LEYDEN - AMSTERDAM - COLUMBIA  

SUMMER 2003 PROGRAM 

IN AMERICAN LAW, July 6 -August 1, 2003*

*Dates subject to change.

FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES

Penny Andrews, Professor of Law at The City University of New York School of Law

Teaches courses in Torts, International Human Rights Law, Lawyering and Comparative Perspectives on Race and the Law. She earned her B.A. and LL. B. degrees from The University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, and an LL.M. from Columbia Law School. She was the Chamberlain Fellow in Legislation at Columbia Law School, and has worked at the Legal Resources Center in Johannesburg, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. She was on the faculty of the Department of Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and has visited at the University of Maryland School of Law, the University of Natal in South Africa and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. She has written extensively on constitutional and human rights issues in the South African and Australian contexts, with particular emphasis on the rights of women and people of color, affirmative action and the provision of legal services to disadvantaged communities. She is active in many international organizations and is the secretary/treasurer of the International Third World Legal Studies Association. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Welfare Law Center in New York.

Barbara Black, George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History

B.A., Brooklyn, 1953; LL.B., Columbia, 1955; Ph.D., Yale, 1975. Honorary doctorates from Brooklyn; Marymount Manhattan; Osgoode Hall; New Rochelle; New York Law School; Smith; Vermont Law School; and Georgetown University Law Center. Editor, Columbia Law Review. Associate-in-law, Columbia, 1955–56. In 1965 began a doctoral program in history at Yale, specializing in Anglo-American legal history. Served as instructor and lecturer in history while completing graduate study and, on award of the Ph.D. degree, became assistant professor of history at Yale. Appointed associate professor of law at Yale in 1979. Visiting lecturer, Harvard Law School, 1978. Visiting professor, Columbia Law School, 1984. Joined the Columbia faculty in 1984. Dean of the Faculty of Law, 1986–91. President, American Society for Legal History, 1986–87, 1988–89. Member, Selden Society; Massachusetts Historical Society; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; American Philosophical Society; New York State Ethics Commission, 1992–95; Board of Trustees, New York Law School, 1992–98; Board of Directors, Supreme Court Historical Society; Board of Guarantors, The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University; and Permanent Advisory Board, Jay Papers Project, Columbia University. Publications are on legal history. Principal areas of interest are legal history and contracts.

Simon Canick, Reference Librarian, Columbia Law School Library

Ellen Chapnick, Assistant Dean; Director of the Center for Public Interest Law and Director of the Human Rights Internship Program

Assistant Dean Ellen P. Chapnick is the founding director of the Center for Public Interest Law at Columbia Law School. She joined Columbia after 20 years as a federal litigator including as the senior partner responsible for the environmental law department at Wolf Pepper Ross Wolf & Jones where, among other matters, she served as a plaintiff's lawyer in the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Litigation, for which she and her co-counsel shared the Trial Lawyers for Public Justices 1995 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award.

Her recent pro bono work includes being co-president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, co-chairing the Court as Employer Subcommittee of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness, and serving on the Association of American Law Schools Task Force on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities, of which she is the chair-elect. Dean Chapnick has received the 1997 Pro Bono Publico Award from Pro Bono Students America and a 1998 award in recognition of outstanding pro bono publico service from the Legal Aid Society of the City of New York. She is the author of several articles and the Access to the Courts chapter in the ABA's The Law of Environmental Justice.

Dean Chapnick is an honors graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center and Cornell University, College of Arts and Sciences.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law

B.A., Cornell, 1981; J.D., Harvard, 1984; LL.M., Wisconsin, 1985. Presently professor of law at UCLA and Columbia. Has written in the areas of civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. Her work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. A founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory workshop; coeditor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Has lectured nationally and internationally on race matters, addressing audiences throughout Europe, Africa, and South America. She has facilitated workshops for civil rights activists in Brazil and constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her work on race and gender was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. In 2001, she authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism and helped facilitate the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration. In the domestic arena, she has served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s committee to research violence against women and has assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill. In 1996, she co-founded the African-American Policy Forum to highlight the centrality of gender in racial justice discourse. Professor Crenshaw is also a founding member of the Women’s Media Initiative and is a regular commentator on NPR’s “The Tavis Smiley Show.” She was twice named Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School and received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award, presented by the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, for her path breaking work on black women and the law.

Alejandro Garro, Adjunct Professor of Law; Senior Research Scholar, Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law

J.D. (abogado), National University of La Plata (Argentina), 1975; LL.M., Louisiana State, 1979; J.S.D., Columbia, 1990. In private practice in Argentina until 1977. Research assistant to the Louisiana State Law Institute, 1979–80, and subsequently joined the LSU faculty. Came to Columbia in 1981 as lecturer in law and associate research scholar of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law. Collaborateur scientifique at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne in 1983–85; visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute of Foreign and Private International Law, Hamburg, 1993 and 2001; and visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico, 1992; SMU, 1995; Freibourg, 1996; the National University of Buenos Aires, 1997; and the University Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina), 1998–99. Member of the panel of international arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association; the National Futures Association; and the Federación Argentina de Arbitraje y Conciliación. Member of the American Academy of Foreign Law and Asociación Argentina de Derecho Comparado. Consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development on administration of justice in Latin America, to the World Bank and the Academia de Legislación y Jurisprudencia of Puerto Rico on secured financing, and to the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law on international commercial contracts. Also serves as a consultant to Human Rights Watch/Americas, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Center for Justice and International Law. Principal areas of teaching and research interests are comparative law and international business transactions, Latin American law, and the inter-American system for the protection of human rights. Publications include The Louisiana Public Records Doctrine and the Civil Law Tradition (1989); Labor and Commercial Arbitration in Central America (ed., 1990); Compraventa Internacional de Mercaderías (with A. Zuppi, 1990); Arbitration Law and Practice in Latin America (ed., 2002); and numerous articles on the international protection of human rights, international commercial arbitration, international sales, and secured transactions in Latin America.

Jane Spinak, Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor of Law

B.A., Smith, 1974; J.D., New York University, 1979. Prior to attending law school, taught high school history and social studies. Staff attorney, Juvenile Rights Division, Legal Aid Society, 1980–82. Joined Columbia faculty in 1982 as co-founder of the Child Advocacy Clinic. Attorney-in-charge, Juvenile Rights Division, Legal Aid Society of New York, 1995–98. Has served on numerous task forces and committees addressing the needs and rights of children and families. Current member, New York State Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children and the Steering Committee of the Columbia University Institute on Child and Family Policy. Chair of the Board, Center for Family Representation. Lectures and writes on issues of child welfare policy, juvenile justice, child advocacy, Family Court reform, clinical legal education, and legal organization management.

Kendall Thomas,  Professor of Law

B.A., Yale, 1978; J.D., 1982. Joined the Columbia faculty in 1984. Principal areas of interest are constitutional law, theory and history, law and sexuality, and critical race theory.