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While Visiting Academic at University College London, Georgia Law Professor Amann presents “No Exit at Nuremberg”

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann gave a presentation yesterday at University College London Faculty of Laws, where she is a Visiting Academic for all of Summer 2022.

Her talk, entitled “No Exit at Nuremberg: The Postwar Order As Stage for 21st-Century Global Insecurity” (video here) drew upon her research on participants at the post-World War II International Military Tribunal, as well as an existentialist play written toward the end of that long war. The talk investigated the relationship of international criminal justice to security with particular reference to the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law (she is pictured above at the right of the table). Chairing her talk in London yesterday, and moderating questions from in-person and online attendees was Dr. Martins Paparinskis (above left), a Reader in Public International Law at UCL who recently was elected to an upcoming term on the United Nations’ International Law Commission.

Georgia Law Professor Nathan Chapman gives scholarly presentations at Oxford and Heidelberg universities

Nathan Chapman, Pope F. Brock Associate Professor of Professional Responsibility here at the University of Georgia School of Law, is just back after giving scholarly presentations at Oxford University in the United Kingdom and the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The Oxford Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Governance hosted Professor Chapman’s visit last month to the Oxford University Faculty of Law, where he gave two presentations:

  • “Judicial Review in the US As a Tradition of Moral Reasoning.” Commenting were Professor Richard Ekins (St. John’s, Oxford) and Professor Fernando Simon Yarza (Oxford/Navarre).
  • “The Doctrine of Qualified Immunity,” which summarized his argument in “The Fair Notice Rationale for Qualified Immunity,” forthcoming in the Florida Law Review. Professor Timothy Endicott (All Soul’s, Oxford) commented.

In Germany, Chapman presented as part of the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum, or International Academic Forum, at the University of Heidelberg. Entitled “Government Conditions on Religious School Funding,” the chapter will appear in an interdisciplinary book on The Impact of Political Economy on Character Formation. Workshop participants were the other authors and editors of the book. They included scholars in social theory, theology, philosophy, economics, and law from the Universities of Chicago, Heidelberg, Bonn, Queensland, and Stellenbosch, located, respectively, in the United States, Germany, Australia, and South Africa.

Georgia Law Professor Christopher Bruner publishes on AI and corporations in Cambridge Law Journal

Professor Christopher Bruner, the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law, has published “Distributed Ledgers, Artificial Intelligence and the Purpose of the Corporation” in 79 Cambridge Law Journal 431 (2020).

Here’s the abstract:

“Distributed ledgers and blockchain technology are widely expected to promote more direct shareholder involvement in corporate governance by reducing costs of voting and trade clearance. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence may shrink the decision-making terrain where corporations rely on human management. This article analyses these technologies and concludes that, while such outcomes are plausible, their potential corporate governance impacts are likely more complex and contingent. Despite the implicit libertarianism that characterises much of the discourse, we in fact have choices to make about how such technologies are developed and deployed – and these policy decisions will have to be grounded in a normative conception of corporate purpose external to the technology itself.”

Bruner presented the work at a conference on “The Future of the Firm” held last year in London.

Georgia Law Professor Christopher Bruner speaks at London conference on technology and corporate governance


Christopher Bruner, the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law, presented his scholarship at a conference on “The Future of the Firm” held last Friday in London.

Professor Bruner’s presentation was entitled “Distributed Ledgers, Artificial Intelligence, and the Purpose of the Corporation.”

Among the other speakers were scholars from the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University College London, and Loyola Law School-Los Angeles.

The event was hosted by the University College London, Faculty of Laws. Co-sponsors included the University of Cambridge Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law, as well as the Brussels-based European Corporate Governance Institute, of which Professor Bruner is an Academic Member.

Georgia Law Professor Amann speaks at Oxford University conference on transnational human rights

“Victors’ Justice and the New Turn to Transnational Process” is the title of a paper that Professor Diane Marie Amann presented earlier this month in England, as part of an Oxford University conference, which took place over the course of 2 days at the Law Faculty’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Mansfield College, and at St. Antony’s College.

Through the lens of the “victors’ justice” critique that some late 20th century scholars used to describe post-World War II trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo, the paper examines contemporary interest in transnational means of prosecuting international crimes.

An expert in international criminal law and human rights, Amann is the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law. For a portion of 2018, she was a Research Visitor/Visiting Fellow at Bonavero/Mansfield College.

Professor Bruner publishes chapter on “How Small Jurisdictions Compete in International Financial Services”

Christopher M. Bruner, J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law, has just published “How Small Jurisdictions Compete in International Financial Services.”

This chapter appears in Integration and International Dispute Resolution in Small States, a 2018 Springer volume edited by Petra Butler (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Eva Lein (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), and Salim Rhonson (Open University).

Bruner’s contribution is a revised version of his keynote address at a conference on “International Financial Services and Small States,” held in London in 2017.

Georgia Law Professor Harlan Cohen presents “Multilateralism’s Life Cycle” in visit at University College London

Harlan Grant Cohen, the Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, spent the last two weeks as a visitor of University College London (UCL) Faculty of Laws newly renovated building, Bentham House.

As part of Cohen’s visit, UCL’s Global Governance Institute invited him to give a public keynote lecture on “Multilateralism’s Life Cycle.” As previously posted, that is the topic of his forthcoming article for the American Journal of International Law.

Cohen is a member of AJIL’s Board of Editors, and serves as Editor of the journal’s International Decisions section.

Georgia Law Professor Amann presents “A New History of the Nuremberg Trials” at Oxford University’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights

We’re pleased today to cross-post this report from Professor Diane Marie Amann, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director here at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law, who undertook research-intensive semester this spring:

OXFORD – A capstone of my Hilary-Trinity Term visit here took place yesterday, when I presented “A New History of the Nuremberg Trials: Figuring Women and Others into the Narrative” to law students and faculty who gathered at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, located at Oxford University’s Mansfield College. The Oxford Transitional Justice Research network cosponsored.

Professor Kate O’Regan, director of the institute and a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, opened my Research Visitor Seminar. Then came my  presentation of my research on the roles women played at Nuremberg – not only the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, but also the 12 subsequent American trials before what are known as the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Next, Dapo Akande, Professor of Public International Law at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, offered discussant’s remarks before opening the floor for a stimulating round of Q&A.

I’m grateful to all at the Institute for this event and the hospitality I’ve enjoyed during my stay at a Bonavero Research Visitor and Mansfield College Visiting Fellow. Grateful, too, for the opportunities I’ve had to present this work elsewhere in Europe, at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland Galway, University of Stockholm, University of Göttingen, and Max Planck Institute Luxembourg.

Georgia Law Professor Chapman presents “Due Process of War” at Oxford University Faculty of Law

OXFORD – University of Georgia School of Law Professor Nathan S. Chapman recently visited Oxford University to deliver a paper entitled “Due Process of War.” He spoke at Oxford’s Trinity College, on the invitation of the Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government, a project within the auspices of the Oxford Faculty of Law.

In his presentation, Chapman set forth an historical account of how thinkers in America’s founding era understood the interplay of war and due process. He then linked these understandings to much more recent events, such as the United States’ 2011 targeted killing by drone strike of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

The paper follows from Chapman’s other works in this area, including “Due Process Abroad,” published in 2017 in the Northwestern University Law Review.

Professor Bruner presents on corporate law and corporate governance at international conference in England

“Contextual Corporate Governance: Tailoring Board Independence Rules by Industry” is the title of the presentation that our Christopher Bruner, J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law, delivered Monday at the annual International Corporate Governance and Law Forum, held this year in England.

Hosted by the Centre for Business Law and Practice at the University of Leeds School of Law and cosponsored by Deakin Law School of Australia and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the 2-day event brought together law and business scholars from around the world to discuss corporate board composition and process.

Bruner, a member of our Dean Rusk International Law Center Council, was among the 20 or so scholars who presented, from Australia, China, England, France, Japan, Norway, and the United States. Here’s the description of his paper:

Over recent decades, several commercially prominent jurisdictions have increasingly required that listed company boards, and certain committees, consist primarily of ‘independent’ (i.e. non-executive) directors. In the United States, for example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act respectively require that a listed company’s audit and compensation committees be entirely independent. NYSE and NASDAQ rules go further, requiring that a majority of the whole board be independent. Such requirements reflect the prevailing view that independent directors protect minority shareholder interests through greater objectivity and practical capacity to monitor and resist domineering CEOs. That such benefits outweigh the costs – notably, limited information (relative to executive directors) – is assumed.

Recent empirical work, however, increasingly casts doubt on this assumption – at least in certain contexts. While empirical studies initially found little evidence that director independence rules impact corporate performance at all, more recent studies focusing on the cost of acquiring company-specific information suggest that the impacts of such rules are far from uniform. Indeed, mounting evidence suggests that such rules may improve performance where company-specific information can be acquired at low cost, yet harm performance where the cost of information acquisition is high. These findings – commending sensitivity to industry context – dovetail with a parallel body of post-crisis studies associating board independence (and other shareholder-centric governance structures) with potentially undesirable risk-taking incentives in certain industries – notably, finance.

These perspectives offer much-needed nuance to our thinking about corporate governance reform, strongly suggesting that one-size-fits-all rules mandating uniform board structures across the universe of listed companies may widely miss the mark in important contexts. This paper will discuss the history of such reforms, canvass relevant legal and financial literatures, and explore regulatory strategies for more targeted reforms on an industry-by-industry basis.