News - October 2005

WTO Appellate Body member speaks at U-M Law School
October 18, 2005

Luiz Olavo Baptista, member of the appellate body of the World Trade Organization, will present the University of Michigan Law School Dean’s Special Lecture on Thursday, October 20 at 4 p.m. in room 116 Hutchins Hall, located at the corner of Monroe and State Streets. Baptista will discuss “Facts and Rules in the WTO.” The lecture is free and open to the public.

“The Law School is privileged to host Luiz Olavo Baptista to discuss the WTO for the Dean’s Special Lecture,” says University of Michigan Law School Dean Evan Caminker. “Throughout his career, Mr. Baptista has been integrally involved in both Brazilian legal issues and those of the broader international community. His experience makes him an authority on the World Trade Organization. This should be a fascinating talk.”

While Baptista is in Ann Arbor, he will also participate in a conference on “Perspectives on the WTO Doha Development Agenda Multilateral Trade Negotiations” and will serve on a panel, “WTO Jurisprudence and Governance.” As of December 8, 2005, papers and panelist comments have recently been published as a special issue of the on-line Global Economy Journal.

In addition to serving on the WTO Appellate Body, Baptista is on the faculty of the University of São Paulo in Brazil as professor of international law, a member of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Institute for International Trade Practices and of its Commission on Trade and Investment Policy since 1999. He was a member of the Brazilian delegation at the OCDE Treaty Against Corruption of Foreign Officers, Paris 1997, chair of Panel E4A of the UN Compensation Commission where he decided more than 5,000 Kuwaiti claim cases, and is senior partner at the L.O. Baptista Law Firm in São Paulo. Baptista has announced his retirement from both the Appellate Body and the University of São Paulo.

For more information please contact Stephanie Wiederhold, 734.764.0535 or wls@umich.edu.

MacKinnon named Fellow of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
October 18, 2005

Catharine A. MacKinnon, the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences class of 2005 as a Fellow. Fellows and members of this year’s class are leaders in scholarship, business, the arts, and public affairs.

Professor MacKinnon specializes in sex equality issues under international and constitutional law. She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation. The Supreme Court of Canada accepted her approaches to equality, pornography, and hate speech. Her 11 scholarly books include Sex Equality (2001), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), and Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005). She is published in scholarly journals, the popular press, and in many languages. She has represented Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities since 1992, winning with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in August 2000. Their case, Kadic v. Karadzic, first recognized rape as an act of genocide. She co-directs The Lawyers Alliance for Women (LAW) Project of Equality Now, an NGO promoting international sex equality rights for women. Professor MacKinnon has taught at Yale, Chicago, Harvard, Osgoode Hall, Stanford, Basel (Switzerland), and Columbia, spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, and practices and consults nationally and internationally. She is one of the most widely-cited legal scholars in English.

Legal issues: Old boilers, new Web site
Monday, October 10, 2005
By Dave Gershman , Ann Arbor News

2005, The Ann Arbor News. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

What's to know about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers? Click and see.

University of Michigan Law School librarians wasted no time. The day after President Bush nominated Miers to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court, the law school Web site had a fairly extensive new page of information about Miers up and running (www.law.umich.edu/library/news/toPublishingImages/miers/miersindex.htm).

The new page is one-stop shopping for anyone curious about Miers' career and writings. Here readers find court documents for more than 20 cases in which Miers served as counsel while working for a Texas law firm, and more than a dozen articles by Miers, most from the Texas Bar Journal. There are links to the growing body of New York Times stories about Miers, and links to several sources of biographical information. There are also headings for White House records and confirmation hearings where librarians will plug in information as soon as it is available.

The law library already had a feather in its cap: Staff compiled a similar Web page on John Roberts, soon after he was nominated for the high court, that was so extensive that the U.S. Library of Congress asked for permission to include a link to it in its own Supreme Court Internet materials.

The Roberts page eventually had more than 230 entries as librarians kept adding material. U-M Law Library Director Margaret Leary says it's unlikely Miers' page will ever be that extensive. Roberts, after all, had 40 arguments before the Supreme Court.

The page is available to anybody, Leary stresses. Contrast that with pre-computer times, when U-M law librarian Barbara Garavaglia used to prepare paper notebooks on Supreme Court nominees for faculty and library users.

Like her colleagues who worked on the Miers and Roberts Web pages, Garavaglia has both law and library degrees. "They are experts at digging up information,'' says Leary.

Dave Gershman can be reached at (734) 994-6818 or dgershman@annarbornews.com.

Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers: Current background information
October 4, 2005

The University of Michigan Law Library has developed a resource site for background information on President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, Harriet E. Miers. This resource page was created with the collaborative effort of Kincaid C. Brown, Barbara H. Garavaglia, Aimee S. Mangan and Jennifer Selby.