Call for Papers: Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) conference to be held 20-22 October 2011

Submissions are due 30 May 2011 for the upcoming Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) conference to be held 20-22 October 2011. The theme is "Capitalism and the Common Good" The call can be found here.

Keynote Speaker:
- B.S. Chimni (Centre for International Legal Studies School of International Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Confirmed speakers include:
- Antony Anghie (Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah)
- Tayyab Mahmud (Professor of Law and Director, Center for Global Justice at Seattle University School of Law)
- Balakrishnan Rajagopal (Associate Professor of Law and Development and Director, MIT Program on Human Rights and Justice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Publication Opportunities:
Select papers will be published in the Oregon Review of International Law. We are also investigating the possibility of a TWAIL book volume.

Call for Papers: 2011 Law and Development Institute Conference

Following last year's success, the Law and Development Institute (LDI, www.lawanddevelopment.net) is pleased to announce a call for paper proposals for the 2011 annual conference, entitled, "Law and Development at the Microlevel: From Microtrade to Current Issues in Law and Development". The conference will be co-hosted with Seattle University School of Law on December 10, 2011. The LDI calls for papers on any aspect of microtrade, which is a new system of international trade designed to alleviate populations of least-developed countries of extreme poverty (for a concept paper, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1524185), as well as for papers on other law and development issues that can be considered broadly at the "micro level", including but not limited to: microfinance, microinsurance, green growth and development etc.

Paper proposals should be limited to a 500 word abstract, which must be received by June 30 at the latest. Accepted conference papers should be completed by November 15 for circulation among the participants in advance of the conference. All proposals must be sent by email to the Law and Development Institute, info@lawanddevelopment.net (with a cc to wtogeneva@hotmail.com). The paper proposals will be peer-reviewed by members of the editorial board of the Law and Development Review (www.bepress.com/ldr). It is anticipated that paper selection will be completed by July 31, 2011. The selected authors will be invited to present their papers at the Conference. The conference venue is Seattle University School of Law, located in Seattle, United States. The invited speakers are expected to cover their own expenses to attend the conference.

Berkman webcast: Academic Uses of Social Media: Exploring 21st Century Communications Webcast Event

Tuesday, May 312:00-2:15pm
Webcast Event; the live webcast of this event will be available at the following URL: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcastat 12pm on 5/3
Co-sponsored by the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity at Harvard and the Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs

Social media — from blogs to wikis to tweets — have become academic media, new means by which scholars communicate, collaborate, and teach. Hear from a distinguished faculty panel, moderated by John Palfrey, about how they are adopting and adapting to new communication and networking tools, following a keynote by social media thought leader danah boyd.

New book on Law and Development Perspective on International Trade Law

Law and Development Perspective on International Trade Law (Cambridge University Press)

Edited by: Yong-Shik Lee, The Law and Development Institute, Sydney
Edited by: Gary Horlick, Georgetown University Law Center
Edited by: Won-Mog Choi, Ewha Womans University School of Law, Seoul
Edited by: Tomer Broude, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

BOOK ABSTRACT: Economic development is the most important agenda in the international trading system today, as demonstrated by the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) adopted in the current multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (the Doha Round). This book provides a relevant discussion of major international trade law issues from the perspective of development in the following areas: general issues on international trade law and economic development; and specific law and development issues in World Trade Organization, Free Trade Agreement and regional initiatives. This book offers an unparalleled breadth of coverage on the topic and diversity of authorship, as seventeen leading scholars contribute chapters from nine major developed and developing countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Israel.

Contributors: Yong-Shik Lee, Tomer Broude, Bryan Mercurio, Maureen Irish, Faizel Ismail, Gary Horlick, Katherine Fennell, Andrew Mitchell, Joanne Wallis, Moche Hirsch, Mitsuo Matsushita, Anthony Cassimatis, Colin Picker, Caf Dowlah, Young-Ok Kim, Hye Seong Mun, Xiaojie Lu

Berkman Event: Building a More Diverse and Inclusive Legal Profession: A Call to Action Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft

A new methodology for legal service delivery?

Thursday, April 15, 5:30 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)Free and Open to the Public
RSVP Required via the form below
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law Program on the Legal Profession

The diversity of the legal profession continues to lag the diversity of the American population. Despite rising awareness of the issue over the last decade and even a number of well-intentioned efforts, progress has been slow. In this speech, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith will make the case for more rapid progress, outline the types of practical steps that are needed at law firms and companies, and speak to new initiatives across the legal profession to make the next decade more successful.

About Brad

Law and Development Review- another Special Issue

The 3rd of the 'Specials' of this series (see my posts on the previous first and second special issues here and here respectively), the 2011 Law and Development Review Special Issue is devoted to the Law and Development Institute Inaugural Conference entitled, “Future of Law and Development, International Trade and Economic Development”, which was held in Sydney, Australia, on the 16th of October, 2010. Articles:

PDF

Introduction
Yong-Shik Lee

PDF

Export Promotion Policies, Export Composition and Economic Development of Korea
Jai S. Mah

PDF

WTO Rules and Agricultural Development Cooperation between Developed and Developing Countries
Won-Mog Choi

PDF

International Trade and Development Law: A Legal Cultural Critique
Colin Picker

PDF

Special and Differential Treatment, Trade and Sustainable Development
Maureen Irish

PDF

International Development Disputes
Tomer Broude

PDF

Law and Development in the Islamic World: New Possibilities
Salim Farrar

You can also access the all the (Special and Regular) issues here: 

Berkman Event- Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Self-Branding in Web 2.0

Tuesday, March 29, 12:30 pmBerkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

In the mid-2000s, journalists and businesspeople heralded “Web 2.0” technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook as signs of a new participatory era that would democratize journalism, entertainment, and politics. By the decade’s end, this idealism had been replaced by a gold-rush mentality focusing on status and promotion. While the rhetoric of Web 2.0 as democratic and revolutionary persists, I will contend that a primary use of social media is to boost user status and popularity, maintaining hierarchy rather than diminishing it. This talk focuses on three status-seeking techniques that emerged with social media: micro-celebrity, self-branding, and life-streaming. I examine interactions between social media and social life in the San Francisco “tech scene” to show that Web 2.0 has become a key aspect of social hierarchy in technologically mediated communities.

Berkman Event: An Optimization-Based Framework for Automated Market-Making

I am thinking of ways that this might be used for the delivery of legal services:

CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, March 21, 2011
Time: 11:30am – 1:-00pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

While computers have automated the operation of most financial markets, the underlying mechanism was designed for people to operate it. It is simple, not necessarily efficient, and has room for improvement. This work is an endeavor to design efficient automated market-making mechanisms that take into consideration of the logical relationships of securities.

We propose a general framework for the design of securities markets over combinatorial or infinite state spaces. The framework enables the design of computationally efficient markets tailored to an arbitrary, yet relatively small, space of securities with bounded payoff. We prove that any market satisfying a set of intuitive conditions must price securities via a convex cost function, which is constructed via conjugate duality. Rather than dealing with an exponentially large or infinite outcome space directly, our framework only requires optimization over a convex hull. By reducing the problem of automated market-making to convex optimization, where many efficient algorithms exist, we arrive at a range of new polynomial-time pricing mechanisms for various problems. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework with the design of some particular markets. We also show that by relaxing the convex hull we can gain computational tractability without compromising the market institution’s bounded budget.

This talk is based on joint work with Jacob Abernethy and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan.