Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Fall/Winter 2009 - Online Volume 2
Lectures and Events
Noteworthy
Experts Discuss Sotomayor Nomination
Susan Low Bloch and Richard Lazarus joined Washington, D.C., Supreme Court litigators Roy Englert and Patricia Millett as well as journalists Adam Liptak (the New York Times) and Joan Biskupic (L’93) (USA Today) to discuss the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit who later in the summer became the first Hispanic jurist on the High Court. Pam Harris, the incoming executive director of Georgetown Law’s Supreme Court Institute and of counsel in the Washington, D.C., office of O’Melveny and Myers, moderated the discussion, which was organized by Deputy Director Tina Drake Zimmerman. Bloch and Lazarus shed some light on how the White House would prepare Sotomayor for her confirmation hearings and the inevitable level of intrusiveness into her life. Even the nominee’s food preferences have become fodder for public discussion — but not by this panel. “Unless she’s a cannibal,” Millett said, “I don’t care what she orders for takeout food.”
Imigration Reform
On June 24, one day before legislators were slated to attend a White House summit on immigration reform, Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., gave a crowd gathered in Georgetown Law’s Hart Auditorium a sneak preview of just what he was planning to tell the president.
“When [he] asks me whether the Congress can pass comprehensive immigration reform,” said Schumer, “I will smile and say, Mr. President, ‘Yes we can.’”
Schumer’s remarks came during the sixth annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference, an all-day event sponsored by the Law Center, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and the Migration Policy Institute. Other participants included Dean Alex Aleinikoff, the former executive associate commissioner for programs at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Andrew Schoenholtz, visiting professor and deputy director of Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration.
Aleinikoff and Schoenholtz also spoke April 24 at a separate event on immigration policy in transition. “We have a broken system at the border and a broken system at the workplace,” said Aleinikoff, who emphasized that his remarks were unconnected with the work he did on the transition team and that he was not speaking for the current administration. “It’s not a healthy system.”
Cokie Roberts at the Corporate Counsel Institute
Cokie Roberts of NPR and ABC News was at Georgetown Law’s 13th Annual Corporate Counsel Institute to discuss the recent presidential election. She compared it to the 1980 contest, when Republican Ronald Reagan defeated Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time in 28 years. By the time of the 1984 election, Roberts said, “everybody understood that the 1980 election had ushered in an entire generation of conservatives and conservative change.” We won’t know for a while whether the 2008 election was a similar “realignment,” she said.
Nearly 300 attorneys attended this year’s Corporate Counsel Institute, sponsored by Georgetown Law’s Continuing Legal Education. They also heard keynote speaker Dennis Archer, a former mayor of Detroit who served on the Michigan Supreme Court and became the first African American president of the American Bar Association. “In the legal world in which we live, the last 10 years have been somewhat remarkable … astounding, unnerving, clearly challenging,” said Archer.
Theodore Schneyer on Radical Reforms
Should non-lawyers be allowed to own an interest in law firms and trade law firm stock on a publicly traded exchange? Should U.S. lawyers be allowed to practice with other professionals such as accountants in multidisciplinary practices? Could we eventually be seeing department stores with law firms attached?
Since the United Kingdom’s Legal Services Act now allows for alternative business structures, “we should be thinking hard about the implications of those developments more in the United States,” said Theodore Schneyer, the University of Arizona’s Milton O. Riepe Professor of Law, in the inaugural lecture of Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession on April 20.
In his speech, Schneyer outlined the radical reforms taking place in the U.K. and Australia in the regulation of the legal practice, as well the driving forces behind these changes.
“Australia and the U.K. have adopted legislation that divests the bar from regulating itself to some extent, and imposes authority in an independent commission,” said Professor Mitt Regan, who co-directs the Center, in an interview before the lecture. “We have in the U.S. a Byzantine, balkanized regulatory system where 51 different jurisdictions regulate lawyers’ conduct.”
In light of those recent developments overseas, therefore, Regan and the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession commissioned Schneyer last fall to conduct research on the future regulation of the legal profession.
“Ted is without doubt the foremost scholar on the regulation of the United States legal profession,” Regan told the crowd assembled in Gewirz Student Center before the lecture began, noting that Schneyer has focused increasingly on those forms of regulation that go beyond U.S. rules.
Home Court
Forget the score (the Hoya Lawyas were edged out by the Hill’s Angels team). The real winner of this year’s Home Court charity basketball game was the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, which raised $335,000 from the game. This year’s event honored the long-time contributions of Senior Assistant Dean Everett Bellamy. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, who died last year, was remembered for her involvement in Home Court, and her jersey number was retired.
Once Again, SCI Moots the Most
It was another banner year for Georgetown Law’s Supreme Court Institute, which mooted a stellar 92 percent of the cases heard before the High Court in the October 2008 term. Institute Director and Professor Steven Goldblatt and Deputy Director Tina Drake Zimmerman were on hand May 1 to celebrate the year’s accomplishments with a reception attended by, among others, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Solicitor General Elena Kagan and former Solicitor General Paul Clement. The event was an official “welcome to Washington” for Kagan.
“I’m not sure why you’d want to give up the title of ‘Dean’ for ‘General’ — I guess some people would think that’s a good move,” Dean Alex Aleinikoff joked as he welcomed Kagan and Pam Harris, the Institute’s new executive director. “For the academic that remains within you, we hope that you will make this your home away from home.”
Kagan said she was honored to join such an extraordinary group of appellate attorneys who have worn the title of solicitor general. “When I think of what I want to be as solicitor general, and what I want the solicitor general’s office to do, all I have to do is look back at solicitors general past,” she said. “It’s a great thing to live up to.”
Five Georgetown Law students — Dan Kahan (C’06, L’09), Christine Macey (L’10), Rupal Doshi (L’09), Charles Li (L’09) and Elana Newberger (L’09) — were recognized for their research work with the Institute. Law Center Ethics Counsel and Adjunct Professor Michael Frisch was also honored (see page 6).
Clement — an alumnus of Georgetown University (F’88) as well as Harvard Law — said that while he has a great affinity and fondness for both institutions, the Supreme Court Institute was an area where Georgetown has Harvard beat. (Kagan graciously agreed — but don’t tell them that up in Cambridge.)
“You have a group of people whose business it is to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court, to perpetuate the idea that having specialized counsel for the Supreme Court is the way to go, [and who] volunteer their time to make first-time advocates look better,” Clement said of the Institute. “It is a model of selfless public service.”
