Faculty Updates - University of Wisconsin Law School

John Ohnesorge gave the presentation “‘Legal Origins’ and the Tasks of Corporate Law in Economic Development” at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law's Globalization, Law & Justice Workshop Series on November 12, 2009. Ohnesorge argued that the World Bank's prescriptions for corporate law reform in developing countries are seriously flawed due to an over-reliance on what is known as the “legal origins” approach to corporate law.
Victoria Nourse, Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law, will offer courses in Constitutional History and Legislation at the UW Law School in the fall 2010 semester.
Alta Charo delivered the annual Daniel W. Foster, M.D. Lecture in Medical Ethics at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center in November. She spoke on “The Celestial Fire of Conscience: Is There a ‘Right’ to Refuse Medical Services?” Previous lectures in the series have been delivered by Dr. Ed Pelligrino, chair of the President's Bioethics Council under George W. Bush, and Dr. Ruth Faden, who chaired the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments under Bill Clinton.
Alexandra Huneeus has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Law and Society Association, an international organization of scholars who study the interrelation of law and social, political, economic, and cultural life. Huneeus will serve on the Board for a term of three years.
Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who is in residence at the University of Wisconsin Law School each fall semester as a Visiting Scholar, has been awarded the Gran-Cruz da Ordem do Mérito Cultural de 2009 (Grand Cross of Cultural Merit for 2009) by the government of Brazil. This is the highest honor conferred annually to recognize a personality or institution making the greatest contribution to Brazilian culture throughout the world.
Darian Ibrahim is cited in an October 28, 2009 article from the Wisconsin Technology Network, "A Tale of Three Cities," on attempts to clone Silicon Valley. The article compares Silicon Valley, New York City, and Madison as entrepreneurial centers, and cites Professor Ibrahim for the conclusion that "the Silicon Valley scenario is incredibly difficult to replicate." The Wisconsin Technology Network article is here; Professor Ibrahim's paper "Financing the Next Silicon Valley" is available here.
Elizabeth Mertz spoke on “The Myth of Transparent Translation” on October 9, 2009, at the Brown University Legal Studies Seminar, an interdisciplinary colloquium series featuring cutting-edge research on law and legal institutions from a wide range of vantage points across the social sciences and humanities.
Brad Snyder was a speaker at the American Constitution Society’s Milwaukee Lawyer Chapter on October 22, 2009, for a 2009-10 Supreme Court Term Preview. Snyder joined Judge Lynn S. Adelman of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin, and Professor and Dean Peter K. Rofes of Marquette University Law School.
Ann Althouse was a commentator at the Washington, D.C., symposium “Judicial Review: Historical Debate, Modern Perspectives, and Comparative Approaches” on October 16, 2009, at George Washington Law School, sponsored by the George Washington Law Review and the Washington Area Legal History Roundtable. The symposium was a response to two new books: Philip Hamburger’s Law and Judicial Duty and Barry Friedman’s The Will of the People.
Alta Charo received the "Faith and Justice" award from the Wisconsin chapter of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Her address to the inter-faith group focused on political ethics as an alternative to bioethics in the debates surrounding abortion, embryo research and other topics characterized by fundamental values disagreements.
Mitra Sharafi gave the 2009 Government of India Fellowship Lectures at the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute in Mumbai, India, on October 8-10. The lectures are an annual series of three lectures over three days on a Zoroastrian-related topic. Sharafi's lectures will be published by the Institute.
An article by Shubha Ghosh, “Open Borders, The Economic Espionage Act of 1996, and the Global Movement of People and Information,” has been accepted for publication in King's Law Journal, a peer-review journal published by King's College Faculty of Law, London.
Shubha Ghosh has published “Carte Blanche, Quanta, and Competition Policy” in the Journal of Corporation Law (Vol. 34, No. 4 as part of the Symposium on Invention, Creation, and Public Policy, held at the University of Iowa in February 2009. Most recently Ghosh organized the Annual Canadian Law and Economics Association meeting in Toronto, October 2-3, 2009, and will be participating.
Darian Ibrahim presented the paper “Debt as Venture Capital” at the Western New England College of Law on September 22, 2009, as part of the College’s Law and Business Center for Advancing Entrepreneurship Speaker Series. The paper can be downloaded here.
Stewart Macaulay has been chosen as the Distinguished Annual Lecturer for 2009-10 by the J. Reuben Clark Law School of Brigham Young University, based on a life of achievements in law. Macaulay’s lecture, presented on October 1, 2009, was titled "A Contracts Crisis? It Ain’t Necessarily So." The committee awarding the lectureship to Macaulay noted, "We found in you someone who models for our community rigorous intellectual inquiry, devoted service to academia and the profession, and the highest professional standards." A BYU report on the lecture can be read here.
David Schultz has prepared the 2009 edition of Wisconsin Crimes: Elements, Definitions, and Penalties, published by the UW Law School’s department of Continuing Education and Outreach. The book, which includes a summary list of the elements for virtually all Wisconsin crimes, is intended for use by judges, attorneys, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and defense counsel. More information is available here.
On September 3, 2009, John Ohnesorge, vice-director of the Law School's East Asian Legal Studies Center and co-chair of the Wisconsin China Initiative, briefed members of Governor Doyle's upcoming trade mission to Asia on recent developments in Chinese law, politics, and economics.
Keith Findley, co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, will argue before the Supreme Court of Wisconsin on September 11, 2009, in State of Wisconsin v. Robert Artic. The case will require the Court to decide if a man's consent to search his home was lawfully obtained when police, without a warrant, broke down his front doors and swept through his home with weapons drawn before allegedly obtaining his consent.
Michele LaVigne received the Thomas G. Cannon Equal Justice Award from the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee at the society’s 2009 Anniversary Luncheon on September 3, 2009. The award recognizes LaVigne’s advocacy on behalf of the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.
John Ohnesorge spent three weeks in July and August 2009 at Seoul National University, co-teaching Asian Law & Society in SNU's International Summer Institute. Professor Ohnesorge's portion of the course dealt with law and society in China and Japan, while Professor Hyunah Yang, of the SNU law faculty, focused on Korea. The visit helped strengthen the UW Law School’s already extensive ties with SNU and other Korean law schools.
William Whitford and Stewart Macaulay posted their co-authored paper, “Hoffman v. Red Owl Stores: The Rest of the Story,” on SSRN (the Social Science Research Network) as a working paper. An abstract of the paper can be read here.
Anuj Desai will spend the 2009-10 academic year in Nanjing, China, teaching at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. His courses will include American Constitutional Law, History and Philosophy of Law in the West, Cyberlaw, and a seminar on academic legal writing.
Darian Ibrahim has been selected by the Searle Center at Northwestern University School of Law as a Searle-Kauffman Fellow on Law, Innovation, and Growth for 2009-10. As a Fellow, he will participate in three Institutes over the coming academic year that will bring together Fellows and leading legal scholars to explore foundational articles and discuss how their insights can be extended to future research on law, innovation, and economic growth. The sessions will also explore original research in the area by the Fellows.
Bonnie Shucha, UW Law Library Head of Reference and Chair of the Computing Services Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries, is co-author of a new article: “Inspiring Innovation: Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating the Web 2.0 Challenge,” in the Law Library Journal (2009-19), available here.
Shubha Ghosh presented the talk “Entrepreneurship and IP at a Research University” at the Center for Innovation and Structural Change at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway) on August 6, 2009.
William Whitford is co-editor of the new book Consumer Credit, Debt and Bankruptcy: Comparative and International Perspectives, released by Hart Publishing and co-edited by Johanna Niemi and Iain Ramsay. Essays in the collection address topics including mortgages, credit binges, the regulation of consumer lending, insolvency, repayment plans, and debt counseling.
Darian Ibrahim presented his new paper "Debt as Venture Capital" at the Fourth Annual Big Ten Aspiring Scholars Conference at the University of Illinois College of Law on August 3, 2009.
Elizabeth Mertz was a panel participant at the conference “YES WE CArNegie: Change in Legal Education Since the Carnegie Report,” at John Marshall Law School on July 29, 2009. Mertz spoke on “legal analysis – or the intellectual apprenticeship in legal education.” Her book The Language of Law School was extensively cited in the 2007 Carnegie Report, which drew national attention to the need for reform in U.S. legal education.
Shubha Ghosh has published “Patenting Games: Baker v. Selden Revisited,” 11(4) Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law (2009).
Lisa Alexander posted her latest article, “Stakeholder Participation in New Governance,” on her Social Science Research Network page (University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1083). Previously the article was published in the Winter 2009 issue (Volume 16, no. 1) of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy, the nation’s premier journal of poverty and social reform discourse.
Ben Kempinen will be a speaker at the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s panel discussion “Government Litigators: How Far Must They Go to Seek Justice?” on August 1, 2009, as part of the ABA Annual Meeting at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The panel is free to law students. Information available here.
Gretchen Viney presented the workshop “Enriching Your Course with a Case File” at the annual summer conference of the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning in Spokane, Washington, June 23-24, 2009.
Shubha Ghosh presented the paper “Transactional Skills Through an IP Lens” on June 12, 2009, at the AALS (Association of American Law Schools) Midyear Workshop on Transactional Law held in Long Beach, California.
Jason Yackee and co-author Susan Yackee published the article “Administrative Procedures and Bureaucratic Performance: Is Federal Rule-making ‘Ossified’?” in June 2009 in the Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, the top peer-reviewed journal of public administration.
Adjunct Grady Frenchick was an invited speaker on the panel "Intellectual Property Strategies" at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference in Milwaukee in June 2009. The conference was devoted to entrepreneur funding and growth issues from start-up through liquidity.
Lisa Alexander moderated the panel “Existing Housing Stock and Neighborhoods: Responding to Foreclosure” at the conference Housing Outlook 2010: Continued Crisis or Recovery?, held June 11, 2009, at the Fluno Center by the UW Business School’s Graaskamp Center for Real Estate.
Alta Charo was among the 25 advocates and academics who participated in a roundtable discussion on women's health at the White House on June 5, 2009. The meeting, which was web-streamed live, was hosted by Melody Barnes, director of the President's Domestic Policy Council, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform.
Louis Butler is teaching Criminal Procedure at the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada, the week of June 8-12, 2009.
Mitra Sharafi published “The Semi-autonomous Judge in Colonial India: Chivalric Imperialism Meets Anglo-Islamic Dower and Divorce Law” in the leading India-based journal of history, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 46:1 (2009): 57-81.
Darian Ibrahim organized three panels on “empirical law and entrepreneurship” at the 2009 annual meeting of the Law & Society Association in Denver. He presented the paper “Debt as Venture Capital” at one of the panels.
Keith Findley will speak on “Innocence Protection in the Appellate Process” at the Marquette Law School conference “Criminal Appeals: Past, Present, and Future” on June 15, 2009. Speakers will include leading criminal law and appellate-process scholars from around the nation, Wisconsin Supreme Court justices, and other appellate judges.
Michele LaVigne and alumna Rachel Arfa ‘07 gave a joint presentation at the Wisconsin State Bar Convention on May 8, 2009. Their topic was “Representing the Deaf Litigant: It’s Not What You Think.” Arfa is a staff attorney with Milwaukee Legal Aid.
Louis Butler made a luncheon presentation to the Dane County Bar Association on May 12, 2009, on the topic “The Question of Judicial Elections or Merit.” Butler was joined for discussion by former State Bar President Thomas Basting and Executive Director of the Wisconsin Judicial Commission James Alexander.
John Ohnesorge presented the paper “Pathways to Administrative Law” on May 8, 2009, at the inaugural conference of the Comparative Administrative Law Initiative established at Yale Law School.
Keith Findley has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Center on Wrongful Conviction of Youth, Northwestern University School of Law.
Brad Snyder spoke about his book, A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports, at the American College of Family Trial Lawyers’ 2009 conference in Savannah, Georgia, on May 1, 2009. Speaking with Snyder was Curt Flood’s St. Louis-based attorney, Allan Zerman.
Michael Scott published the article “Progress in American Policing? Reviewing the National Reviews” in 34 Law & Social Inquiry 171-185 (2009). Scott’s article discusses National Research Council, Fairness in Policing: The Evidence; 1967 President's Crime Commission, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society; and Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives, David Weisburd and Anthony A. Braga, eds.
David Schwartz will participate in the panel "Facilitating Active Learning" at the Workshop on Innovative Teaching Methods & Materials, to be held at Washburn University School of Law, May 18-20, 2009. The conference, co-sponsored by Carolina Academic Press, is for authors in the forthcoming "Context and Practice Series" of casebooks. Schwartz is under contract to write a textbook tentatively titled, Constitutional Law: The New Case Method, to be co-authored with UW law colleague Asifa Quraishi.
Darian Ibrahim will be participating in a Corporate Governance Roundtable at Northwestern Law School April 30-May 1, 2009. The roundtable will explore recent books on corporate governance by Jonathan Macey and Larry Ribstein.
Lisa Alexander presented “Reflections on the Miner’s Canary and Strange Bedfellows in Economic Markets” at the University of Maryland Law School’s Spring Business Law Roundtable “Early Reflections on the Financial Crisis” in April 2009. Her paper will be published in the Maryland Law School’s Journal of Business and Technology Law in January 2010.
Michele LaVigne presented a talk covering indigent defense and communication (“when a client doesn’t speak your language”) at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law Center for Law and Social Justice in April 2009. A report on the presentation with photos is at
http://www.tjsl.edu.
Sarah Davis of the Center for Patient Partnerships has received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program to create a course on advocacy and leadership in community public health. The course will be added to the curriculum of the Consumer Health Advocacy Certificate.
Mitra Sharafi presented the paper "A Court for Poor Wives: How Zoroastrian Women Litigated Marriage in Colonial Bombay" at the American Bar Foundation/Illinois Legal History Seminar in Chicago on March 30, 2009. The paper explores the unusual use of a divorce court by working-class South Asian women in colonial India circa 1900.
Darian Ibrahim presented a talk to the Stanford Law & Technology Association at Stanford Law School on April 6, 2009. His topic was “Financing for Start-ups: Angel Capital, Venture Capital, and Venture Debt.”
An article by Sumudu Atapattu, “Global Climate Change: Can Human Rights (and Human Beings) Survive This Onslaught?”, was published in the Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy, Fall 2008 (Vol. 20, No. 1).
Mitra Sharafi has been awarded a National Science Foundation “Law and Social Sciences” research grant for 2009-10. The grant will help fund archival research in London and Mumbai for Sharafi’s book project, “Parsing Law: Zoroastrians and Litigation in Colonial South Asia.”
John Ohnesorge participated in a conference at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies on March 13-14, 2009, titled “Regional Powers, New Developmental States, and Global Governance.” Ohnesorge took the lead in organizing the conference's speakers on China and made a presentation on China's industrial development policies. He then visited Northeastern University School of Law, where he gave the faculty colloquium “Northeast Asian Development and the Problem of Rights” and led a seminar on comparative corporate law, the “legal origins” scholarship, and development.
Darian Ibrahim gave presentations at both the UW Law School and Business School this week. On March 24 he presented “Financing the Next Silicon Valley” at the Business School’s INSITE interdisciplinary research seminar. On March 25 he spoke on the SEC’s role in the current financial crisis at the WAGE event “The Global Financial Crisis and Implications for Wisconsin.”
Allison Christians was the featured speaker at the St. Louis University Faculty Workshop Series March 18, 2009. Her topic was “Networks, Norms, and National Tax Policy.”
The American Antitrust Institute (AAI) has named Peter Carstensen a Senior Fellow. The AAI's Senior Fellows, appointed to a term of two years, constitute an "inner circle" of advisers and undertake specific projects for the AAI.
Thomas Mitchell presented the Winthrop and Frances Lane Lecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law on February 19, 2009. His topic was “Transactional Law and Economic Justice: Addressing Some of the Civil Rights Movement’s Unfinished Business.” Mitchell has done extensive research and outreach work on property issues within minority communities.
An article co-authored by Michele LaVigne was cited and discussed by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in a decision February 18, 2009, in Strook v. Kedinger. The article, “An Interpreter Isn’t Enough: Deafness, Language and Due Process,” in the 2003 Wisconsin Law Review, which LaVigne co-authored with McCay Vernon, was recommended as “a thorough and thoughtful primer for how to assess a deaf person’s abilities and needs.”
Gretchen Viney spoke on “Surveys and Easements” at the State Bar of Wisconsin CLE Workshop “Basic Residential Real Estate Transactions” February 25, 2009. The workshop is part of the State Bar’s "Build Your Practice" series, designed for newer lawyers or lawyers who want to expand into a new area of practice. The presentation covered how to read and understand land surveys and how to correct problems disclosed by those surveys.
Elizabeth Mertz delivered the lecture “Translating Social Science in Legal Arenas: The Myth of Transparency” at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law on February 19, 2009, as part of the 2008-09 Colloquium, “New Directions in Law & Society Scholarship: Engaging with Empiricism.”
John Ohnesorge presented the paper “Legal Origins and the Tasks of Corporate Law in Development” at the Brigham Young University Law Review Symposium “Evaluating Legal Origins Theory” on February 6, 2009. Ohnesorge notes, “The Legal Origins approach is an example of sophisticated statistical tools being misapplied to an important question: the relationship between corporate law and economic development.”
Darian Ibrahim is a contributor to the new Berkeley Law VC Blog, which focuses on papers and developments in the world of venture capital. See http://vc.berkeleylawblogs.org .
Louis Butler has been appointed to the ten-person National Judicial College (NJC) Faculty Council. The NJC offers an average of 65 courses annually with more than 2,500 judges enrolling from all 50 states, U.S. territories and more than 150 countries.
Allison Christians, posted her latest article, “Fair Taxation as a Human Right” (Valparaiso Law Review Vol. 42, 2008; University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1066) on her Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page.
Darian Ibrahim posted his latest article, “Financing the Next Silicon Valley” (University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1065) on his Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page.
Richard Bilder serves as a Counsellor to the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and Book Review Editor of the American Journal of International Law (AJIL), the leading professional journal in that field. He has been a member of the Board of Editors of the AJIL for more than 35 years.
Charles Irish received the Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award from East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL), in recognition of his work since 1994 presenting lectures and continuing education programs for lawyers and business people on international trade law, international taxation, Chinese/U.S trade relations, and other topics, and creating joint programs between ECUPL and UW-Madison.
John Ohnesorge and David Trubek will join Professor Gay Seidman of Sociology in the roundtable “Remaking the Developmental State,” part of the WAGE Research Collaborative and Sociology of Development Brown Bag, January 30 (noon -- Room 8117 Social Science).