South of Everything: A Workshop on Global Legal Education

Speaker Bios

• Pratiksha Baxi, Jawaharlal Nehru University — "The Ethnography of Trials and the Layering of Law"

  Pratiksha Baxi is a lawyer and ethnographer. A founding member of the law and social science network, Pratiksha combines work on violence, court ethnography and feminist theory in analyzing the many layers of legal culture and cultural norm in the court room. Her book Public Secrets of Law traces the fate of femininity in rape trials in India, addressing in particular the social stigma associated with rape, and the role of police and courts, coercive power and legal knowledge in transforming and disqualifying women’s testimony.
  

• Mark Beer, DIFC — "The Plurality of the Local"

  Mark Beer is the Chief Executive and Registrar at the DIFC Courts. He is a Judge of the Courts’ Small Claims Tribunal, Chairman of the DIFC Legal Group, a Member of the DIFC Courts’ Rules Subcommittee, Registrar of the Special Tribunal Related to Dubai World and Chief Executive of the Dispute Resolution Authority. In 2010 he was elected the Vice President of the Middle East for the International Association for Court Administration. Under his management, the Courts have secured a reputation as one of the most efficient commercial courts in the world. He has played a key role in the development of the Courts many formalized relationships with partner judicial systems including New York, London, Singapore, and Australia.
  

• Hervé Crès, NYUAD — "Law at Sciènce-Po: The Melding of Cultures"

  Hervé Crès is a Professor of Economics at New York University in Abu Dhabi, where he officiates as Dean for the Social Sciences. He has been previously a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, at HEC, Paris, and at Sciènces Po, Paris. His main research interests are in general equilibrium theory, social choice theory and formal political theory, with a particular emphasis on the study of the role of collective decision mechanisms to fix market failures. Hervé Crès has held various leadership positions, among which Deputy Director of HEC Grande Ecole, and Vice-president and Interim Director at Sciènces Po.
  

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• Gilles Cuniberti, University of Luxembourg — "The Global Market and Legal Education"

  Gilles Cuniberti is Professor of Comparative Law and Private International Law. Previously, he was the director of the BA in Global Legal studies. His primary research interests are international commercial law, international litigation and arbitration, comparative law and the conflict of laws. He is the author of six books and numerous articles published in French, English, and Italian. 
  

• Marinos Diamantides, University of London — "East West and the Political Theology of Law"

  Marinos Diamantides, Dean of Birkbeck Law School, and former constitutional law adviser to the government of Yemen, Diamantides has written and worked copiously on the interface of Eastern and Western legal regimes. Author most recently of Immaculate Conceptions: Secularization in Law and Philosophy; he is also co-editor of Islam, Law and Identity.
  

• Werner Gephart, University of Bonn — "Law, Art and Culture across the Globe"

  Werner Gephart is founding Director of The Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture." Artist, lawyer, and specialist and editor of a new edition of the works of Max Weber, Professor Gephart established the Center so as to bring together artists and lawyers from a diversity of global legal cultures and disciplines. Continuing also to paint, Werner Gephart has a yearlong exhibition of his work, Some Colours of the Law, currently on display at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College, and London. 
  

• Janny Leung, Hong Kong University — "Multilingual Legal Education"

  Janny Leung is Program Director of Legal and Literary Studies, one of the first joint degrees in law and literature. She specializes in new media, communication and law. Author of several textbooks on language, textuality and law, she has trained in England, the USA, and in China and teaches students from mainland China as well as from around the disparate and developing dominions of the common law world. Her latest book is Multilingual Legal Order, forthcoming from Oxford this spring.
  

• Rony Rogoff, NYUAD — "Building a Global Orchestra in the Desert"

  Rony Rogoff is an Art Professor. He studied at the Juilliard School in New York with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, as well as in Switzerland with Joseph Szigeti. As a soloist he was accompanied by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta, as well as by the leading orchestras in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Paris, Madrid, Tokyo, Manila, Caracas, under conductors like Sergiu Celibidache, Leonard Bernstein, Enrique García Asensio, Aldo Ceccato, and Arthur Fiedler. Rogoff has encouraged a continuous open exchange with many other internationally acclaimed artists, orchestras, and extraordinary students, all of whom have helped him to develop into one of the most experienced violin teachers and orchestra builders of our time, including in Denmark (Danish Radio Orchestra); Germany (Munich Young Philharmonic); Spain (Servera Festival Orchestra); throughout the Philippines (Outreach Program). 
  

• Spyros Maniatis, Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London

  Spyros Maniatis is Professor of Intellectual Property and Director of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London and consultant with Edwards Angell Palmers & Dodge in London. He is co-author of Trade Marks, Trade Names, and Unfair Competition World Law and Practice and Trade Marks in Europe: a Practical Jurisprudence. 
  

• Raja Sakrani, University of Bonn — "Convivencia"

  Raja Sakrani, lawyer and anthropologist, trained in Tunisia and then has practiced, researched, and taught in France and in Germany. A specialist in the history and practice of "Convivencia," she has written extensively on revolution, Sharia law, legal hybridity, Islamic and Jewish juristic traditions, religion, and identity. 
  

• Laurent de Sutter, University of Brussels — "Legal Excitement: Reimagining Legal Education"

  Laurent de Sutter is an author, editor, lawyer, media intellectual, and publishing entrepreneur. His works include Theory of the Kamikaze; The Law of Excitation; Pornostars; Deleuze, and the Practice of Law.
  

• Carl Stychin, City University London — "Pluri-jurisdictional and pluri-disciplinary Teaching Methods"

  Carl Stychin, Dean of the City Law School at City University, is best known for his work on sexuality and the law, as well as for a leading teaching text on legal methods and systems. He is currently on the Executive Committee of the Heads of University Law Schools.
  

• Robert Young, NYU New York — "Lawientalism"

  Robert Young, Dean of Arts and Humanities at NYU New York, is one of the early pioneers and most influential scholars in the rapidly growing field of Anglophone and postcolonial literatures; this interdisciplinary literary field involves research that also crosses over into areas of history, theory, philosophy, anthropology, and translation studies. Young has always been concerned in his work with writing and knowledge that falls outside the mainstream of contemporary thinking, particularly in the context of the history of colonialism.