The Center holds symposia and lectures on topics as varied as international trade, banking, international taxation, pension reform, international corporate and securities law, intellectual property law, and international telecommunications. Our programs provide an important avenue for furthering intellectual discourse and are a key element of our students’ academic success. Papers from the events are often published in our law journals.

Symposium by the Trade Secrets Institute and the Dennis J. Block Center for International Business Law

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This conference will look at the CFPB in its first year and evaluate what it has accomplished so far, and future initiatives it may undertake.

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The symposium brings together scholars to discuss how the U.S. model has or has not influenced the development of other litigation systems.

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Professor Edward J. Janger, Professor Roberta S. Karmel; Co-Sponsored by The Dennis J. Block Center for International Business Law and the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

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The Business Law Association and the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law hosted a panel discussion, “Regulation to the Rescue, or Too Little, Too Late?” to address the new Dodd-Frank legislation, which was recently signed into law.  

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The symposium will bring together prominent scholars and experts in a range of subject matters and disciplines to address how improving NGOs as institutions relates to the legitimacy of their role in civil society. Speakers: Shamima Ahmed, Kenneth Anderson, Dana Brakman Reiser, Oonagh B. Breen, Steve Charnovitz, Mary Kay Gugerty, Garry W. Jenkins, Claire R. Kelly, Thomas A. Kelley, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, Mark Sidel, Sophie E. Smyth, Edward S. Cohen, and Adam Parachin

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The symposium will bring together prominent scholars and experts in a range of subject matters and disciplines to address how improving NGOs as institutions relates to the legitimacy of their role in civil society. Speakers: Claire R. Kelly '93, Steven R. Gursky '79, Frances P. Hadfield, Guillermo C. Jimenez, Barbara Kolsun, and Karen Ceil Lapidus '8

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In the modern payment system tremendous amounts of data flow between and among financial institutions, consumers, merchants and data processors.  Some of the data is shared to effectuate transactions.  Other data is shared for customer service and marketing purposes.  Data privacy law governs the question of what uses of this information are appropriate. Data security law governs the ways in which such data must be secured from inadvertent disclosure.

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Brooklyn Law School hosted a symposium today that brought together academics and lawyers practicing in the U.S. and the E.U. to talk about the characteristics of the financial crisis on both sides of the pond, and to exchange proposals for regulatory reform to minimize systemic risk in order to avert another crisis.

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In the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown and the ensuing financial crisis, the question being asked is why bankers, money managers, auditors, securities lawyers and credit rating agencies failed – individually and collectively – to conduct the sort of “due diligence” necessary to detect and prevent detrimental investment practices. On March 31, Brooklyn Law School sponsored the Abraham L. Pomerantz Lecture on “Due Diligence: Failures and Remedies,” which explored this question and suggested legal reforms to avert future crises.

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As bankruptcy filings increase in the wake of the current recession, the buying and selling of distressed debt presents opportunities for investors to profit. At Brooklyn Law School’s symposium, “Bankruptcy Claims Trading and Securities Regulation,” a group of distinguished academics, practitioners, and judges debated the value and risks of bankruptcy claims trading. Held on February 27, the symposium was co-sponsored by the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law and the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law. It was organized by Brooklyn Law School Professors Edward Janger and Michael Gerber.

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Professor Roderick Macdonald opened the recent Brooklyn Law School symposium, “Ruling the World: Generating International Legal Norms,” with a keynote address that described three metaphors – harmonization, transplantation and viruses. Macdonald, who is the F.R. Scott Professor of Constitutional and Public Law at McGill University, argued that absolute harmonization of legal norms is impossible, but temperance can achieve compromises that create effective convergence. “Soil” must surround transplanted norms for them to take root, he said. Viruses must have methods of autonomous reproduction, vectors of transmission, and a lack of immune systems or vaccines if they are to spread. Macdonald concluded that international norms generally represent one of these metaphors.

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In the light of dramatic change in the securities industry and the increasing privatization of the U.S. capital markets, this lecture examined the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on public and private companies; the growth of trading markets designed for securities that are not registered on securities exchanges, and the role of hedge funds in these transactions and systems, as unregulated financial participants within private markets.

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The securities markets are in the midst of unparalleled structural changes: electronic trading of securities is largely replacing the traditional floor-based trading system; the exchanges have been transformed from membership associations into publicly owned business corporations; and international mergers of stock exchanges are underway.

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In 1996, the Brooklyn Journal of International Law published a path-breaking symposium volume entitled “Bankruptcy in the Global Village.” The symposium was organized by the late Professor Barry Zaretsky at a time when efforts to regularize and harmonize international bankruptcy law and practice were in their relative infancy. The articles published in that symposium volume proved influential and helped shape international lawmaking efforts that were then under way. Since that time, the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvencies has been enacted in the United States (as Chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code) and the EU Regulation on Insolvency Proceedings has gone into force. Both of these measures seek to harmonize bankruptcy practice for cross-border cases. Other relevant UNCITRAL projects have fostered harmonization of national insolvency and secured transactions law and have created an international law governing receivables financing.

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