Category Archives: U.Miami

Jan Paulsson Event This Afternoon

We're doing a big bash at 4:30pm this afternoon in the Lowe Art museum to celebrate Prof. Jan Paulsson's taking up of the Michael Klein chair. Jan is going to give a lecture on “Moral Hazard and Dispute Resolution” and then there will be a nice reception.

As one of the people who helped set up the Arbitration Center, and an active participant in recruiting Jan — who is a tremendous asset to the law school — I'm happy about this.

jpaulsson2.JPGThe University of Miami School of Law will host a celebration in honor of the appointment of Jan Paulsson as the Michael Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair. Paulsson, who joined the law school in the academic year 2009-10, is head of the public international law and international arbitration groups at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, and has had his professional base in Paris for 30 years. He is currently the President of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal and the London Court of International Arbitration, and he was recently elected president of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA) and vice president of the International Chamber of Commerce International Court of Arbitration.

The event will take place Thursday, April 29, 2010, at the UM Lowe Art Museum. A dedication ceremony will take place at 4:30 p.m. with a lecture followed by a reception.

In his post, Paulsson heads a newly established concentration in international arbitration at the University of Miami School of Law.

“Jan Paulsson is one of the world’s leading international arbitrators, and having him at Miami reflects our commitment to being the preeminent academic center for the subject,” said Dean Patricia D. White.

Paulsson has served as arbitrator in over 500 arbitrations in Europe, Asia, the United States and Africa. He has also appeared before a great variety of international tribunals, including the International Court of Justice and the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Paulsson holds an A.B. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Diplome d’études superieures spécialisées from the University of Paris. His recent books include Denial of Justice in International Arbitration, published by Cambridge University Press, and The Idea of Arbitration, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Michael R. Klein, JD ’66, established the Michael Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair in 2005. He is Chairman of the Board of CoStar Group, Inc., a public company he co-founded that provides 24/7 internet access to information about 70 billion square feet of commercial, retail, industrial and multi-family structures. Klein, who is involved in a wide array of organizations and activities, serves on the School of Law’s Visiting Committee and is a former trustee of the university. He was named as the first Alumnus in Residence by the UM Alumni Association and has been honored as the Distinguished Alumni Lecturer.

Posted in Arbitration Law, U.Miami | Comments Off on Jan Paulsson Event This Afternoon

Larry Tribe Will Be Our Commencement Speaker

Looks like we're giving Larry Tribe an honorary degree and he's speaking to our grads:

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School. He is widely recognized as a liberal scholar of constitutional law and a practitioner before the U.S. Supreme Court. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart from 1967-1968 and became an assistant professor of law at Harvard in 1968, where has taught ever since. He is the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a treatise in that field, and has argued before the Supreme Court more than 30 times. He taught President Obama at Harvard Law School. He is currently on leave from Harvard to fulfill his new duties as senior counselor for access to justice at the U.S. Justice Department. In that position, Tribe will develop ways to improve legal services for the poor, find alternatives to court-intensive litigation, and strengthen the fairness and independence of domestic courts. He will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws and will speak to graduates at the School of Law commencement exercise on Sunday, May 16 at 2 p.m..

Posted in U.Miami | 3 Comments

U. Miami Law Brags About Recent Faculty Hires

The University of Miami School of Law sent out a deservedly self-congratulatory announcement bragging about our new hires:

Four legal scholars – Lawrence Lokken, Mary Ann Franks, Tamara Rice Lave, and Carrie Bettinger-Lopez — will join UM Law next year, bringing with them a rich array of professional and scholarly experiences. Experts in taxation, human rights, criminal law, and law and gender, these recent hires represent a diversity of interests that will enrich the Law School’s research and teaching enterprises.

Lawrence Lokken is the Hugh Culverhouse Eminent Scholar in Taxation at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and has taught at the University of Georgia and New York University. He has written numerous articles and books in the field of taxation, including Fundamentals of International Taxation, Federal Taxation of Employee Compensation, and Federal Taxation of Income, Estates & Gifts.

Lokken joined the University of Florida Law School in 1974 and was named the Hugh Culverhouse Eminent Scholar in Taxation in 1994. He has served as a Research Consultant for Harvard Law School’s International Tax Program and on the United Nations Ad Hoc Group of Experts on International Tax Matters. He received his J.D. degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Minnesota and a B.A., cum laude, from Augsburg College.

Mary Anne Franks is the Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2007, where she was Senior Executive Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender and an Executive Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. She received her D.Phil. in 2004 and her M.Phil. in 2001 from Oxford University, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. Her dissertation focused on philosophical, legal, and psychoanalytic constructions of sexual violence. She graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Philosophy and English from Loyola University New Orleans in 1999.

Before coming to Chicago, Franks taught courses in social theory and philosophy at Harvard University, where she received four Derek Bok Distinction in Teaching Awards. She has also worked as a senior consultant for The SAB Group, conducting negotiation skills seminars for lawyers and other professionals. Her research and teaching interests include law and gender, free speech, cyberlaw, and international and domestic criminal law.

Tamara Rice Lave is a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She also served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Navarro in Pamplona, Spain where she taught a course on substantive U.S. criminal law. Lave received her Ph.D. degree in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and her J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, where she served as Associate Editor of the Stanford Law Review.

Lave’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, jurisprudence and law and philosophy. She has published several articles, including “Only Yesterday: The Rise and Fall of Twentieth Century Sexual Psychopath Law” and “Breaking the Cycle of Despair: Street Children in Guatemala City.”

Carrie Bettinger-Lopez currently teaches in the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. She helps to coordinate the Human Rights in the U.S. Project and Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers’ Network, a network of over 100 public interest lawyers who are actively involved in domestic human rights strategies. Her research and teaching focuses on international human rights law and advocacy, including the implementation of human rights norms at the domestic level. Her main regional focus is the United States and Latin America, and her principal areas of interest include violence against women, gender and race discrimination, and immigrants’ rights.

Prior to joining Columbia, Bettinger-López worked as a Skadden Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, Women’s Rights Project, where she focused on employment and housing discrimination against domestic violence victims and low-wage immigrant women workers. At the ACLU, she filed a landmark case against the United States before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Jessica Gonzales, a domestic violence victim whose three children were killed after police in Colorado failed to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband, and whose constitutional claims against the police were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. Bettinger-López, the Human Rights Clinic, and the ACLU currently represent Gonzales in Jessica Gonzales v. United States.

But we've still got a LOT more slots to fill.

Posted in U.Miami | 7 Comments

UM Foreclosure Fellows in the News

We got some great publicity for the Foreclosure Fellowship program I started early this academic year. But what we really need is money.

Unfortunately, even though everyone loves the program and the participants are doing wonderful things, we haven't found the $150,000+ it would take to run the program next year, even though there will be even more foreclosures. (See, for example, March Foreclosure Activity Highest on Record.)

The good news is that (last I heard) the law school is planning to have a traditional clinic aimed at housing issues, staffed by law students, that will work with lawyers at Legal Services of Greater Miami.

Posted in Econ & Money: Mortgage Mess, U.Miami | 3 Comments

Follow the Bouncing Ball?

According to this unofficial source U.Miami Law's US News Score jumped 11 points this year, raising us to a tie for 60th place. If that's true, it's good news for the school, especially following last year's jump of 11 points. Whatever the actual merits, a 22 point rise in two years will help both student and faculty recruiting, and will be good for student morale.

As I have written before, the idea of ranking, or at least clumping, law schools is a good one; the US News system is a very bad one.

Yet, oddly, the jump in Miami's rankings may represent something real: because we have such a small endowment, we are in a particularly good position in this recession. We have a new marquee Dean, and we have been doing some great hiring, and expect to do more.

Update: Leiter says it's a hoax. He could well be right. The trouble is that the real rankings are so arbitrary and random, it's hard to tell real from fake.

Update2: As noted in the comments, they're real.

Posted in U.Miami | 7 Comments

UM Law Freezes (and Partly Lowers) Tuition

Hot news from UM Law Dean White:

I am pleased to be able to announce that there will be NO tuition increase for the 2010-2011 academic year. In fact, while full-time tuition will remain at its current level of $18,709 per semester, the per credit tuition amount charged for part-time attendance will be reduced to $1337 from its current level of $1633.

The new part-time number lowers the cost of summer classes and of taking non-cross-listed courses elsewhere in the university.

I suppose this is one good outcome from the salary freeze.

Posted in U.Miami | 3 Comments