Last week, Professor Jeff Sovern spoke at the 17th Conference of the International Association of Consumer Law at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, Indianapolis, Indiana.

The IACL brings together consumer law professors from all over the world and this year’s edition included professors from New Zeeland, Japan, Africa, South America, Australia, and Hong Kong, as well as the United States.  Sovern’s talk was titled “Do Markets Provide Consumer Protection?”

Professor Sovern’s recent op-eds include a June 11 Bloomberg Law Insight essay headlined CFPB Should Cut Back on Texts, Emails Debt Collectors Could Send, and a May 16 piece in The Conversation, which was reprinted widely, including by the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, and Fast Company, captioned Congress is considering privacy legislation – be afraid.

Bloomberg quoted Sovern in an April 18 article headlined Guns, Priests, and Drugs: New Targets for Old Consumer Laws and AdWeek quoted him on February 4 in an article, As Businesses Prep for California’s Data Privacy Law, They’re Also Fighting to Change It.

Sovern’s work also elicited attention in other forums. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cited two articles Sovern co-authored at various points in its proposed debt collection regulations. And in the last fortnight, two of his blog posts prompted news coverage by an industry publication (here and here).

 

Professor Ann Goldweber moderated the panel “Working with Clients when Capacity is an Issue” at the Annual NYC Elder Abuse Conference at the New School on June 5, 2019.

 

The panel focused on the attorney’s ethical duty to evaluate a client’s mental capacity and ability to understand the legal proceedings and assist in their representation. The discussion also evaluated least restrictive alternatives when capacity is an issue, including Supported Decision Making. Panelists included Professor Rebekah Diller, Co-Director, Cardozo Bet Tzedek Legal Services, Benjamin Cardozo School of Law and Donna Dougherty, Attorney-in-Charge, Legal Services for the Elderly in Queens. St. John’s University School of Law was a co-sponsor of the conference, with 250 attendees.

On June 10, 2019, Professors Ann Goldweber and Gina Calabrese were  honored for their role as founders of Queens CLARO (The Civil Legal Advice and Resource Office).

Queens CLARO provides pro bono legal services to low-income residents representing themselves in consumer debt lawsuits. The program was started eleven years ago Professors Calabrese and Goldweber, along with the Honorable Bernice Siegal (former Chief Administrative Judge, Queen’s Civil Court), The Honorable April Newbauer (former Attorney-in-Charge, Queens Legal Aid Society, Civil) and Mark Weliky (Director, Queens Volunteer Lawyers Project).

Since that time, Queens CLARO has provided services to 10,400 people. St. John’s law students have played a prominent role in assisting volunteer lawyers since the inception of the program. St. John’s alumnus Christopher Newton ’13 was also honored for his role as student coordinator.  The award was presented by the Honorable Edwina Mendelson, Deputy Chief Administrative Judge, Office for Justice Initiatives, at the Feerick Center for Social Justice, Fordham Law School.

The United States Commission on Civil Rights repeatedly quotes and cites the work of Professor Anna Roberts in its new report “Collateral Consequences: The Crossroads of Punishment, Redemption, and the Effects on Communities.”

Professor Roberts gave testimony before the Commission in 2017, and the report draws on her articles Casual Ostracism: Jury Exclusion on the Basis of Criminal Convictions and Disparately Seeking Jurors: Disparate Impact and the (Mis)Use of Batson.

Professor Rosemary Salomone‘s commentary, “Court Decision on Language Provokes Cries of Neo-Colonialism,” published in the June 8th issue of University World News, was cited by the petitioners in a “letter of protest” filed with the Court.

The petition asks the Court, “in the spirit of dialogue and armed with the conviction that history should record all sides,” to reconsider “matters of public interest” that the Court had failed to scrutinize in their recent denial of a rehearing “with finality. “

Professor Rosemary Salomone‘s commentary, “Court Decision on Language Provokes Cries of Neo-Colonialism,” was published in the June 8th issue of University World News.

The commentary examines the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of the Philippines denying “with finality” a rehearing on the Court’s prior decision upholding the Commission on Higher Education’s Memorandum Order removing Filipino language and literature from the university core curriculum. The plan’s intent was to open the way for higher level language competencies, preparing students for the global knowledge economy presumably in English. The petitioners, including professors from more than 40 colleges and universities, students, writers, artists, lawmakers, and cultural activists, plan to again request a rehearing despite the Court’s definitive language.

Both the Order and the Court’s ruling have sparked heated debate, plumbing the depths of nationalism, globalization, the legacy of colonialism, and the country’s conflicted relationship with English which the American occupiers used as a tool of cultural conditioning. Using Facebook and other social media, some charge the Commission and the Court with “kill[ing] the nation’s soul” and the people’s “capacity to think freely” while others point to Filipino as the main cause of “economic stagnation” and English as the language of “business and technology.” The debate is significant, and the Order somewhat baffling, given the country’s turn toward extreme nationalism, confused with patriotism.

In the end, Professor Salomone concludes that, regardless of the constitutional merits of the petitioners’ claims, their concerns are not unreasonable, nor are they inconsequential. Eliminating Filipino language and literature from the core curriculum weakens the intellectual worth of the language and its unifying role as a symbol of national identity. Without denying the role that English has played in driving the Philippine economy and its business processing industry, the Commission’s Order demands reconsideration at least as a matter of policy.

The commentary draws from a book project on global English, identity, and linguistic justice that Professor Salomone is completing for Oxford University Press.

On Saturday June 1^st, Professor Eva Subotnik participated as an invited fellow in the 2019 Symposium by the University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law (IPIL), held each year in Santa Fe.

The topic for this year was “What’s Real? – IP from a Property Theory Perspective.”  Symposium presenters included Professors Michael A. Carrier, TJ Chiang, Brett Frischmann, Irina Manta, and Carol M. Rose.  In addition to Professor Subotnik, the Symposium fellows included Professors Robert Heverly, Alina Ng, and Deepa Varadarajan.  More information about the Symposium can be found here and here.