduction brings the historical circumstances and the three writers to life. "At is best, The Federalist is a treatise on what political science can do and mean for any society," he writes. The book, which also contains bios on the authors, a time-line of related events, and the text of the Constitution, is especially suitable for those who have yet to delve into these great essays.
Legislation: Understanding and Using Statutes Peter Strauss (Foundation Press, 2006)
This book's focus makes statutes, and the processes that produce them, the primary consideration. Traditional teaching materials tend to make statutes and the circumstances of their creation secondary; students encounter the legislative process and legislative materials chiefly, sometimes exclusively, through the eyes of judges. In contrast, two of the three principal chapters of this book are organized around the enactment of two particular statutes -- one late 19th century, the second late 20th century. These chapters expose students to primary documents reflecting the quite different processes by which these two statutes were enacted, and invite them to reach conclusions about their meaning, in advance of any exposure to judicial interpretations -- just as lawyers would typically be required to do in practice. The latter of these two chapters also includes extensive selections from the secondary literature to help put the current debates between textualists and purposivists in sharp focus.
The intervening chapter deals in a more conventional way with the development and use of the purpose/intent-oriented methods of interpretation that characterized mid-Twentieth Century judicial practice. This chapter, in which judicial decisions predominate, often sets a statutory problem as a prologue to the case -- highlighting the statutory issue and inviting the student to do her own interpretive analysis before encountering the judges' opinion.
The IMPACT of the Adoption and Safe Families Act on Children of IncarceratedParents Philip Genty (with Arlene Lee and Mimi Laver)(Child Welfare League of America, 2005)
This book analyzes the effects the Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997) - specifically, requirements for initiating termination of parental rights. The act, created to improve the safety of children, to promote adoption and other permanent homes for children, and to support families, has had a deleterious effect on the more than 1.6 million children who currently have an incarcerated parent, according to the authors, who surveyed judges, attorneys, and child welfare representatives. The authors call for an urgent development of improved programs and policies, paying particular attention to the need for family-based and community-based substance abuse treatment programs, which increases the frequency of the termination of parental rights.
