Highlighting Global Progress on the Rule of Law and Human Rights: How Can We Advance These Efforts?
Thursday, June 27, 2024 | 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT (Eastern USA)
Now more than ever, global concerns about the Rule of Law and Human Rights are in the news worldwide. Given ongoing conflicts, extreme weather events, resource depletion and recognizing the growing needs of global citizens, what progress is being made now to advance these crucial legal frameworks? And how can we help support these advances? Join us for this webinar, to hear a powerful example of how the judicial branches of three of Latin America’s largest countries are each taking principled and important actions to defend democratic norms. The program also will highlight progress from the American Bar Association’s Center for Global Programs 2023 Annual Report—covering a breadth of programmatic work from around the world between the ABA Center for Human Rights (CHR) and the ABA Rule of Law Initiative (ROLI).
Please register in advance for the details on how to join via Zoom:
Co-hosted by Penn Carey Law of the University of Pennsylvania
Speakers:
Diego A. Zambrano
Stanford Law School
Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Global Programs; Faculty Director, Neukom Center for the Rule of Law
Palo Alto, California
Thomas Susman
American Bar Association
Strategic Advisor for Governmental Affairs and Global Programs
Washington, DC
Jean Galbraith
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Professor of Law
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. He also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Venezuela. Professor Zambrano is the Associate Dean for Global Programs and faculty director of the Neukom Center for the Rule of Law. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Professor Zambrano’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among other journals, and has been honored by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and the National Civil Justice Institute. Professor Zambrano will be a co-author of the leading casebook Civil Procedure: A Modern Approach (8th ed. 2024) (with Marcus, Pfander, and Redish). In addition, Professor Zambrano served as chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. He also writes about legal issues for broader public audiences, with his contributions appearing in the Journal of Democracy, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Lawfare.
After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 2013, Professor Zambrano spent three years as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, focusing on transnational litigation and arbitration. Before joining Stanford Law School in 2018, Professor Zambrano was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.
Thomas M. Susman is the ABA’s Strategic Advisor for Governmental Affairs and Global Programs. He assumed that role after retiring in 2018 as the Director of the Governmental Affairs Office and Associate Executive Director of the American Bar Association, a position he held since May 2008.
Prior to joining the ABA, he was a partner in the Washington Office of Ropes & Gray LLP for 27 years. There his work included counseling, litigation, and lobbying on a wide range of regulatory, antitrust, healthcare, lobbying, ethics, and information law issues.
Before joining Ropes & Gray, Tom served on Capitol Hill for over 11 years. He was Chief Counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure and General Counsel to the Antitrust Subcommittee and to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Prior to that, he served in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice
He is a nationally recognized expert on lobbying, freedom of information, and administrative law. Tom co-edits the Lobbying Manual; served as an adjunct professor at The American University’s Washington College of Law; and chairs the Ethics Committee of the National Institute for Lobbying and Ethics. His articles address lobbying reform, reciprocity, contingent fee lobbying, and campaign contributions. He has also written, taught, and lectured both in the U.S. and abroad on transparency, access to government information, and administrative law; he received the American Library Association’s “Champion of Public Access” award in 2009 and the Collaboration on Government Secrecy’s “Robert Vaughn FOIA Legend” award in 2008, and is Founding President of the D.C. Open Government Coalition.
His activities in the international arena include consulting, speaking, teaching, and election monitoring in over 30 countries spanning the globe from New Zealand to Russia, the Philippines to Chile, South Africa to France.
Tom chaired the Administrative Law Section of the ABA and served in the ABA’s House of Delegates and on its Board of Governors. He is a member of the American Law Institute, was Chairman of the National Judicial College Board, and was president of the District of Columbia Public Library Foundation. He is a graduate of Yale University and received his J.D. from the University of Texas Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Texas Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. In 2011 he was named Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Texas Law School. In November 2023, Tom was honored by the National Institute for Lobbying and Ethics with its inaugural “Best Lobbyist” Lifetime Achievement Award.
Jean Galbraith is a scholar of public international law and of U.S. law as it relates to foreign affairs. Her research focuses on how legal and institutional design choices affect international cooperation and global justice.
One strand of Galbraith’s research explores how the United States joins, implements, and exits treaties and other international commitments. She calls for structural and doctrinal reforms that would increase the prospects for U.S. international engagement. Her research also demonstrates how, over time, U.S. presidents have increasingly claimed constitutional power over diplomacy and uses of force at the expense of Congress through expansive legal reasoning.
In other work, Galbraith studies how international institutions could operate more effectively to promote equality and justice. Her empirical research on the use of “opt in” versus “opt out” clauses in treaties provides strong evidence that behavioral design can improve international cooperation. Her paper on Ending Security Council Resolutionsargues that the U.N. Security Council could reduce gridlock by making use of carefully designed termination clauses. Her recent work explores how criminal justice systems in the United States and around the world overly penalize low-income persons with fines and other financial penalties – and highlights the implications of these findings for human rights treaty bodies.
Before becoming a legal academic, Galbraith served as a law clerk for three judges: Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Theodor Meron of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She also practiced law in Philadelphia as an associate at Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University and received her J.D. from Berkeley Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the California Law Review.
As a professor, Galbraith maintains close ties to legal practice. From 2019-2021, she litigated pro bono cases relating to excessive fines, criminal procedure, and immigration law as the co-director of Penn Carey Law’s Appellate Advocacy Clinic. She has filed briefs in the Pennsylvania Superior Court, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the Third Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, and a long-standing member of the American Society of International Law.
At Penn Carey Law, Galbraith teaches a wide range of classes, including first-year Contracts, Foreign Relations Law, Federal Courts, and upper-level seminars in international law. In 2017, 2020, and 2024, she received the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence, which is awarded by vote of the graduating J.D. class.