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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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Greetings from Miami, Florida, COVID19 hotspot. Yesterday, 33% of those tested had a positive result. Although my university still plans to have some residential instruction as of the time of this writing, most of us are preparing to go fully online at some point. In Part I,   Part II, and Part III, I provided perspectives from experts in learning. I’m still gathering that information.

This week, however, I spoke to the real experts — students. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to hear from students studying business and human rights from all over the world courtesy of the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum. I’ve also been talking to research assistants and other current and former students. Here’s a summary of their conclusions:

  • We know that Spring was hard for everyone and that everyone is still learning how to teach online. Do not be worried about making mistakes. 
  • Don’t assume that we are all digital natives. Some of us are older students or not used to the technology that you have decided to use. Make sure that the interface is intuitive and use tech in fun and interesting ways. (One professor used Jeopardy online and students

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It seems that every day, more schools are announcing that they will re-open either totally or mostly online in the Fall. If you’re still debating whether opening face-to-face in the Fall is safe, I recommend that you read this compelling essay by my colleague, Bill Widen. I live in a COVID hotspot in Miami, Florida, and fortunately, I had already been assigned to teach online. Unlike many of you who may find out about your school’s plans at the end of July, I’ve already been focusing on upping my online game.

Last week, in Part II of this series, I promised to summarize what I have learned from some of my readings from  Learning How to Learn, Small Teaching Online, and Online Learning and the Future of Legal Education. Alas, I haven’t even had time to look at them because I’ve been teaching two courses, watching webinars on teaching, and taking two online courses for my own non-legal certifications. But it wasn’t a waste of time because it allowed me to look at online learning from a student’s perspective. Next week, I’ll summarize the readings in the sources listed above, but this week, I’ll provide…

As many of you may know, I enjoy reading and writing about leadership.  I am proud of the work that our law school has been doing for a number of years in highlighting the value of lawyers as leaders–through teaching, scholarship, and service–under the auspices of our Institute for Professional Leadership.  I am privileged to have the opportunity to serve as Interim Director of that program effective as of August 1.  I am grateful for the support of our incoming Interim Dean, Doug Blaze, and so many of my colleagues as I assume this new responsibility.

Among the service elements of the Institute is its weblog, Leading as Lawyers. Last year, I began writing occasional posts for the blog–first on Leading Without a Title and next on The Role of Process in Leadership.  (I mentioned and linked to the latter in this BLPB post last summer.)  I have continued my leadership blog post writing this spring, and the first of my spring posts, There is No Place for Schadenfreude in Leadership, was published late last week.  Although my Leading as Lawyers posts may well have value for business lawyers and business law instructors, they are not…

Last week, I wrote the first in a series of posts with tips for teaching online. I expect many more law schools to join Harvard and now UC Berkeley by doing all Fall classes online. I’m already teaching online this summer and will teach online in the fall. Our students deserve the best, so I’m spending my summer on webinars from my home institution and others learning best practices in course design.

Here are some tips that I learned this week from our distance learning experts. First, I need to adopt backward design. I have to  identify the learning objectives for my courses, then decide how I will assess whether or not students successfully met the learning objective. Effective learning objectives are active, measurable, and focus on different levels of learning (e.g., remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating). Some people find Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives helpful.

Once I figure out my learning objectives, I will work backwards to determine what kinds of activities the students will work on either online or face to face (which for me will be Zoom). For more on this topic, see this guide to backward design from Vanderbilt University Center for …

Thanks to all of our readers who were able to come to the National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) last Thursday and Friday.  It was lovely to see so many of you there, even though it was somewhat sad that we could not be with each other in person.  The conference enjoyed record participation, and we have received a lot of useful informal feedback about our virtual format from folks who attended.

I was the beneficiary of many “teaching moments” in hosting and participating in the NBLSC this year.  I later will post on some of the outtakes from the NBLSC teaching panel (to which co-blogger Marcia Narine Weldon–who blogged about teaching on Friday–contributed meaningfully).  Today, however, I am focusing my post on a few new things my fellow UT Law conference hosts and I learned about Zoom in the process of hosting the conference.  A list follows.  

  • Although meeting participants should mute themselves on entering a meeting, it is best for a meeting host to set up the meeting so that all participants will be muted on entry, especially for large meetings.  It can be challenging to track down and mute participants who join a meeting and bring

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If you’re like me, you’re wondering how you can improve your teaching after last Spring’s foray into online learning. I wasn’t nearly as traumatized as many of my colleagues because I had already taught Transactional Drafting online asynchronously for several semesters. This summer, I’m teaching two courses — Transactional Drafting asynchronously and a hybrid course on Regulatory Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability. I’m making a list of tips based on my experience and will post about that in the future. In the meantime, I’ve started to think about how I can improve next semester when I will be teaching all of my courses online. Since I know that so many students had a mediocre to poor experience with emergency online teaching, I’ve spent a lot of time on webinars learning how to do better. This will be the first in a series of posts on what I’m learning on course design, learning styles, and best practices. But let’s start with the basic questions to ask yourself as you’re preparing for next semester.

First, think about whether you want to teach synchronously or not. If you’re looking for maximum flexibility for both you and the students, then asynchronous teaching makes sense.

Just a quick reminder that the 2020 National Business Law Scholars Conference–the 11th annual conference and our first virtual conference–begins tomorrow morning at 9:00 am EDT and extends through Friday afternoon at 4:30 pm EDT.  The conference schedule is available here.  Even if your workday is full, think about joining us (with or without a beverage) for some business law fellowship at 6:15 pm EDT tomorrow during our virtual happy hour.

Please make sure that you have upgraded your Zoom client to Zoom 5.0 before attempting to join in from your computer.  Effective as of June 1, Zoom is no longer supporting earlier versions.  If you have questions about upgrading, check out this page from the Zoom Support Center.

We hope to see many of you there!

The full schedule for the 2020 National Business Law Scholars Conference, which is being hosted on Zoom Thursday and Friday of this week, is now available.  You can find it here.  If and as additional changes are necessary, we will re-post.

As is always the case, the conference includes folks presenting work in a variety of areas of business law.  These traditional paper panels are the heart of the conference.  In addition, as I noted in my post last week, we are including three plenary sessions–one on “Business Law in the COVID-19 Era,” one reflecting on teaching business law in the current environment, and one on current bankruptcy law and practice issues.  There is something for almost everyone in the business law space in the conference program.

I am pleased and proud to note that several of my fellow bloggers from the Business Law Prof Blog are participating in the conference this year.  They include (in addition to me): Colleen Baker, Ben Edwards, Ann Lipton, and Marcia Narine Weldon.  I hope many of you will join us for all or part of the program and offer comments to colleagues on and relating to their work.

The 2020 National Business Law Scholars Conference will be hosted on Zoom on Thursday, June 18 and Friday, June 19.  Conference sessions include paper panels covering a variety of areas of business law and plenary sessions on several current topics of interest.  As is true for the in-person conference, no registration fee is required for attendance.

The conference will begin on Thursday at 9:00 am EDT with a plenary Q&A session entitled “Business Law in the COVID-19 Era” (focusing on the ways in which Business Law has impacted and been impacted by the pandemic in various academic and practice settings).  Thursday’s formal proceedings end with a second plenary Q&A session at 4:45 pm EDT, “Teaching Business Law: Applying What We Learned from Emergency Remote Teaching During the Pandemic,” featuring doctrinal and experiential (including clinical) business law faculty reflecting on their recent experiences teaching remotely on an emergency basis and the lessons learned from that experience that inform future teaching.  An informal virtual cocktail hour follows that program, beginning at approximately 6:15 pm EDT.

Friday’s sessions begin at 9:00 am EDT and end at 4:30 pm EDT.  The final program of the day is a plenary panel on “Bankruptcy and COVID-19”…

The AALS Section on Securities Regulation distributed two calls for papers earlier today.
Both are included below.

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AALS Call for Papers:
What Can Securities Regulation Contribute to Environmental Law, and Vice Versa?

The AALS Sections on Environmental Law and Securities Regulation are delighted to present a joint session at the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting, titled “What Can Securities Regulation Contribute to Environmental Law, and Vice Versa?” We are awaiting final scheduling information from AALS, but we anticipate receiving a three-hour joint program slot. We are planning an innovative format that will include short (5-7 minute) paper presentations in plenary session, followed by collaboration in “table discussion” groups.

The political vicissitudes of environmental policy in recent years have led to increased focus on the potential of private mechanisms to achieve environmental results that had traditionally been sought by government action. At the same time, investors and market regulators have become increasingly aware of the need for corporations to grapple with environmental risks, particularly with respect to global climate disruption.

This joint session will bring together leading scholars from the fields of environmental and securities law to discuss the reciprocal influences that environmental and securities law exert on each…