Conferences

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Happy New Year.

Starting Saturday morning (or maybe tomorrow night), I’ll be live tweeting from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) conference. Because I teach both civil procedure and business associations, my tweets will largely relate to those sessions as well as sessions for new law professors.

Next Thursday I will summarize the high points of the conference, at least from my perspective. 

My twitter handle is @mlnarine and the AALS hashtag is #AALS2015. If you’re at the conference and a blog reader, please say hello.

March 21, 2015
University of Georgia School of Law, Athens GA

The ninth annual meeting of the Law and Entrepreneurship Association (LEA) will occur on March 21, 2015 in Athens, Georgia.  The LEA is a group of legal scholars interested in the topic of entrepreneurship—broadly construed.  Topics have ranged from crowdfunding to electronic contracting to issues of taxation in startups.

Our annual conference is an intimate gathering where each participant is expected to have read and actively engage with all of the pieces under discussion.  We call for papers and proposals relating to the general topic of entrepreneurship and the law.

Proposals should be comprehensive enough to allow the LEA board to evaluate the aims and likely content of papers they propose. Papers may be accepted for publication but must not be published prior to the meeting. Works in progress, even those at a relatively early stage, are welcome.  Junior scholars and those considering entering the legal academy are especially encouraged to participate. There is no registration fee, but participants must cover their own costs.

To submit a presentation, email Professor Usha Rodrigues at rodrig@uga.edu with a proposal or paper by February 1, 2015. Please title the email “LEA Submission – {Name}.&rdquo…

In many companies, executives and employees alike will give a blank stare if you discuss “human rights.”  They understand the terms “supply chain” and “labor” but don’t always make the leap to the potentially loaded term “human rights.” But business and human rights is all encompassing and leads to a number of uncomfortable questions for firms. When an extractive company wants to get to the coal, the minerals, or the oil, what rights do the indigenous peoples have to their land? If there is a human right to “water” or “food,” do Kellogg’s, Coca Cola, and General Mills have a special duty to protect the environment and safeguard the rights of women, children and human rights defenders? Oxfam’s Behind the Brands Campaign says yes, and provides a scorecard. How should companies operating in dangerous lands provide security for their property and personnel? Are they responsible if the host country’s security forces commit massacres while protecting their corporate property? What actions make companies complicit with state abuses and not merely bystanders? What about the digital domain and state surveillance? What rights should companies protect and how do they balance those with government requests for information?

The disconnect between “business” and “human…

National Business Law Scholars Conference

Thursday & Friday, June 4-5, 2015
Seton Hall University School of Law, Newark, NJ

This is the sixth annual meeting of the NBLSC, a conference which annually draws together legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all scholarly submissions relating to business law. Presentations should focus on research appropriate for publication in academic journals, law reviews, and should make a contribution to the existing scholarly literature. We will attempt to provide the opportunity for everyone to actively participate. Junior scholars and those considering entering the legal academy are especially encouraged to participate. For additional information, please email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at eric.chaffee@utoledo.edu.

Call for Papers

To submit a presentation, email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at eric.chaffee@utoledo.edu with an abstract or paper by February 13, 2015. Please title the email “NBLSC Submission – {Name}.” If you would like to attend, but not present, email Professor Chaffee with an email entitled “NBLSC Attendance.” Please specify in your email whether you are willing to serve as a commentator or moderator. A conference schedule will be circulated in late April.

 Conference Organizers:

Barbara Black (The University of Cincinnati College of…

I had planned to blog about the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights this week, but my head is overflowing with information about export credits, development financing, a possible international arbitration tribunal, remarks by the CEOs of Nestle and Unilever, and the polite rebuff to the remarks by the Ambassador of Qatar by a human rights activist in the plenary session. Next week, in between exam grading, I promise to blog about some of the new developments that will affect business lawyers and professors. FYI, I apparently was one of the top live tweeters of the Forum (#bizhumanrights #unforumwatch) and gained many valuable contacts and dozens of new followers. 

In the meantime, I recommend reading this great piece from the Legal Skills Prof Blog.  As I prepare to teach BA for the third time (which I hear is the charm), I plan to refine the techniques I already use and adopt others where appropriate. The link is below.

https://www.businesslawprofessors.com/legal_skills/2014/12/teaching-transactional-skills-in-business-aassociations/

As regular readers know, I research and write on business and human rights. For this reason, I really enjoyed the post about corporate citizenship on Thanksgiving by Ann Lipton, and Haskell Murray’s post about the social enterprise and strategic considerations behind a “values” message for Whole Foods, in contrast to the low price mantra for Wal-Mart. Both posts garnered a number of insightful comments.

As I write this on Thanksgiving Day, I’m working on a law review article, refining final exam questions, and meeting with students who have finals starting next week (being on campus is a great way to avoid holiday cooking, by the way). Fortunately, I gladly do all of this without complaint, but many workers are in stores setting up for “door-buster” sales that now start at Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Best Buy, and Toys R Us shortly after families clear the table on Thanksgiving, if not before. As Ann pointed out, a number of protestors have targeted these purportedly “anti-family” businesses and touted the “values” of those businesses that plan to stick to the now “normal” crack of dawn opening time on Friday (which of course requires workers to arrive in the middle of the night). The…

CALL FOR PAPERS

Fourth European Research Conference on Microfinance

1-3 June 2015

Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva

Geneva, Switzerland

Access to suitable and affordable finance is a precondition for meeting basic human needs in incomes and employment, health, education, work, housing, energy, water and transport. Microfinance – and more broadly, financial inclusion – will continue to be on the research and policy agenda. 2015 will be a special occasion to question received notions about the link between access to finance and welfare. In 2015 the Millennium Development Goals will make place for the Sustainable Development Goals. A broad debate and exchange on micro, macro and policy topics in financial inclusion will advance our knowledge and ultimately improve institutional performance and policy. This applies in particular to issues of financial market organization, but also patterns, diversity and trade-offs in institutional performance, scope for fiscal instruments, impact of technology on efficiency and outreach etc.

The European Research Conference on Microfinance is a unique platform of exchange for academics involved in microfinance research. The three former conferences organized by the Centre for European Research in Microfinance (CERMI) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2009, by the University of…

Received Saturday (edited slightly for publication here):

Dear Colleague,

Please consider submitting your work to the Track “Crowdfunding: a democratic way for financing innovative projects” @ the RnD Management Conference 2015.

The RnD Management Conference 2015 will be held in June 23-26 at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa.

You can find more information on the Conference Track and on the submission process at the following link: http://www.rnd2015.sssup.it/.

I warmly apologize for cross-posting.

Best regards,

Cristina Rossi Lamastra, PhD

Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano School of Management

Phone: 0039 0223993972

Fax: 0039 0323992710

Skype: crossi73

Web page: http://www.dig.polimi.it/index.php?id=308&tx_wfqbe_pi1[id]=52

I used to joke that my alma mater Columbia University’s core curriculum, which required students to study the history of art, music, literature, and philosophy (among other things) was designed solely to make sure that graduates could distinguish a Manet from a Monet and not embarrass the university at cocktail parties for wealthy donors. I have since tortured my son by dragging him through museums and ruins all over the world pointing spouting what I remember about chiaroscuro and Doric columns. He’s now a freshman at San Francisco Art Institute, and I’m sure that my now-fond memories of class helped to spark a love of art in him. I must confess though that as a college freshman I was less fond of  Contemporary Civilization class, (“CC”) which took us through Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Hume, Hegel, and all of the usual suspects. At the time I thought it was boring and too high level for a student who planned to work in the gritty city counseling abused children and rape survivors.

Fast forward twenty years or so, and my job as a Compliance and Ethics Officer for a Fortune 500 company immersed me in many of the principles…