Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School jointly hosted the inaugural Harvard-Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum on October 17 and 18. Held on the Stanford campus this year, the annual conference seeks to bring together leading younger scholars from throughout the world beyond the US.

“The inaugural forum was terrific,” said Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Studies Bill Alford ’77, who, with Professor Lawrence Friedman of Stanford and the strong support of Dean Elena Kagan ’86 and Dean Larry Kramer of Stanford, developed the idea for the forum. “Paper writers and the senior faculty who served as judge-commentators came from some fifteen countries across the globe and employed a variety of methodologies, including those of law and economics, law and society, doctrinal analysis, moral philosophy, critical theory, and historical inquiry. This diversity notwithstanding, papers were engaged on their own terms in two days of lively, rigorous, and constructive conversation.”

Scholars whose home institution is outside the United States and who have held an academic position for less than seven years, or whose last degree was earned less than ten years ago , were invited to submit an abstract. A distinguished jury of senior legal scholars selected the papers to be presented and served as commentators at the conference.

“We had more than 200 scholars from throughout the world submit abstracts,” said Alford. “From this, more than 50 were invited to submit full papers, and then 10 papers were selected for presentation at Stanford. We also had a very distinguished set of senior scholars from throughout the world, including HLS faculty members Martha Minow, Noah Feldman, and Mark Roe ’75, serve as judges.”

In addition to these Harvard faculty members, Alford, and Friedman, other judges included:

  • Sergio Ayllon, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, Mexico
  • Seung Wha Chang, LL.M. ’92, S.J.D. ‘94 Seoul National University College of Law, Korea, former visiting professor at both HLS and Stanford Law School
  • Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Stanford Law School
  • Liu Fangfang, China University of Politics & Law, visiting professor at HLS 2008-09 winter term
  • Eric Feldman, University of Pennsylvania Law School, visiting professor at Stanford Law School
  • Rich Ford, ’91 Stanford Law School
  • Vincenzo Ferrai, University of Milan, Italy
  • Yash Ghai LL.M. ’63, University of Hong Kong, former visiting professor at HLS
  • Deborah Hensler, Stanford Law School
  • Helen Irving, University of Sydney Law School, Australia, former visiting professor at HLS
  • Lewis Kornhauser, New York University School of Law
  • Stewart Macaulay, University of Wisconsin Law School
  • Mavis Maclean, University of Oxford
  • Tracy Meares, Yale Law School
  • Rogelio Perez-Perdomo, Universidad Metropolitana, Venezuela, visiting professor at Stanford Law School
  • John Witt, Columbia Law School, former visiting professor at HLS

The authors and papers that were finally selected were:

  • Dr. Nina-Louisa Arold, Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Sweden
    Coherence Between the Two European Courts: The Judges’ View on a Human Rights Culture in Europe
  • Moshe Cohen-Eliya & Iddo Porat, Ramat Gan Law School, Israel
    American Balancing and German Proportionality: The Historical Origins
  • Helge Dedek, Faculty of Law, McGill University, Canada
    Suspicions of the “Modern Mind”
    and Scholastic Jurisprudence and “Irrational Formality”
  • Marcelo Ferrante, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, School of Law, Argentina
    Recasting the Problem of Resultant Luck
  • Talia Fisher & Issi Rosen-Zvi, Tel Aviv University, Israel
    The Confessional Penalty
  • Pascale Fournier, University of Ottawa, Canada
    Adjudicating Religious Laws in Secular Courts: When Islamic Divorce Travels to Canada, the U.S., France and Germany
  • Kiyoshi Hasegawa, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
    The Urban Community and the Law
  • Cherie Metcalf, Queen’s Faculty of Law, Canada
    The (Ir)relevance of Constitutional Protection for Property Rights?: Compensation for Takings in Canada and the United States
  • Alexander Stremitzer, University of Bonn, Germany
    Opportunistic Termination
  • Yanbai Andrea Wang, University of Oxford, England
    Constructing International Legal Regimes: A Comparative Study of the 1969 and 2005 International Health Regulations