Diversity Workshop at Westminster on October 13

 

(Thanks to New Yorker)

I am sure we won't have this problem on Wednesday at the Diversity Workshop. Find the details here. You are all welcome.

Diversity Workshop at Westminster on October 13

Diversity Workshop at Westminster 13 October--You Are Invited

(Thanks to Richard Thomson in Guardian from Notting Hill Carnival 2010)

A while back I wrote about my colleagues' research project on diversity in the legal profession for the Legal Services Board (LSB). At last that research is completed. A multi-faceted team from the Universities of Westminster, Leeds, and Leicester have submitted their report to the LSB.

We, at Westminster, are holding a seminar/workshop for the launch of the report. Here's a brief clip of what to expect:

The seminar is being held to launch a new research report commissioned by the Legal Services Board on diversity in the legal profession. There have been dramatic changes in the legal profession in the last 20 years. In 2008-09 women made up 46% of practising solicitors and 60% of entrants to the profession. For the Bar the figures were 34% (women barristers) and 50% (women entrants). In the case of black and minority ethnic lawyers there has been a 244% increase in their numbers in the ten years between 1996 and 2006. Despite these increases the legal profession is still dominated by white males. There is a greater division with white lawyers being over-represented in City law firms and at the Bar, while BME lawyers are found in greater numbers in smaller High Street law firms.

The research examines the causes for these differences, their persistence and what strategies are available to change cultures and expectations. Despite the implementation of procedures meant to neutralize discrimination, they are easily bypassed. Interviewers raise inappropriate questions about ethnicity, gender, and background. For those in the profession work was allocated unfairly and to question this was deprecated.

The biggest obstacle was the culture of informality that made it difficult for people to raise problems or question established ways of working. Moreover, racial stereotyping was pervasive.

Even though many law firms are trying hard to counter these inequities, the majority still abide by them.

(thanks to idsgn.org)

On October 13 the University of Westminster and the Legal Services Board are hosting a workshop/seminar to launch the report and discuss it.

The research team--Liz Duff (Westminster), Daniel Muzio (Leeds), Hilary Sommerlad (Leicester), Jenny Tomlinson (Leeds), Lisa Webley (Westminster), along with Anna Zimdars (Manchester)--will present their findings.

This will be followed by a panel discussion and questions with David Pittaway QC (Bar Council), Pat Corcoran and Stephen Ward (Law Society), Crispin Passmore (Legal Services Board) and Andy Boon (Westminster). I will be moderating.

It should be a lively and intriguing time. You are all invited.

DATE: October 13
TIME: 1500--1800
PLACE: Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London W1B 2UW (Streetmap link)

(thanks to chrisjfry)

Diversity Workshop at Westminster 13 October--You Are Invited

The Future of Rights?

(thanks to humanrightsnigeria.org)

My friend, Conor Gearty at the LSE, has started an intriguing and fascinating new project called The Rights' Future. Here's Conor's opening gambit:

THE RIGHTs’ FUTURE explores the history, development and current success of the human rights ideal, with all the dangers and compromises that such success has brought.  It argues for a particular human rights story, one that rescues the radical activists and the egalitarians from the footnotes to which they are often relegated in the standard accounts.

Conor has his own take on human rights and intends to tell the story over a period of 20 weeks. Each Monday he will put up an essay on therightsfuture.com. He is inviting anyone (and he means anyone) to comment, add, substract, or even disagree. At the end of this period, he will have told not only his story but those of others whose narratives will become interwoven with his.

You can hear more about this venture in Conor's own words here:

The Future of Rights?

57th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance Updated

Dear All,

We are happy to announce that the fifty-seventh session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance will be held at the Latimer Conference Centre (for directions, see http://www.devere.co.uk/our-locations/latimer-place), with Joe leading a discussion from 6 to 7pm on "The Philosophical Foundations of Bounty-Hunting under the Dodd-Frank Act" followed by a dinner from 7 to 8pm.  In attendance will be about thirty candidates of the LLM Corporate Finance Law and two PhDs candidates.  You are welcome to attend the lecture and please RSVP to Rezi at rezartavukatana@gmail.com for the dinner, which for guests will be a nominal charge of £15.  Please also note that there is an alumni networking lunch on Oct 9th at 1 to 2:30pm where former LLM students now working in banking and finance will join us.

The topic of discussion will be a continuation of Hohfeldian 'analytical jurisprudence' and Category Theory (see Conceptual Mathematics by Lawvere and Schanuel, 2009, 2ed) with application of such theories to the Whistleblower Incentives and Protection provisions (mainly sections 748 and 921-924) of the US Dodd-Frank Act 2010, also known as the "Bounty Hunting" provisions. You can access the US Dodd-Frank Act text by clicking here http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h4173enr.txt.pdf.

We will investigate the structural features of bounty-hunting in regulatory gaming space in terms of the isomorphism of time, space, greed and fear. We will also ask whether the fundamental psychological unit of risk is non-invertible (and thus, implying an invariance) across a universal regulatory space amongst gaming agents pro se. This move in the development of theory is in response to James Waters' query in the 56th session as to whether Category Theory in social science and specifically, in its applications to financial economic phenomena could be improved with the addition of "combinatorics" and "numerics". Joe's initial response in the last session was to agree with Waters' suggestion that it was in "the combination of categories" that we can see the worth of category theory in terms of practical applications of the predictive sort to legal and financial phenomena. But this practical move would merely be an implementation of a much more fundamental and general position which still needs proof and justification. The prime motivation of Category Theory as applied to law and finance generally is to hunt down structures which are not simply analogous but literally in a rigorous sense, fundamentally the same across specialist discourses.  Our hunt is Parmenidean in the sense of recovering by force of simple structures arguments in favour of the One. In the simplest terms, we wish to find the structures of law and finance, since neither discourse is equipped or motivated to do this job for us, and our suspicion is that bounty-hunting not only offers radical rewards to particular whistleblowers but that it establishes a market nucleus that has the same structural properties that make investment banking so successful.

This fifty-seventh session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance is the capstone of the introductory set of lectures for the LLM Corporate Finance Law programme, and the beginning of the Corporate Finance Law Executive Weekend which will include 18 hours of intensive instruction led by Professor Mark Watson-Gandy, module leader of Legal Aspects of Corporate Finance,  Florin Coseraru, Director of Barclays Capital & Fellow and Module Leader of Investment Banking, Dr. Dmitry Gololobov, Fellow of Corporate Criminal Law & Module Leader of Money Laundering and Corporate Fraud, Viktoria Baklanova, PhD Candidate in Law and Senior Director of Fitch, New York.

If you can't make it to the Friday session, you are most welcome to join us for the networking lunch on Saturday.

See you there!

Rezi and Joe

57th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance Updated

Conviction

Interesting film being shown during London Film Festival week CONVICTION. The film is having a gala screening at the London Film Festival on 15^th October and is about one of the first cases of DNA being used as evidence. Hilary Swank plays Betty Ann Waters, a woman who devoted her life to earning a law degree to free her brother, Kenny Waters, from life without parole for a murder he did not commit.

Conviction

Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance - 56th Weekly Meeting

Dear all

We are keen and delighted to announce that the 56th session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance will take place on Friday 1 October 2010, from 6.00 to 8.00pm, in room 5.16, 309 Regent Street (University of Westminster).

To get us back in the mood of philosophizing about the nature of laws we will read something classical (Plato's Laws or Aristotle's Rhetoric) and develop quite independently what might be called "A Hierarchy of Algebras for Legal Analysis". Joe will set out how Hohfeld's schema of legal relations, i.e., jural opposites and jural correlatives of rights, privileges, power and immunity, can be more simply understood in terms of Category Theory.

Category Theory, born about 60 years ago is now firmly embedded in the way we think about modern algebras – it is an extremely superficial theory that can be applied to practically anything –computing networks, quarks, boxing, dish stacking menus, flights of birds, and now, hopefully, legal theory and applications.

Hohfeld in the early part of the 20th century purported to have established an "analytical jurisprudence" that could be used to unravel the mysteries of any legal problem by showing how genuinely complex any legal relation is in terms of jural opposites and correlatives. This schema has always been quite difficult to apply, but with a bit of practice, can be used to resolve many so-called problems in the interpretation of laws – or, in the so-called "practice of law".

Joe will propose to simplify Hohfeld's "field equations" into a much more compact framework, making use of monoids and the articles of faith of Category Theory. The hypothesis is that if we can show how Hohfeld's legal relations are a category, then wherever Hohfeld's analysis applies, we also have a category. Thus, this sort of legal analysis would get everything else that Category Theory has to offer for free! Further, we would have a precise way of speaking about the structure of laws as fundamental conceptions of mathematics. This sounds like a conceptual breakthrough... At this level of abstraction, fundamental conceptions of law (which is the very title and aim of Hohfeld's work) are equivalent to fundamental conceptions of mathematics – which is the title to high school level text on Category Theory. How weird and wonderful if the implied isomorphism is actually the case!

We shall consequently test the application of Category Theory to our traditional banqueting session at Vapiano (19-21 Great Portland Street, W1W 8QB), from 8pm onwards.

See you on Friday!
Joe, Rezarte and Laura

Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance - 56th Weekly Meeting

Revolution or Evolution? The Future of Legal Services

(thanks to toonpool.com)

Legal Support Network has just published its fourth briefing on legal services reform. The thrust of the issue is to prefigure what will happen in a year's time when Alternative Business Structures start running.

There is an interview with Stephen Mayson about the future of the legal sector and Neil Rose (of Legal Futures) writes about the shape of the new regulatory landscape. Outcomes-focused regulation will be "regulation for grown-ups" according to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. What will be the outcomes for clients? The entity/firm not the individual lawyer will be responsible, and that goes wider than lawyers.

Finally, there's an article on "Welcome to the Revolution" which says it's already happening. Disclosure: I'm one of the people interviewed for this piece. Despite that it's good.

Happy reading and you can download the Briefing here. And remember, at the best of times, revolutions can be unsettling....

(thanks to hubpages.com)

Revolution or Evolution? The Future of Legal Services