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New Era Dawns with Major Gift
university of pennsylvania
carey law school
Winter 2021
Penn Law Journal logo
Editor
Larry Teitelbaum

Design
Landesberg Design

Senior Contributing Writer
Lindsay Podraza

Contributing Writers
Derek Guy
Aisha Labi L’96
Jay Nachman

Photography
Sameer Khan
Colin Lenton
Chet Susslin
Stephen Voss

Website
https://journal.law.upenn.edu/

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Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy. We offer our sincere apologies for any typographical errors or omissions. Please forward any corrections to the attention of:

Larry Teitelbaum
Editor, Penn Law Journal
University of Pennsylvania
Carey Law School
3501 Sansom Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Telephone 215 573 7182
Fax 215 573 2020
Email alumnijournal@law.upenn.edu

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The University of Pennsylvania values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds. The University of Pennsylvania does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, citizenship status, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected class status in the administration of its admissions, financial aid, educational or athletic programs, or other University-administered programs or in its employment practices. Questions or complaints regarding this policy should be directed to the Executive Director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs, Sansom Place East, 3600 Chestnut Street, Suite 228, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6106; or (215)
898-6993 (Voice) or (215) 898-7803 (TDD).

Cover: Photo by Colin Lenton
Vol. 55, No. 2 Winter 2021
Arrow
The US plans to return to the moon by 2024, operating under the Mike Gold L’98-led Artemis Accords, an international agreement that governs space exploration.
Illustration: Courtesy of NASA
24
Largest gift in law school history promises to reshape the Law School and the profession, turning Penn Carey Law into a hub of innovation for students, faculty and alumni.
32
With a $50 million gift, Robert Toll L’66 and Jane Toll GSE’66 reaffirm their commitment to the training of young lawyers in service to the common good.
36
Let us introduce eight alumni who advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, people in poverty, abused women and African Americans who suffer disparities in the administration of justice. Their work has never been more important.
48
Meet Mike Gold L’98, an irrepressible presence at the nation’s legendary space agency, where for him it’s all in a day’s work to write international space treaties and protect the Earth from asteroids.
Letters
From The Dean
Photo: Sameer Khan / Fotobuddy
Theodore Ruger, Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law
This has been a year of turmoil and upheaval in the country. But it has also been a year of great promise at the Law School. We have received two monumental gifts — from the W. P. Carey Foundation and from the Robert and Jane Toll Foundation — which have given us the capacity to expand and grow our academic program while creating greater capacity to address the inequities in our society.

One year ago, we were the beneficiaries of an historic $125 million gift from the W. P. Carey Foundation. Since then, as chronicled in the Journal cover story, we have worked assiduously and strategically to apply these resources in a way that supports and provides new opportunities to students, that fortifies our excellent faculty, and that strengthens the Law School overall.

And we have done so in concert with our students, many of whom have been engaged in the process, meeting with me in person and sharing ideas about how to maximize the impact of these resources.

Thanks to them, and the generosity of the W.  P. Carey Foundation and support from many other alumni donors, in just a year-and-a-half we have added six new faculty, excellent teachers and distinguished scholars. We have increased funding for public interest summer fellowships and for post-graduate fellowships, tripling the number of students in the latter category this year. We also have created a full suite of lifelong learning programs. And this is just a brief summary of all that we’ve accomplished.

#pennLaw
Signing of Fair Housing legislation
A federal lawsuit accuses Google of harming consumers by using restrictive contracts to stifle competition in search and search advertising. In the @nytimes, Prof. Herbert Hovenkamp offers insight on the antitrust case against Google.
pennlaw.news/31sPsQm
Woman walking in New York
‘Perspectives on Fair Housing’ looks back on more than 50 years of landmark legislation. A new Penn Press book presents FairHousing as one of the foremost issues facing the U.S. today.
pennlaw.news/31rMeg2
Google screenshot
Is #NewYorkCity Over? In a recent @Freakonomics episode, Prof. David Abrams’ research on COVID-19 and crime trends is discussed.
pennlaw.news/3dfeTtz

Prof. Allison Hoffman’s recent scholarship offers post-pandemic path to solving nursing home crisis.
pennlaw.news/3lW02qU

In @washingtonpost, Prof. Natasha Sarin co-writes an op-ed about how many companies pay nothing in taxes.
pennlaw.news/35tnaGI
Justice Ginsburg paved the way toward gender equality, inspiring generations to advocate justice under the law. Learn more about her legacy. #RBG #SCOTUS
pennlaw.news/2SlEfw5
“Yet it is striking how little U.S. corporations pay in taxes: Based on public reporting, we calculate that in 2019, nearly 20 percent of large corporations that reported profits to shareholders of $100 million (or more) paid zero (or even negative) federal income taxes.”
Natasha Sarin
Assistant Professor of Law
#pennLaw
Signing of Fair Housing legislation
‘Perspectives on Fair Housing’ looks back on more than 50 years of landmark legislation. A new Penn Press book presents FairHousing as one of the foremost issues facing the U.S. today.
pennlaw.news/31rMeg2
Google screenshot
A federal lawsuit accuses Google of harming consumers by using restrictive contracts to stifle competition in search and search advertising. In the @nytimes, Prof. Herbert Hovenkamp offers insight on the antitrust case against Google.
pennlaw.news/31sPsQm
Woman walking in New York
Is #NewYorkCity Over? In a recent @Freakonomics episode, Prof. David Abrams’ research on COVID-19 and crime trends is discussed.
pennlaw.news/3dfeTtz

Prof. Allison Hoffman’s recent scholarship offers post-pandemic path to solving nursing home crisis.
pennlaw.news/3lW02qU

“Yet it is striking how little U.S. corporations pay in taxes: Based on public reporting, we calculate that in 2019, nearly 20 percent of large corporations that reported profits to shareholders of $100 million (or more) paid zero (or even negative) federal income taxes.”
Natasha Sarin
Assistant Professor of Law
In @washingtonpost, Prof. Natasha Sarin co-writes an op-ed about how many companies pay nothing in taxes.
pennlaw.news/35tnaGI

Justice Ginsburg paved the way toward gender equality, inspiring generations to advocate justice under the law. Learn more about her legacy. #RBG #SCOTUS
pennlaw.news/2SlEfw5

Opinion
At Issue Department
At Issue Department
Illustration of an hourglass with silhouettes of military veterans
The Fight for Faster Resolution of VA Disability Appeals
By Richard M. Rosenbleeth W’54, L’57
Ten years ago, in November 2010, a veteran named Wayne Gary Mote filed a claim to the Veteran’s Administration asking for disability payments due to the heart condition he had developed from exposure to Agent Orange.

He said he had flown several classified missions in Vietnam and produced affidavits from fellow veterans to support his claim. The VA said it could find no record of that service. When his claim was rejected, Mote appealed the decision in 2013, but he died later that year. His widow is continuing her fight for disability payments.

Mote’s case is just one disturbing example of the effect of unreasonable delays on veterans and their families who have waited years for resolution of their disability claims. For years, I have led an effort to solve the problem of delay in deciding appeals of veterans’ disability benefits claims from the VA to the Board of Veteran’s Appeals. These disability claims relate to service-connected injuries/illnesses for which there is compensation from the government, based on a rating system. The VA decides eligibility and amount. Veterans depend on these benefits for basic necessities such as food, clothing, housing and medical care.

News & Events
IN SESSION
Osagie O. Imasogie headshot
Photo: Sameer Khan / Fotobuddy
Osagie O. Imasogie Appointed Chair of Board of Advisors
Osagie O. Imasogie llm’85 has been appointed Chair of the Law School’s Board of Advisors effective January 1, 2021. Current Chair Perry Golkin, for whom the Law School’s Golkin Hall is named, is rotating out of the position and will remain an active member of the Board of Advisors.

Imasogie has been a member of the Law School’s board since 2006. Imasogie received his law degrees from the University of Ife, Ile-Ife and the Nigerian Law School, and continued his education earning LLM degrees at both the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1984 and Penn’s Law School in 1985. A dedicated and engaged teacher, alumni supporter, and civic leader, he has more than 35 years of experience in law, finance and business management, healthcare, and the pharmaceutical industry.

“I am looking forward to working with Dean (Ted) Ruger and my colleagues on the board to continue the trajectory of growth and innovation that we have seen at the Law School,” said Imasogie. “As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and strive for a more just and equitable society, the next few years will be critical as legal education continues to evolve to meet changing needs and demands.”

Imasogie is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He is the Senior Managing Partner and Co-Founder at PIPV Capital, a fully integrated Private Equity and Venture Capital Fund which specializes in Life Sciences, principally in the pharmaceutical sector.

Photo: Sameer Khan / Fotobuddy
Painting of Robert H. Mundheim
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Robert H. Mundheim, Dean of the Law School from 1982–1989, received a prestigious award, the Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award, from the ABA.
ABA Honors Mundheim for Career Steeped in Ethics and Professionalism
Robert H. Mundheim, former Dean of the Law School, received a high honor in October when the American Bar Association presented him with the Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award.

The award from the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility is named for the late director of the State Bar of Michigan and longtime champion of ethics and lawyer regulation in every aspect of the practice of law.

According to the ABA, the Michael Franck Award brings deserved attention to individuals whose career commitments in areas such as legal ethics, disciplinary enforcement and lawyer professionalism demonstrate the best accomplishments of lawyers.

“No award means more to me than receipt of the Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award,” Mundheim said. “As I look back at my time as Dean, I am particularly proud of innovations we made at Penn in the teaching of professional responsibility: launching the experimental first year mandatory intensive course in Professional Responsibility; building the Center for Professional Responsibility and creating a series of films depicting situations raising ethical issues; and the institution of a mandatory public service requirement for graduation.”

In addition to his efforts to raise the profile of professionalism, ethics and public service at the Law School, Mundheim has made consistent contributions in these areas to the practice of law. Mundheim served on the New York City Bar’s Presidential Task Force on the Lawyer’s Role in Corporate Governance and continues to serve as an expert panelist at legal ethics continuing legal education programs across the United States and in the United Kingdom.

News & Events
Exhibit Department
A Different Form of Justice
Khoi Pham L’01 turned from the world of Super Lawyers to superheroes, following his lifelong passion for art. The one-time Assistant Public Defender in West Chester, Pa. got a gig with Marvel and, as he describes it, by day was a criminal attorney defending people accused of crimes and by night was drawing superheroes fighting for justice. Ten years ago, Marvel contract in hand, he left the practice of law and today draws intricate and vivid illustrations for Marvel and DC Comics, depicting famous figures such as Mighty Avengers and Spider-Man.
News & Events
Service Department
Arrow pointing left
Stephenie Foster L’86 says striving for gender equality is good for business.
Photo: Chet Susslin
Gender Equality and Diversity in the Workplace is More Nuanced Than We Realize, Foster Says
E

mpowering women is good for business—just ask Stephenie Foster L’86. As Co-Founder of Smash Strategies, a consulting firm dedicated to helping institutions advance their missions by being strategic around gender equality, Foster works with clients to identify opportunities and design strategies to help organizations “do well and do good.”

While part of that involves advancing opportunities for women in the workplace, including advocating for equal pay and increased access to leadership roles, Smash Strategies ultimately intends to revolutionize how organizations — and society at large   — think about inclusion and impact.

“Our work is about more than women’s equality in the workplace. It’s really about changing the discussion around what institutions do and understanding that what they do has an impact on people differently based on their demographics,” Foster explained. “We’re not the same, so our systems and our institutions need to take that into account.”

Technology as the Ultimate Pro Bono Tool
While recent events have stirred many to support social justice reforms, Claudia Johnson L’97 has long considered that her life’s work: helping the marginalized gain equal access to the justice system has remained a common denominator throughout her career.

Lessons she learned as a legal aid hotline manager several years ago launched a career at LawHelp Interactive, where, with the help of technology, Johnson gets everyday Americans the legal aid they need and deserve.

“I’m not a technophile, I’m a lawyer,” she said. “But give me a tool that will make a difference, and I will adopt and use it and exploit it to fight poverty.”

Johnson had already been involved in pro bono work in San Francisco when she joined, in 2004, Bay Area Legal Aid (BALA), a consolidation of 7 nonprofits into one overarching organization. She served as the Managing Attorney for its civil legal advice hotline. Johnson was tasked with creating the Legal Aid Line (LAL) from scratch. Her first decision was to design it with multilingual capacity, skill routing, and then hiring and training a team of lawyers to directly answer legal queries on the hotline and devising new protocols for handling and managing those calls.

News & Events
Discovery Department
Joe Borstein and Gary Sangha screencaps
Joe Borstein screencap
Gary Sangha screencap
Joe Borstein C’02, L’05 and Gary Sangha L’03 during the Reimagining Legal Technology webinar in August 2020.
The Fears and Fallacies of Legal Technology
At the Reimagining Legal Technology webinar Joe Borstein C’02, L’05 and Gary Sangha L’03 drew on their extensive experience to make a persuasive case for the swift adoption of new tools in the practice of law, which they said will improve the delivery of legal services and ultimately benefit lawyers.

Joe Borstein is a leader in the area of alternative legal services, spending nearly a decade building the brand of one of the world’s largest providers of such services, Pangea3, which counseled Fortune 500 companies and AmLaw firms on how to leverage legal technology and globalized services to improve efficiency, increase work quality and reduce costs. He served as Director of Innovation at Thompson Reuters and writes a column on emerging trends in legal technology for Above the Law. Borstein is a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of the Profession Initiative at the Law School.

Gary Sangha is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of LexCheck, which is using artificial intelligence to help businesses more quickly review and negotiate contracts. Prior to starting LexCheck, Sangha founded Intelligize, an information services company that helps business professionals more easily research regulatory filings. Intelligize was one of the fastest growing legal technology companies in the US. Sangha has taught at the Law School and serves as a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Paul Robinson portrait
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Leading criminal law scholar returns to membership in elite legal institution.
Professor of Law Paul Robinson Elected to ALI
After a 25-year hiatus, Paul Robinson, the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law, was reelected a member of the American Law Institute.

Founded in 1923, the ALI is an independent organization that produces scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. Its elected members include eminent lawyers, judges, and academics. In the area of criminal law — Robinson’s specialty — the ALI promulgated the Model Penal Code, which is today the basis for criminal law codification in three-quarters of the states.

“Professor Robinson is one of the world’s leading criminal law scholars, and this is a richly-deserved honor for him,” said Ted Ruger, Dean of the Law School. “His writings on punishment, deterrence, justification, and desert, to name just a few of his areas of expertise, have left an indelible mark on the field.”

Robinson is the author or editor of seventeen books, including several widely used casebooks and books for general audiences, in addition to more than a hundred scholarly articles. His writings have been published in 15 languages, and he lectures frequently throughout the U.S. and abroad. His most recent books include Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage & Reform (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and, with Tyler Scott Williams, Mapping American Criminal Law: Variations Across the 50 States (Praeger, 2018).

A former Federal Prosecutor and Counsel for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures, Robinson began his academic career at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden in 1977. He joined the Penn Law faculty in 2003.

Robinson was previously a member of ALI from 1990 to 1995 but withdrew because the body was not at that time working on criminal law matters. “They are back in that business now,” said Robinson, “so I’m happy to contribute once again.”

The ALI has 20 members from the Penn Law faculty.

Microsoft Attorney’s Reaction to DACA Decision: ‘Oh My God, We Won.’
Cindy Randall L’93 barely slept the night before the US Supreme Court published Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion that would hold immigrant Dreamers’ fate in the balance.

“I was up early scanning the website for the decision,” said Randall, who represented Microsoft as the only corporate plaintiff among 42 groups who challenged the Department of Homeland Security’s move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

“I saw it was posted and started reading it, and it was not immediately apparent from the first couple of sentences what the ruling was. I was a complete ball of nerves,” she said. “Then it dawned on me, oh my God, we won. It’s hard to overstate how thrilling it was — just an incredible day.”

Randall, who serves as In-House Counsel for Microsoft, worked on behalf of the tech giant’s 66 Dreamer employees. She said the 5–4 June decision, in which Roberts said Homeland Security’s action was “arbitrary and capricious,” and therefore unlawful, was the result of a true collaborative effort between universities, advocacy groups, states, individual Dreamers and Microsoft.

“We had many plaintiffs but only a limited amount of time to argue the case to the Supreme Court, and that we were able to pull together and do this so effectively was amazing,” Randall said, adding that many amicus briefs were crucial in the Justices’ decision.

“Our strategy was to craft an argument that would appeal to Chief Justice Roberts,” she said. “We wanted to outline a narrow path to affirm that would not be inconsistent with his views on executive power.”

The decision did not address the legality of DACA itself, and the government still has the power to abolish it. Randall said that while she believes DACA’s fate lies in the winner of the next presidential election, the best way forward would be a legislative path to citizenship for Dreamers. “In the meantime, to the extent that litigation can keep people in the program and in the country and working for us, which it has done for three years, it’s really serving an important purpose,” she said.

Randall noted that since the June decision, the program is now under review, new applicants are not permitted, and current participants must renew their DACA status annually instead of every two years.

Despite DACA’s uncertain future, she said she is proud of this summer’s outcome. “Really the most thrilling thing about it was hearing directly from Microsoft’s Dreamer employees that my work made a difference for them and more than 700,000 others.”

News & Events
Citation Department
Who Wins and Who Loses
Inequality and the Distribution of Regulatory Impacts
By Cary Coglianese (Penn Law Edward B. Shils Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Penn Program on Regulation)

The Brookings Institution Press

The recent debate over growing inequality in the United States has focused on several causes but has pretty much ignored one potential factor: government regulation. This book is the first serious examination of whether federal regulation, defined broadly, has exacerbated or counteracted economic disparities that pose major long-term political and social consequences.

Contributors provide extensive empirical evidence showing how key areas of federal regulation during the past forty years have had varying social and economic impacts across the different strata of American society. The fields of regulation examined in the book include those addressing pharmaceutical products, energy systems, financial institutions, employment, transportation, manufacturing operations, antitrust, and workplace safety.

The book synthesizes economic data and research to identify the major impacts of regulation in these fields and assess who enjoys most of the benefits and who incurs most of the costs from each. Overall, the aim is to gauge whether and when regulation, on balance, is either a progressive or a regressive force in the United States.

Contributors are leading scholars in law, economics, policy analysis, and the social sciences who bring extensive research backgrounds to their study of the major regulatory fields addressed in each chapter. The book provides policymakers, scholars, and analysts an empirical basis for understanding how regulations affect different sectors of society differently — and the potential impact on inequality of those regulatory differences.

News & Events
Citation Department
Red Book
Who Wins and Who Loses
Inequality and the Distribution of Regulatory Impacts
By Cary Coglianese (Penn Law Edward B. Shils Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Penn Program on Regulation)

The Brookings Institution Press

The recent debate over growing inequality in the United States has focused on several causes but has pretty much ignored one potential factor: government regulation. This book is the first serious examination of whether federal regulation, defined broadly, has exacerbated or counteracted economic disparities that pose major long-term political and social consequences.

Contributors provide extensive empirical evidence showing how key areas of federal regulation during the past forty years have had varying social and economic impacts across the different strata of American society. The fields of regulation examined in the book include those addressing pharmaceutical products, energy systems, financial institutions, employment, transportation, manufacturing operations, antitrust, and workplace safety.

The book synthesizes economic data and research to identify the major impacts of regulation in these fields and assess who enjoys most of the benefits and who incurs most of the costs from each. Overall, the aim is to gauge whether and when regulation, on balance, is either a progressive or a regressive force in the United States.

Contributors are leading scholars in law, economics, policy analysis, and the social sciences who bring extensive research backgrounds to their study of the major regulatory fields addressed in each chapter. The book provides policymakers, scholars, and analysts an empirical basis for understanding how regulations affect different sectors of society differently — and the potential impact on inequality of those regulatory differences.

The Pandemic Has Not Immobilized Student Mobile TEAMS Who Help Rural Pa. Residents With Their Legal Problems
In 2018, the Toll Public Interest Center launched Mobile TEAMS (Trained Educators and Advocates Mobilized for Service) to provide pro bono legal assistance to outlying areas and populations without accessible legal services. Ever since, groups of Penn Law students have traveled around the state and more recently staffed the phones to help Pennsylvanians resolve immigration and unemployment issues.

The idea, said TPIC Staff Attorney Sarah Egoville, was to extend beyond Philadelphia, where many service opportunities tend to concentrate. “The legal needs in rural counties are dire, and the access to legal services can be much more limited,” said Egoville, who runs Mobile TEAMS.

Inevitably, COVID-19 has changed what those expeditions around the state look like, leading Mobile Teams to explore situations that students can address remotely by phone. For example, a partnership with MidPenn Legal Services enabled students to work with its low-income taxpayer clinic to help people over the phone.

This spring, the pandemic presented unexpected pro bono opportunities: Thirty-five Mobile TEAMS students staffed the Philadelphia Legal Assistance (PLA) temporary unemployment compensation hotline to help those affected by coronavirus-related layoffs.

The hotline was the brainchild of PLA’s Julia Simon-Mishel L’13, who saw an enormous unmet need when thousands lost their jobs as the state shut down. The project was a true Law School effort: Jonathan Pyle L’02, PLA’s contract performance officer, used his tech savvy to build the hotline while Rachel Miller L’12 assisted in the orchestration and training of volunteers.

News & Events
Casebook Department
Westmoreland v. CBS 1982–1985
On January 23, 1982, General William Westmoreland sued CBS for defamation related to its airing of a documentary claiming that the former U.S. military commander in Vietnam had deliberately underestimated the strength of North Vietnamese troops to support his optimistic reports on the progress of the war. The network charged that the undercount led to heavy American casualties during the Tet Offensive.

George Croner L’80 served as the principal Litigation Counsel for the National Security Agency in the Westmoreland case. Following his government service, Croner spent years in private practice. Today he is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where he writes and researches on foreign intelligence and national security interests. Earlier this year, Croner was appointed to the advisory board of the Law School’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law.

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American military commander Gereral William C. Westmoreland (front) reviews the men of the US Army’s 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam, as a squadron of helicopters flies overhead.
Three Faculty Members to Retire from the Law School in 2020–21

Three distinguished faculty members will retire from the Law School by the end of the 2020–21 academic year: Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law William Wilson Bratton; Earle Hepburn Professor of Law Emeritus Howard F. Chang; and William B. and Mary Barb Johnson Professor of Law and Economics Michael L. Wachter.

All three professors have made incredibly valuable contributions to both the legal academy and the Law School community — from their teaching excellence and pathbreaking scholarship to their mentorship and dedicated guidance of students.

William Wilson Bratton
Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Co-Director, Institute for Law and Economics
Professor Bratton is recognized internationally as a leading writer on business law. He brings an interdisciplinary perspective to a wide range of subject matters that encompass corporate governance, corporate finance, accounting, corporate legal history, and comparative corporate law. His work has appeared in some of the country’s most prestigious law reviews, including those of the University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Berkeley; Cornell; Michigan; Northwestern; Stanford; Texas; and Virginia.

“I spent 40 years as a standing faculty member at a number of law schools,” said Bratton. “It was a privilege to serve on the Penn Law faculty during my last decade of service. My interactions while on the Penn faculty led to some of my best work. Penn Law students were far and away the best of my experience. They are motivated and supremely capable and respond well when an instructor demonstrates commitment to the material.”

The Law School is on the march with an historic, foundational gift that lifts faculty and students, both now and post-graduation, and provides opportunities for alumni to grow in their careers through robust lifelong learning programs. Faculty hiring, student support, cross-disciplinary offerings, the experiential learning curriculum, the public service program — all benefit from the generosity of the W. P. Carey Foundation. There’s an emphasis on innovation and change. And doors open wider for students from underrepresented backgrounds. The future is here.
By Larry Teitelbaum
As befits someone who leads the Future of the Profession Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Jennifer Leonard L’04 is already looking to the horizon, considering the multiplier effect of the historic gift from the W. P. Carey Foundation.

One year ago, in November, the Foundation donated $125 million to the school. It was the largest gift to a law school in history.

“The gift gives us the ability to amplify, in a massive way, what a forward-thinking, leading law school should and could be doing,” said Leonard, the Law School’s Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director of the Future of the Profession Initiative. “It allows us to take more of a moonshot approach to everything that we’ve been building toward, and it comes when that approach is really necessary to boost us through this accelerated time of change.”

In Leonard’s view, the Law School now has an opportunity to solidify its reputation as a center of legal innovation, funding student ideas to deliver legal services in new ways and producing tech-savvy graduates who comprehend market forces and can help lead law firms, public interest organizations and NewLaw ventures into the future.

New Stars Join Seasoned Scholars
For generations, the Law School has been recognized for its distinguished faculty of thought leaders and renowned teachers. That tradition continues as Penn Carey Law, aided by the gift from the W.P. Carey Foundation, expands the faculty, adding new stars to a deep roster of seasoned scholars. Introducing the new faculty and distinguished lawyers, teachers and leaders who have joined the Law School in the 2020–21 academic school year:
Kimberly Kessler headshot

Kimberly Kessler Ferzan L’95, the Earle Hepburn Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Institute of Law & Philosophy, teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and a seminar on the theory and practice of criminal law. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2015.

Ferzan writes in criminal law theory. She has co-authored two books, co-edited three volumes, and authored over 50 book chapters and articles. She received the American Philosophical Association’s Berger Memorial Prize in 2013 for “Beyond Crime and Commitment: Justifying Liberty Deprivations of the Dangerous and Responsible” (Minnesota Law Review, 2011). Before joining the Law School faculty, Ferzan was the Harrison Robertson Professor of Law and the Joel B. Piassick Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, where three different graduating classes recognized her with their highest teaching honor at graduation. Prior to her time at Virginia, Ferzan was a member of the faculty at Rutgers Law, where she was twice awarded Professor of the Year and received the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

Yanbai Andrea Wang headshot

Assistant Professor of Law Yanbai Andrea Wang’s scholarship focuses on the emerging system of transnational civil litigation and arbitration, including procedural coordination across borders and institutional change in the global governance of health. At Penn Carey Law, Wang teaches Civil Procedure and courses in the area of transnational litigation.

Her most recent work, “Exporting American Discovery,” won the American Society of International Law David D. Caron Prize and is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review. Before joining the Law School faculty, Wang was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School and an Associate Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine’s Center for Innovation in Global Health.

Doubling Down typography
Tolls’ $50 Million Gift Paves Way for Influx of Young Lawyers into Public Service
The Robert and Jane Toll Foundation, founded by Robert Toll L’66 and Jane Toll GSE’66, made a $50 million gift to the Law School to dramatically expand the Toll Public Interest Scholars and Fellows Program, doubling the number of public interest graduates in the coming decade through a combination of full and partial tuition scholarships.

The Toll Foundation’s $50 million gift is the largest gift in history devoted entirely to the training and support of public interest lawyers, and among the ten largest gifts ever to a law school in the United States. This transformative gift comes at an unprecedented time in history, when lawyers working for a more just and fair system are desperately needed. Beginning in the 2021 academic year, the Toll gift will be implemented to support the tuition and programming for students working towards the crucial goals of public service. This will place the Law School in the unique position to catalyze its unwavering commitment to put service and justice into action in ways that have never before been possible, through recruiting, enrolling, and empowering the next generation of advocates.

As the world continues to grapple with a global pandemic that has exposed deep inequality, the U.S. finds itself in the midst of facing and correcting the deep racial inequities present through its society. This gift will enable the Law School to widen the gateways to service for students who will change the world for the better through their careers in the public interest. By increasing the number of Toll Public Interest Scholars and Fellows, the Law School can exponentially increase the capacity of our global public interest community to fight the most significant legal battles of the time while expanding access to justice.
Advancing
‌Civil
Rights
The continuation of decades of tireless work, current civil rights efforts are alive throughout the country — with women marching en masse for gender equity, people of every background protesting against antiblack police violence, and LGBTQ+ advocates mobilizing to advance legal protections. The fight for a fairer, more just society surges on. At the center of these movements stand many Penn Law alumni. Here, we shine a light on the important work of eight of our graduates.
By Derek Guy, Aisha Labi, Jay Nachman, Lindsay Podraza, Larry Teitelbaum
Illustrations: Andrew Colin Beck
Illustration of people climbing american flag
Omar Gonzalez-Pagan headshot
Omar Gonzalez-Pagan L’10
Joining the Battle Against a New Rule Threatening to Deny Health Care to the LGBTQ+ Community
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gainst the backdrop of the United States’ continued struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, LGBTQ+ rights advocates across the country are contesting a new federal rule issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that repeals discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ individuals seeking healthcare. Among those leading the challenge is Omar Gonzalez-Pagan L’10 of Lambda Legal.

“Imagine losing access to health care or fearing discrimination in health care while at the same time being in the midst of a public health pandemic that has cost so many lives — over 200,000,” said Gonzalez-Pagan, who filed Whitman Walker Clinic v. HHS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “It is a reminder of what is at stake in this litigation.”

Gonzalez-Pagan, a Senior Attorney and Health Care Strategist at Lambda Legal, has been in the forefront of some of the most consequential decisions on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in modern history. He was a member of the legal team that prevailed in Obergefell v. Hodges and secured marriage equality, and he helped win two landmark decisions holding that Title VII covers sexual orientation discrimination.

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Marsha Chien L’10
A Child of Immigrants Fights for Other Immigrants
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arsha Chien L’10 didn’t get a lot of sleep in the weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president.

On Friday, January 27, 2017, Trump signed an executive order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the country for 90 days.

Chien, an Assistant Attorney General with the Washington State Attorney General’s Civil Rights Unit, and her colleagues worked all weekend to prepare briefs challenging the order. Washington state, the lead plaintiffs, sued on Monday.

“It was a very busy weekend,” Chien said.

The Muslim travel ban case, she said, was about “recognizing and asserting our power and our authority to protect our residents and the state itself from encroachment onto constitutional rights, not even just our anti-discrimination laws but our own federal protections as well.

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Britney Wilson L’15
A Champion for People of Color with Disabilities
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o the clarion call of Black Lives Matter add Black Disabled Lives Matter. Britney Wilson, L’15, is working to ensure that disability is centered among the social justice issues of our time.

Wilson, a Black woman and civil rights attorney with cerebral palsy, came to the Law School knowing that she wanted to practice civil rights law, and especially to advocate on behalf of people of color with disabilities. Wilson has been practicing civil rights law since her graduation — beginning her legal career as a Karpatkin Fellow in the Racial Justice Program in the National office of the ACLU. But despite writing and doing a great deal of personal advocacy on disability issues, incorporating disability into her legal advocacy has been more of a challenge.

“In my experience,” Wilson said, “the civil rights advocacy community and the disability advocacy community have traditionally been pretty separate. Civil rights organizations often have their slate of issues that they work on, all of which affect people with disabilities, but none of which typically include or center us. Similarly, many disability advocacy organizations traditionally focus on their set of issues, which sometimes tend to be less expansive than ‘traditional civil rights issues’ and often don’t include or center the experiences of disabled people of color.”

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Mariela Noles Cotito LLM’12
A Personal Journey Toward Racial Awareness is Reflected in Peru’s
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rowing up in Peru, Mariela Noles Cotito LLM’12 did not have a comprehensive awareness of her African ancestry. She identified most strongly with her Japanese grandmother and had little concept of herself as an Afro-Peruvian woman. Only when she was in law school, where she was one of just two Afro-Peruvian students in the department, did this change. “I discovered what it meant to be Black in Peru,” she says.

Today, Noles Cotito is a Professor at the Universidad del Pacifico in Lima and also works as a consultant to the national government on issues related to minority rights. Her personal journey is reflected in her country’s complicated relationship with race, particularly with regard to its population of African descent. As in other Andean nations, minority rights in Peru have tended to be framed around the history and rights of indigenous cultures, she says. Until recently, Black Peruvians, who comprise an estimated 5 percent of the population, were a largely unrecognized minority, says Noles Cotito.

The push for greater racial inclusivity was jump-started in the run-up to the World Conference Against Racism, in Durban, South Africa, beginning with the Meeting for the Americas in 1999. “We went from a period of being invisible in law, legislation, and public policy,” she recalls, to the focus of a growing “Black movement” in Peru. “Before Durban, demands from the Black and indigenous populations were thought of as demands of social justice,” she says. The Durban conference contributed to a growing understanding of racism and discrimination as a human rights issue, she says. The government established a ministry tasked with generating policy for the inclusion of minority populations and in 2009, Peru became the first country in Latin America to offer a public apology to its citizens of African descent.

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Elizabeth Tang L’17, WG’17
Working to Bring Sexual Assault and Harassment to the Surface
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he statistic is both stunning and sobering. One in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college.

Elizabeth Tang L’17, WG’17 first learned that figure (now one in four) when she was an undergraduate at Harvard and it prompted her to volunteer at the school’s peer hotline for sexual assault survivors.

“A lot of my friends and acquaintances confided in me during college that they had been sexually assaulted,” Tang said. “They pointed out who their assailants were. I knew their rapists. I had been in many cases friends or acquaintances with their rapists, so I knew firsthand how true that one in five statistic was. And I think that’s what really drew me to the peer counseling hotline in college. And then I continued learning about gender justice.”

The more Tang studied and learned about gender justice and other types of oppression people face, the more it became clear that fighting those injustices would fuel her life’s work. She has since advocated for gender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and Apne Aap Women’s Collective in Mumbai, India. She does so now at the National Women’s Law Center, where she is Counsel for Education and Workplace Justice and where she focuses on ending sexual harassment and violence in both K–12 schools and higher education.

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Harper Seldin C’11, L’14
Fighting for the Rights of Vulnerable Children
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ociety’s most vulnerable, especially children, motivate Harper Seldin C’11, L’14 to work on pro bono civil rights projects.

“To me, it’s ‘people first’ and ensuring that all the promises of our country’s civil rights laws are kept,” said Seldin, who joined Cozen O’Connor’s Business Litigation Department in 2016.

In one recent case, Fulton vs. City of Philadelphia, Seldin worked on an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of former foster children in opposition to government-contracted foster care agencies who claim a constitutional right to discriminate against prospective foster parents in same-sex couples.

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Patrick Mulvaney L’08
Underscoring Inequities in the Criminal Justice System
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t this moment of national reckoning over racial inequities, the extent to which the criminal justice system is rife with systemic bias has come as a shock to many. For Patrick Mulvaney L’08, the Managing Attorney for Capital Litigation at the Southern Center for Human Rights, such biases are the persistent undercurrent of much of his work.

Mulvaney has been with the capital litigation unit of SCHR for the past 12 years, the last seven as its managing attorney. Few areas of the law are as tainted by bias as capital cases, he observes. “Race and poverty are the defining features of the death penalty system,” he says. Although fewer death sentences are being handed down now than in earlier decades, as older cases wind their way through the appeals process, more executions are looming. In Georgia, for example, there has been only one new death sentence in the past five years, but 19 executions of defendants who had previously been sentenced.

Two of SCHR’s capital cases in which Mulvaney was involved have made it to the United States Supreme Court in recent years. In 2016, the court reviewed the case of Timothy Foster, a Black defendant who was tried in 1987 in Georgia for the murder of a white woman by an all-white jury, after the state excluded all four Black prospective jurors with preemptory strikes. Evidence discovered years later showed that, although prosecutors had cited other reasons for these strikes, potential jurors’ names were identified in jury selection notes by race. The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 that there had in fact been race discrimination at trial. Foster’s conviction was vacated and the case is pending retrial.

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Laval Miller-Wilson L’95
Providing a Lifeline to Vulnerable People with Healthcare Needs
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n 2009, Laval Miller-Wilson L’95 arrived at the Philadelphia Health Law Project to serve as its new Executive Director. He was eager for a leadership role and suspected that the US health insurance system would soon be reformed. He was right. Just a year after Miller-Wilson arrived at PHLP, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, transforming this Pennsylvanian firm’s work and the lives of millions of Americans.

Founded in 1981, PHLP is a nonprofit organization that helps vulnerable Pennsylvanians and people with limited incomes get the healthcare they need. Miller-Wilson oversees a team of nineteen people, including ten lawyers, spread across three offices (Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh). They are experts in Medicaid, the provider of health insurance coverage for about one in five Pennsylvanians and the largest payer for long-term care services in the community and nursing homes.

Miller-Wilson and his PHLP colleagues were very pleased Pennsylvania expanded Medicaid coverage when given the chance through the ACA. “We’re in a better place than we were [in 2009] during the Great Recession because Medicaid can now cover tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who are unfortunately losing their employer-sponsored health insurance coverage.” But less of PHLP’s work is focused on getting people covered, and more time is being spent challenging insurance companies to authorize medically necessary services and supports.

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A Long-Term Community-Wide Initiative to Achieve Racial Justice
The Penn Law Journal recently had a long conversation with Arlene Rivera Finkelstein, Associate Dean for Equity & Justice, and newly appointed Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Officer for the Law School, about the school’s efforts to foster increased diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Dean Ted Ruger has written that the Law School has much work to do to help our law school become an anti-racist institution. What does that work entail?
Our efforts involve students, staff, faculty and alumni, as we believe it is our shared responsibility to advance equity and justice. We have to review longstanding programs to make sure we are really drilling down on inequity in how we teach the law and how we as lawyers do the work that we do. It goes to our building, even the images in the spaces that we live and work in every day. The dean has convened a committee, chaired by Professor Sally Gordon, to review all the iconography, some of which has a really troubling history and understandably causes distress to members of our community. We’ll think about how we can instead elevate images that advance equity and inclusion.

In addition, we’ve created new scholarships focused on acknowledging the legacy of Dr. Sadie Mosell Tanner Alexander ED’18, G’21, L’27 the first Black woman to graduate from the Law School. These scholarships will be awarded to members of the Fall 2021 incoming class. We are also increasing financial support for all students who are facing additional hardship, and we have launched really important conversations on advancing racial justice. We announced many of these initiatives this past summer and immediately took steps to start actualizing our vision. We anticipate continuing to take more steps progressively. This is in addition to our continued efforts to increase the diversity of our faculty, staff, and students, as well as our efforts to evaluate ourselves as an employer through an equity and inclusion lens.

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For Mike Gold, a Law Degree Served as a Launching Pad to NASA. And it’s Been a Blast.
By Larry Teitelbaum
Photo: Stephen Voss
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Text Galaxy
even though his mother was a math teacher. His aversion to integers and null sets placed a stumbling block in his path to a career in the aerospace industry, so he found a warp in the space-time field: law school.

And that was his intergalactic ticket, a stairway, if not to heaven, then to his dream job at NASA, where he landed last year after years with commercial aerospace companies. “I wouldn’t have my career without my JD,” he said. “It has helped open up a number of doors to me … It was the way I got into aerospace.”

Gold is Acting Associate Administrator for NASA’s Office of International and Interagency Relations in Washington, DC, a job in which he serves as NASA’s top diplomat. He also provides strategic direction to the Office of General Counsel and supports commercial initiatives.

Campaign Update
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Advocates for a New Era department
Campaign Priorities
1
Access and Opportunity
Penn Law’s important assets are people: those who are learning the law and those who educate them.
2
Investing in Leaders
Penn Law anticipates the changing environment in which law is practiced.
3
Pathways to Public Service
Penn Law will continue to build upon programs that create pathways to careers in public interest and government.
The Influencers
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Center for Ethics & the Rule of Law

Fourteen students participated in the virtual CERL internship program this past summer, which prepares law and graduate-level students for a national security career.

Summer internship projects comprised research, writing, and other projects stemming from the subject matter of future CERL conferences and current critical national security and governance issues that demand CERL’s immediate attention and action. Each intern served on teams that examined the ethical and rule of law issues in the areas of 2020 election security, nuclear threat escalation, U.S. violent extremism, today’s Department of Justice policies and practices, Arctic climate change, state and federal COVID-19 response, and lasting damage to the rule of law caused by the CIA’s illegal post-9/11 torture program. The students researched and wrote memoranda, reports, and blog articles for CERL’s blog, The Rule of Law Post.

Throughout the internship, leading authorities in national security made virtual presentations on topics related to the curriculum and engaged with the interns in free-flowing dialogue.

Class Notes
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Stephen A. Cozen C’61, L’64, Founder and Chairman of Philadelphia-based Cozen O’Connor, has been recognized by Pennsylvania Super Lawyers in the category of General Litigation. Cozen O’Connor has 30 offices throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The firm has grown from just four attorneys in 1970 to its present complement of more than 750 attorneys. An accomplished litigator and counselor, Cozen is a Fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers, a designation held by only the most respected and experienced courtroom practitioners, a Fellow of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and a Senior Fellow of the Advisory Board of the Litigation Counsel of America. He is also well-recognized as a consummate strategist, an appellate advocate, and is frequently called upon for appellate advice, counsel, and oral advocacy before both state and federal appellate courts.

H. Robert Fiebach C’61, L’64, Senior Counsel in Cozen O’Connor’s commercial litigation department and co-chair of the firm’s legal malpractice group, has been recognized by Pennsylvania Super Lawyers in the category of Business Litigation. In addition to his trial experience, Fiebach is an accomplished appellate advocate. He has successfully handled many appeals within his practice areas in the Pennsylvania Superior and Supreme Courts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He has also successfully handled appeals in the Federal Courts of Appeal for the Second and Fourth Circuits.

Dan Solin L’66, a recognized wealth advisory coach and bestselling author, has joined forces with Dynamic Advisor Solutions in a strategic partnership to offer coaching and professional marketing services to advisors across the Dynamic network to help grow their businesses. Solin is the Founder and President of Solin Strategic, LLC and Evidence Based Advisor Marketing, LLC, which provide coaching, workshops, content, design and videos for websites and original blog articles that can be white labeled on a subscription basis, exclusively to evidence-based advisors. Dynamic Advisor Solutions works with wealth advisors to sharpen their practices.

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CultureNet Zooms in on New Market for the Arts in Pandemic Era
With people stuck at home and yearning for something to watch, Curtis Jewell L’06 saw an opening. He and his business partner, filmmaker David Donnelly, rushed to market a series of virtual concerts on their online startup CultureNet (myculturenet.com).

Now that the concept has been validated by more than one million views, the two entrepreneurs have created a subscription service for the site’s Netflix-style musical performances and documentaries. In addition to a related educational platform, Jewell said he hopes to have 10,000 subscribers — from individuals to families to home schooled students — by the end of the year. For a monthly fee of $7.99, or an annual fee of $49, subscribers get access to original content such as films, performances and a series on the arts, as well as exclusive interactive events and educational resources. The plan is to add new content every week.

“Music can help you discover the world … and to be part of a project that can bring that to more people is really rewarding to me,” Jewell said last June as he and Donnelly planned next steps to fill the void in arts events this fall, with in-person concerts and school field trips largely on hold.

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Adam Neuman: The First Chief of Staff in Big Ten Conference History
When Big Ten Conference Commissioner Kevin Warren presented Adam Neuman LPS’17, L’18 with an opportunity to serve as his Chief of Staff, there was no hesitation.

“It wasn’t one of those, ‘maybe, I have to think about it’ situations, it was a yes.” Neuman, who had previously worked as a legal intern for NFL’s Minnesota Vikings while Warren was COO, immediately recognized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for what it was. “It became clear that [Commissioner Warren] wanted to develop a positive and impactful movement. It wasn’t going to be just about sports, but about what we can do with the platform of sports. We are trying to create a positive movement of leadership in sports where academics, athletics and social responsibility meet the challenges of our time.”

The 30-year-old Chief of Staff is responsible for the internal and external operations of the Big Ten Conference, which includes 14 major universities, spanning over eleven states and nearly ten thousand student-athletes. Neuman is a liaison to its various departments, including finance, human resources, legal, and student-athlete initiatives.

Published Alumni
Bookshelf Department
Bookshelf Department
McCreight Plumbs the Secrets of Marriage in Latest Thriller
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isting Rikers Island in person was eye-opening.

“It was definitely illuminating,” said Kimberly McCreight L’98. “I was really glad I had the opportunity. Without having been there myself, I don’t think I could have written about it with nearly as much conviction.”

The prime suspect in McCreight’s latest thriller, A Good Marriage, spends the entirety of the novel at the notorious New York prison complex. The story opens with a prison phone call to the main character, Lizzie, who happens to be a Penn Law alumna and Big Law attorney in New York.

A Good Marriage, published this summer by Harper Books and optioned by Amazon, was McCreight’s first stab at a legal thriller and has been received with acclaim: Big names including The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly heaped on the praise. This is McCreight’s sixth work of fiction.

Is War Inevitable Between the US and China?
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he United States and China are in the midst of a cold war. And while America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union was characterized by conflicting ideologies, this new war, Alfredo Toro Hardy GL’79 asserts, is based on perceptions of power on the world stage.

He explores the emerging conflict between the two countries in China Versus the US: Who Will Prevail? (World Scientific), and specifically, seeks to answer two questions: has China already overstepped in its relationship with the United States, effectively jeopardizing its status as a rival superpower?, and can the US contend with China’s newfound ascendency and maintain its status as a world leader?

In his twentieth book, Toro Hardy compares the comprehensive national power of both countries by measuring both hard and soft power. These include the countries’ economic, military and technological capabilities along with their aptitude in forming a coalition of other countries behind them and projecting their cultures and values globally.

In Memoriam
Lee Holt, Former member of the Board of Advisors and Early Supporter of ILE, Leaves Rich Legacy at Penn Law with Creation of Incisive Lecture Series
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eon “Lee” Holt, Jr. L’51, a well-traveled international businessman in the postwar period who foresaw the coming era of globalization and translated his experience into a renowned lecture series at the Law School, died on Sept. 13. He was 95.

He created the Holt Program in International Trade Law in 2007, the centerpiece of which was the Leon C. & June W. Holt Lecture in International Trade. The lectures brought a distinguished roster of speakers to campus — including the first black woman in a senior legal position at the World Bank and the former President of Mexico — and reflected Holt’s belief that students and young lawyers must become fluent in other legal cultures and gain a better understanding of the forces reshaping the world of law and the world at large.

Rangita De Silva-De Alwis, Adjunct Professor of Global Leadership at the Law School, said the Holt Lecture, for which she has in recent years convened prominent speakers, said the lecture series has put the Law School “at the epicenter of the world, emphasizing the importance of trade relations in a new world order.”

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