Photo of Marcia Narine Weldon

Marcia Narine Weldon

Subscribe to Marcia Narine Weldon's Posts

Professor Narine Weldon is the director of the Transactional Skills Program, Faculty Coordinator of the Business Compliance & Sustainability Concentration, Transactional Law Concentration, and a Lecturer in Law.

She earned her law degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and her undergraduate degree, cum laude, in political science and psychology from Columbia University. After graduating, she worked as a law clerk to former Justice Marie Garibaldi of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, a commercial litigator with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in New York, an employment lawyer with Morgan, Lewis and Bockius in Miami, and as a Deputy General Counsel, VP of Global Compliance and Business Standards, and Chief Privacy Officer of Ryder, a Fortune 500 Company. In addition to her academic position, she serves as the general counsel of a startup and a nonprofit.  Read More

Follow:Marcia's Linkedin Profile

Conference Announcement and Call for Papers
2017 Junior Scholars #FutureLaw Workshop 2.0 at Duquesne

The conference is organized by Seth Oranburg, Assistant Professor, Duquesne University School of Law. Funding is provided in part by the Federalist Society. All papers are selected based on scholarly merit, with an emphasis on scholarly impact, topical relevance, and viewpoint diversity.

September 7-8, 2017

By invitation only

OVERVIEW: The conference aims to foster legal and economic research on “FutureLaw” (as defined below) topics particularly by junior and emerging scholars by bringing together a diverse group of academics early in their career focusing on cutting-edge issues.

TOPICS: The conference organizers encourage the submission of papers about all aspects of FutureLaw, which includes open-data policy, machine learning, computational law, legal informatics, smart contracts, crypto-currency, block-chain technology, big data, algorithmic research, LegalTech, FinTech, MedTech, eCommerce, eGovernment, electronic discovery, computers & the law, teaching innovations, and related subjects. FutureLaw is an inter-disciplinary field with cross-opportunities in crowd science, behavioral economics, computer science, mathematics, statistics, learning theory, and related fields. Papers may be theoretical, archival or experimental in nature. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– Innovation in legal instruments (e.g., new securities, new corporate forms, new…

Bernard Sharfman has written another interesting article on shareholder empowerment. I wish I had read A Private Ordering Defense of a Company’s Right to Use Dual Class Share Structures in IPOs before I discussed the Snap IPO last semester in business associations.

The abstract is below:

The shareholder empowerment movement (movement) has renewed its effort to eliminate, restrict or at the very least discourage the use of dual class share structures in initial public offerings (IPOs). This renewed effort was triggered by the recent Snap Inc. IPO that utilized non-voting stock. Such advocacy, if successful, would not be trivial, as many of our most valuable and dynamic companies, including Alphabet (Google) and Facebook, have gone public by offering shares with unequal voting rights.

This Article utilizes Zohar Goshen and Richard Squire’s “principal-cost theory” to argue that the use of the dual class share structure in IPOs is a value enhancing result of the bargaining that takes place in the private ordering of corporate governance arrangements, making the movement’s renewed advocacy unwarranted.

As he has concluded:

It is important to understand that while excellent arguments can be made that the private ordering of dual class share structures must incorporate certain…

The Section on Women in Legal Education (WILE) of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) recently announced that our business law colleague from Boston University, Tamar Frankel, is this year’s recipient of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award.  Kerri Stone, this year’s chair of the section, wrote the following in her message to section members on June 23:

Professor Frankel, a true pioneer and mentor to so many, will be honored at the Section’s annual luncheon on January 6, 2018 in San Diego. We hope to see all of you there as we reconvene, reconnect, and celebrate Professor Frankel.

I will add (briefly) that I have been personally mentored and supported by Tamar over the years (as I know many law faculty members have been).  She has acknowledged receipt of my reprints (a rare thing) with a pithy comment that indicates she actually read the piece (an even rarer thing).  Her work on money managers and trust law has inspired and founded the scholarship of many (including my own work).  Her comments offered at academic conferences over the years have been insightful and constructive.  She has climbed mountains in her life and career that were tall and…

Next month, I will speak at a legal conference in Chicago. The invite-only audience will consist of in-house counsel, law firm partners, academics, and legal tech pioneers. The website for the conference has not been updated to reflect my new school or topic, but I have titled my talk “Why Lawyers Need to Demand that Law Schools Innovate or Die.” In the 20 minutes allotted to me, I hope to discuss the state of legal education, the bar passage crisis in so many states, what the bar should test on, the push for “practice-ready” graduates, the effect of the rise of artificial intelligence, and what law schools can and should do differently to educate tomorrow’s lawyers. It’s a good thing I’m a fast talker.

I will be looking at the programs mentioned in this article as well as some innovations mentioned in this article, which mentions my institution, the University of Miami and its LawWithoutWalls program, which I have participated in since its inception in 2011. In fact one of my LWOW mentees, Margaret Hagan, now heads a program at Stanford, which I will highlight.

I have a few questions for the readers, as I prepare…

This post follows on my earlier travel posts on prepacking and packing for conference travel.  For last week’s post, I used my trip to Mexico City for the Law and Society Association conference as an example.  This week, I assess my packing skills by chronicling briefly what I used and commenting on that assessment.  Bottom line: I did OK but could have left a few items of clothing and my flip flops at home.

For my plane travel to Mexico City a week ago last Sunday, I wore the reversible dance leggings (pattern side facing out), one of the tank tops, the embellished sweatshirt, and the suit jacket wth my sneakers.

BLPBOutfits1

Once I got to the hotel, I determined to take a walk through Chapultepec Park (Mexico’s rough equivalent of New York’s Central Park).  For the walk (and the rest of the day), I swapped out the sweatshirt and jacket for one of the button-downs I had brought–a medium green insect-repelling shirt I originally had bought to use when I taught in a study abroad program in Brazil.

For Monday, another sightseeing day (but one that I planned to end with an Ashtanga yoga class), I dressed for the day at the outset: reversible yoga shorts (pattern side facing out), light blue tank top, same green button down, and sneakers.

BLPBOutfits2

I noticed during the day that folks in Mexico City do not wear yoga shorts around.  So, I would revisit my decision to wear them all day on that basis.

Yesterday, during a conversation with a law student about whether corporate social responsibility is a mere marketing ploy to fool consumers, the student described her conflict with using Uber. She didn’t like what she had read in the news about Uber’s workplace culture issues, sex harassment allegations, legal battles with its drivers, and leadership vacuum. The student, who is studying for the bar, probably didn’t even know that the company had even more PR nightmares just over the past ten days— the termination of twenty employees after a harassment investigation; the departure of a number of executives including the CEO’s right hand man; the CEO’s “indefinite” leave of absence to “mourn his mother” following a scathing investigative report by former Attorney General Eric Holder; and the resignation of a board member who made a sexist remark during a board meeting (ironically) about sexism at Uber. She clearly hadn’t read Ann Lipton’s excellent post on Uber on June 17th.

Around 1:00 am EST, the company announced that the CEO had resigned after five of the largest investors in the $70 billion company issued a memo entitled “Moving Uber Forward.” The memo was not available as…

As I am traveling and conferencing, my thoughts already have turned to next summer’s conference schedule.  It seems like a good time to get two important business law conferences on the agenda for next year.  Those two conferences are: the sixth biennial conference on teaching transactional law and skills, “To Teach is to Learn Twice: Fostering Excellence in Transactional Law and Skills Education,” which will be held on June 1 – 2, 2018, at Emory Law in Atlanta, GA and the National Business Law scholars conference, which will be held at the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens, GA on June 21-22, 2018.  Emory Law’s “Save the Date” notice hit my in box this morning and appears below, FYI.

*          *          *

SAVE THE DATE

Emory’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice cordially invites you to attend its sixth biennial conference on the teaching of transactional law and skills. The conference, entitled “To Teach is to Learn Twice: Fostering Excellence in Transactional Law and Skills Education,” will be held at Emory Law, beginning at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, June 1, 2018, and ending at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, June 2, 2018.…

Hola de la Ciudad de Mexico.  I arrived in Mexico City for the Law and Society Association conference yesterday to get acclimated and take some personal time to see the city.  Today, I carry forward the theme I posted on last week: packing for conference travel.  Last week, I shared my prepacking strategy.  This week, I will offer some parameters for packing for the actual trip, using the trip I am on now as an example.  This is what I was working toward (and achieved).

BLPBPacking4

I noted in my post last week that I almost always travel with one carry on duffle-like bag (soft-sider) and one tote bag that holds, among other things, my handbag for the trip.  That is what I chose for this trip!  The main advantage is that I do not have to check bags.  I had a tight connection yesterday in Atlanta, and my grab-and-go luggage helped me to make that connection with time to spare.

To quote the Talking Heads, ” . . . you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

Let’s begin with the things I packed in the blue soft-sider.  I started by considering what I plan do on the trip.  For this trip, I have four days of conference proceedings (for which I will dress up) and three days of walking/sight-seeing.  I also plan to attend at least two yoga classes and have to teach Barbri in Nashville on my way home.  I next consider the climate.  I am in one place almost the whole time, and the weather is forecasted to be pretty consistent–mid-eighties (Fahrenheit) during the day and mid-fifties in the evenings.  Chances of rain are slim most days, but higher at the end of the week.  Here’s what I chose to pack:

A three-piece coordinated suit set: skirt, cropped trousers, and jacket
9 shirts/blouses (6 tank tops–3 with shelf bras–and 3 wrinkle-resistant long-sleeved button-downs)
1 pair of reversible yoga shorts
1 pair of reversible dance/yoga leggings
PJs (undershirt tank top and boxers)
1 light rain jacket
1 French terrycloth embellished sweatshirt
Appropriate underwear items (gals, you can PM me for details, if you’d like)
2 extra pairs of earrings
1 necklace
1 pair of pumps
1 pair of fold-up flats
1 pair of sneakers
1 pair of flip-flops
1 traveling yoga mat

[Addendum:  I forgot to add that I also packed a printed silk scarf and a printed cotton bandana scarf!  I almost always travel with a scarf or two to accessorize outfits and make them look different when I am reusing the same basic suit pieces.]

It’s conference season, yet again.  It seems like just yesterday that I was embarking on my June Scholarship and Teaching Tour 2016.  In fact, it was over a year ago.  My, how time flies . . . .

This year, I am doing the “City” tour for the first part of the summer season.  I have already been to Kansas City, MO (Midwest Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship), New York City, NY (Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing: In the US and Beyond), and Salt Lake City, UT (National Business Law Scholars Conference).  Next week, I will be in Mexico City, Mexico for the Law and Society Association’s International Meeting on Law and Society.  Not fitting into the “City” theme is my teaching day for Barbri in Nashville, TN and the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference in Boca Raton, FL at the end of the summer.

Because of my travel schedule throughout the year, I often am asked about packing for my conference trips, which typically include some personal elements (e.g., touring, yoga, walking, or other exercise, etc.).  So, I decided to do a few posts on some packing tips and hacks that I use.  

Today, I focus on having a prepacked bag.  Given that I am a woman and choose to dress up for conferences, men and those who dress more casually will have to make significant modifications to my system.  Nevertheless, I hope that by sharing my conventions, I am offering something new to think about (at the very least). 

First things first: the generalities of my luggage (such as it is).  Unless I am teaching in a study abroad program (which I have not done since 2010), I pack in a soft-sided carryall and a tote large enough to fit my handbag (usually a small cross-body bag).  This combination works well for me.  (I am sure, however, that my doctor doesn’t approve and would like me to use a wheelie bag, given the cervical and thoracic issues that I have in my neck and back.)  I do not like to have to lift wheelie bags into the overhead bins. The carryall lifts easily and typically fits nicely, even in the overhead bins on the small puddle-jumper planes that I sometimes must take from my beloved TYS (Knoxville’s McGee-Tyson Airport). 

In 2016, a number of news outlets focused on Wal-Mart’s reputation crisis and outdated management style. Many, including union leaders, doubted the sincerity behind the company’s motivation in raising wages last year. I’ve blogged about Wal-Mart before, but today, there appears to be a different story to tell. Wal-Mart, the bogeyman of many NGOs and workers’ rights groups, actually believes that “serving the customers and society is the same thing… [and] putting the customer first means delivering for them in ways that protect and preserve the communities they live in and the world they will pass on to future generations.” This comes from the company’s 148-page 2016 Global Responsibility Report. Target’s report is a paltry 43 pages in comparison.

What accounts for the difference? Both use the Global Reporting Initiative framework, which aims to standardize sustainability reporting using materiality factors and items in the 10-K. Key GRI disclosures include: a CEO statement; key impacts, risks, and opportunities; markets; collective bargaining agreements; supply chain description; organizational changes; internal and external CSR standards (such as conflict mineral policy, LEED etc); membership associations; governance structure; high-level accountability for sustainability; consultation between stakeholders and the board; board composition; board knowledge of…