Laws Locations: Textures of Legality in Developing

and Transitional Societies

Biographies of Speakers, Chairs and Commentators

Richard Abel (University of California Los Angeles, CA)

Richard Abel is Michael J. Connell Professor of Lawat University of California Los Angeles Law School. He teaches Torts, Legal Profession, and Law and Social Change. Over the years, he has been president of the Law and Society Association, editor of African Law Studies and of the Law & Society Review, and a member of the editorial boards of other journals in the law and society field in the United States, Europe, and Australia. He participated in the founding of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies in 1977 and helped organize the meeting on "Law and Racism: The Sounds of Silence."

Professor Abel spent two years after law school reading African law and legal anthropology in London and then a year of field work in Kenya studying the ways in which primary courts staffed by and serving the African population had preserved indigenous notions of law and procedure within European institutions. Professor Abel's most recent books are English Lawyers between Market and State: The Politics of Professionalism (2003), Speaking Respect, Respecting Speech (1998); Lawyers: A Critical Reader (1997); Politics by Other Means: Law in the Struggle Against Apartheid, 1980-1994 (1995); The Law & Society Reader (1995); Speech and Respect (1994); American Lawyers (1989); The Legal Profession in England and Wales (1988); The Politics of Informal Justice (editor, 1982); and Lawyers in Society (co-editor, 1988-89).

Flavia Agnes (Majlis, Mumbai, India)

Flavia Agnes is a leading women’s rights lawyer in India. A pioneer of the women’s rights movement, she has worked for over 25 years on issues of gender and law reform. She is the co-founder of Majlis, a Mumbai-based center that addresses issues of gender and human rights advocacy and provides legal services to women and children. Ms Agnes has played an important role in bringing women's rights to the forefront of the Indian legal system and in contextualizing issues of gender and identity. A prolific writer, she has written on various legal issues including, domestic violence, minority law reform, secularism and human rights. Significant among her many publications is her autobiographical book My Story Our Story ... Of Rebuilding Broken Lives which has been translated into several languages. Other publications include Law & Gender Inequality, The Politics of Personal Laws in India and an Omnibus, Women and Law (co-edited) published by Oxford University Press. At present she is completing a textbook on Gender and Law.

Ms. Agnes is a visiting faculty member at several law schools in India including the prestigious National Law School at Bangalore. She has received many awards for her work on women’s rights including the Times Foundation’s Award for Women Achievers. In 2005 she was recognized as an outstanding women’s rights activist in India at the Global Rights Annual Event held in Washington DC. In fall 2009, she was a Distinguished International Visitor at UW-Madison and taught a course on “Legal Domains, Community Constructions and Gender Concerns” at the UW Law School.

Walter Alban (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú)

Walter Albán is the Dean and Principle Professor of the Law School of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He is also a member of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at the University. Dean Alban has a long history in constitutional law and human rights law. He worked as the Defensor del Pueblo, or human rights ombudsman, of Peru from 2001 to 2005, and has worked with the Defensoría del Pueblo del Perú since it was founded in 1996. Prior to that, he was in charge of the Dirección Adjunta de la Comisión Andina de Juristas, an important transnational NGO that advocated for democracy and rule of law in the Andean region. Since June 2007, he has been a member of the Tribunal de Ética del Consejo de la Prensa Peruana, an institution charged with monitoring compliance by the Peruvian media to ethical standards.

Catherine Albertyn(University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)

Catherine Albertyn is a professor of law at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She has a BA LLB from UCT and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She trained as an attorney and practiced as a human rights lawyer from 1989 to 1992. She then joined the Centre for Applied Legal Studies to start the Gender Research Project. She is currently a commissioner at the Law Reform Commission. Professor Albertyn is a constitutional lawyer with a particular specialization in equality, human rights and social justice, and the transformation of the legal profession and the judiciary.

Helena AlviarGarcia (Los Andes University Law School, Bogota, Colombia)

Helena AlviarGarcia is an Associate Professor at Los Andes University Law School, Bogota, and was visiting Tinker Professor at University of Wisconsin Law School in Fall 2008. She holds an SJD Degree in Economic Law and Gender, and an LL.M. Degree from Harvard University, and a law degree from the Universidad de Los Andes. She is the Director of the Master’s Degree in Law program at the Universidad de Los Andes, teaching courses in: Theory of Private Law, Theory of Public Law, Legal Theory, and Law and Development. She is an expert on feminist approaches to law, and on the relationship between law and development. She has many publications to her credit including: “Aproximaciones feministas al Derecho Comercial” (in Revista de Derecho Privado, No. 27, Uniandes Ed., Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, December 2001); “The Relationship between Modernization and Law in Colombia during the First Half of the Twentieth Century” (presented at the Harvard Law School, April 2002), and “The Influence of Leon Duguit in the Colombian Constitutional Reform of 1936” (presented at the Harvard Law School, December 2001).

Penelope Andrews (Valparaiso Law School)

Penelope (Penny) Andrewsis a Professor of Law at Valparaiso Law School. In the summer of 2010 she will move to the City University of New York as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Between 2008 and 2010 she held a Chair in Law at LaTrobe University, Australia. She has been a visiting professor at several law schools, including the University of Maryland, the University of Natal, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Potsdam, and the University of Amsterdam. In 2002 she was the Stoneman Fellow of Law and Democracy at Albany Law School and the Parsons Visitor at the University of Sydney. In 2004 she was a resident at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, working on a manuscript on women's human rights law.

She has written extensively on human rights issues in the South African, Australian, and international contexts, and appears frequently on panels addressing issues of international human rights, women, and racial minorities. She is the editor of two books, The Post-Apartheid Constitutions: Reflections on South Africa's Basic Law, and Law and Rights: Global Perspectives on Constitutionalism and Governance. Her forthcoming book, From Cape Town to Kabul: Reconsidering Women’s Human Rights, will be published in 2010. She has received several awards for her human rights work, including a scholarship in her honor to benefit disadvantaged black South Africans at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She sits on the Boards of several law journals and is the editor of the International Review of Constitutionalism. Professor Andrews has served as a Board Member for NGOs, and has also served as a consultant and advisor to governments and NGOs. She has served as a law school site inspector for the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools. In 2005 she was a finalist for a vacancy on the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

Sumudu Atapattu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Sumudu Atapattu is the Associate Director of the Global Legal Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She teaches International Environmental law and her book entitled Emerging Principles of International Environmental Law was published by Transnational Publishers in 2006. She holds an LLM and a PhD Degree from University of Cambridge and is an Attorney-at-law of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka. Sumudu is also the Lead Counsel for Poverty and Human Rights at the Center for International Environmental Law, Montreal, Canada. Before coming to the United States, she was an Associate Professor at the Law School, University of Colombo and Consultant, Law & Society Trust, Colombo. Her research interests include human rights and environment, climate change, environmental migration and sustainable development.

Swethaa Ballakrishnen (Stanford University)

Swethaa Ballakrishnen is a PhD candidate in the Sociology of Education Department at Stanford University. She was an Inlaks Scholar to the Harvard LL.M class of 2008 and a 2004 graduate of the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad (where she won the Amancharla Krishna Murti Memorial Gold Medal for the best student of her graduating class). In 2008, she joined PLP and EALS as a Joint Research Fellow with a South Asia specific research agenda. Before coming to Harvard, Ms. Ballakrishnen was an international finance lawyer with the Mumbai offices of Amarchand Mangaldas & Suresh A. Shroff & Co., an intern at the Supreme Court of India with Justice A. Pasayat and spent a year teaching international finance and legal methods at two national law schools in Hyderabad and Bhopal, India.

At the Harvard Law School, her graduate program had a shared focus in international finance and the sociology of legal education and her recent research has been on the evolution of law schools and students in/from South Asia and the corresponding implications on the legal profession. At PLP, her research has been concentrated on further study of the profession in South Asia with particular focus on the globalization and off shoring of legal services in India. This past winter, Ms. Ballakrishnen was on a PLP Research Grant in India, doing field research on the growth and of the country’s growing legal outsourcing industry. She is currently working on finalizing these findings. In addition to her doctoral studies, Ms. Ballakrishnen works closely with Professor Marc Galanter (University of Wisconsin-Madison) on the legal profession, and consults periodically on legal education-related projects for the Lewis & Clark Law School, Portland, Oregon.

Jane Burbank (New York University, NY)

Jane Burbank is a Professor of Arts and Science at New York University. Her early work concerned the multiple and insightful interpretations of the Russian revolution of 1917 produced by Russian intellectuals during the first five years of Bolshevik government. From the Russian intelligentsia, Professor Burbank turned to study law, in particular law as engaged by Russian peasants in the last years of the imperial regime. She is now working on a study of the law in Russia, as imagined and engaged by professionals, officials, theorists, and court users, from 1905 through 1925, and on a second project comparing law in the Russian and Ottoman empires. Professor Burbank’s teaching interests include Russian cultural, social, and intellectual history; European intellectual history and social theory; rural people and their politics; legal cultures; gender and social organization; political cultures of empires.

Peter Carstensen (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Peter C. Carstensen is the George Young-Bascom Professor of Law. From 1993 to 2002 he served as Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development at the UW Law School. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, and received his law degree and a master's degree in economics from Yale University. From 1968 to 1973, he was an attorney at the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice assigned to the Evaluation Section, where one of his primary areas of work was on questions of relating competition policy and law to regulated industries. He has been a member of the faculty of the UW Law School since 1973. His scholarship and teaching have focused on antitrust law and competition policy issues. He has published a number of articles in the field, including a number analyzing aspects of the relationship of antitrust law and regulation. He has also done extensive research on the operation and regulation of markets for agricultural commodities. He served as co-editor and primary author of four chapters of the ABA Antitrust Section's monograph, Federal Statutory Exemptions from Antitrust Law (2007). His other areas of teaching and scholarly interest are tort law, energy law and insurance law.

Allison Christians (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Allison Christians joined the University of Wisconsin Law School faculty in 2005. She received her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and her LL.M. in Taxation from New York University School of Law. Prior to joining the faculty of the UW Law School, Professor Christians taught J.D. and LL.M. courses in federal and international income taxation at Northwestern University School of Law, and before that practiced tax law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York, where she focused on the taxation of domestic and cross-border mergers and acquisitions, spin-offs, restructurings and associated issues and transactions involving private and public companies. Professor Christians has written several articles and book chapters addressing national and international policy, globalization, competition, institutional, and development aspects of taxation, she is co-author of a leading casebook on U.S. international tax law, and she serves as Editor for the Tax Section of Jotwell, the legal scholarship review blog. She teaches courses on Federal Income Taxation; International Taxation; Taxation of Business Entities and Tax Policy.

Joe Conti(University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Joe Conti is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Conti specializes in international trade disputes and world society. He is currently a collaborator at the NSF Center for Nanotechnology and Society.Professor Conti received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California – Santa Barbara, where his research focused on dispute resolution in the World Trade Organization. Before joining the faculty at UW-Madison, Professor Conti was a collaborator at the National Science Foundation Center for Nanotechnology and Society.

Javier Couso (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile)

Javier Couso is Professor of Law and Sociology at the Universidad Diego Portales, in Santiago, Chile and former Director of the Center of Socio-Legal Research. During Fall 2006, Professor Couso was aTinker Visiting Professor at UW Law School and organized with Professor Alexandra Huneeus a conference on “Legal Culture and the Judicialization of Politics in Latin America.” The papers presented at the conference were accepted for publication by the Cambridge University Press. Professor Couso’s research interests include the study of law and courts in Latin America, the comparative study of judicialization, and the legal profession.

Jackie Dugard (Socio-Economic Rights Institute, South Africa)

Jackie Dugard is the Executive Director of the newly created Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI). She is a human rights activist and was a senior researcher at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She works on socio-economic rights, focusing on basic services (water and electricity) and access to justice for the poor. Prior to joining CALS (in January 2004), Dr Dugard worked in the Political Affairs Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. She has a BA (Hons) and an LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand, an MPhil and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex. Jackie was part of the legal team in the Phiri water rights case – Mazibuko & Others v City of Johannesburg & Others. In this groundbreaking application in the Johannesburg High Court – the first explicit right to water case in South Africa - the applicants challenged the lawfulness and constitutionality of prepayment water meters, as well as the sufficiency of the City’s Free Basic Water policy to meet the basic needs of large poor urban households.

Rachel Ellett (Beloit College, Wisconsin)

Rachel Ellett is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Moat Junior Professor of International Studies, at Beloit College, Wisconsin. She joined the department in 2008 and teaches courses in international and comparative politics, and African Studies. Courses offered include contemporary African politics, comparative law and courts, promoting democracy and women and politics in the developing world. Her research interests focus on the politics of eastern and southern Africa and comparative judicial politics. Her dissertation, "Emerging Judicial Power in Transitional Democracies: Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi," is based on fieldwork funded by the National Science Foundation. Her publications include "Re-emergence of The 'Other': Nationalism in Post-Nyerere Tanzania" in Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism.2005 Vol. 32 No. 1-2. In addition to continuing her research agenda on the intersection of law and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, she is currently exploring the ways in which teachers can effectively draw on students' study abroad experiences in the political science classroom.

David Engel (University at Buffalo Law School, NY)

David Engel is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor at University at Buffalo Law School and teaches courses on Torts and Products Liability and seminars on Injuries and on Law, Culture, and Society as well as a Directed Readings Course for General LL.M. students. His research deals with law and society in the United States and in other countries, particularly Thailand, where he has lived, worked, and taught for many years. Professor Engel currently serves as chair of UB's Council on International Studies and Programs, an advisory body to the Provost. From 1991 to 2001, he served as Director of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy and as Vice Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies; and from 2002 to 2008 he was Director of International Programs at the law school. His latest book is Tort, Custom, and Karma: Globalization and Legal Consciousness in Thailand (2010), which is a study of injuries and the law in a rapidly changing Asian society. Professor Engel is an active member of the Law & Society Association, an international membership organization which he served as President from 1997-1998. He was also a member of the Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation Program for Law and Social Sciences and the LSAC Grants Sub-Committee. In 2005/6, he was selected as the inaugural occupant of the Sturm Distinguished Visiting Chair at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.