St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Ray Warner will serve as a delegate of the International Insolvency Institute to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Working Group VI during its meeting at the UN this week.  Working Group VI is preparing a model law of secured transactions as part of UNCITRAL’s work to harmonize and unify the law of international trade.  Among other courses, Professor Warner teaches Secured Transactions and International Business Transactions at the law school.

Professor John Q. Barrett has published an essay on TIME online, “Lawrence Walsh, Iran-Contra Counsel, Played It Straight.”  From 1988-1993, Professor Barrett worked for Judge Walsh as an associate counsel on the Iran/Contra investigations and prosecutions.

John Q. Barrett

Professor Anita Krishnakumar responded to Will Baude’s Washington Post piece on whether legislation passed by unanimous vote should be invalidated or narrowly construed in a post on Rick Hasen’s electionlawblog.   The issue arose out of the Hobby Lobby case that was argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.  Professor Krisknakumar notes,  “Different legislators vote for (or against) a statute for many different reasons, and their final vote tells us nothing about those reasons.”  See the full post here.

Professor Jeff Sovern co-authored an op-ed, Consumer Contracts Should Not Be Secrets, for The Hill’s Congress Blog of the Capitol Hill newspaper with Theresa Amato, executive director of Citizen Works.  The op-ed describes the authors’ quest to determine credit card terms and calls for more transparency of credit card terms.  Sovern and Amato explain:

[W]hen the Illinois legislature considered a bill in 2012 that would require standard form contract terms to be available to consumers on the web, it ran into stiff opposition and the bill died.  The Illinois Retail Merchants Association argued that posting contracts would enable competitors to see them.  Of course, those same competitors should be able to obtain the contracts the way any consumer would now—by agreeing to them.

While many consumers may have little interest in reading contract terms, consumers who do want to know what they are agreeing to – and in many cases the rights they are giving away to their potential detriment — should have the ability to find out before accepting the terms.  Consumer contracts should not be secrets.  Nor should it take hours, much less lawyers, to find them. It should require a mouse click, not a quest.

Professor Sovern was also quoted in a Fox Business News article, Medical Card Pays for Endorsements.  The article notes that the CareCredit medical card, which pays for most endorsements of  its credit card and has been fined by regulators for deceptive marketing, is supported by over 100 professional health care groups, including the American Dental Association.  Professor Sovern commented that “[the paid endorsements are] troubling because medical professionals tend to build up trust.  Patients might trust their provider to steer them into the best deal, without knowing that a paid endorsement influenced the provider’s choice.”

On Friday, March 14th, Rosemary Salomone, the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law, served as discussant on two panels at the Council for European Studies’ International Conference of Europeanists in Washington, D.C.  The first was a panel of paper presentations on the subject of “Educating Migrants: Money, Institutions, and Impact.”  The second was a discussion on “immigrants and emigrants” from Sabina Donati’s book, “A Political History of National Citizenship and Identity in Italy: 1861-1950” (Stanford University Press, 2013).

Rosemary Salomone

Dean Harold F. McNiece Professor of Law Cheryl L. Wade posted ‘Today’s Headlines: The Public Does Not Trust Big Business” on the Corporate Justice Blog on March 14th, 2014.  Professor Wade has been a regular contributor to the blog since 2010. In this most recent piece, she writes

More than ten years after the massive fraud that brought down companies like Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and Tyco, badly governed and socially irresponsible companies continue to harm workers, consumers and communities.  This is true even after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.  In Enron’s aftermath, there was a great deal of discussion about whether the company was an outlier.  Observers tossed around the famously overused bad-apples metaphor.  Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco, etc., were just a few bad apples, the argument went.  Yet, in 2014, we continue to grapple with what seems to be inadequate governance and deplorable social irresponsibility that too frequently occurs.

Christine Lazaro, Director of the Law School’s Securities Arbitration Clinic, presented at a NYS Bar CLE program today, entitled, Securities Arbitration and Mediation 2014: Telling Your Story, on the panel entitled “Panel Selection and Discovery Issues”.  She also submitted written materials for the program–two articles that she co-wrote with Paul Radvany and updated from the last program, “The Arbitrator Selection Process” & “Keys to Successful Motions to Compel”, and another article she co-wrote with Brent Burns for this year, “Special Considerations in Simplified Arbitration Cases”.