Official Blog of St. John's University School of Law Faculty
Professor Deepa Varadarajan has been invited to present her paper, Improvement Doctrines, at the 2013 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. This marks the third year in a row a St. John’s Law professor will present a paper at the Junior Faculty Forum.
On April 13, Dean Cunningham spoke at the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning’s conference, Law Teaching for Adjunct Faculty, held at Western State College of Law in Fullerton, CA. His topic was hiring, supervising, and collaborating with adjunct faculty.
On Friday, April 12, Professor Michael Perino will present a paper entitled Setting Attorneys’ Fees in Securities Class Actions: An Empirical Assessment at the 19th Annual Symposium of the Institute for Law and Economic Policy in Naples, Florida. Co-written with University of Texas Law Professors Lynn Baker and Charles Silver, the paper analyzes, among other things, the effect that ex ante fee agreements have on fee awards in securities class actions. Papers from the conference will be published in an upcoming issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review. The paper is not yet available on SSRN.
More information on the symposium is available here.
The St. John’s Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, in partnership with the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development, the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), the Asian American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and Latino Justice/PRLDEF is hosting a symposium this Friday, April 5, from 8 a.m. – 7:30 p.m. at the Law School. The full title of the symposium is Criminal Justice in the 21st Century: The Challenge to Protect Individual Freedoms, Civil Rights and Our Safety. Speakers include federal judges, state senators, and leading civil rights advocates. More information is available here.
.
On March 15, 2013, Assistant Professor Adam S. Zimmerman spoke at the University of Cincinnati College of Law’s 26th Annual Corporate Law Symposium. This year’s symposium was entitled Addressing the Challenges of Protecting the Public: Enforcement Practices and Policies in the Post-Financial Crisis Era. You can find out more about the symposium here.
Adam appeared on a panel focusing on the policy implications of public enforcement and presented a paper called Mass Settlement Rivalries. Here is the abstract:
From cases involving securities fraud to Ponzi schemes to consumer scams, private attorneys in class actions and civil bankruptcies increasingly compete with federal prosecutors, agencies, and state attorneys general, for the same funds, from the same defendant, for the same harm, and often, on behalf of the same groups of people. To some, government attorneys offer less expensive and more accountable representation for victims of widely disbursed harm. To others, politically insulated private attorneys in class actions and bankruptcies offer more effective representation for parties. But few have examined the dynamic way public and private settlements impact each other when they are implemented at the same time.
This Article argues that dueling public and private settlements offer several potential advantages—including more efficient representation, more oversight, and more complete forms of compensation to different subgroups of victims. In their current form, however, settlement rivalries fall far short of these goals. Among other things, rival settlements: (1) waste resources as duplicative actions proceed on separate tracks without coordinated judicial oversight, (2) introduce new uncertainty into litigation financing by unpredictably affecting the number of victims who ultimately participate in a class settlement, and accordingly, the fees that private attorneys recover, and (3) confuse unrepresented victims with separate, rival settlement offers.
Accordingly, this Article recommends three reforms that tap settlement rivalries’ potential benefits. First, courts should formally or informally coordinate review over dueling public and private settlements. Second, courts should streamline notice and opt-out provisions to reduce victim confusion or unintended waivers of rights. Third, government lawyers should adopt the distribution guidelines proposed by the American Law Institute in large-scale litigation to consistently balance victims competing interests and reduce strategic behavior among parties.
On Friday, October 19, St. John’s will host a symposium on the relationship between bankruptcy and race. Co-sponsored by the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, Center for Bankruptcy Studies and The Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development, the symposium is centered on the findings of a recent study by Professors Jean Braucher, Dov Cohen and Robert Lawless: the debtor’s race appears to affect the advice that lawyers give about whether to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Is this finding correct? And if so, what are its implications for bankruptcy law and policy? The symposium brings together leading bankruptcy, empirical, and race scholars to address these questions through commentary on the Braucher study and a reply from the primary study authors.
You can find a full list of speakers and the schedule here.
St. John’s Fall Faculty Workshop Series begins on Monday September 17 with Matthew Bruckner, a Research Professor at St. John’s. Matt will present his paper Virtue in Bankruptcy. Here is the abstract:
This article offers a new positive theory of bankruptcy law based on virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is one of the three major schools of moral philosophy, and is rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle, among others. Virtue ethics appears to offer a better account of bankruptcy law than competing theories for at least two reasons. First, both virtue ethics and bankruptcy law are focused on concerns such as fairness and justice that underlie common notions of morality. Second, virtue ethics’ decision-making process appears comparable to how bankruptcy judges decide cases, particularly where the bankruptcy court’s equitable jurisdiction or discretionary powers are implicated. Other theories have failed to provide an adequate positive theory of bankruptcy law and this article seeks to fill that gap.
The workshop begins with lunch at 12:45 P.M. and will run until 2:00 P.M. You can find the full schedule of fall workshops here.
This semester, the Center for Law and Religion (CLR) inaugurated an exciting new course, “Colloquium in Law: Law and Religion.” The seminar, taught jointly by CLR Director Mark L. Movsesian and Assistant Director Marc O. DeGirolami, gave selected St. John’s Law School students an opportunity to study cutting-edge issues in law and religion with some of the most prominent thinkers in the field, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
The seminar was structured as a series of workshops in which speakers presented papers to the students and faculty from St. John’s and other universities. The papers addressed a variety of topics and perspectives. Michael W. McConnell (Stanford Law School) critiqued the Supreme Court’s free-exercise jurisprudence, demonstrating the tensions in the Court’s landmark decision in Employment Division v. Smith. Philip Hamburger (Columbia Law School) discussed the history of freedom of conscience, focusing on medieval thinkers like Aquinas and Bonaventure, and M. Cathleen Kaveny (University of Notre Dame Law School) critiqued a classic contracts case, Watts v. Watts, from the perspective of moral theology. Two papers were comparative. Joseph Weiler (NYU School of Law) addressed the recent European Court of Human Rights decision in the Italian crucifix case, Lautsi v. Italy, and Ayelet Shachar (University of Toronto Faculty of Law) discussed religious family-law arbitration in Canada and the UK.
You can find more information on the colloquium here.
The Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s School of Law and the Department of Law at the Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA) have announced an academic conference:
State-Sponsored Religious Displays in the U.S. and Europe
Taking place on Friday, June 22, 2012, the conference will bring together American and European law and religion scholars to discuss state-sponsored religious displays from a variety of perspectives. The conference proceedings will be in English and Italian with simultaneous translation. Selected papers will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies.
Conference Introduction
Panel 1: Cultural or Religious? Understanding Symbols in Public Places
Panel 2: Lautsi v. Italy and the Margin of Appreciation
Panel 3: State-Sponsored Religious Displays in Comparative Perspective
Conference Conclusion
Location
LUMSA, Complesso del Giubileo
via di Porta Castello, 44 – Roma
Registration
Please register to attend the conference by e-mail to areacomunicazione@lumsa.it
More Information
Monica Lugato | LUMSA Department of Law
m.lugato@lumsa.it
Mark L. Movsesian | St. John’s School of Law Mark.Movsesian@stjohns.edu
