BYLINE: Karl P. Sauvant “WITH US$1.8 trillion, world foreign direct investment (FDI) flows reached an all-time high last year. All major regions benefited from increased flows. But that was then. What is, and will be, the impact of the financial crisis and the recession on FDI flows this year and next? Several forces are at work, best discussed in terms of the three sets of FDI determinants: economic conditions, the regulatory framework and investment promotion. … The author is executive director of Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, research scholar and lecturer in law at Columbia Law School.”
November 20, 2008 BYLINE: John C. Coffee, Jr. “Sometime in the next decade, an economic historian will write the definitive account of the 2008 credit crisis. Possessing better data and greater distance from the still current turmoil, this author will do a far better job than anyone can hope to do today. A critical issue that such a history must face will be the extent to which there was a regulatory failure. Indeed, this issue is sufficiently pressing that even at this early point columnists need to address it. Little doubt exists that there were private market failures, as some CEOs (O'Neal at Merrill, Lynch, Cayne at Bear Stearns, and Fuld at Lehman) recklessly increased leverage and concentrated their firm's assets in illiquid real estate investments. But what responsibility does the SEC bear for not resisting the steady slide of the major investment banks into insolvency? … John C. Coffee, Jr. is the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School and director of its Center on Corporate Governance.”
BYLINE: Joseph Landau “The Associated Press reported Monday that advisors to President-Elect Barack Obama ‘are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials.’ This likely signals a major policy shift in the detention and trial of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantanamo Bay. But the AP's conclusion that the proposal ‘would make good on [Obama's] promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison’ is premature. Shutting down Guantanamo won't be so easy. … Joseph Landau, a former New Republic assistant managing editor, is an attorney in New York and an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School.”
November 9, 2008 BYLINE: Philip Bobbitt “Americans have always been a little flag-crazy, and I am no exception. Shortly after 9/11, I happened to arrive at JFK - the same airport runway from which I had watched the Trade Towers explode - and saw through the airplane porthole an airport worker waving the plane to its berth. … The first phase of the wars on terror is over. The US has conquered its fear of the unknown - for a time, as there will surely be new and justified fears to face down. By electing a figure largely unknown a year ago, an African-American who has had to live by his wits, whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was a Muslim, the US has decisively rejected offshore penal colonies, deceptive rationalizations for warfare, secret torture chambers, and contempt for the constitutional and international law that would forbid such activities. Indeed by selecting a former law professor, the country has thoroughly dismissed the notion that law is an obstacle rather than a guide to achieving security. We know what security policies Obama is against. What are some of the international programs he should be for? …Philip Bobbitt is professor of jurisprudence at Columbia University and a former senior adviser at the White House.”
BYLINE: Patricia Williams “Given the drama of our last two presidential elections, most of us Americans are much too cautious to prognosticate prematurely. Nevertheless, I can't stifle a fizzy little hiccup of joy at the prospect of something like our own Nelson Mandela moment. By this, I do not mean to say that the election of Barack Obama would launch us into some sort of 'post-race' utopia - it is naïve to think that the urgently worrisome accumulations of racial inequality, ghetto isolation, horrendous rates of incarceration, or economic disparity will evaporate overnight. As one marker of progress, however, the election of Obama would be hugely significant. It would surely count as something like a toehold on the proverbial mountaintop for which Martin Luther King so longed. … Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University, New York.”
SHANGHAI DAILY: Emerging markets' FDI strikes sensitive nerve October 23, 2008 BYLINE: Karl P. Sauvant “WHEN CNOOC, a state-owned Chinese oil company, tried to buy the American oil company Unocal three summers ago, it generated a firestorm of protest by US politicians. … So far, the impact of FDI from emerging markets on developed countries remains small. But it is growing quickly. Among the most dynamic are multinationals based in the Chinese mainland, with their outflows this year reaching perhaps US$50-60 billion - more than double the 2007 total. It is therefore fitting that the ranking of large Chinese multinationals undertaken by the School of Management of Fudan University and the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment (a joint center of Columbia Law School and The Earth Institute at Columbia University) was released yesterday at in a press conference in Shanghai (available at www.vcc.columbia.edu). … (The author is executive director of Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, research scholar and lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. The views are his own.)”
FINANCIAL TIMES: We need to guard against destructive creation October 16, 2008 BYLINE: Jagdish Bhagwati “It seems clear that the current financial crisis, terrifying though it is in its dimensions, will not be allowed to turn into the Great Crash of 2008. However, the larger lessons of the crisis, and its commonalities with previous calamities, must still be learnt if a new financial architecture is to be designed that can reduce the prospect of something similar happening again. … The writer, a university professor at Columbia University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of In Defense of Globalization (Oxford), reissued in 2007 with an afterword.”
October 5, 2008 BYLINE: Patricia Williams “We are now several weeks into the weird humiliation that the Republican party inflicted upon us Americans with their choice of Sarah Palin as their nominee for Vice-President. Here we are, at as precarious a crossroad as history is ever likely to offer up, yet there stands Sarah Palin regurgitating George W Bush's 'good guys-bad guys' baby talk. I despair. … Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University and a regular columnist for the Nation magazine.”
September 15, 2008 BYLINE: John C. Coffee Jr. “ ‘Naked’ short selling is discouraged, but not prohibited. Indeed, the level of current discouragement is probably accurately described as only a mild chill. Still, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is considering proposed rules to deepen the chill that ‘nudist’ short sellers must endure to engage in an activity that seems to be increasingly popular. This column will review the options. … John C. Coffee Jr. is the Adolf A. Berle Professor at Columbia Law School and director of its Center on Corporate Governance.”
September 14, 2008 BYLINE: Jagdish Bhagwati “Globalization is the target of many critics today. The young see it as a malign force in regard to social agendas. The workers see it as a pernicious force in regard to their economic well-being. But both sets of fears, and resulting opposition to (economic) globalization, especially via trade and multinationals, are mistaken. … Jagdish Bhagwati is Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York.”
September 11, 2008 BYLINE: Philip Bobbitt and John C. Danforth “JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are two of the most remarkable Americans to enter public life. Both men are extraordinarily capable and their campaigns — which began against great odds — reflect that fact. And yet with respect to national security, neither campaign has articulated the fundamental points of view that will allow people to make an informed choice in November. … Here, then, on the anniversary of 9/11, a day when both candidates have chosen to put politics aside and appear together at ground zero, are a dozen questions we would like to see them address. … Philip Bobbitt, the author of ‘Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century,’ is a law professor at Columbia and a fellow at the University of Texas.”
BYLINE: Tim Wu “Someone—lots of people, actually—have been editing Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry, but chances are, none of them is John McCain. Over the past weeks and months, some members of the mainstream media and many bloggers have grown obsessed with a single question: Does John McCain truly not know how to operate a computer? While entertaining (see ‘McCain makes historic first trip to Internet’), it's also a pretty silly discussion. The 1930 version of this game might have been, ‘Roosevelt can't drive a combine harvester—can we trust his agricultural policies?’ What, exactly, does knowing how to Twitter illuminate? Behind this superficial buzzing lies something deeper, however—an interesting split between McCain and Barack Obama on what might broadly be called their media policies. … Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?”
Jose Alvarez, the Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, was the luncheon speaker in September at the American Foreign Law Association in New York on the topic of the Argentine crisis cases. That month, Prof. Alvarez was also a commentator at a New York University conference titled “Selecting International Judges: Principles, Process, and Politics” (along with Lori Damrosch, the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization), as well as a dinner speaker at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law on the topic of the internationalization of U.S. law. Also in September, he gave the second annual International Legal Studies Program Lecture on International Law at the American University Washington College of Law titled “Contemporary International Law: Empire of Law or the Law of Empire?”
In October, Prof. Alvarez was a commentator/convener at the third annual Columbia International Investment Conference titled “FDI by State-Controlled Entities.” He served as a commentator for two events at New York University Law School: one on constitutionalism, the other on the routinization of adjudication in complex international governance regimes. In addition, Professor Alvarez also served as a panelist during the International Law Weekend in New York, speaking on “The United States and the Future of the UN.”
George Bermann ’75 LL.M., the Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law and the Walter Gellhorn Professor of Law, continues to serve as chief reporter for the American Law Institute Restatement Third, the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration, as well as chief reporter for the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice project on the Administrative Law of the European Union. Professor Bermann is also serving as president of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Paris.
In September, Professor Bermann organized and moderated a panel on transatlantic regulatory convergence at the ABA International Law Section meeting in Brussels. In October, he spoke on the recognition and enforcement of U.S. class actions abroad at the International Bar Association meeting and was a panelist (with Petros Mavroidis, theEdwin B. Parker Professor of Foreign and Comparative Law) on restatements and principles in the ALI’s international law activities at Columbia Law School‘s European Reunion in London.
In November, he will speak on “The Rise of Transnational Networks” at a conference at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas. The following month, he will deliver the address for the inauguration of the Robert Casad chair in comparative law at the University of Kansas School of Law in Lawrence, Kan.
Finally, Prof. Bermann was named a senior fellow of the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice.
The newly retired Barbara Black, George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History, continues with her scholarly research and writing, including an article titled “A Constitutional History of 17th-Century Massachusetts Bay” and a study of contracts scholars Samuel Williston and Arthur Corbin. Among her forthcoming essays are “Friedrich Kessler,” which will appear in the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, and an essay on Justice John Rutledge, forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Associate Professor Christina Burnett served as a commentator on a panel titled Thomas Jefferson and the Rights of Citizens on Constitution Day, Sept. 17, at Princeton University. Also in September, she presented her paper “A Clash of Constitutionalism: The Conflict over the Platt Amendment, 1900-1901” at the NYU Legal History Colloquium. She also spoke on the paper at a Columbia Law School faculty workshop.
Michael Doyle, the Harold Brown Professor of International and Public Affairs, of Law, and of Political Science, delivered the Chairman’s Welcome at the UN Democracy Fund’s colloquium to celebrate the International Day of Democracy at the UN in September. Also that month, Prof. Doyle was at the Carnegie Institution in New York, exchanging views on his newest book on preventative war, Striking First, with Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School. In October, Professor Doyle gave the Harold Jacobson Memorial Lecture at the University of Michigan, which was titled “The UN Charter: A Global Constitution?” In November, he will present his policy paper “Global Democratization” at the World Economic Forum in Dubai.
Jeffrey Fagan, Professor of Law and Public Health, presented a paper in September at the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies titled “Legitimacy and Cooperation: Why Do People Help the Police Fight Crime?” Also in September, he testified before the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment.
In October, Prof. Fagan presented at a roundtable on the future of juvenile justice that was convened by The Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton. His article, “Crime and Neighborhood Change,” will be published in November by the National Academy of Science. Also in November, Professor Fagan will present papers on incarceration and crime and on policing and crime at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology.
This fall, he was appointed to the American Law Institute’s Ad Hoc Review Committee on Capital Punishment, as well as to the Governor’s Task Force on Juvenile Justice for New York State.
Robert Ferguson, the George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature, and Criticism, will be a keynote speaker at the University of Illinois’ conference called Lincoln Bicentennial—Lincoln Then, Lincoln Now. He will also be a member of a colloquium titled Lincoln and Cultural Value in November. His topic is “Hearing Lincoln and the Making of Eloquence,” and his talk and subsequent essay will trace the source of the speaking power of “our most eloquent president” to his career as a 19th-century lawyer. Prof. Ferguson also will take up the nature of eloquence during his era against our current suspicion of eloquence in national debate. Lincoln’s career depended entirely on his success as a platform speaker, and that success has much to tell us about the nature of eloquence then and now. Before his presentation, Prof. Ferguson will appear on the talk/discussion program “Focus 580” on WILL Radio with host David Inge.
Adjunct Professor Alejandro Garrospoke at the September conference organized by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in New York called ICC Arbitration Today: Bridging the Cultural Gap in International Arbitration, where he shared a panel with four other academics from different regions of the world. The panel discussed such issues as how core legal values affect arbitration. Also in September, Prof. Garro presided over an awards ceremony of the first moot court competition organized by the University of Buenos Aires on international commercial arbitration and he delivered a lecture titled “International Commercial Arbitration in Latin America Today.”
In October, Prof. Garro gave a lecture called “Best Practices in Arbitration Proceedings: An Arbitrator’s Viewpoint,” and presided over a mock arbitration panel at the first conference organized by the International Chamber of Commerce in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, called “Recent Developments on International Commercial Arbitration in Latin America.” Also in October, Professor Garro presented a paper at the annual meeting of the International Bar Association in Buenos Aires in a panel focusing on hot topics in arbitration. His lecture was titled “Update on Arbitration in Mercosur Countries.”
In November, Prof. Garro will deliver a lecture called “Exemption of Damages under the Vienna Sales Convention” at an academic conference and practitioners’ seminar organized by the University of Tokyo School of Law. The seminar is designed to examine the implication of Japan’s recent accession to the Vienna Sales Convention. He also has been appointed as a visiting professor at the University of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) for the spring semester of 2009.
Jane Ginsburg, the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, gave the first lecture in the Willamette University College of Law’s Speaker Series in September. Her topic was “The Author’s Place in the Future of Copyright,” and the lecture will be published in the Willamette Law Review. She was also the Herbert Smith Fellow for the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, where she co-taught a course in international and comparative trademarks law with University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Professor Lionel Bently. She inaugurated a course on that subject with Prof. Bently at Columbia last spring when he was a visiting professor. In October, Prof. Ginsburg spoke on trademarks on the Internet at the Facultes Universitaires St. Louis in Brussels, Belgium. In November, she will participate on a panel at a World Intellectual Property Organization conference on collective management of copyright.
Jack Greenberg ’48, the Alphonse Fletcher Professor of Law, was videotaped for a documentary being made about civil rights leader Whitney Young in September. Also that month, he represented the Law School at the Tony Patino Scholarship Awards dinner.
Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, spoke in August on the unconstitutionality of the IRB laws at the American Psychological Association meeting in Boston. In late September, he spoke on religious liberty at a symposium in Washington, D.C., organized by the Congressional Black Caucus. In October, he gave a talk at Princeton titled “Varieties of Religious Liberty.”
Associate Professor C. Scott Hemphill spoke at an IP/antitrust workshop at University of Minnesota Law School and at a patent law and pharmaceuticals symposium at Rutgers School of Law in September. Also that month, he spoke on NAAG antitrust litigation training in Salt Lake City and at a telecommunications policy research conference in Arlington, Va.
In October, Prof. Hemphill spoke at the CBI Pharmaceutical Congress on Paragraph IV disputes in Philadelphia and at the Columbia Law School Global Reunion in London. In November, he will be at the University of Michigan Law School to attend a law and economics of drug development symposium and at Harvard Law School for a health law policy workshop.
Clarisa Long, the Max Mendel Shaye Professor of Intellectual Property Law,will present her paper “Interest Groups and Institutions in Patent and Copyright” at the University of Minnesota Law School in November.
Curtis Milhaupt, the Fuyo Professor of Japanese Law and the Professor of Comparative Corporate Law, was the keynote speaker in October at the first meeting of the Brazilian Law and Economics Association in Porto Alegre, Brazil. His topic was “Why Law and Economics for Latin America?” On the same trip, Prof. Milhaupt presented his book Law and Capitalism (co-authored with Professor Katharina Pistor) at the Centro Universitario Ritter dos Reis. In December, he will speak at a conference on mergers and acquisitions in Tokyo, along with Justice Jack Jacobs of the Supreme Court of Delaware.
Professor Trevor W. Morrison ’98 was a panelist in September at a symposium on presidential power in the 21st century at Willamette University College of Law, where he spoke about judicial approaches to enemy combatant detention in the war on terror. On Constitution Day, Sept. 17, he joined Professors Philip Bobbitt, Katherine Franke, Jamal Greene, and Theodore Shaw and Dean of Social Justice Initiatives Ellen Chapnick on a panel at the Law School titled “The Constitution: Its Past, Present, and Future.” In October, he presented a new paper titled “Stare Decisis in the Office of Legal Counsel” at UCLA Law School’s Legal Theory Workshop.
Professor Alex Raskolnikovcommented on a paper by Lily Batchelder and Surachai Khitatrakun titled “Dead or Alive: An Investigation of the Incidence of Estate and Inheritance Taxes” at a conference on empirical legal studies at Cornell Law School in September. In November, he will be a presenter at the Closing the Tax Gap Conference at Stanford Law School, and in December, he will present a paper called “Beyond Deterrence: Targeting Tax Enforcement with a Penalty Default” at the tax policy workshop at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Professor Joseph Razgave the keynote address in September to the annual metaethics conference in Madison, Wis., on reason and normativity. The following month, he participated in a panel discussion on human rights at a workshop at Rutgers Law School in Camden. In November, Professor Raz will present and defend a paper on toleration at Chicago Law School.
Peter Strauss, the Betts Professor of Law, is in residence as Senior Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute, where he is pursuing research into the control of political influence over regulatory science. He is also giving occasional seminars on the topic until the fellowship ends in December. Professor Strauss presented this project as a 10-10 workshop to the Columbia faculty on Sept. 9, just before he departed.
Also in September, Professor Strauss discussed the “Rulemaking” chapter of Administrative Law of the European Union, edited by Professor George Bermann et al., on a panel at the meeting of the American Bar Association Section on International Law in Brussels. In October, he participated in a workshop on global administrative law at Sciences Po in Paris, France. He also participated with an International Working Group on governance in the electronic age in Washington, D.C.
In November, Professor Strauss will be a member of a roundtable panel on the regulatory state in London. He also will speak on transparency in rulemaking at a Regulatory Reform panel at the Bertelsman International Conference in Berlin. In addition, Prof. Strauss will discuss contemporary issues in U.S. rulemaking procedure at an international conference on administrative law in Seville, Spain.
Mary Zulack, a clinical professor of law,along with Professor Conrad Johnson and Director of Educational Technology Brian Donnelly, was honored by the Legal Aid Society in October with a Pro Bono Award for work with the Community Development Project of the Legal Aid Office in East Harlem. All three individuals are the force behind the successes of the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic. The ceremony was held in the Great Hall of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and was presided over by Judith S. Kaye, chief judge of the state of New York.
Also that month, at the National Association of Administrative Judiciary Annual Conference and Meeting in New York, Professor Zulack presented an address on technology and access to justice, demonstrating the work of the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic for trial courts in New York. She also focused on the internal (training of ALJs) and external (preparation for litigants) targets of technological projects within administrative tribunals.
SHANGHAI DAILY: Pondering FDI in crisis: Investment could drop or it just might rise
NEW YORK LAW JOURNAL: Missing in Action? Meltdown Raises Doubts About SEC Regulation
NEW REPUBLIC: Indefinite Detention Center
INDEPENDENT: Philip Bobbitt: The flag-waving is over. This is how the president can change the world
GUARDIAN: A nation could be on the verge of its Mandela moment
FINANCIAL TIMES: We need to guard against destructive creation
TAGESSPIEGEL: Why the Critics of Globalization Are Mistaken
NEW YORK TIMES: Questions of Security
ON THE MEDIA: Obama vs. McCain on media policy 2008