Participants
Natasha Affolder — Patrick Armstrong — Albert Baker
Edward Balleisen —John Braithwaite — David Duff — Cristie Ford
Judith Freedman — Carol Heimer — Dimity Kingsford Smith
Jane Lister — Mary Liston — Oren Perez — Benjamin Richardson
Larry Ritchie — Janis Sarra — Arthur Stinchcombe — Susan Sturm — Dennis Ventry
Natasha Affolder is the Director of the Centre for Global Environmental and Natural Resource Law at UBC’s Faculty of Law. She teaches Transnational Law, Sustainable Development Law, International Business Transactions and Land Use Planning. She joined the Faculty of Law in 2004 and is a Faculty Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Studies. Professor Affolder holds an LLB from the University of Alberta and a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) and doctorate from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to joining UBC, Professor Affolder practiced law in private practice in Boston and was a Research Associate in the area of large project negotiation at Harvard Business School. She has also worked in various capacities for international non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations including Oxfam and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Patrick Armstrong has been an advocate, negotiator, and participant in forestry, land use, and environmental processes over the past twenty years – from the Queen Charlotte Islands/Haida Gwaii to the Great Bear Rainforest. His strategic issues management skills and communications advice are valued by North American and European clients as is his ability to help them engage constructively with advocacy groups. Patrick has been involved in forest certification and procurement policies since 1992 and is a founding member of the Forest Stewardship Council. He is also familiar with the development and implementation of CSA, SFI, and PEFC standards. Patrick is also a published writer and documentary photographer.
Albert Baker, FCA, is the leader of Deloitte’s tax practice in Vancouver. He also leads Deloitte Canada’s international tax services practice and is a member of the Deloitte Canada tax leadership team. Mr Baker was previously based in the firm’s Montreal office.
Specializing in international tax, Albert has over 20 years of experience in structuring mergers and acquisitions, corporate financing, and corporate reorganizations.
He acts as lead tax adviser for a number of Canadian-based multinationals and foreign multinationals with Canadian operations. His industry experience includes telecommunications, transportation, manufacturing, e-commerce and mining.
Edward Balleisen is Associate Professor of History and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He specializes in the evolving “culture of American capitalism” – the institutions, values, and practices that both structure and limit commercial activity. He is the author of Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America and Scenes from a Corporate Makeover: Columbia/HCA and Heathcare Fraud, 1992-2001. His work has been published in numerous journals, including Business History Review, Australian Journal of Legal History, and Reviews in American History. In 2005, he was awarded the Howard D. Johnson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He earned a bachelor’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University and a doctoral degree in history from Yale University. He is currently working on a history of commercial fraud in the United States, and especially organizational fraud against consumers and investors, from the early nineteenth century to the present.
John Braithwaite is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Founder of RegNet (the Regulatory Institutions Network) at the Australian National University. He is embarking on a 20-year comparative project called Peacebuilding Compared, with Hilary Charlesworth, Valerie Braithwaite, and Kate Macfarlane. In the past he has worked on a variety of areas of business regulation and on the crime problem. His best known work is on the ideas of responsive regulation and restorative justice. John has been active in social movement politics around these and other ideas for 40 years in Australia and internationally. His most recent book is Regulatory Capitalism: How it works, ideas for making it work better (2008).
David Duff joined the UBC Faculty of Law in July 2009 after visiting at the Faculty during the 2008-09 academic year. From 1996 to 2008, Professor Duff taught tax law and policy at the University of Toronto. Prior to this, he was a tax associate at the Toronto office of Stikeman, Elliott. He was also employed as a researcher with the Ontario Fair Tax Commission from 1991 to 1993 and as a tax policy analyst with the Ontario Ministry of Finance from 1993 to 1994. Professor Duff has an LL.M. from Harvard and an LL.B. from the University of Toronto, master’s degrees in political theory from the University of Toronto and economics from York University, and a B.A. (Honours) from Queen’s University. He has been a visiting scholar at the law faculties at Auckland University, McGill University, Oxford University, and the University of Sydney, and is a Research Fellow of the Monash University Taxation Law and Policy Research Institute, an International Research Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, a member of the Tax Academy of the Americas, and a member of the Board of the Canadian Tax Foundation. He is also Director of the National Centre for Business Law at the UBC Faculty of Law.
Cristie Ford joined the UBC Faculty of Law in 2005. She conducts research on Canadian and comparative securities regulation, comparative administrative and public law, and regulatory theory and design. Among her professional activities, she is on the Board of Directors and Chair of the Research & Education Committee of the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice (CIAJ), and past Co-Director of UBC’s National Centre for Business Law (NCBL). Professor Ford joined UBC from Columbia Law School, where she pursued her graduate degrees and taught in a variety of capacities between 2000 and 2005. She was the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards during her time at Columbia, including a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and the title James Kent Scholar (for highest honours). Professor Ford also practised securities, regulatory, and administrative law for a number of years, at Guild Yule LLP in Vancouver and at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP in New York.
Judith Freedman is KPMG Professor of Taxation Law and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. She worked in the corporate tax department of Freshfields before joining the University of Surrey as a lecturer in law in 1980. She then moved to the London School of Economics (LSE) with a secondment to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies as Senior Research Fellow in Company and Commercial Law from 1989-92. Whilst at the LSE, she lectured and researched on tax and company law. At Oxford, her focus is taxation, particularly corporate and business taxation, but she has a continuing interest in related areas of corporate law, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, the interaction between law and accounting and small businesses. She participated in the establishment of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation and is now its Director of Legal Research and a member of its Steering Committee and Advisory Board.
Carol Heimer is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. She is co-editor of Regulation and Governance. Heimer has written on risk and insurance (Reactive Risk and Rational Action), organization theory (Organization Theory and Project Management), and the sociology of law and the sociology of medicine (For the Sake of the Children). She has just completed pieces on the regulation of research ethics (forthcoming in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science) and on the relation of law and morality (forthcoming in edited volume on the sociology of morality). She is currently working on a book from her NSF-funded comparative study of the role of law in medicine. In recent years, American medicine has been “legalized” as relatively informal regulation by professional peers has been supplanted by an increasingly rule-based system. This rule-based regulation has diffused widely, sometimes freely adopted by medical workers eager for the legitimacy conferred by American medical science, at other times imposed on foreign scientific colleagues by American funding agencies and research organizations. The Legal Transformation of Medicine is grounded in ethnographic work and interviews on the use of rules (broadly conceived) in HIV/AIDS clinics in the US, Uganda, South Africa, and Thailand.
Dimity Kingsford Smith is Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales. She teaches in the areas of corporations law and regulation of securities and financial products and teaches master of laws courses on corporate governance and on the regulation of online investing. She also supervises a number of postgraduate research students on a wide range of corporate and financial regulatory questions; at the moment these range from a thesis investigating compliance with ASX disclosure rules and selective disclosure through to the effectiveness of independent directors to whether trust law is still an effective contributor to regulation of occupational superannuation schemes. She is also very interested in corporations and securities regulation in developing economies, and has supervised a PhD in this area. She also supervises Master of Laws and Honours theses.
Jane Lister is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC. She has an MBA and PhD from the University of British Columbia and an honours BA in economics and environmental studies from Trinity College, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on corporate social responsibility, eco-labelling & certification, and forest governance. Jane’s professional background includes six years as an environmental management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in their Global Risk Management Solutions Group (1995-2001), and five years in the public sector as a policy analyst with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (1989-1993).
Mary Liston joined the UBC Faculty of Law in 2008. She previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Ethics at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis, “Honest Counsel: Institutional Dialogue and the Canadian Rule of Law,” constructed a theoretical model of a democratic rule of law from a close reading of Canadian jurisprudence in public law, with a particular focus on constitutional law and administrative law. At the core of this model is the concept of dialogue between courts and other state institutions, between different orders of government within the Canadian constitutional system, and between citizens and the state. In addition to her passion for democratic and legal theory, she also has an abiding interest in law and literature. Her teaching interests include contemporary political philosophy, theories of justice and the rule of law, legal pluralism, and Canadian law and politics.
Oren Perez is a member of the Faculty of Law at Bar Ilan University, Israel. He received his LLB (Magna Cum Laude) from Tel Aviv University in 1993, and his LLM and Ph.D from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1995 and 2001 respectively. His research focuses on environmental law & policy, regulation, globalization and the law, and legal theory.
Benjamin Richardson will be joining UBC Faculty of Law in January 2011. He has been with Osgoode Hall Law School since 2003, and previously held academic positions at the law faculties at the Universities of Manchester (UK) and Auckland (New Zealand). His scholarship and teaching covers environmental law, aboriginal law, international law and corporate social responsibility. In recent years, his main research focus has been socially responsible investment (SRI) law. Among various academic and professional bodies he works with, Professor Richardson is an elected member of the Governing Board of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law and is co-chair of the SRI Research Cluster of the Canadian Business Ethics Research Network.
Larry Ritchie is the Executive Vice President and Senior Policy Advisor of the Canadian Securities Transition Office (CSTO), the office established by the Government of Canada to lead the transition to a national securities regulator. He is on secondment from the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), where he has been Vice-Chair since 2007. At the OSC, Mr. Ritchie sat on and chaired hearing panels and participated in overseeing operations, setting priorities and sponsoring policy initiatives. He was also a member of the Commission’s Executive Management Committee and the Adjudicative Committee. Prior to joining the OSC, he was a litigation partner with Osler, Hoskin & Harcout LLP in Toronto, where he specialized in securities enforcement and general corporate, securities, and commercial litigation. In 1993, he was seconded from his law firm to serve as enforcement counsel at the OSC.
Janis Sarra is a professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia and was founding Director of the National Centre for Business Law. She holds the Honourable Lloyd Houlden Fellowship for 2007-2008. She also served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law from 2003 to 2007 and was Senator of the University from 2003 to 2008. In 2004, she was awarded title of Distinguished University Scholar for her scholarship in corporate and securities law. Dr. Sarra teaches corporate finance, commercial insolvency law, corporate law, securities law, contract law, and law and economics. She was one of two INSOL International Scholars in 2006-2007 and was awarded the UBC Alumni Research Award in 2007. She is additionarlly a Fellow of the Corporate Directors’ Duties Group, Taxation Law and Policy Research Institute, Monash University, Australia.
Arthur Stinchcombe is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology (emeritus means literally “off the merit system”) at Northwestern University. He has followed the motto: Find some variance; explain it. He has had some failures on both parts. Among the people regulated, their regulators and the norms enforced, that he has studied, are: adolescents and secondary school teacher and principals trying to get conformity to norms of school conduct; steel plant middle managers and those responsible for efficiency, and corresponding norms; craftsmen (and now a few craftswomen) and construction entrepreneurs eliciting various craftsmanship to fit varying construction projects; foreigners and American immigration officials normatively expected to be nasty to them; former officials of autocratic regimes and those managing their conversion into civilized citizens; slaves in varying systems of slavery within the 18th and 19th century Caribbean Islands; police supposed to find provably guilty criminals, with varying outcomes for different offences, and a few others.
Susan Sturm is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility at Columbia Law School, where her principal areas of teaching and research include institutional change, structural inequality in employment and higher education, employment discrimination, public law remedies, conflict resolution, and civil procedure. She is also a founding co-director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia, as well as a founding member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Diversity at Columbia University. She has developed a website with Lani Guinier, www.racetalks.org, on building multiracial learning communities. Additionally, in 2007 she received the Presidential Teaching Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia.
Dennis Ventry is Acting Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law. He is a graduate of UC Los Angeles (B.A., History), UC Santa Barbara (Ph.D., Economic and Legal History), and New York University School of Law (J.D.). He is the author of dozens of articles, book chapters, and an edited volume. His research interests include tax policy, tax theory and history, family taxation, legal ethics and professional standards, tax administration and compliance, distributive justice, and public finance. He is a frequent contributor to TAX NOTES, the leading publisher of tax policy and tax information, and he has provided commentary to popular media including USA TODAY and CNN.
