Keynote and Plenary Speakers
The following speakers have been confirmed for the CLTA Conference.
Key Presenters
Plenary speakers
Key Presenters
Keynote Speaker: Professor Steven L Schwarcz
Keynote Address:
Correlations and Consequences - The Global
Financial Crisis and the Role of Lawyers
Professor
Steven L Schwarcz is the Stanley A Star Professor of Law & Business at
the Faculty of Law, Duke University, North Carolina, USA. Professor
Schwarcz's principal fields of expertise are commercial law, bankruptcy,
and international finance and capital markets. He is widely published in
these fields.
Professor Schwarcz is qualified in both engineering and law. Prior to joining Duke University, Professor Schwarcz was a partner in the law firm, Shearman & Sterling and then later a partner and practice-group chair with Kaye Scholer LLP, where he represented global banking and financial institutions advising upon the structuring of innovative market financing transactions. He is a leader in the field of asset securitization and his book Structured Finance, A Guide to the Principles of Asset Securitization (3d edition 2002) continues to be one of the most widely respected monographs in this field.
When he practised law, Professor Schwarcz maintained close links with legal education and taught at the Yale, Columbia, and Cardozo (Yeshiva University) Law Schools.
Currently Professor Schwarcz is a fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers, a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, and founding member of the International Insolvency Institute. He is also the co-Academic Director of the Duke University Global Capital Markets Center.
Abstract
In recent articles, Professor Schwarcz has argued that the global financial crisis can be attributed in large part to three causes - conflicts, complacency, and complexity - as well as to a type of tragedy of the commons. Professor Schwarcz's keynote address will focus on the failure of market observers, including corporate lawyers, to foresee or act on critical correlations that might have prevented or at least mitigated the crisis. Although conflicts, complacency, complexity, and the tragedy of the commons can help to explain this failure, the goal will be less to tie the failure to these factors than to demonstrate that the same types of failures to see the same types of correlations have been responsible for many of the major financial crises of the past century, including the current crisis, the collapse of Enron, the meltdown of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), and even the Great Depression. In accordance with the conference theme, "Educating Corporate Lawyers: Better Counsel and Better Managers of the Corporate Legal Framework," Professor Schwarcz will also examine what the responsibility of corporate lawyers should be, and how corporate lawyers can be better educated, to help their clients try to see these correlations.
Other Plenary Speakers
Professor John Farrar
Professor John Farrar is Emeritus Professor of Law and Associate Dean
(Research) at Bond University and Professor of Corporate Governance,
University of Auckland Business School. Until recently he was a
Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Professor Farrar was formerly Dean of Law, University of Canterbury (1985-1988); Bond University (1993-1996) and Acting Vice Chancellor, Bond University, (1995-1996) and Dean of the University of Waikato Law School (2004-2008).
Professor Farrar is admitted to practice law as a Barrister of the Supreme Courts of Queensland and ACT and High Courts of Australia and New Zealand.
He is a well known scholar in the field of corporate law and corporate governance where he has published numerous books and articles. Professor Farrar's latest publications are Corporate Governance: Theories, Principles and Practice (3rd ed 2008) and Company & Securities Law in New Zealand (2008) of which he is general editor and contributor. He is also about to publish a new work on Legal Reasoning.
Abstract
Professor Farrar will present a regional perspective on matters raised by Professor Schwarcz's keynote address, and provide his views on the underlying causes of the global financial crisis, and the current regulatory responses of governments and international institutions. He considers whether the regulatory responses represent a paradigm shift in the capitalist framework or whether the responses are merely evolutionary developments in the regulation of financial risk. Following Professor Schwarcz's and his presentation, Professor Farrar will raise a series of discussion questions on the relationship between these developments and the teaching of corporate law and related matters in Australian higher education.
Professor Paul Redmond
Professor Paul Redmond is the inaugural Sir Gerard Brennan Professor
of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Paul joined the staff at
UTS after serving for many years at the Faculty of Law University of New
South Wales where he was also appointed Dean from 1996 - 2002. Paul is
also an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales.
Professor Redmond has been involved in professional organisations addressing corporate law and development including the Corporations Committee of the Business Law Section of the Law Council of Australia. He has also been a driver in legal education reform.
A corporate responsibility to respect human rights?
In June 2008 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted the framework for business and human rights that had been proposed by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Professor John G Ruggie. This 'conceptual and policy framework' is intended to anchor the debate on corporate responsibility and accountability for the human rights impacts of operations. It comprises three core principles: the duty upon states to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business corporations, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and the need for more effective access to remedies. This paper examines the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, the nature of the underlying obligation asserted to exist, how the responsibility might be discharged by corporations, its relationship with national corporate law systems and with corporate social responsibility notions, and its implications for corporate governance systems generally. The paper concludes by assessing the utility of this responsibility as a response to challenges facing, and those posed by, cross-border business operations.
Bernard Murphy
Bernard Murphy is the Chair of Maurice Blackburn and is the senior
principal of its Major Projects Department, which comprises Australia's
largest class action legal practice. Bernard has 29 years experience in
litigation practice and has been involved in many major cases including
the supervision or conduct of 24 class actions. He has lectured at
Melbourne, Monash, Stanford and Oxford on the topic of class action
litigation.
Class Action and Litigation Funding
The orientation of class actions and class action funding has shifted toward shareholder actions over the past 5 years with consequences for corporate regulation and governance. This paper will examine the current Australian class action landscape and consider implications of recent authority on the regulatory aspects of litigation funding.