Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz | Equity Promoting Initiatives

In This Episode...

I speak with Dr. Lisa Benjamin, Associate Professor of Law at Lewis and Clark Law School, about the benefits of Electronic Vehicles. Dr. Benjamin takes an honest look at the benefits and burdens of driving an EV (BTW, the benefits far outweigh the burdens) and explores the many consequences of continuing our dependence on fossil fuels. You can read about her thesis in her article, EVs as EJ? published in Harvard Environmental Law Review.

About Our Guest...

Dr. Lisa Benjamin is an Associate Professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland Oregon. She completed her PhD at the University of Leicester in 2017, and received the Doctoral Honors Award in 2018. In 2018, Lisa was a Global Leaders Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, and was a visiting assistant professor at Penn State Law School, where she taught Business Associations and Energy Law. In 2019, she was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University. In 2021 she won the Huffman Award for outstanding faculty scholarship, in 2022 she won the Leo Levenson Award for excellence in teaching, and was also awarded the 2022-2023 Pace Haub Environmental Law Distinguished Junior Scholar Award.

Her research focuses on climate justice and climate risk, and how these issues intersect with energy law and administrative law. She has written a book and several articles and book chapters on non-state actors and climate risk, as well as energy and climate justice in developing countries, including small island developing states. She was the legal advisor to The Bahamas during the UNFCCC Paris Agreement negotiations.

Lisa is the Vice Chair of the UNFCCC Compliance Committee (Facilitative Branch), a director of Verde PDX (an environmental justice NGO), co-Chair of the Climate Accountability working group of the Climate Social Science Network, and a member of the Expert Peer Review Group in the Race to Zero campaign (a UN-backed global campaign to rally leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, investors for a healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery). She has been quoted in Bloomberg Law, The Financial Times, and made appearances on Velshi on MSNBC, and the BBC World Service.

In This Episode...

I speak with Professor Tracy Norton, Louisianna State University School of Law, and Dr. Susan Tanner, Brandeis Law School, about the AI literacy. This episode is particularly helpful to those engaged in legal research.

About Our Guests...

Tracy L. M. Norton is the Erick Vincent Anderson Professor of Professional Practice at Louisiana State University's Paul M. Hebert Law Center. Prof. Norton is an accomplished legal educator and scholar whose significant contributions to the field of legal communication and pedagogy include published works and influential presentations. Her notable publications include the co-edited "Law Teaching Strategies for a New Era: Beyond the Physical Classroom" (2021) with Tessa Dysart, offering insights into innovative teaching methodologies for legal education. Norton began developing digital formative assessment tools for legal education in 1998 with her pioneering work, the "Interactive Citation Workbook" (2000-2024 editions) and accompanying Lexis+ Interactive Citation Workstation. This tool is in use in approximately half of U.S. law schools, underscoring her commitment to advancing legal education through technology. Norton's contributions extend to the national and international stages with presentations at leading legal education conferences, where she has addressed pressing issues such as the application of artificial intelligence in law practice and legal education, the transition to online teaching, and the challenges and opportunities presented by generational shifts in the legal profession. Through her scholarly work and advocacy for effective teaching strategies over the past 27 years, Prof. Norton has left an indelible mark on the landscape of legal education, blending rigorous analysis with a forward-thinking approach to pedagogy and law practice not only at LSU Law but also at Touro University School of Law in New York, South Texas College of Law in Houston, and Texas Tech University School of Law in Lubbock. She currently researches and writes about using generative artificial intelligence within the bounds of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

Dr. Susan Tanner, Assistant Professor of Law at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. Professor Tanner teaches Lawyering Skills at Brandeis Law and was most recently an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice and taught first-year Legal Research and Writing at the Law Center at Louisiana State University Law School.

Tanner served as the Assistant Director of First-Year Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, where she oversaw and mentored new writing faculty and helped develop the curriculum for a new first-year course, Writing about Public Problems, a course on written advocacy and proposal writing.

She received her PhD in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, where she held the A.W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellowship in 2016 and the William S. Dietrich II Presidential Doctoral Fellowship in 2017. She holds a Master’s degree in Rhetoric and Composition from Arizona State University and a JD from Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where she was a Balfour Merit Scholar and graduated cum laude.

Her scholarship focuses on legal language and linguistic access to justice. Before entering academia, Professor Tanner worked in a variety of legal areas including complex litigation cases at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, education legislation for Students First, and taxpayer representation at a Low-Income Tax Clinic.

In This Episode...

Professor Michael Hunter Schwartz, Dean of McGeorge School of Law shares his ideas on promoting equity in the classroom. He explains initiatives that the administration and professors can take to make students feel comfortable in their learning experience—which translates into a better learning environment. Dean Schwartz offers specific advice to law students who don't feel seen. It is an important episode for law students, professors, administrators and lawyers.

About Our Guest...

Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz is the 10th Dean of the University of Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law. He started July 1, 2017.

Dean Schwartz is the author of seven books (three of which come with lengthy teacher’s manuals), seven law review papers, three book chapters, and eight shorter works addressing a wide variety of teaching, learning and curriculum design topics. Schwartz's books include What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard University Press 2013) and a contracts textbook, Contracts: A Context and Practice Casebook (3d ed. 2020), which was the first book in a textbook series he designed to modernize law school casebooks (which he now edits).

Dean Schwartz is a national leader in law school teaching and learning. Dean Schwartz has delivered more than 230 professional presentations about teaching and learning in law school. Dean Schwartz is a Consultant to the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning, and he is a member of the board of advisors for a national legal publisher and two peer-reviewed law reviews. In January 2024, National Jurist Magazine named Dean Schwartz the 9th Most Influential Person in Legal Education. He was also ranked on the list in 2014, 2015, and 2016. The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System selected Dean Schwartz's Contracts course as “an innovative course that reflects exemplary, innovative teaching.” In 2019, Schwartz was one of 30 CLEO Edge Award Honorees in the Education category, underscoring his transformative contributions to the field.

Dean Schwartz invites you to follow his blog on innovation in legal education, What Great Law Schools Do.

In This Episode...

Professor Stephanie McMahon explains why law schools should flip the traditional model of law school learning, suggesting that second-year students should engage in more “field work” such as externships and clinics, saving the third year for the kind of doctrinal courses that are necessary to pass the bar. It’s a compelling argument, and I am not a convert to her theory!

About Our Guest...

Professor Stephanie Hunter McMahon has taught courses in tax law and legal history at the University of Cincinnati College of Law since 2008, and while doing so has won two of the law school’s teaching awards, its faculty excellence award, and its award for scholarship. To date, much of her scholarship explores the relationship between taxation and the public’s perception of taxation with respect to families and the application of administrative law to tax. Her interest in the development of tax policy led her to write Principles of Tax Policy for West’s Concise Hornbook Series. In the last two years, she has begun scholarship focusing on the tax treatment of disadvantaged groups, both women seeking abortions in states that do not provide access to care and the discriminatory tax treatment of inmate labor.

Her writings have been published in peer-reviewed journals, The Tax Lawyer (ABA journal), Florida Tax Review, and the Virginia Tax Review, as well as student-reviewed journals, such as Northwestern Law Review, Washington Law Review, and Michigan State Law Review. Professor McMahon received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and PhD in American history from the University of Virginia. Following law school, Professor McMahon practiced in the New York offices of Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

In This Episode...

We conclude our series on lawyers working to prevent climate change. Professor Jason Czarnezki, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law, joins us to discuss his most recent article, Disclosure, Greenwashing & The Future of ESG Litigation in which he and co-author Barbara Ballan explain the laws and regulations that cover consumer and securities greenwashing litigation, how these forms of greenwashing litigation are evolving, and the synergistic relationships that does, and should, exist between these forms of litigation.

About Our Guest...

Professor Jason J. Czarnezki holds the Gilbert and Sarah Kerlin Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law Chair and is Associate Dean of Environmental Law Programs and Strategic Initiatives at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University.

Prior to joining the Pace Law faculty in 2013, Professor Czarnezki was formerly Professor of Law in the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School and director of the U.S.-China Partnership for Environmental Law. He has also held academic appointments at Marquette University Law School and DePaul University College of Law, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He also served as a J. William Fulbright Scholar at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Professor Czarnezki was formerly Honorary Research Associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute (UK), Visiting Fellow at Uppsala Universitet Faculty of Law (Sweden), and Fellow at the University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway. For 2020, Professor Czarnezki was named, by the Swedish National Research Council, the Olof Palme Visiting Professor at Stockholm University.

He has presented his work on natural resources law, environmentalism, food policy, sustainable public procurement, private environmental governance, and global climate policy at universities, public interest organizations, government institutions, and conferences throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Previously, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable D. Brock Hornby of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine and as a law clerk for the Bureau of Legal Services at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. His articles have been published in the law journals of Boston College, Boston University, Stanford University, University of Chicago, University of Colorado, University of Maryland, and University of Virginia. His books include "Everyday Environmentalism: Law, Nature and Individual Behavior" (2011) and "Food, Agriculture and Environmental Law" (2013). Professor Czarnezki received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago and his PhD in Environmental Law from Uppsala University in Sweden.

In This Episode...

I speak with Professors Michael Vanderburgh and Sarah Light about their book, Private Environmental Governance.

About Our Guests...

Sarah E. Light is the Mitchell J. Blutt and Margo Krody Blutt Presidential Professor and the Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at Wharton Business School. Professor Light’s research examines issues at the intersection of environmental law, corporate sustainability, and business innovation. Her articles have addressed the ways in which laws that structure corporations and the marketplace should be considered forms of environmental law; how private actions by business firms, such as the adoption of a private carbon fee, or lending and underwriting decisions by banks and insurance companies, can be forms of private environmental governance; and how to address concerns about greenwashing consistent with the First Amendment. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the UCLA Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, among others.

Professor Light serves as Faculty Co-Director of Wharton’s Climate Center. Professor Light has repeatedly been awarded Wharton Teaching Excellence Awards in both the undergraduate and MBA divisions.

Michael Vandenbergh is the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law Director, and the Climate Change Research Network Co-Director, Energy, Environment and Land Use Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. He is an award-winning teacher and scholar whose research focuses on working with interdisciplinary teams to explore environmental governance, environmental behavior and climate change. His research has developed the concept of private environmental governance and explored how private governance initiatives can address polarization and other barriers to climate change mitigation. His interdisciplinary work with Vanderbilt’s Climate Change Research Network focuses on the reduction of carbon emissions from the household sector, and he is one of the top 25 law professors in the US based on peer-reviewed literature citations. His book with physicist Jonathan Gilligan, Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was favorably reviewed in Science, Nature Climate Change and Legal Planet; won the 2018 Chancellor’s Award for Research; and was named by the Environmental Forum as one of the most important environmental policy books of the last 50 years. His article “Beyond Gridlock,” also co-authored with Gilligan, won the 2015 Morrison Prize for North America’s best sustainability article. Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty, Professor Vandenbergh was a partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. He served as chief of staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 1993 to 1995. He began his career as a law clerk for Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Vandenburgh has received teaching awards at Vanderbilt and at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

In This Episode...

Darryl Carbanaro, General Counsel at Generate Capital, PBC explains, ESG, which stands for Environmental, Social and Business Growth.  ESG aspects of a company’s activities are the three main evaluation standards utilized to measure a company’s societal and sustainability policies and practices. ESG criteria are applied most frequently by investment firms, law firms, and individuals who want to direct their money toward companies that are socially responsible.

About Our Guest...

Darryl Carbonaro is General Counsel at Generate Capital. Darryl began his career at White & Case in New York, then moved to Dechert, LLP in San Francisco. He served as assistant general counsel for six years at Bank of America, where he helped launch the bank’s renewable energy finance and energy efficacy finance group. Prior to joining Generate, Darryl was a managing director and deputy general counsel for a technology-enabled consumer finance company focused on solar energy, energy efficiency and home improvements. Darryl earned his JD from Pace Law School and a BS in Chemical Engineering from Drexel University.

In This Episode...

Professor Camila Bustos of Pace Law School discusses the important work Law Students for Climate Accountability. When we think about law students and climate change, we think about student advocacy work. The organization, Law Students for Climate Change, is a bit different. LS4CA harnesses the power of law students in their decision-making process when it comes to planning their careers. The group's mission is to inform and encourage law students to accept jobs with law firms that have demonstrated a commitment to represent firms that help the planet, not firms that represent fossil fuel companies. You can learn more about the mission here. And check out their 2023 Climate Change Score Card here.

About Our Guest...

Camila Bustos joined the Elisabeth Haub School of Law faculty in 2023. Prior to joining the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, Professor Bustos was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College and a Clinical Supervisor in human rights practice at the University Network for Human Rights. She also served as a term law clerk to Justice Steven D. Ecker of the Connecticut Supreme Court and as a consultant with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).

Professor Bustos is a graduate from Yale Law School, where she received the Francis Wayland Prize and was a Switzer Foundation Fellow and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. During law school, she worked at the Center for Climate Integrity, the Climate Litigation Network, and EarthRights International. Professor Bustos also co-founded Law Students for Climate Accountability, a national law student-led movement pushing the legal industry to phase out fossil fuel representation and support a just, livable future. She was also the co-chair of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project at Yale, and co-chair of the Women of Color Collective. Prior to law school, she worked as a human rights researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) in Colombia.

Professor Bustos’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, the ABA Human Rights Magazine, and the first legal casebook on Earth Law. Her research and scholarship focuses on human rights law, environmental law, international environmental law, and climate change law. Her forthcoming co-authored article, Climate Migration and Displacement: A Case Study of Puerto Rican Women in Connecticut, will be published in the Connecticut Law Review. She is a frequent presenter on climate displacement, human rights, climate law, climate ethics, environmental justice, and more. Currently, she serves on the Advisory Board of Law Students for Climate Accountability, and she is a Board Member of Breach Collective.

It is the season of giving, and what better topic to discuss than Nonprofit Law. Professor Jon Brown of the Elisabeth Haub School of Law is here to explain nonprofit law.  We discuss all things nonprofit including the murky line between for-profit and charitable companies.  There is a great discussion of ChatGPT in here too!

About Our Guest:

Professor Jonathan Brown  joined the Pace Law faculty in 2016. Professor Brown is the founder and director of the school’s Food and Farm Business Law Clinic, which launched in January 2017. The Food and Farm Business Law Clinic provides pro bono transactional legal services to small farm businesses, artisan food manufacturers, craft beverage entrepreneurs, and related nonprofit organizations. The Clinic’s legal services help clients expand access to local, healthy food in underserved communities, start or expand mission-driven business ventures, steward the preservation and transitioning of farmland for future generations of farmers, and implement innovative and sustainable production, processing, and distribution practices. 

Prior to joining the Pace faculty, Professor Brown was a Clinical Lecturer in Law and Eugene Ludwig/Robert M. Cover Fellow in Law at Yale Law School, where he co-taught the Community and Economic Development Clinic. There, he represented community-based organizations seeking to promote economic opportunity and mobility, including affordable housing developers, community development banks, farms and farmer’s markets, and neighborhood associations. Previously, Brown was a senior associate at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, in New York. There, he primarily represented lenders and borrowers in large corporate finance transactions, and also represented not-for-profit organizations on corporate matters.

Professor Brown serves on the board of the Northeastern Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), New York’s leading non‐profit organization providing programs and services to promote sustainable, local organic food and farming.

In this episode, Harold Kaplan, M.H.A., J.D., presents a primer on alternative dispute resolution and in particular a quick overview of how arbitration is an alternative dispute resolution process.

About Our Guest:

Harold Kaplan is a graduate of Pace University School of Law (J.D. 1983), and also Pace’s Lubin School of Business (B.B.A. 1972, with triple major of Law, Taxation and Economics), the University of Ottawa, Graduate School of Health Administration (M.H.A. 1974), and the Nova University Circuit Civil Dispute Resolution program (1998).

As a health law attorney, he represented medical practices and health care providers for over 30 years and since 1998 he has been an arbitrator and neutral dispute resolver for the American Arbitration Association’s health care and mergers and acquisitions panels.

He is also an arbitrator for the American Health Lawyers Association-Dispute Resolution Service and for the Better Business Bureau’s AutoLine lemon law cases and for its national class action arbitration cases.  He is a volunteer pro bono attorney for Pisgah Legal Services, Asheville, North Carolina.

Since 2016, he has limited his practice to arbitrating commercial disputes and all other facets of arbitration including serving as a case consultant for attorneys handling complex arbitrations. 

Mr. Kaplan was past chair of the Florida Bar’s Health Law Section and also its Board Certification Committee.  He is AV rated by Martindale-Hubbell® and listed in its register of Preeminent Lawyers (2002 - 2023).  He was voted a Florida Super Lawyer in 2007 through 2011 and he is a member of the American Bar Association's Dispute Resolution Section.

His website is www.kaplanarbitration.com

Today’s discussion will focus on a primer on alternative dispute resolution and in particular a quick overview of how arbitration is an alternative dispute resolution process.