Official Blog of St. John's University School of Law Faculty
Professor Cheryl L. Wade will present a paper entitled “The African
![wade[1]](https://stjlawfaculty.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/wade1.jpg?w=780)
Cheryl Wade
American Consumer and Predatory Lending” at a conference organized by Indiana Tech Law School and Attorney General Greg Zoeller on November 18, 2015. In her paper, she explores a range of contexts in which African American consumers face economically debilitating discrimination in the mortgage and auto loan contexts.
Professor Anita Krishnakumar presented her work in progress, 
Reconsidering Substantive Canons, on Monday, November 9, at Cardozo Law School’s faculty workshop series. The paper discusses the Roberts Court’s use of substantive canons over its first six terms and argues that the empirical evidence suggests that many of scholars’ conventional assumptions about this category of interpretive canons are wrong, or at least overstated.
Professor Rosemary Salomone’s commentary, “Public Single-Sex Schools: What Oprah Knew,” has been published on line in
![salomone[1]](https://stjlawfaculty.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/salomone1.jpg?w=780)
Rosemary Salomone
Teachers College Record. The commentary discusses the U.S. Department of Education’s recent ruling dismissing a Title IX complaint filed almost 20 years ago by civil liberties groups challenging the legality of the Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem. It recalls the school’s first graduation ceremony where Oprah Winfrey as the commencement speaker affirmed the merits of single-sex schooling especially for disadvantaged students.
Jeff Sovern
The American Banker has run Professor Jeff Sovern’s op-ed, CFPB Arbitration Plan Provokes Dubious Industry Claims. Sovern notes:
[C]ompanies can use class action waivers to block consumer protection laws unless consumer protection laws find a way to block class action waivers.
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Last month, the bureau made public a proposal to block class action waivers in arbitration clauses. A leading advocate for arbitration in the financial industry, Alan Kaplinsky, responded with [a] forecast of how the industry would respond: “We firmly believe that, should the CFPB enact its proposal to ban class action waivers, most companies will abandon arbitration with the result that arbitration will no longer be available as a quick, efficient and inexpensive way of resolving disputes.”
But if the industry truly believes that arbitration is so much better than litigation at resolving disputes, shouldn’t it prefer arbitration to litigation for resolving individual disputes, where there is not a threat of a class action? Or should we be shocked, shocked, to discover the industry’s love of arbitration is about barring class actions?
Jeff Sovern
The Los Angeles Times quoted Professor Jeff Sovern in an article titled Using TiVo? Your personal choices may be going straight to advertisers. Consumer columnist David Lazarus explains:
If you’re a TiVo user, your digital video recorder may be ratting you out to advertisers.
In the latest example of consumer privacy being threatened by Big Data, TiVo’s number-crunching subsidiary this week announced a partnership with media heavyweight Viacom that helps advertisers target TV viewers with specific commercials.
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Is this arrangement fair to TiVo users? They apparently have no choice except to cancel their service. TiVo’s privacy policy states that the company “may work with third-party advertising companies that collect and use information to deliver more relevant advertising.”Jeff Sovern, a professor at St. John’s University School of Law in New York, called this an “unfortunate” way of getting subscribers to agree to having their personal information exploited for marketing purposes.
“Unless TiVo actually makes an additional effort to tell its customers what it is doing, probably many will think that information about their viewing choices is not being given to others, when it is,” he said.
Elayne Greenberg
On November 9, 2015, Professor Elayne E. Greenberg presented “Everything You Wanted to Know About Bankruptcy Mediation” to bankruptcy practitioners at the TMA NextGen Leadership Conference. The conference was held at the offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
John Barrett
Professor John Q. Barrett has, in this 70th anniversary year of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, given a number of recent lectures regarding the Nuremberg trials:
Professor Barrett is biographer of U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) and writer of The Jackson List.
Professors Marc DeGirolami and Mark Movsesian will present papers later this week as part of the
University of Notre Dame Law School’s annual Law Review symposium, which this year commemorates the 50th anniversary of Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II’s declaration on religious liberty:
The Symposium will begin with an address from Bishop Daniel E. Flores on Thursday, November 5. Bishop Flores currently serves as the Bishop of Brownsville, Texas.
The Symposium panelists will present their works on Friday, November 6. Panelists include
Mark Movsesian
Professors Thomas Berg of the University of St. Thomas School of Law, Paul Horwitz of the University of Alabama School of Law, Christopher Lund of Wayne State University Law School, Mark Movsesian and Marc DeGirolami of St. John’s University School of Law, Brett Scharffs of Brigham Young University Law School, Steven Smith of the University of San Diego School of Law, Anna Su of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Richard Garnett and Phillip Muñoz of Notre Dame Law School. The panels will be moderated by Judge Richard Sullivan of the Southern District of New York.
The Symposium will feature a keynote address from John H. Garvey, President of The Catholic University of America.
Papers will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Notre Dame Law Review. Details about the symposium are here.
Professor Lazaro was quoted in The Street on shared responsibility defenses raised by brokerage firms during arbitrations. The article covered a panel on the topic from the PIABA Annual Meeting in late October on which Professor Lazaro participated:
Christine Lazaro, director of the Securities Arbitration Clinic at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., told an audience of Piaba members that even in cases where salespeople have put customers into inappropriate investments, financial firms are arguing that the client — not the broker — has failed at their duty to properly monitor an account.
That makes no sense, she said, because brokers have an obligation to recommend suitable investments in the first place. How can vigilant monitoring help the investor who started off with a portfolio that was never right for them?
Professor Christopher Borgen will be speaking at the United Nations this Thursday, at the invitation 
of the Polish Mission to the UN to address interested UN Ambassadors and Legal Advisers on a panel about “non-recognition of illegal situations in international law.” Professor Borgen’s presentation is related to his work as the Co-Rapporteur of the International Law Association’s Study Group on Recognition and Non-recognition. He will be discussing the domestic legal effects of governments refusing to recognize seemingly illegal situations such as the annexation of territory and the invasion of one country by another.
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