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Symposium Speaker Bios
Nada Abdelsater-Abusamra
Nada Abdelsater-Abusamra is an international Corporate and Finance legal advisor admitted to the courts of Beirut and New York. She is one of the pioneers in corporate governance in the Middle East with interest and concentration in corporate governance going back to 1998 when she was studying at Harvard Law School where she concentrated on corporate governance issues and research.
Ms. Abdelsater-Abusamra is the co-author of the first Lebanese Code of Corporate Governance issued in 2006 by the Lebanese Transparency Association. Also, in collaboration with Hawkamah, she drafted the Corporate Governance Code adopted by the QFMA for listed companies in Qatar. She has also participated in the drafting of the corporate governance guidelines issued by the Union of Arab Banks in 2007 and was part of the legal team that conducted and drafted the corporate governance assessment of the Lebanese banking system for the IFC in 2005.
She advises central banks, regulators, private and public financial institutions on all aspects of corporate governance and finance law related issues, including corporate governance in Islamic and conventional banks. Ms. Abdelsater-Abusamra handled a number of transactions including the development of corporate governance structures, legal tools and mechanisms to ensure compliance with corporate governance best practice. She is a lecturer on corporate law and corporate governance at the American University of Beirut and is a regular speaker on corporate governance in various national, regional and international venues.
She founded Abdelsater Abusamra Legal Practice established in Beirut in 2005. She also collaborates with the prestigious law firm Raphael & Associés with activities in the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Ms. Abdelsater-Abusamra is a founding member of the Lebanese Corporate Governance Taskforce where she co-chairs the Legal and Regulatory Committee. She is a founding member of the Corporate Governance Consortium advising public and private institutions on corporate governance reforms, assessments and action plans. She is a Board member of the Lebanese Transparency Association (the Lebanese Chapter of Transparency International) and a founder and board member of the Lebanese Institute for Excellence in Government.
Ms. Abdelsater-Abusamra holds an LL.M from Harvard Law School with emphasis on corporate law and international finance. She also holds a Lebanese and French law degree from the Université Saint Joseph in Beirut, a BSc from the American University of Beirut and has completed the coursework for an M.A degree in International Affairs at the Lebanese American University.
Adefolake Adeyeye
Adefolake Adeyeye is an adjunct lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests are in corporate social responsibility, corruption and multinational corporations. She holds a Bachelor of Laws from Buckingham University, a Master of Laws from Cambridge University and a PhD from the National University of Singapore. She is also an attorney at law admitted in New York State and a graduate of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, U.K.
Larry Cata Backer
Professor Backer is a Professor of Law at The Dickinson School of Law at Penn State. He concentrates his research and teaching in the fields of constitutional, corporate, and transnational law. The focus of his research is on issues of globalization. His most recent work touches on the regulation of multinational corporations, transnational and theocratic constitutionalism, the free movement of capital within European Union law, and the convergence of public and private law. Professor Backer teaches a variety of courses that reflect his research interests, including constitutional law, corporate law, European Union law, comparative corporate and constitutional law, and international business transactions. He broke new ground with the creation of an innovative course in transnational law and legal issues.
Professor Backer is a member of the American Law Institute and the European Corporate Governance Institute. He serves on the editorial board of Revista Seqüência (Brasil) and has served as editor of the Association of American Law School's Minority Groups Section Newsletter since 2003.
Professor Backer has authored a casebook on Comparative Corporate Law, and edited a collection of essays on legal harmonization. He has authored more than sixty-five articles, book chapters, and book reviews. He is currently working on a casebook Transnational Law and Legal Problems: An Introduction to the Field and a monograph, Corporate Governance, Financial Markets And Development: The Convergence Of Public And Private Law. In addition, he is currently researching materials on theocratic constitutionalism, on the regulation of multinational corporations, and on sovereign wealth funds.
Professor Backer joined the Penn State Dickinson Law faculty in 2000, after having served as professor of law and executive director of the Center for International and Comparative Law of the University of Tulsa College of Law. He has visited at the Tulane Law School (2007-2008) and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (1998). Professor Backer has lectured and taught on public and private law aspects of globalization in Argentina, Brazil, Ireland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain, Slovakia, Turkey, and Italy. At the law school he founded and sponsors the Latina/o Law Students Association.
Professor Backer was raised in Miami after arriving with his family from Cuba. He received his B.A. from Brandeis University, an M.P.P. from Harvard University and his J.D. from Columbia University. After law school and a clerkship with Judge Leonard I. Garth (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit) he was in private practice in Los Angeles, California.
Andrea Bjorklund
Andrea Bjorklund is Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. She teaches courses in international arbitration and litigation, international trade, international investment, international business associations, conflict of laws, and contracts. Professor Bjorklund is co-rapporteur of the International Law Association's Study Group on the Role of Soft-Law Instruments in International Investment Law. She has written extensively on investor-state arbitration issues, and has published chapters in many books, as well as pieces in several journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the Hastings Law Journal, the American Review of International Arbitration, and the Virginia Journal of International Law. She is also co-author of Investment Disputes Under NAFTA: An Annotated Guide to NAFTA Chapter 11.
Prior to entering the academy, Professor Bjorklund worked on the NAFTA arbitration team in the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Legal Adviser, and also worked for Commissioner Thelma J. Askey on the U.S. International Trade Commission and in private practice at Miller & Chevalier in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and her M.A. from New York University. A graduate of Yale Law School, she clerked for Judge Sam J. Ervin, III, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Douglas Branson
Douglas M. Branson is the W. Edward Sell Professor of Business Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. One of the top corporate law experts in the United States, Professor Branson is a prolific writer whose work has been described as the best "traditional" corporate scholarship currently being done. The most recent book on his impressive bibliography is the widely and favorably reviewed 1993 treatise, Corporate Governance (Michie & Co.)
Branson, a professor at Seattle University School of Law for more than 20 years, joined the Pittsburgh Law faculty in the fall of 1996. He has been a visiting professor or lecturer at several law schools, including: the University of Alabama, as Charles Tweedy Distinguished Visiting Professor; the University of Oregon; Cornell University; Arizona State University; and universities in New Zealand and England. He also holds a permanent faculty appointment at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in its Master of Laws program.
His reputation as one of the country's most productive and thoughtful business law scholars has earned Professor Branson an especially influential role in framing the highly prestigious American Law Institute's recommendations for corporate governance. In addition, he is considered the world's leading expert on the corporate law aspects of Alaska native corporations.
Natalie Bridgeman
Natalie Bridgeman is an attorney based in San Francisco, California. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Accountability Counsel. As one of fourteen 2009 Echoing Green Fellows recognized for her groundbreaking social entrepreneurship, Natalie has worked as a lawyer advocating for environmental and human rights since 2002, with a focus on accountability in international finance and development.
As a Consultant to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Ms. Bridgeman directed and implemented the 2008 Review of their accountability mechanism. She has also worked as a litigator at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she worked pro bono as part of the Cabello v. Fernández-Larios team that successfully sued Pinochet-era lieutenant Armando Fernández-Larios in U.S. federal court under the ATCA for crimes against humanity, torture and extrajudicial killing. The Cabello case was the first to render a jury verdict on a crimes against humanity claim in a U.S. court. Ms. Bridgeman has also served as a Consultant to the World Bank Inspection Panel and teaches as a guest lecturer in international law, international financial institution accountability, and use of U.S. courts to litigate human rights and environmental claims, at law schools and universities.
Ms. Bridgeman is a graduate of Cornell University with a degree in Government and a Concentration in International Relations. She was the recipient of numerous national awards, including the Udall National Environmental Policy Fellowship and the Michael Schwerner National Activist Award. She received her law degree from UCLA School of Law’s Program in Public Interest Law and Policy where she was Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs.
Charles Brower
Charles Brower is the Jessie D. Puckett, Jr., Lecturer and Croft Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Brower has taught and written about Human Rights, International Business Transactions, International Commercial Arbitration, the Law of Armed Conflict, and Public International Law for over a decade.
Among other places, his publications have appeared in the American Journal of International Law, Arbitration International, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Columbia’s Yearbook of International Investment Law and Policy, the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and the Virginia Journal of International Law. He has also contributed chapters to several books.
In addition to his academic work, Brower is an arbitrator who currently serves on the Commercial Panel of the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the AAA’s delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, and as Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration’s Academic Council. Brower also serves as co-editor-in-chief of World Arbitration & Mediation Review, and as co-chair of the ABILA-ASIL Joint Study Panel on Transparency in International Commercial Arbitration.
In previous years, Brower has received appointments to serve as Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University’s Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law, as Tillar House Fellow at the American Society of International Law (ASIL), and as Visiting Associate Professor and Scholar-in-Residence at American University. He has also served as Advocate for the Government of the Republic of Costa Rica in advisory proceedings before the International Court of Justice, as a member of the ASIL’s Executive Council, co-chair of the ASIL’s 97th Annual Meeting, and co-chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration’s 18th Annual Workshop.
Professor Brower received his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Vermont and his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he served on the Editorial Board of the Virginia Law Review. He enjoys membership in Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and the Order of the Coif.
Anupam Chander
Anupam Chander is Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. He is a leading scholar in the law of globalization and digitization. Professor Chander has written widely in international law, cyberlaw and corporate law. His recent works include: Globalization and Distrust, Yale Law Journal (2005); Homeward Bound, N.Y.U. Law Review (2005); The Romance of the Public Domain, California Law Review (2004); Minorities, Shareholder and Otherwise, Yale Law Journal (2003); The New, New Property, Texas Law Review (2003); Whose Republic?, University of Chicago Law Review (2002); and Diaspora Bonds, N.Y.U. Law Review (2001) (Ass'n of American Law Schools Scholarly Paper, Honorable Mention).
In Spring 2008, he was a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. During the 2008/2009 school year, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. In 2004, he was a Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, and in 2003, he was a Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School. He began teaching as an Associate Professor at Arizona State University before he joined the UC Davis faculty in 2000.
A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, Professor Chander clerked for Chief Judge Jon O. Newman of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit. He practiced law in New York and Hong Kong with the firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, representing foreign sovereigns in international financial transactions.
Tai-Heng Cheng
Tai-Heng Cheng is a visiting professor at Vanderbilt Law School during spring 2010. He is associate professor of law and associate director of the Center for International Law at New York Law School, having joined its faculty in 2006. He is an expert in international law and arbitration. His book, State Succession and Commercial Obligations, received acclaim in law reviews and has been relied on and cited as authoritative by U.S. federal courts. His next book, International Law as Commitment, is forthcoming in 2010 with Oxford University Press.
Professor Cheng has served as arbitrator and counsel in disputes under ICC, UNCITRAL, JAMS and CIETAC rules, as well as multi-jurisdiction proceedings in the United States and abroad. He is a member of the panels of neutrals of the AAA/ICDR, CPR and HKIAC. He has also advised the government of Kosovo, the Singapore Police Force and the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor. Professor Cheng has been a visiting faculty member at the City University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and Sarah Lawrence College.
He is an Honorary Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association. He is a member of the American Law Institute, the Institute for Transnational Arbitration Academic Council, and the New York City Bar Association International Commercial Disputes Resolution Committee. From 2008-2009, he served on the Awards Committee of the American Society of International Law.
Professor Cheng holds a Doctor of the Science of Law degree and a Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, where he was Howard M. Holtzman Fellow for International Law. He also holds a Master of Arts degree and a law degree with first class honors from Oxford University, where he was Oxford University Scholar.
Katherine Gallagher
Katherine Gallagher is a Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where she focuses on holding individuals, including US and foreign government officials, and corporations, including private military contractors, accountable for serious human rights violations. Among the cases she is working on are Arar v. Ashcroft, Matar v. Dichter, Saleh v. Titan and Estate of Atban v. Blackwater.
Prior to joining CCR, she worked at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 2001-2006. She has also worked as a legal advisor for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Kosovo, with the United Nations International Independent Investigating Commission in Beirut, Lebanon, and with the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown. During the negotiations to establish the International Criminal Court, she worked as a member of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice in the International Criminal Court, to ensure that gender-based violence and discrimination are adequately addressed.
Katherine received a joint M.A. in Journalism and Middle East Studies from New York University in 1995 and a J.D. from the City University of New York in 2000.
Donald Kochan
Donald Kochan is an Associate Professor of Law at Chapman University School of Law. Immediately before coming to Chapman, he was an Olin Research Fellow and Instructor in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law for the 2003-2004 academic year. During 2002-2003, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law where he taught courses in Property and Environmental Law; and, during the summer of 2007, he was a visiting Professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
Professor Kochan received his Juris Doctor from Cornell Law School (1998), where he was a John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics and managing editor of the Cornell International Law Journal. He also served as editor and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy symposium issues in 1997 and 1998. He received his B.A. from Western Michigan University (1995), with majors in political science and philosophy.
After graduating from law school, Professor Kochan was a law clerk to The Honorable Richard F. Suhrheinrich of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Following his clerkship, Professor Kochan was an associate with the firm of Crowell & Moring LLP in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in Natural Resources & Environmental Law. He has been an adjunct scholar for The Mackinac Center for Public Policy since 1995 and serves as a member of the board of governors of The Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
He has also served as a co-editor for the chapters on administrative law in the treatise The American Law of Mining.
Christiana Ochoa
Christiana Ochoa is Associate Professor of Law and Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University, Maurer School of Law. Before joining the faculty in 2003, Professor Ochoa was an associate in the Banking and Finance Group at the New York office of the global law firm, Clifford Chance, where she dedicated her efforts to cross-border capital markets and asset-backed finance transactions. Ochoa has also worked for a number of human rights and non-governmental organizations in Colombia, Brazil, and Nicaragua. She has lived for extended periods in Latin America and has significant academic and other work experience in that region.
Ochoa's scholarship focuses on global governance and human rights. Her work has been published in the Harvard International Law Journal, the Virginia Journal of International Law, the Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming 2008), and the Human Rights Quarterly, among others. Her research concentrates in two interconnected areas: the role of individuals in law formation and the inextricable links between global economic activity and human rights. The first of these concentrations explores the relationship between the evolving role of individuals in global governance and under international law and the doctrinal role of individuals in international law formation. Ochoa's more recent work in this area examines the individual's participation in law formation and in civil society as means to increasing the democratic legitimacy of international law and global governance mechanisms. Her work on global economic activity and human rights has included the development of what she terms the "Odious Finance Doctrine," as well as inquiries into the complex interconnection between the proliferation of finance tools and human rights.
Professor Ochoa received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Anita Ramasastry
Anita Ramasastry joined the faculty at the University of Washington School of Law in 1996. Her research interests include commercial law, banking and payments systems, law and development and comparative law, and her current research focuses on the accountability of economic actors in conflict and weak governance zones.
She has served as a staff attorney at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an associate attorney at the international law firm of White & Case in Budapest, Hungary, and assistant professor of law at the Central European University in Budapest, founded by financier George Soros. In 1998-99, she served as a special attorney and advisor to a special claims resolution tribunal in Zurich, Switzerland, established to resolve claims to World War II-era bank accounts. She was the symposium editor for the Harvard International Law Journal and has clerked for Justice Alan B. Handler of the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Professor Ramasastry has been a consultant and advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the U.S. Department of Commerce Commercial Law Development Program, the European Commission, Global Witness and the Open Society Institute. She has been an advisor to the International Commission of Jurists Expert Panel on Corporate Complicity and has participated in several expert consultations convened by the United Nations Secretary General's Special Representative on Business and Human Rights.
Zenichi Shishido
Zenichi Shishido is Faculty Fellow and Professor at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University. He was also a Professor of Law at Seiki University’s School of Law in. He has served as a Visiting Professor at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard Law School, and Columbia University School of Law. Professor Shishido specializes in Corporate Law, Corporate Governance, Commercial Transactions, International Transactions, and Law and Economics.
Professor Shishido has served as an Expert Member of the Committee on Legal Structure on Corporate Law with Japan’s Ministry of Justice, the Committee on Industrial Structure on Corporation Law at the Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Committee on Industrial Structure at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. He also served as a Delegate of Japan to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. Professor Shishido graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo. He also earned a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Tokyo.
Faith Stevelman
Faith Stevelman is a Professor Law and Director of the Center for Business Law & Policy at New York Law School. She is a well-known authority on corporate governance and securities law. Her teaching and scholarly interests range from the nuts and bolts of merger deals and doctrine to the conceptual underpinnings of corporate disclosure. In her advanced seminars, Professor Stevelman updates her students on the latest market and legal developments in financing and acquisition transactions, whenever possible collaborating with high level practicing lawyers to supplement the traditional curriculum. In 2003–2004 she was in residence at Georgetown University Law Center as the recipient of a prestigious research fellowship awarded by the Sloan Program on Business and Society.
Before joining the New York Law School faculty, Professor Stevelman spent four years as a transactional lawyer in Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson’s New York office. She received her B.A. and M.Phil from Yale, and her J.D. from New York University. Prior to law school, Professor Stevelman was a Ph.D. candidate at Yale studying early modern history—a program she credits with awakening her interest in the connection between economic, legal, and political systems and their impact on the broader culture.
Ursula Wynhoven
Ursula Wynhoven is the Head of Policy & Legal of the United Nations Global Compact Office. A member of the office’s senior management team, she also handles the office’s legal affairs and policy matters, and leads its work on human rights and labor. A lawyer by background, Ursula worked in private practice and government human rights agencies in Australia and the United States and for the OECD Secretariat on the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises before joining the office. Ursula has two Masters of Law degrees from Columbia Law School and Monash University. She is also an Adjunct Professor in Business and Human Rights at Fordham Law School.
David Yosifon
David Yosifon is an Assistant Professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law. He teaches courses in the areas of business law, legal ethics, and legal theory. Professor Yosifon’s scholarship is focused on the application of social psychology, and allied social sciences, to law and legal theory. His recent work advances this approach to legal theory through a critique of the role that conventional conceptions of human agency play in contemporary corporate governance law.
Professor Yosifon received his undergraduate degree in history and philosophy from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in 1995 (Summa Cum Laude). After Rutgers he attended graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where in 1997 he received a Masters Degree in American Social History. He received his J.D. from Harvard University in 2002 (Magna Cum Laude). Before joining the faculty at Santa Clara University, Yosifon served as a visiting assistant professor at Rutgers Law School-Camden, and as a visiting associate professor at New York Law School. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Patti B. Saris of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and as a litigation associate at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray, LLP.
