faculty

Welcoming Ammar Zafar, Visiting Scholar at University of Georgia School of Law

We at the University of Georgia School of Law Dean Rusk International Law Center are pleased to welcome a new Visiting Research Scholar: Ammar Zafar, a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Zafar’s doctoral research focuses on the potential of central bank digital currencies, implemented through blockchain technology with the aim of establishing an inclusive and sustainable monetary system. While at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, he plans to conduct comparative research on how U.S. financial regulations and Federal Reserve fiscal policies address legal and macroeconomic issues related to CBDCs and blockchain technology. Zafar holds a master’s degree in Banking and Corporate Finance and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree in Legal Practice from Britain’s University of Bristol, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from Karnataka State University, India, and an LL.B. degree from BPP Law University in London.

Serving as Zafar’s Georgia Law faculty sponsor will be Professor Usha Rodrigues, who holds the M.E. Kilpatrick Chair of Corporate Finance and Securities Law.

Zafar is visiting pursuant to an institutional partnership between the University of Liverpool and the University of Georgia. His visit continues our Center’s long tradition of hosting, for brief or extended stays, scholars and researchers whose work touches on issues of international, comparative, or transnational law. Details and an online application to become a visiting scholar here.

Georgia Law Professor Hellerstein presents on crypto-assets at OECD

Walter Hellerstein, Distinguished Research Professor and Shackelford Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Taxation Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law, spoke this month at a gathering of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, France.

Hellerstein presented “Crypto-Assets: Key Concepts and Terms,” a paper he co-authored with a member of the Secretariat, at a meeting of the OECD Working Party No. 9 on Consumption Taxes.

Georgia Law Dean Rutledge and student Rudzinskyi comment on appeals decision affecting international arbitration

A decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned its precedent regarding international arbitration awards, and thus ruled in line with other federal appellate courts, is the subject of a new commentary by  Peter B. “Bo” Rutledge (above left) and student Vladyslav Rudzinskyi, a member of the Master of Laws (LL.M.) Class of 2023.

Their article, entitled “Eleventh Circuit Switches Stance on Grounds for the Vacatur of Non-Domestic Awards,” appeared on May 11 in the Daily Report.

The article discusses Corporacion AIC, SA v. Hidroelectrica Santa Rita S.A., an en banc April 13, 2023, decision in which the Eleventh Circuit set aside panel precedents to hold that vacatur proceedings related to non-domestic awards are governed by chapter 1 the Federal Arbitration Act. Noting that the new decision corresponds with others in the Second, Third, Sixth, and Tenth Circuits, Rutledge and Rudzinskyi concluded noted:

“Previously, arbitration practitioners in the Eleventh Circuit (especially hubs like Atlanta and Miami) could tout its distinctive vacatur standards as a reason to site disputes there.

“Those standards had aligned the Eleventh Circuit with international jurisdictions following the UNCITRAL Model Arbitration Law (whose vacatur standards track those under the New York Convention). Corporacion strips the Eleventh Circuit of that potential comparative advantage as an arbitral forum.”

They further warned that “[t]he new standard risks diluting the enforceability of international awards.”

Georgia Law Professor Amann publishes afterword to new volume translating work by legal thinker Mireille Delmas-Marty

University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann contributed the afterword to a just-published volume featuring an English translation of an important work by the late Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941-2022), Collège de France de Paris law professor and one of the pre-eminent legal thinkers of her generation.

Co-editors of the volume, A Compass of Possibilities, are law professors Emanuela Fronza (University of Bologna, Italy) and Chiara Giorgetti (University of Richmond). Fronza also wrote an Epilogue to the main work. Subtitled “Global Governance and Legal Humanism,” the book offers, in translation, Delmas-Marty’s 2011 closing lecture at Collège de France, entitled “Une boussole des possibles. Gouvernance mondiale et humanismes juridiques.” Publishing the new work is 1088 Press, a University of Bologna imprint.

Amann – who is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at Georgia Law – was a longtime colleague of Delmas-Marty. Amann’s role in their collaborations included a year-long stint as professeure invitée at Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), where Delmas-Marty then taught; a lecture at Collège de France; and annual participation in a decade of gatherings of the Réseau ID franco-américain/French-American Network on the Internationalization of Law.

Amann’s afterword is titled “A Guide to Mireille Delmas-Marty’s “Compass'”; it appears at pp. 55-64 of the new volume. Here’s the abstract from a pre-publication version of Amann’s afterword, available at SSRN:

“This essay appears as the Afterword (pp. 55-64) to a volume featuring an important work by the late Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941-2022). A Collège de France de Paris law professor and one of the pre-eminent legal thinkers of her generation, Delmas-Marty and the essay’s author were longtime colleagues and collaborators. The volume contains an English translation of a 2011 lecture by Delmas-Marty, originally titled “Une boussole des possibles: Gouvernance mondiale et humanismes juridiques.” Amann’s essay surveys that writing, in a manner designed to acquaint non-francophone lawyers and academics with Delmas-Marty’s vast and visionary œuvre.”

Georgia Law Professor MJ Durkee’s “The Pledging World Order” published in new Yale Journal of International Law issue

The latest publication by University of Georgia School of Law Professor Melissa J. “MJ” Durkee is now in print at Yale Journal of International Law.

The article by Durkee, who is Associate Dean for International Programs, Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, and Allen Post Professor here at Georgia Law, is “The Pledging World Order,” 48 Yale J. Int’l L. 1 (2023).

Here’s the SSRN abstract:

“There is an emerging world order characterized by unilateral pledges within a legal or ‘legal-ish’ architecture of commitments. The pledging world order has materialized in the international legal response to climate change and in other diverse sites. It crosses and blurs the public-private divide. It erodes distinctions between multilateralism and localism, law and not-law, and progress and stasis. It is both a symptom of and a contributor to the dismantling of the Westphalian and postwar orders. Its report card is mixed: While pledging can be highly ineffective as a legal technology, the pledging world order may respond to some legitimacy concerns that attach to earlier orders. And this may be the best available method to respond to important global commons problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, orbital debris, and other emerging issues.

“This Article makes three principal contributions. First, it identifies pledging as a treaty design choice and contrasts it with a variety of standard forms of international lawmaking. Second, it casts pledging as a trans-regime, trans-substantive ordering device that appears both inside and outside of law, in public and private sites, and at all levels of organization. Third, it identifies features of the world order that pledging reflects. Specifically, the pledging world order privileges function over status, departs from the top-down methods of deep cooperation common to the postwar legal order, and embraces a form of coordinated autonomy. Reformers might make design choices to improve this order, try to reclaim features of older orders, or reject both paths and turn to something new.”

Prior posts on Durkee’s presentations of this scholarship here.

International law at University of Georgia, administered by Dean Rusk International Law Center, earns #15 U.S. News ranking

Delighted to report that the just-released U.S. News rankings place our international law curriculum here at the University of Georgia School of Law at No. 15 in the United States.

This excellence rating caps a decade in which our international law initiatives have ranked in the top 20 or so among US law schools. In this year’s rankings, our international law curriculum tied with UCLA Law for the No. 15 spot. (The University of Georgia School of Law, as a whole, earned a No. 20 ranking this year, as it posted here.)

Our international law achievement is due in no small part to the enthusiastic support and hard work of everyone affiliated with Georgia Law’s four-decades-old-old Dean Rusk International Law Center. As chronicled at this Exchange of Notes blog and our Center website, these include:

► Superb members of the law faculty, including: Dean Peter B. “Bo” Rutledge, an international arbitration expert; our Center’s Director, Melissa J. “MJ” Durkee, whose expertise includes international business law, international environmental law, and space law; the Center’s Faculty Co-Directors, Professors Diane Marie Amann, an expert in peace-and-security fields including the laws of war, child rights, and international criminal justice, and Harlan G. Cohen, an expert in global governance, trade, and foreign relations law. Among those supporting their efforts are many other Georgia Law faculty and courtesy faculty members, including: Professors Zohra Ahmed, whose interests include law and political economy; Christopher M. Bruner, a comparative corporate governance scholar; Thomas Burch, who leads the Appellate Clinic that has won clients relief under the Convention Against Torture; Anne Burnett, foreign and international law research librarian; Jason Cade and Clare Norins, who recently led a clinical team in securing federal redress for immigration detainees; Nathan S. Chapman, a scholar of due process and extraterritoriality; Jessica L. Heywood, Director of the Washington, D.C. Semester in Practice; Thomas E. Kadri, whose expertise includes cybercrime and global data privacy; Fazal Khan and Elizabeth Weeks, health law specialists; Jonathan Peters, a journalism and law professor expert in international media and free speech; Laura Phillips-Sawyer; Kalyani Ramnath, a global legal historian who focuses on South Asia; Lori A. Ringhand, a scholar of comparative constitutional law and elections law; Tim Samples, whose scholarship includes global digital platforms agreements; Kent Barnett, Sonja West, and Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, who have presented overseas on administrative law, media law, and civil procedure, respectively; Walter Hellerstein, a world-renowned tax specialist; Michael L. Wells, a European Union scholar; and Anna Howard White, who led our champion Jessup International Moot Court Team.

► Talented students pursuing JD, MSL, and LLM degrees, as well as Graduate Certificates in International Law. They include: our Center’s many Student Ambassadors; the staffers and editors of the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law who produce one of the country’s oldest student journals, and who led our October 2022 conference, “The Law of Global Economic Statecraft”; the advocates on the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court, the LL.M.s’ International Commercial & Investment Arbitration Moot Competition, and the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot; student clinicians in our Appellate Litigation Clinic who have argued asylum cases before U.S. Courts of Appeals, as well as those in our Community HeLP Clinic, Jane W. Wilson Family Justice Clinic, and First Amendment Clinic who have litigated claims for detainees and other immigration clients; participants in our Global Externships as well as our full-semester NATO Externship and other D.C. Semester in Practice placements; and the student leaders of our International Law Society.

► Superb Center staff like Laura Tate Kagel, Sarah Quinn, Mandy Dixon, and Catrina Martin.

► Visiting Scholars and Researchers, including, most recently, Professor Brianne McGonigle Leyh and Maisie Hopkins from the Netherlands’ Utrecht University, Daesun Kim, a comparative administrative law researcher; and Professor Natalia Pires de Vasconcelos, Insper São Paulo, Brazil.

► Academics, practitioners, and policymakers, from all over the world, who have contributed to our events – conferences, workshops, and lectures, including our ongoing Consular Series and International Law Colloquium, as well as this past semester’s Space Law Speaker Series, part of a minicourse that culminated in a daylong problem-solving exercise.

► Graduates who excel as partners in international commercial law firms, as heads of nongovernmental organizations and international organizations, as in-house counsel at leading multinational enterprises, and as diplomats and public servants – and who give back through participation in our Dean Rusk International Law Center Council, through mentoring, and through other support.

► Our valued partnerships, with Georgia Law student organizations; with leading higher education institutions such as the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies in Belgium, our partner in our Global Governance Summer School,  as well as O.P. Jindal University in India and Bar Ilan University in Israel, with which we have student and faculty exchanges; with organizations like the American Branch of the International Law Association, the American Society of International Law, and the European Society of International Law, in which our faculty have held leadership roles, as well as Global Atlanta, the World Affairs Council of Atlanta, the Atlanta International Arbitration Society; and with university units like the School of Public & International Affairs, the Terry College of Business, the Grady School of Journalism, the African Studies Institute, and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts.

With thanks to all, we look forward to continue strengthening our initiatives in international, comparative, transnational, and foreign relations law – not least, in the preparation of Georgia Law students to practice in our 21st C. globalized legal profession.

Georgia Law Professor Bruner comments on Princeton symposium in Bermuda’s daily newspaper

Christopher Bruner, the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law, was quoted earlier this month in The Royal Gazette, a daily newspaper based in Hamilton, Bermuda. The article reported on participation by Bruner and others in Princeton University’s Law, Identity, and Economic Development in the Post-Colonial Era symposium held during April. (prior post)

Entitled “Bermudians join discussions on regional economic development,” the article cited Bruner’s 2016 Oxford University Press book, Re-Imagining Offshore Finance: Market Dominant Small Jurisdictions in a Globalising Financial World. It then reported Bruner’s comments respecting the significance of issues that the Princeton conference explored:

“Small jurisdictions around the world – including in the Northern Atlantic and Caribbean regions – are at the front lines of a range of global environmental and economic challenges.

“Now more than ever, it is critical that we explore sustainable economic development models available to small jurisdictions, as well as the lessons that all jurisdictions can learn from their experiences.”

Georgia Law Dean Bo Rutledge and student Alexandra Lampe publish commentary on federal appellate ruling involving state secrets privilege

The implications of a recent federal appellate ruling related to international civil litigation is the subject of a commentary published last week by the dean and a student researcher here at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Coauthoring the Daily Report article, entitled “State Secrets Privilege: A Challenge in International Litigation,” were international business law expert Peter B. “Bo” Rutledge, Dean and Herman E. Talmadge Chair of Law at Georgia  Law, along with Alexandra Lampe, a member of Georgia Law’s Master of Laws (LL.M.) Class of 2023.

The article discusses Sakab Saudi Holding Co. v. Aljabri, 58 F.4th 585 (1st Cir. 2023), in which the Boston-based U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed a dismissal of a suit arising out of an asset seizure, lest further litigation risk disclosure of state secrets. After describing the ruling in the context of other case law, Rutledge and Lampe concluded:

“Parties in international commercial disputes with any kind of national security implication approaching U.S. courts, thus, should be aware to not expect too much from such proceedings. … [T]he broad application and interpretation of the state secrets privilege in the U.S. can complicate the resolution of international disputes.”

Georgia Law Professor Hellerstein in Bloomberg article on tax havens

Walter Hellerstein, Distinguished Research Professor and Shackelford Distinguished Professor in Taxation Law Emeritus here at the University of Georgia School of Law, was featured last Tuesday on Bloomberg’ Daily Tax Report.

The article, entitled “Minnesota Targets Corporations Shifting Profits to Tax Havens” and written by Michael H. Bologna, discussed the practice of worldwide combined tax reporting.

Bon voyage to students taking part in Georgia Law global summer initiatives

In the weeks ahead, more than two dozen students will travel to participate in two global practice preparation offerings administered by the University of Georgia School of Law Dean Rusk International Law Center. These are the:

GGSS

This year’s Global Governance Summer School will focus on economic and human rights. It’s set to begin at the end this month, when students will travel to Belgium for a week of lectures led by Georgia Law Professor Zohra Ahmed as well as Leuven professors. The first week of this for-credit course also will include professional development briefings at the European Parliament, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a private law firm.

Then programming shifts to The Hague, Netherlands, where Professor Melissa J. “MJ” Durkee, the Center’s Director, Associate Dean for International Programs, and Allen Post Professor at Georgia Law, will lead briefings at the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, and Leiden University. Casey Graham, Sarah Quinn, and Catrina Martin will provide logistical assistance during the program. (Above, many in the group gather for a predeparture photo.)

Seventeen Georgia Law students will take part: Andrew Arrington, Hao Chen “Bobby” Dong, and Marly “Jansen” Killian, Allison Reid, all rising 3Ls; Mona Abboud, Madison Graham, Megan Jones, Anna “Carolina” Mares, Erin Nalley, Caden Pruitt, Hannah Silvers, Tiffany Torchia, Daniel “Tripp” Vaughn, all rising 2Ls; and Alma Bajramovic, Thomas Kingsley, Angela Mossgrove, Jasmine Underwood, all pursuing Graduate Certificates in International Law.

GEO

Our Center’s Global Externship Overseas initiative places Georgia Law students in externships lasting between four and twelve weeks. It thus offers students the opportunity to gain practical work experience in a variety of legal settings worldwide. Some students opt to combine the GEO opportunity with participation in GGSS.

This summer, fifteen Georgia Law students are set to pursue Global Externships Overseas, in practice areas such as privacy and technology law, international environmental law, intellectual property law, European Union competition and trade law, international arbitration, corporate law, and human rights law.

Private-sector placements among rising 3Ls include: Caroline Bailey, GreenCo S.A., Buenos Aires, Argentina; Hao Chen “Bobby” Dong, Baker Tilly, Hamburg and Frankfurt, Germany; Matthew Philips, PSA Legal, New Delhi, India; Benjamin Siegel, Soreinen, Tallinn, Estonia. Among rising 2Ls, private-sector placements include: Mona Abboud, Alston & Bird, Brussels, Belgium; Madison Graham, Van Bael & Bellis, Brussels, Belgium; Sierra Hamilton, Weickmann & Weickmann, Munich, Germany; Anna “Carolina” Mares, Houerbi Law Firm, Tunis, Tunisia; Matthew McKaig, GÖRG, Berlin, Germany; Caden Pruitt, Bodenheimer, Cologne, Germany; Daniel “Tripp” Vaughn, Deloitte, Baku, Azerbaijan.

Public-sector placements include: rising 3L Allison Reid, Eliberare, Brasov, Romania; and rising 2Ls Jasmine Furin, Office of the Privacy Commissioner, Hamilton, Bermuda; Bryonna Howard, No Peace Without Justice, Brussels, Belgium; and Erin Nalley, New Zealand Department of Conservation, Wellington, New Zealand.

More information on both of these Georgia Law initiatives here.