St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

On February 17th, Professor Christine Lazaro presented to the Oregon Bar Association Securities Regulation Section on the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest, along with Hasan Ibrahim, Chief Legal Officer at Prudential Advisors. They provided the Section with an overview of the regulation and discussed how it is being implemented by brokerage firms as well as the role of the regulators in the early stages of the regulation’s implementation. 

In January 2021, Professor Lazaro presented at the AALS Annual Meeting’s Section on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation panel, “Working in a New World – Employee and Worker Benefits Re-examined in a Time of Crisis.” Professor Lazaro discussed a working paper that examines the regulation of IRAs, specifically when handled by securities brokers. 

Between September 2020 and January 2021, Professor Lazaro moderated a four-part webinar series for the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association (PIABA) on the Fundamentals of FINRA Arbitration. The program covered all aspects of the FINRA arbitration process, from vetting cases to the arbitration hearing. 

In October 2020, Professor Lazaro moderated a panel at PIABA’s Annual Meeting entitled, “Life under Regulation Best Interest.” The panel examined the implementation of Regulation Best Interest. Professor Lazaro authored the article An Overview of the Regulation Best Interest Rule Package for the program materials. The article was also published in the PIABA Bar Journal. Additionally, Professor Lazaro’s students, Cameron Michelson and Theodore Ryan, co-authored the article Regulation Best Interest: FINRA and SEC Guidance, which was also included in the program materials.   

Professor John Q. Barrett published a short essay, “RBG and the Girls,” in the current New York State Bar Association Journal (Jan./Feb. 2021).  It describes how he, at the Second Circuit Conference in 2018, witnessed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interact with three star-struck girls in the conference center’s back hallway.

Click here to get to SSRN, for an abstract and to download the essay.  It is also available here on the NYSBA website.

This photograph, taken by Professor Barrett, accompanies the essay:

Professor Renee Nicole Allen is an invited speaker at the upcoming virtual roundtable, “Taking Our Space: Women of Color and Antiracism in Legal Academia.” The roundtable features women of color law school professors and deans. It is scheduled for March 5, 2021 from 12:30pm-2:00pm EST.

To join the roundtable, please register here.

In conjunction with the virtual event, Professor Allen’s article, Our Collective Work, Our Collective Strength, will be published in Volume 73 of the Rutgers University Law Review. 

On February 4th, Professor Ray Warner delivered the keynote address at the Attorney General Alliance Africa judicial conference on the new insolvency framework in Abuja, Nigeria.  Warner spoke (virtually) about the main recent global trends in corporate insolvency law.

Marissa Jackson Sow, who is joining the Law School in June as an Assistant Professor of Law, will be publishing her forthcoming article, Whiteness as Contract, in the Washington and Lee Law Review. An abstract of the article follows. Congratulations and welcome to incoming Prof. Jackson Sow!

Abstract:

The year 2020 forced scholars, policymakers, and activists alike to grapple with the impact of “twin pandemics”—the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated Black communities in the United States, and the scourge of structural and physical state violence against Black people—upon American society. As atrocious acts of anti-Black violence and harassment by law enforcement officers and white civilians are captured on recording devices, the gap between the human and civil rights to which Black people are entitled and their living conditions is readily apparent. Less visible human rights abuses, too, camouflaged as private commercial matters, and thus out of the reach of the state, are also increasingly exposed as social and financial inequalities have become ever starker. These abuses are not effectively reached by antidiscrimination law, leaving Black people with rights, but no remedies, as they are forced to navigate a degraded existence suspended somewhere citizen and foreigner, and more importantly, between life and death. 

This Article proposes a departure from reliance upon the extant antidiscrimination legal frameworks in the United States, offering up a theory of whiteness as contract as a new prism of analysis for the structural and physical violence that those raced as Black endure at the express direction of the state. Despite federal law establishing formal racial equality with respect to citizenship, and with citizenship, the rights to contract and to property, the terms of America’s social contract set forth that Black people lack contractual capacity with the state, the white body politic, and its individual members. Under the terms of this contract for whiteness for which those raced as white have bargained, Black people lack capacity to negotiate, occupy, or exercise a reliable authority over property. Moreover, whenever Black people are found to be in trespass on white property, they have no expectation of physical integrity, liberty, or life—or of remedies for breaches thereof. 

An end to anti-Black state violence requires the revocation of the terms of whiteness and the institution of a new social contract in which Black people are accorded full political personhood, and full citizenship, complete with full contracting capacity and authority and full protection of their contracts and proprietorship. Scholars and advocates committed to ending structural and physical anti-Black brutality may use the new framework proposed in this Article to explore new advocacy strategies and to consider meaningful racial justice remedies.

During his Fall 2020 research leave, Professor John Q. Barrett also participated virtually in these symposia and events—

• On September 9, he participated, with Dean Michael Simons and Professors Marc DeGirolami and Anita Krishnakumar, in a SJU “Law Matters” discussion of leading decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019-2020 term.

• On September 15, Professor Barrett spoke about “Robert H. Jackson in Washington, D.C.,” at the Robert H. Jackson Center’s virtual gala.

• On October 7, he spoke on “U.S. Supreme Court, October Term 2019,” in a Federal Bar Association program (which typically is held at the U.S. Courthouse in Central Islip, NY).

• On October 21, he spoke on the Supreme Court’s Ray v. Blair (1952) decision and Justice Jackson’s views on the Electoral College, in a Robert H. Jackson Center webinar.

• Also in October, he was part of a panel on “Checks and Balances in Times of Crisis,” recorded in advance and played at the Federal Bar Council’s Virtual Fall Bench & Bar Retreat (which typically occurs in person in the Poconos).

• On November 9, he participated in a panel discussion, “The Audacity of Justice: Remembering Nuremberg,” part of a multi-day online program, “A Warning from History?: The Nuremberg Trials 75 Years Later,” hosted by the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, IL.

• On November 18, Professor Barrett spoke in tribute to Whitney R. Harris, a 1945-1946 member of the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, in a Twentieth Anniversary Virtual Gala hosted by the Whitney R. Harris Institute at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.

• On November 20, Professor Barrett spoke online on “The Allied Consensus Model, at Nuremberg and for States in Our Time,” at “The Lessons of Nuremberg,” an International Research and Practice Forum sponsored by the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow, Russian Federation.

• In November, Professor Barrett participated, with many others ranging from world leaders to students, in a videotaped group reading of U.S. Chief of Counsel Robert H. Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg.  This video was released by the Robert H. Jackson Center on November 21, the 75^th anniversary of this historic event:

• On December 8, Professor Barrett spoke about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at an online tribute program hosted by the Nassau County Bar Association, Mineola, NY.