On December 3, 2014, Professor John Q. Barrett delivered a lecture, “Justice Jackson, the IMT & OMGUS: Delivering ‘the 
assistance of Counsel’ to the Nuremberg Defendants,” at a conference on “The Defence in International Criminal Courts”, at Philipps Universität in Marburg, Germany. The lecture will be published next year, in a conference volume, by T.M.C. Asser Press.
December 18, 2014
Sheff Comments at Intellectual Property and Competition Workshop
On Wednesday, December 10, Professor Jeremy Sheff served as an invited commentator at
Jeremy Sheff
a workshop on Intellectual Property and Competition convened by the World Intellectual Property Organization at WIPO’s New York Office. The workshop focused on a recent empirical study of patenting by small- to medium-sized entities (SMEs) in the smartphone industry, and was co-sponsored by Fordham Law School’s Center on Law and Information Policy, which performed the study.
December 17, 2014
Perino Authors NY Times Dealbook Column
Professor Michael Perino had a column in Friday, December 12th’s New York Times titled,
“The Gift of Inside Information,” which discusses and criticizes a recent decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A bit:
Insider trading is perhaps our most symbolic white-collar crime. Our ban on the practice expresses our deep social commitment to equality of opportunity; it embodies that peculiarly American revulsion for any special privileges that might be thought to accrue to the wealthy or to the political and social elite. As Preet Bharara, the United States attorney who spearheaded the most recent spate of prosecutions, explained, insider trading tells everybody “that everything is rigged and only people who have a billion dollars and have access to and are best friends with people who are on the boards of directors of major companies … can make a true buck.”
Allowing executives to give away information to whomever they choose so long as they get nothing in return simply makes no sense.
December 15, 2014
Barrett Lecture to Nova Scotia Judiciary
On November 19th, Professor John Q. Barrett delivered a plenary session lecture, “The
John Barrett
Rule of Law at Nuremberg, 1945-1946 (and Its Lessons for Today),” at the Canadian National Judicial Institute‘s Nova Scotia All Courts Education Seminar, held in Halifax. The seminar was a three-day program of judges, from all levels of courts, across the province of Nova Scotia.
December 11, 2014
Warner to Work with UNCITRAL
G. Ray Warner
Professor Ray Warner will be in Vienna, Austria, this week working with United Nations UNCITRAL Working Group VI. Working Group VI is preparing an international model law on secured transactions.
December 5, 2014
American Banker Runs Sovern Op-Ed on St. John’s Arbitration Study
The American Banker ran Professor Jeff Sovern’s op-ed, Arbitration Clauses Trap Consumers with Fine Print, on the St. John’s Arbitration Study. Professor Sovern collaborated on the study with Professors Elayne Greenberg and Paul Kirgis, and the director of St. John’s Institutional Assessment, Yuxiang Liu. The full study can be found here.
Jeff Sovern
Elayne Greenberg
Paul Kirgis
December 2, 2014
Cleveland Plain Dealer Reports on St. John’s Arbitration Study
Jeff Sovern
Cleveland Plain Dealer consumer affairs columnist Sheryl Harris reported on the St. John’s arbitration study in her column, Arbitration – what you don’t know about fine print can hurt you: Plain Dealing. Here is an excerpt:
Well, lawyers at St. John’s University Law School recently conducted [a study] and found that even when [consumers] know there’s an arbitration clause in a contract, they often don’t understand what it really means — even when they think they do know.
Researchers showed consumers a standard credit card contract with a binding arbitration clause and then asked them a series of questions.
The findings:
- Most people didn’t realize there was an arbitration clause in the contract.
- Of the 40-odd percent who spotted the clause, almost two-thirds believed – wrongly – that if the disputed amount was too big for small claims court, they could still go to common pleas or federal court.
- Less than 9 percent both spotted the arbitration clause and correctly said it would prevent all consumers from going to [a] court [other than a small claims court] to resolve a dispute.
Remarkably, 87 percent of the 303 people who swore they’d never agreed to a contract that contained an arbitration clause were flat-out wrong
How did researchers know? They asked people if they did business with AT&T Mobility, Sprint, Verizon, PayPal or Skype – companies whose contracts routinely require consumers to agree up front that if they ever have an issue with the company, they can only resolve it through binding arbitration.
“We don’t know about the remaining 13 percent,” says law prof Jeff Sovern, one of the authors of the study. Sovern says the number of people who had unwittingly agreed to mandatory arbitration is likely higher because researchers asked consumers about contracts with those five companies, not about every company they did business with.
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