Faculty

J_Barcelo John J. Barceló III is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International and Comparative Law and the Reich Director of the Berger International Legal Studies Program at Cornell Law School. He is also the founding director and this year (2012) a co-director of the 2013 Summer Institute of International and Comparative Law. He received a doctorate in law (S.J.D.) from Harvard Law School and a J.D. degree from Tulane University Law School. At Cornell he teaches international commercial arbitration, international trade and business law (including WTO law), and European Union law. Professor Barceló is a coauthor of International Commercial Arbitration—A Transnational Perspective (4th ed., 2009) (with Tibor Varady). He is also coeditor of A Global Law of Jurisdiction and Judgments—Lessons from the Hague (2002) and Lawyers' Practice and Ideals—A Comparative View (1999). He has published widely in U.S. and European legal journals, especially in the field of international trade law. He was a Fulbright scholar in 1966-67 at the University of Bonn, Germany, and has taught or lectured in Argentina, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the U.K., and Spain. He has experience as an international arbitrator. Professor Barceló was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Commerce on international trade law from 1981 to 1983. He has held visiting positions at St. John's College, University of Oxford (1987); the University of Siena, Italy (1987); the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1996 and 1998); Pompeu Fabra law faculty in Barcelona (2002); the Bucerius law faculty in Hamburg (2004; 2007; 2010); the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (2004-2010); and the Centre for Law, Economics and Institutions at Torino, Italy (2006). He is currently a visiting professor at the Central European University, in Budapest, Hungary (since 1995).

James Hanks James J. Hanks, Jr. is a partner in the 550-lawyer firm of Venable LLP, with offices in Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and is an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School. He received an A.B. degree from Princeton University; an LL.B. degree from the University of Maryland Law School, where he was an editor of the Maryland Law Review; and an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School. During the 1967-68 term, he served as law clerk to Judge Charles Fahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In private practice, Professor Hanks represents publicly- and privately-held corporations and other entities in securities offerings and other financing transactions. Professor Hanks has advised buyers or sellers in more than 250 mergers or acquisitions, including many valued at more than one billion dollars. He has also represented parties in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and other transactions. Professor Hanks regularly serves as independent counsel to the boards of directors of major U.S. corporations and as an expert witness in connection with major transactions, stockholder litigation, conflicts of interest, and corporate governance issues. He also advises foreign governments on revision of their corporate and securities laws. At Cornell Law School, Professor Hanks has taught courses in securities regulation, corporate counsel, and business combinations. He has also taught classes in corporation law at law schools in the United States and the Republic of South Africa and at the Institute of Law in Beijing. Professor Hanks is the author of Maryland Corporation Law and the coauthor (with former Stanford Law School Dean Bayless Manning) of the third edition of Legal Capital. He is also the author of several law review articles and is a frequent speaker on corporation law issues. He has been actively involved in the revision of the Model Business Corporation Act and is a member of the American Law Institute. During the Fall, 2003, Professor Hanks was Commerzbank Visiting Professor of Law at Bucerius Law School, in Hamburg, Germany, and has taught there occasionally since then. Mr. Hanks appears in the current edition of The Best Lawyers in America in three categories: Corporate Governance and Compliance Law, Corporate Law, and Mergers and Acquisitions Law. In 2008, he received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award of the Maryland State Bar Association Section of Business Law..

Holden-Smith-Barbara[1] Barbara J. Holden-Smith is Vice Dean and Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. Dean Holden-Smith, recognized for her groundbreaking work in the Supreme Court history and practice, currently teaches federal courts, civil procedure, and African Americans and the Supreme Court. After her graduation from the University of Chicago Law School, she spent a year in an Illinois law firm and then entered a clerkship with the Hon. Ann C. Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Professor Holden-Smith then joined the Washington D.C. law firm of Arnold & Porter, where she worked for three years in litigation, antitrust and food and drug law, before she joined the Cornell Law School Faculty in 1990. Her scholarship has addressed the legal response to lynching and the fugitive-slave cases. Her scholarly interests include global access to justice and the legal and political responses to historical injustices.

Oskar Liivak oskar liivak is an Assistant Professor of Law, graduated from Rutgers College with highest honors in 1994, received a Ph.D. 2000 in physics from Cornell University focusing on techniques for determining protein structure, and received a J.D. from the Yale Law School in 2005. From 2000 to 2001, he was a post-doctoral scientist working on physical realization of quantum computing in the Quantum Information Group at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Prior to law school, he served as a patent agent in the Boston office of Fish and Richardson P.C. Most recently, Professor Liivak served as a law clerk to Judge Sharon Prost on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He is teaching Patent Law and Trade Secrets in the fall and Copyright in the spring.

Mitchel Lasser Mitchel Lasser teaches and writes in the areas of comparative law, law of the European Union, comparative constitutional law, and judicial process. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2004, he was the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale College (1986), received a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1989), an M.A. in French literature (1990) and a Ph.D. in comparative literature (1995) from Yale University. He served as a Fulbright Scholar in France from 1993 to 1994, where he researched the French civil judicial system. While a doctoral student at Yale, he held a Whiting fellowship and an Enders fellowship. Professor Lasser has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris-I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) in 2001, 2002 and 2005, the University of Lausanne in 2003 and 2004, the University of Geneva in 2004, the NYU School of Law and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in 2006, and the Católica Global Law School in Lisbon in 2009. He held the Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Chair at the Law Department of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2003 and was the Maurice R. Greenberg Visiting Professor at Yale Law School in 2007-2008. His articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Cornell Law Review, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Archives de philosophie du droit, and the Revue trimestrielle de droit civil. Oxford University Press has published his two monographs, Judicial Deliberations: A Comparative Analysis of Judicial Transparency and Legitimacy (2004) and Judicial Transformations: The Rights Revolution in the Courts of Europe (2009).

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Muna Ndulo Muna B. Ndulo is an internationally-recognized scholar in the fields of constitution making, governance and institution building, human rights and Foreign Direct Investments. He graduated LLB (Zambia); LLM (Harvard) and D. Phil (Oxford). He is a Professor of Law Cornell Law School and Director of the Cornell University’s Institute for African Development. He is Honorary Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Honorary Professor, Faculty of Law, Free State University, South Africa. He was formerly Professor of Law and Dean of the School of Law, University of Zambia. He served as Legal Officer in the International Trade Law Brach of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) from 1986 t0 1995. He also served as Political and Legal Adviser with the United Nations Observer Mission in South Africa (UNOMSA) and to the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General to South Africa 1992-1994; Legal Adviser to the United Nations Assistance Mission to EAST Timor (UNAMET)-1999, Legal Expert, United Nations Mission to Kosovo (UNAMIK) (2000) and Legal Expert to the United Nations Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) (2003). He has acted as consulted to the African Development Bank (ADB) in the setting up of the African Legal Support Facility (ALSF), World Bank, Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), National Democratic Institute (NDI) United Sates Institute for Peace (USIP) and International Development Law Organization (IDLO). He has acted as consultant to the Kenya 2010 Constitutional Process, Zimbabwe Constitutional Process, Somalia and Sudan. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Africanist Scholar Award (New York African Studies Association) and the Excellence in in the Teaching, Advising and Mentoring Graduate and Professional Students(Cornell university). He is founder of the Southern African Institute for Public Policy and Research (SAIPAR) and member of its Board of Directors. Member of the Board of the African Association of International law, He is a member of the Advisory Committee, Human Rights Watch, (Africa) and Chairperson of Gender Links, A South African NGO. He has published 14 books and over 80 articles in academic journals.

bio_Rossi_Faust_ffr1_rgb Faust F. ROSSI is the Samuel S. Leibowitz Professor of Trial Techniques at Cornell Law School. He received an A.B. degree from the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and the J.D. with distinction from Cornell Law School. After six years of law practice specializing in litigation, he joined Cornell Law School, where he has taught courses on evidence, civil procedure, trial advocacy, torts, and insurance.From 1973 to 1975, Professor Rossi served as associate dean for academic affairs at Cornell Law School. He has been a visiting professor at the New York University, Emory University, and University of San Diego law schools. In 1987, he was a visiting fellow at Wadham College of the University of Oxford. In 1988, he lectured as an academic visitor at the University of Siena, Italy. Professor Rossi has also been a recurring visiting professor in the Legal Studies Department of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.In 1992, he was the national winner of the Jacobson Award for Teaching Excellence. He has lectured on evidence and procedure to judges, lawyers, and students throughout the United States and in Europe. Professor Rossi edited and contributed to Expert Witnesses (1992) and has written numerous monographs and articles on evidence. He is a member of the American Jurisprudence Editorial Advisory Board and of the faculty of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. He served as a consultant on the Federal Rules of Evidence for the American College of Trial Lawyers, for the New York State Law Revision Commission, and for other federal and state associations.

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Mw_whitehead_Charles_ckw26[1] Charles K. Whitehead is an Associate Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, specializing in the law relating to corporations, financial markets, and strategic transactions. At Cornell, Professor Whitehead teaches Business Organizations, Securities Regulation, and Deals: The Economic Structure of Transactions and Contracting. He received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Cornell University, and a J.D. degree from Columbia Law School where he was a James Kent Scholar and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. During 1986-87, Professor Whitehead was a law clerk to Hon. Ellsworth A. Van Graafeiland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before entering academia, he practiced in the United States, Europe, and Asia as outside counsel, general counsel, and a senior executive of several multinational financial institutions. Professor Whitehead has represented U.S. and non-U.S. public and private firms in securities and other financings, as well as in mergers & acquisitions and other strategic transactions, around the world. In addition, Professor Whitehead has developed complex and novel derivative and other financial instruments, both in the private and public capital markets. He is a member of the ISDA Credit Derivatives Determinations Committee, Americas External Review Panel, as well as a board member of a prominent global hedge fund. Professor Whitehead's most recent articles include The Volcker Rule and Evolving Financial Markets (Harvard Business Law Review, 2011), Destructive Coordination (Cornell Law Review, 2011), Reframing Financial Regulation (Boston University Law Review, 2010, reprinted in Journal of Financial Transformation, 2010), and The Evolution of Debt: Covenants, the Credit Market, and Corporate Governance (Journal of Corporation Law, 2009, reprinted in Corporate Practice Commentator, 2009). He is a member of the American Law Institute, a Senior Advisor to the ABA International Financial Products and Services Committee, and a co-recipient in 2010 of the ABA Section of International Law Outstanding Policy Award.

FRENCH LANGUAGE INSTRUCTORS

Claude Bédard-Claret (left) and Chantal Casanova (right)

Claude Bédard-Claret is the instructor of Beginning French. A long-term resident of Paris, where she has taught French for many years, she also has strong ties to Québec. She has a Master’s degree from the Sorbonne and a Certificate of Specialization in Teaching French to Foreigners, from École Normale Supérieure de St-Cloud, Paris. Her doctoral dissertation was on the teaching of the French language. She has been a researcher at the Centre International de Recherche sur le Bilinguisme, at the Université Laval, Québec, and is the author of two texts on teaching French as a foreign language: Français contemporain (Toronto 1980) and Français à la carte (Télé-Université, Montréal 1983).

Chantal Casanova is a native of France. She obtained a master’s degree from the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, where she studied American Civilization. She specializes in F.L.E. (French as a second language). In France, she has taught in various institutions, including the French and Spanish Trade Office, the "INSEE " (national institute of statistics) and the C.I.E.L.F. (International Center of French Language). From 1986-1990, she was a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard University, as well as a teacher in the Harvard Lifelong Learning Center. Since 1994, she has participated in the Cornell Law School Summer Program in Paris, as the instructor of Intermediate French and the coordinator of the language instruction program.