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Marcia Narine Weldon

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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

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With almost six weeks of hybrid Business Associations classes now under my belt (and many more to go), I wanted to share a bit more about my experience teaching in the hybrid classroom.  This follows and builds on my post from the beginning of the semester offering initial impressions (based on my Professional MBA teaching experience).  As I noted in that post, technology can differ from classroom to classroom.  As a result, my observations here (which are based on a hybrid course with an in-class projection system featuring a camera  and document camera and an online component hosted on Zoom), may not hold in other teaching environments.  Hopefully, however, some of what I have to say here may be useful to some of you . . . .

Teaching a hybrid course is a bit like managing a three-ring circus.  Ring #1 is your in-class student population, #2 is your online students population, and #3 is your technology.  It is a lot to pay attention to.  I find it more than a bit exhausting.

I have 63 students in total in Business Associations this fall.  That is a bit low but within a normal range for that…

As we continue to move through the Fall 2020 semester in “pandemic mode” (whatever that may be for you), the investments of colleagues in their teaching continues to amaze me.  The number of teaching webinars and conference panels has been truly awesome, starting in the spring and continuing through the present.  Social media posts on Facebook and Twitter offer individualized tips and the opportunity for innovators to build from them and post their responsive comments and additional advice.  My friend Jessica Erickson (Richmond Law) wrote an excellent series of Prawfsblog posts at the end of the summer, the last of which can be found here (with links to the earlier posts in the series).  Law faculties (including my own) are checking in with each other on challenges and victories on a regular basis.  Although the experiences of others may be different, I have felt supported (and very much like I am part of a team) the whole way along.

Among the more stimulating–and daunting–parts of pandemic teaching presentations and conversations are those relating to the introduction of new teaching technologies.  We have all dealt with this part of COVID-19 teaching in some respects and in our own ways.  Some of…

Thanks to friend of the BLPB Christina Sautter for sending along the following hiring announcement:

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, PAUL M. HEBERT LAW CENTER seeks to hire a tenure-track faculty member in commercial law, including, but not limited to, bankruptcy. Applicants should have a J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school, superior academic credentials and publications or promise of productivity in legal scholarship, as well as a commitment to outstanding teaching.  

We additionally seek to hire a full-time faculty member with security of position to direct the Immigration Law Clinic as part of LSU Law’s Experiential Education Program. The Immigration Law Clinic is a fully in-house, one-semester, 5 credit clinic in which students represent non-citizens in their defensive proceedings before the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) and affirmative applications with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Applicants must have a J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school, superior academic credentials, substantial experience in Immigration practice and be admitted and in good standing in a U.S. jurisdiction. Prior clinical teaching experience and fluency in Spanish is preferred. We may consider applications from persons who specialize in other areas as additional needs arise. 

We also seek to hire a full-time Assistant Professor of…

Lawyers as leaders.
Reputation is sacred.
So, guard it closely.

In my new role as Interim Director of UT Law’s Institute for Professional Leadership (IPL, for short), I have made a commitment to sit in on the classes in the Institute’s curriculum.  One of them, Lawyers as Leaders, is the flagship course–the course that catalyzed the establishment of the IPL.  This semester, it is being hosted on Zoom.

In that course this afternoon, the students wrestled with attorney misconduct–and how to punish it.  During the first hour of the two-hour session, they spent time in breakout rooms discussing three cases that involved different lapses of professional responsibility rules (and, in some cases, criminal law rules).  They were asked to report out/comment on several things about those cases, including the propriety and relative severity of the penalties imposed on the respective transgressor attorneys.  During the second hour of class, the students had the opportunity to listen to one of the three offenders tell his story and share what he learned about leadership through his misconduct.  They also were invited to ask him questions.

The story that the students heard was the one involved in this case.  But they heard about…

Call for Papers – EXTENDED DEADLINE

AALS Section on Transactional Law and Skills

The New Public Interest in Private Markets: Transactional Innovation for Promoting Inclusion

January 5-9, 2021, AALS Annual Meeting

The AALS Section on Transactional Law and Skills is pleased to announce a program titled The New Public Interest in Private Markets: Transactional Innovation for Promoting Inclusion during the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting, which will be held virtually. This session will explore how recent developments in corporate and transactional practice address issues of bias in corporate governance and the workplace, with examples ranging from Weinstein representations & warranties in M&A agreements to California’s Women on Boards statute to inclusion riders in the entertainment industry. These developments raise immediate questions of whether public policy goals of achieving greater inclusivity are being met, and they also shed light on perennial debates about the role public law and private ordering play in spurring social innovation.

In addition to paper presentations, the program will feature a panel focusing on how to incorporate concepts, issues, and discussions of equity and inclusivity across the transactional curriculum, including in clinics and other experiential courses, as well as in doctrinal courses.

FORMAT: Scholars whose papers are selected…

Two weeks ago, I wrote about wokewashing and the board of directors. I discussed companies that tout their social justice credentials to curry favor with consumers but in fact treat their employees differently. I touched on the difference between companies jumping on the “anti-racism” bandwagon and those like Nike, which took an unpopular stand in 2018 by supporting Colin Kapernick, who at the time was considered a pariah for taking a knee during the national anthem. Some commentators predicted boycotts but in fact, Nike had a 31% increase in sales following the ad campaign. One sporting good store owner who publicly called for a boycott actually went out of business.

Four years after Kapernick took a knee, professional basketball, hockey, soccer, and tennis players took a walk protesting a police-involved shooting of a Black man. Although the Milwaukee Bucks spurred the walkout by refusing to play against the Orlando Magic in the playoffs on Wednesday, LeBron James reportedly led what could have been a season-ending strike of the West Coast teams. One hundred league staffers also temporarily walked off the job today in support. Michael Jordan, basketball legend and team owner, helped broker a deal for the…

ILLINOIS TECH CHICAGO-KENT COLLEGE OF LAW

HIRING ANNOUNCEMENT — GALVIN CHAIR

AUGUST 17, 2020

Chicago-Kent College of Law of the Illinois Institute of Technology is excited to announce its search for the inaugural Michael Paul Galvin Chair in Entrepreneurship & Applied Legal Technology.  We seek a tenured scholar (at any rank) researching and teaching in the fields of (i) intellectual property (with a focus on innovation and/or the patent system), (ii) business law (with a focus on issues related to technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, etc.), (iii) the legal regulation of emerging technologies, or (iv) applied legal technology.  In addition to residing in the law school and teaching law school classes, the Galvin Chair will be affiliated with Illinois Tech’s Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship.  The Kaplan Institute teaches innovative and entrepreneurial students from across Illinois Tech how to convert their creative ideas into significant and viable businesses, services, and new solutions.  The Galvin Chair is expected to engage in interdisciplinary research in furtherance of the Kaplan Institute’s mission and help facilitate law student involvement in the Kaplan Institute.

Required qualifications for the Galvin Chair include:  (1) a JD or PhD with experience teaching law classes; (2)…

My friend (and former UT Law Visiting Assistant Professor) Hengameh Saberi informed me of the following academic search at her institution, Osgoode Hall Law School, that may be attractive to our readers:

Assistant/Associate/Full Professor

We hope to make one appointment in one of the following priority areas, which for recruitment purposes is broadly defined as Business Law, including Commercial Law, Tax Law and Contract Law.

The full position posting and application information are available here.  For those who may not be familiar with Osgoode Hall, it is the law school at York University in Toronto.  Among the fabulous faculty members at Osgoode Hall (other than Hengameh, of course!) are business law scholars Cynthia Williams, who works in many corporate law areas (including comparative corporate governance) and formerly taught at the University of Illinois College of Law, and Poonam Puri, who is an internationally respected corporate and securities law researcher.  I am sure either would be happy to answer any questions you may have to the best of her ability.

On Saturday, I taught Business Planning to the Class of 2020 Professional MBA (ProMBA) Students in the Haslam College of Business at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  I have taught business law topics in this program for a number of years now and thoroughly enjoy it as a change-up to teaching law students.  This class is no exception.  And two of the students from this cohort plan to go to law school at some point in the next few years.

The class sessions on Saturday–four hours worth–were taught in a hybrid format, with some of the students in the classroom and some participating in the class remotely through Zoom.  Starting Wednesday, I will be teaching my Business Associations class sessions in a synchronous hybrid flex format with half of the students rotating in and out of the classroom in accordance with a predefined schedule.  The ProMBA program uses classrooms with technology different from that available at the College of Law, did not afford me Zoom hosting privileges that I have at the College of Law, and allows eating and drinking in the classroom.  Nevertheless, parts of the teaching I did on Saturday are analogous to what I will be doing…

As an academic and consultant on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) matters, I’ve used a lot of loaded terms — greenwashing, where companies tout an environmentally friendly record but act otherwise; pinkwashing, where companies commoditize breast cancer awareness or LGBTQ issues; and bluewashing, where companies rally around UN corporate social responsibility initiatives such as the UN Global Compact.

In light of recent events, I’ve added a new term to my arsenal—wokewashing. Wokewashing occurs when a company attempts to show solidarity with certain causes in order to gain public favor. Wokewashing isn’t a new term. It’s been around for years, but it gained more mainstream traction last year when Unilever’s CEO warned that companies were eroding public trust and industry credibility, stating:

 Woke-washing is beginning to infect our industry. It’s polluting purpose. It’s putting in peril the very thing which offers us the opportunity to help tackle many of the world’s issues. What’s more, it threatens to further destroy trust in our industry, when it’s already in short supply… There are too many examples of brands undermining purposeful marketing by launching campaigns which aren’t backing up what their brand says with what their brand does. Purpose-led…