Courses designed and taught

Experience teaching law at the graduate level and training practitioners. Currently, serve as Executive Director of the Rule of Law for Development Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Academic affiliations have included Fordham University and Australian National University School of Law. Organized and delivered professional training seminars for hundreds of lawyers, judges, and regulators on behalf of international organizations. Subject matters include international law, regulation, governance, compliance, and social responsibility covering the global, the national and organizational levels.

 

International Development Architecture

This course analyzes the institutional frameworks and legal mechanisms by which international development assistance is distributed. Begins with consideration of donor policies, motivations for providing aid, and goals. Reviews the legal frameworks and administrative standards that apply to development assistance. Covers mandates and policies of main development institutions, particularly multilateral development banks, international organizations, and bilateral agencies. Examines the full range of financing mechanisms through which development assistance is provided.  Highlights the growing importance and approaches of new donors including emerging economies, private philanthropy, peer to peer financing, and impact investing. The final part of the course considers the means by which partner developing countries use aid giving particular attention to the role of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Operationalizing Treaties

This course probes the relationship between multilateral treaty implementation and economic, social, and institutional development at the domestic level.  Particular attention is devoted to treaties involving arms control, the environment, human rights, labor, and transnational crime. Provides an overview of the international law affecting multilateral treaties and the steps required for treaty standards to function at the national level. It next considers contemporary international legal principles and doctrine relating to the treaty obligations of developing countries and the modalities through which their adherence can be facilitated. Topics include socio-economic and political factors influencing domestic legal and institutional reform, international legal principles relating to treaty implementation, strategies, structures, and financing mechanisms for national implementation of treaty obligations, experience with international technical assistance to build the capacity of national actors to implement and manage treaty obligations, and mechanisms within treaty regimes that promote national compliance through monitoring and coercive measures, and the role of domestic constituencies in mobilizing to advocate national implementation and compliance with multilateral agreements states have already signed.  

History, Theory, and Practice of Rule of Law for Development

This course provides an overview of the main intellectual foundations supporting the view that law and development are linked. While this connection may appear obvious, the course seeks to show that the relationship may not be as straightforward as first impressions might lead one to believe. Indeed, proponents of the presumed relation between law and development must confront two important distinctions well known to social scientists: causation versus correlation. Evidence that societies, which have achieved high levels of development, typically have good legal systems is incontrovertible. What is less clear is how they got where they are and in what sequence. Put differently, do good laws and institutions generate good development outcomes or does development lead to good laws and institutions?  Topics include current theoretical conceptions of human development, the relevance of the colonial experience for law and governance reform, historical experience with state building and economic development, the developmental state and Keynesianism, critiques of the use of planning in development, the role of the Washington Consensus and its continued relevance, how international institutions influence national legal reform, and the role of the Sustainable Development Goals in shaping national legal and governance reform. 

Private Sector Regulation and Development

Course examines main theories and modalities of regulation. Reviews current approaches to regulatory impact analysis. Regulatory models reviewed include command and control, disclosure, naming and shaming, capacity building, and various models of self-regulation. Provides an overview of regulatory performance analysis. Examines practical cases to identify good regulatory practices. Gives particular attention to the challenges in creating effective regulatory institutions in developing countries.

Corporate Governance, Compliance, and Social Responsibility

Provides an overview of the central concepts of corporate governance and the ways in which statutory and regulatory norms interact with economic incentives to shape firms' governance practices. Examines a range of corporate governance tools including:

  • Corporate governance codes, including the OECD Principles on Corporate Governance

  • UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

  • Board and shareholder supervision

  • Administrative oversight

  • Mandatory disclosure rules particularly under securities laws

  • Private lawsuits, and

  • Internal and external auditing

Particular consideration is given to the growing role of compliance, ethics, and corporate social responsibility standards in influencing corporate governance practices.

Public and Private Sector Governance and Anti-Corruption

Reviews main political and economic theories of governance including agency theory, transaction cost economics, new institutional economics, and informational economics. Situates the topic in the context of the changing nature of organizations and the emergence of a more networked global society. Reviews main anti-corruption laws and enforcement modalities. Examines approaches to ensuring ethics and anti-corruption in the public sector including codes of conduct, financial disclosure systems, monitoring by internal audit bodies, administrative enforcement procedures, whistleblower and complaint mechanisms, and competitive and transparent procurement systems.  

Business Ethics

Begins with overview of main ethical theories. Considers challenge of reconciling individual moral decision making with organizational roles.  Topics include stakeholder theory, methods of stakeholder engagement, the influence of societal expectations and reputation, the role of legal and regulatory standards in shaping ethical decision making, self-regulation, whistleblowing, and the challenges of managing ethics in global enterprises. Issues include anti-corruption, employment discrimination, the environment, human rights, labor, and product liability.