Go On! IntLawGrrls at AALS

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

The Association of American Law Schools will be holding its 2011 annual meeting in San Francisco from January 5-8th. This year's theme is: Core Educational Values: Guideposts for the Pursuit of Excellence in Challenging Times.

If you are attending, be sure to check out IntLawGrrls and IntLawGrrl guests/alumnae in action. As detailed in the annual meeting program, they are:

Wednesday, Jan 5th

► At 2:00 pm, Afra Afsharipour will be speaking at the Law and South Asian Studies Section's panel: Lawyers as Social Change Agents in South Asia.

► Also at 2:00, Michele Bratcher Goodwin will speak on the Biolaw Section's panel: Synthetic Biology Meets the Law, and Penelope Andrews will moderate the Africa Section's panel: U.S. Africa Policy at the Midpoint of President Obama's First Term.

Thursday, Jan. 6th

► At 9:00 am, Stephanie Farrior, Hari M. Osofsky, Christiana Ochoa, Annecoos Wiersema, Leila Nadya Sadat, and Cindy Galway Buys will be participating in the International Law Section's panel: International Law Year in Review.

► At 2:00, Penelope Andrews will be speaking on the Constitutional Law Section's panel: American Constitutionalism in Comparative Perspective.

► At 2:30 pm, Lisa R. Pruitt will take part in a panel on Class, Socio-Economics, and Critical Analysis.

Friday, Jan. 7th

► At 8:30 am, Caroline Bettinger-López and Alexandra Huneeus will present at the
New Voices in Human Rights panel of the Section on International Human Rights.

► At 10:30 am, yours truly, Rebecca M. Bratspies, and Hari M. Osofsky will be participating in the Hot Topics panel: The BP Blowout Oil Spill and Its Implications.

► Also at 10:30, Laurel S. Terry will be speaking on the Education Law Section's panel: Immigration and Higher Education.

► At 4:00, Michelle Oberman will be speaking on the Law, Medicine and Health Care Section's panel: Women's Choices, Women's Voices: Legal Regimes and Women's Health.

Saturday, Jan. 8th is an action-packed IntLawGrrls day:

► At 7:00 in the morning, Laurel S. Terry will be speaking at the AALS Workshop and Continental Breakfast for 2010 and 2011 Section Officers.

► At 8:30 am, yours truly, Rebecca M. Bratspies, will be speaking on the Animal Law Section's panel: Treatment and Impact of Farmed Animals.

► At 1:30 pm, Elizabeth L. Hillman will be speaking on the National Security Section's panel: The Relationship Between Military Justice, Civil/Military Relations and National Security Law.

► Also at 1:30 pm, Jenia Iontcheva Turner will be speaking on the Comparative Law Section's panel: Beyond the State: Comparative Approaches to Group Political Identity in the Age of the Transnational.

► At 3:30 pm, Christiana Ochoa, will be moderating the International Law Section's panel: Was Medellin Wrongly Decided?

► Also at 3:30 pm, Jennifer Kreder will speaker on the Section on Law and Anthropology panel entitled The Role of Cultural Property Across Cultures and Legal Regimes.

As always, I am struck by the wide range of interests that our fearless leader Diane Marie Amann has brought together under the IntLawGrrls umbrella.

FYI: Because the Hilton is embroiled in a labor dispute with UNITE HERE, Local 2 (the hotel's workers have been working without a contract for over a year), registration and most of the AALS events have been moved to other nearby hotels. There may be other last-minute changes, so be sure to go by the locations in the schedule you receive at check-in rather than the brochure that circulated last month. See you in San Francisco.

(credit for 2010 poster of San Francisco by Kevin Dart)

Guest Blogger: Laurel Terry

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Laurel Terry (left) as today's guest blogger.
Laurel, the Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of Law, writes about legal ethics and lawyer regulation from comparative, transnational, and international perspectives. She's taught the required legal ethics course for 25 years, and also teaches a global legal profession seminar. She's written many publications and delivered many presentations in these areas, and now serves as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Professional Responsibility.
Among Laurel's other professional service: an International Law Association committee working on draft principles for lawyers appearing in international tribunals and the ILA's Group Membership Committee; the World Trade Organization Working Group of the the International Bar Association, for which she's made presentations to the WTO (here) and to a U.N. subcommittee (here); consulting for the International Agreements Committee of the Conference of Chief Justices; helping the American Society of International Law develop international legal ethics programming. Her activities for the American Bar Association include: contributions to its webpage on the General Agreement on Trade in Services-Legal Services; service as a special advisor to the ABA Task Force on International Trade in Legal Services; membership on the new International Committee of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar; past vice chair of the Transnational Legal Practice Committee of the ABA Section of International Law and of the Policy Implementation Committee and the Standing Committee on Professional Discipline of the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility.
A magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California, San Diego, Laurel was elected to the Order of the Coif while at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, thereafter clerking Judge Ted Goodwin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She practiced at a firm in Portland, Oregon, before joining academia in 1985. Since then she've received three Fulbright grants, to Austria in 1992 and to Germany from 1998 to 1999 and again from 2005 to 2006.
In her guest post below, Laurel explains her scholarly focus and summarizes her article respecting the European Commission’s Professional Services Competition Initiative.
Heartfelt welcome!

Lawyer regulation in Europe & at home

First of all, let me extend my thanks to IntLawGrrls for encouraging me to appear as a guest blogger. Although I have extensive materials posted on the Internet, I usually am very shy about blogging. As a result, I was very appreciative of the encouragement that IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann gave me to serve as a guest blogger, especially since my international law “niche” is not very well known.
I think there are a couple of reasons why my “niche” is not well-known:
► First, relatively few scholars work in this field.
► Second, for many years, the topics I have written about weren’t addressed at American Society of International Law or International Law Association meetings.
► Third, this field doesn’t’ fit neatly into the boxes of public international law or private international law. Indeed, early on, it wasn’t always clear that what I did was “law.”
I am deeply committed to transparency, and many of my early articles memorialized and analyzed bar association initiatives related to lawyer regulation. As time has marched on, many of these initiatives have become “law” and have provided the foundation for international or transnational legal developments. Because these initiatives often were developed by volunteer lawyers who had day jobs, I considered it a great success to get the developments out of their file cabinets (later, their computers) and into the public domain, where the initiatives could be shared, analyzed, and debated.
I still consider myself a transparency crusader. But much of what I now do is sift through voluminous Internet websites in order to synthesize, publicize, and spur public debate about important developments in the regulation of global lawyers.
An example of this scholarship is my article entitled "The European Commission Project Regarding Competition in Professional Services," published this year in the Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business.
Many international lawyers have now heard about the Clementi Report, which provided the impetus for the reforms in Britain's Legal Services Act 2007, which has dramatically changed the regulation of the legal profession in England and Wales and has set the stage to allow allow publicly traded law firms in the United Kingdom. (They already exist in Australia.)
Most lawyers are not aware, however, that a similar initiative exists in the European Union, and that it too has led to wide-ranging reform proposals.
In 2002, Wouters (Case C-309/99) and Arduino (Case C-35/99), both involving competition law (in the United States, antitrust law) and the legal profession, were pending before the European Court of Justice. At this time the European Commission issued an “invitation to tender” a study of the liberal professions; the resulting contract was awarded to the Institut für Höhere Studien/Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, known by the acronym IHS. In March 2003, the European Commission: announced the results of the IHS Study; launched a professional services competition initiative that would focus on several professions, including the legal profession; and began a Stocktaking Exercise. The IHS Study included the figure below, which was very influential:
(In this table, the darker the color and the higher the number, the more regulation a country has.) The Study concluded that countries with lower levels of regulation did not have higher levels of consumer complaints, and questioned whether higher levels of regulation were necessary.
In 2004, the Commission issued its Report on Competition in Professional Services. For the legal services sector, this Report, like the IHS Study, examined 5 issues:
► lawyer qualification, or entry, rules;
► lawyer monopoly rules;
► alternative business structure prohibitions, such as prohibitions on publicly traded law firms and multidisciplinary partnerships;
► fee rules; and
► advertising rules.
The Commission’s 2004 Report relied heavily on the IHS study. Among other things, the former asked whether

the lower regulation strategies which work in one Member State might be made to work in another, without decreasing the quality of professional services, and for the ultimate benefit of the consumer.

In 2005, the Commission issued a followup report, Professional Services -- Scope for more reform, which stated that the Commission was “fully committed to bringing about wide scale reform to this sector.” Paragraph 25 of the Report contained some damning language about the current lawyer regulatory system:

The weight of tradition should not be underestimated as affecting the pace of change, and in many countries regulators fail to see how things can be done differently. Moreover, the professions themselves have in general not been actively promoting it. The current picture could also indicate that some countries have relatively weak regulatory oversight of the professions. This could be caused by the economic phenomenon of regulatory capture which is not uncommon especially in areas subject to self-regulation.

The 2005 followup report used an updated version of a chart that had appeared in the IHS study to bolster its conclusion about the need for regulatory reforms:
Although the Commission seems subsequently to have changed some of its competition enforcement priorities, these reports remain influential for several reasons:
►First, many European Union member states are now engaged in reviewing (and sometimes dramatically changing) their lawyer regulatory rules.
►Second, these reports (or the underlying IHS study) have been relied upon in several subsequent global initiatives, including the 2008 Report on Competitive Restrictions in Legal Professions of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, as well as the OECD's Indicators of Regulatory Conditions in the Professional Services.
►Third, the American Bar Association's creation of a Commission on Ethics 20/20, coupled with the likely adoption of rules that will allow publicly traded law firms in Britain, the issues addressed in these reports remain very topical.

In my view, because of the crucial roles lawyers play in developing international law and in preserving the rule of law, these developments are important for all international lawyers and scholars, regardless of their areas of specialization. This EU initiative addresses infrastructure issues that determine how lawyers are able to go about doing their jobs.
My article discusses the IHS Study, the Commission reports, stakeholder responses, related developments, and possible implications. It is a lengthy article because, as noted earlier, it was intended to synthesize, publicize, and spur public debate about this very important global lawyer regulatory development. My shorter, more reflective article on the significance of the EU Professional Services Initiative, along with a number of other developments, is here; my Powerpoint slide version may be found here.
Thanks again for inviting me to serve as a guest blogger. I hope this post has provided something a bit different, but interesting.

Write On! Lawyers & money laundering

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.) The Section of Professional Responsibility of the Association of American Law Schools is calling for papers so that it may select a speaker for its program of the at AALS' 2010 Annual Meeting -- themed "Transformative Law" -- this January in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Section's session will examine the 2008 Guidance for Legal Professionals, anti-money laundering principles also known as the "Lawyer Guidance," recently issued by a Paris-based, 20-year-old, 34-member intergovernmental organization, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) (logo below right). Entitled "The Transformative Effect of International Initiatives on Lawyer Practice and Regulation: A Case Study Focusing on the FATF & Its 2008 Lawyer Guidance," it will be held from 10:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m. on Friday, January 8, 2009.
Already confirmed speakers include: attorneys Kevin L. Shepherd and Colin Tyre, who will address the history, negotiating dynamics, and implementation of the 2008 FATF Lawyer Guidance, as well as Law Professors Ellen S. Podgor (Stetson), James Thuo Gathii (Albany), and Thomas D. Morgan (George Washington). The Section's Chair, Professor Laurel S. Terry of Penn State Dickinson School of Law, will moderate the panel.
Here's an excerpt of Laurel's call for papers:

Even if you have never heard of the FATF or its October 2008 Lawyer Guidance and even if you do not specialize in professional responsibility issues, please don’t rule yourself out of this call for papers -- you are in good company! One reason why we selected this topic for the Annual Meeting program is our belief that few scholars are aware of the FATF’s legal profession gatekeeper initiatives, even though they have the potential to implicate the lawyer-client relationship in significant practice areas and are likely to change, in some significant ways, the manner in which these U.S.
lawyers practice.
The 2008 FATF Lawyer Guidance applies to U.S transactional lawyers whenever
they are involved in one of five areas of activity:
► helping their clients buy or sell real estate,
► helping them create, operate, or manage legal persons, such as corporations,
► helping them buy or sell business entities, or
► helping manage client money, securities or other assets or bank, savings or securities accounts.
The 2008 FATF Lawyer Guidance requires these lawyers to comply with certain recordkeeping requirements and conduct client due diligence (sometimes referred
to as “know your client” rules). But it does not include any suspicious transaction reporting obligations, which was viewed as a victory for the legal profession. A number of countries already have implemented the FATF principles by amending their laws or ethics rules; the United States is considering how to implement them.

Abstracts of 3 to 5 double-spaced pages, describing papers unpublished as of the session date, should be submitted by the deadline of September 1, 2009, to Section Chair Laurel Terry at LTerry@psu.edu. Laurel also welcomes e-mails seeking more information about the call or the program.