International Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting and Conference in Milan, Italy

The International Association of Law Schools held its 2010 Annual Meeting and associated conference – this year on Labor Law and Labor Market in the New World Economy – at the University of Milan on May 20-22. I attended as the New York Law School delegate, having been invited by my dean to attend because of the subject matter of the associated conference, as I teach Employment Law and Employment Discrimination Law.

This was a fascinating event to attend. Not only was it my first trip to Italy and to Milan, but it was really my first opportunity to attend a meeting of legal educators in which I would be in the distinct minority in terms of ethnicity and legal culture, so it was a grand learning opportunity. The language of the conference was English.

The conference began on Thursday afternoon, after an extended period of greetings from many and sundry local luminaries (including a representative of Fondazione Cariplo, which provided important funding support for the conference), with a panel discussion focused on "Labor and Global Economies," a broad topic that translated to the impact of globalization on working conditions in various countries and the ways in which labor and employment law have fallen short in protecting the interests of workers in various situations. The panelists were from India, Germany, and the U.S., and an Italian professor who chaired the local organizing committee moderated the program. After the panelists had spoken and responded to some questions from the audience, we broke into assigned small groups, and this is where I think the most interesting part of the conference resided – the small group breakout meetings. I was the only member of the small group from the United States. The others in my small group included law teachers from South Africa, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Jordan, China, and India. A few of our assigned group members had not yet arrived for the conference, and some would never arrive, due to visa complications among other things. We had a lively discussion comparing the legal frameworks in our countries as applied to migrant workers and the impact of outsourcing on our working classes.

After the breakout session, we had a break of a few hours before reassembling in front of the University for a brief walking tour to the site of our evening dinner, which was sponsored by the Fondazione Centro Nazionale di Prevenzione e Difesa Sociale - don’t ask me for a translation- which was held at the Societa del Giardino, a private club in a magnificent old building. The meal was sumptuous, and was punctuated before the dessert with an address from Tiziano Treu, an Italian Senator who had served as Minister of Labor in several governments and has occupied a prominent place in Italian labor policy, who delivered a pessimistic talk about the situation for workers in the current economic situation. 

On Friday, the morning panel was devoted to the topic of "Labor and Fundamental Human Rights: Is ‘Discrimination Law’ Doing the Job It Is Supposed to Do?" We had speakers from the International Labor Organization and from law schools in Argentina and South Africa, moderated by a British professor, followed by a breakout session. The focus was on the different employment discrimination law regimes around the world, and the difficulties of enforcement.

There is some question in my mind how one should evaluate the effectiveness of employment discrimination law. The price of admission to this conference, in addition to the registration fee, was to submit a short paper addressing one of the panel topics, and I had chosen this topic. In my paper, I suggested that Employment Discrimination law may serve many different purposes, and that at least in the U.S. it seemed to me that it served some of them very well and some of them quite poorly. I commented that if the purpose is to eradicate employment discrimination, then the discrimination laws in the U.S. are a failure, but if viewed from other angles they have achieved varying degrees of success, especially in terms of stimulating the development of governmental and corporate non-discrimination polices, and substantially reducing the amount of overt workplace discrimination. On the other hand, it is difficult to evaluate the results if one focuses on reported court decisions, which represent only the tip of the iceberg in a system that is designed to dismiss or settle the overwhelming majority of cases in administrative or arbitral proceedings that never get reported in the court statistics. I suggested, perhaps to be provocative, that employment discrimination law may be helping more people than we realize when we consider the number of cases that get settled short of litigation. All the papers submitted for this conference are available on the website of the International Association of Law Schools and were printed in the conference book, but - surprisingly to me - were not the subject of any direct discussion at the conference. Some of the others who submitted papers on this topic tended to judge the effectiveness of Employment Discrimination law by focusing particularly on the intractable wage gap between men and women in the workplace. I must concede that the statistical picture suggests that sex discrimination law has been unsuccessful in eliminating this gap, although some of the articles I’ve read elsewhere suggest that law could have only a limited impact here without significant social changes.

After a fine buffet lunch served in the impressive outdoor courtyard of the university (which is housed in an ancient hospital building that was turned to use as a university in the 1920s), we had a panel titled "Labor and Society: The Maintenance of Family Economies and the Marketplace," in which the topic, addressed by speakers from Canada, Germany and the U.S., focused on the degree to which employment law has facilitated the ability of women to participate fully in the workforce while also acting as mothers. So the focus was very much on the degree of flexibility or lack of flexibility in different employment law regimes, and the relative willingness of lawmakers in different jurisdictions to realize the necessity of accommodating the family needs of employees in order to facilitate equal workplace participation. This session was also followed by breakout groups. Although the personnel of the breakout groups were to be "fixed" for the duration of the conference, there was some shuffling around and also some late arrivals emerged, so by this afternoon session, our group had taken on a slightly different composition, which added a welcome variety to the discussion. There seemed to be widespread agreement that the costs of child-raising should be subsidized by the state to help make it possible for women to have fuller workplace participation, and that more encouragement through legal policy should be given to men to assume a more significant role in childrearing.

We were told that the evening would feature a reception hosted by the University, and the advance materials suggested this would be on the order of a stand-up cocktail party with sufficient appetizers for those who wished to make a meal. In the event, I guess a decision was made and/or funding located to make it a full dinner, as tables were provided in the university courtyard and the traditional four courses of an Italian dinner were served, similar to the prior evening: an appetizer course, a risotto course, a meat course, and a dessert table. There were some speeches from university faculty prior to the dessert course, which was dramatically interrupted when one of the panel speakers from the afternoon session fainted and hurt herself on the cobblestone flooring, and an ambulance had to be called. (She had revived quickly, but prudence dictated calling for medical assistance, although I’m informed that she eventually declined such assistance and left on her own steam.) This intervention cut short a speech by the incoming chair of the university’s labor law department, and after a brief interval the assembled guests attacked the dessert table. These dinners were an essential part of the conference because they facilitated the opportunity to get better acquainted with lawyers and law teachers from other countries. During the first three courses, I was sitting and chatting with law teachers from Nigeria and Canada, and conversing as well with an Italian lawyer who was present as the immediate past president of the alumni association of the University of Milan law department.

Saturday morning we turned to labor law teaching, with a panel titled "What You Teach and How You Teach It: Comparative Study of the Teaching of Labor and Employment Law." The panelists were delegates from China, Germany, and Australia, with the German delegate being presently engaged as a professor at an English law school, so we actually got a view of the topic from four national perspectives. In all of these countries, law is an undergraduate major rather than a graduate degree program as in the U.S. After graduation, these students will have further requirements of clerkship and practical education before they can seek admission to the bar, unlike the U.S. practice of a bar examination being administered shortly upon graduation with the law doctoral degree (JD) and no formal apprenticeship requirement. It seemed from the panel discussions that the focus of labor and employment law study in these countries is rather narrower than is common in U.S. law schools. Employment Discrimination, which is frequently a stand-alone course in the U.S., seems to be subsumed within a general labor law curriculum. The main curricular division seems to be between courses focused on industrial relations (i.e., the role of unions) and courses focused on individual rights, such as unfair dismissal law. Another significant difference is the degree to which labor law is constitutionalized in many other countries, whereas it is primarily statutory in the U.S. In any event, it was interesting to hear this discussion, although I was a bit critical about the omission of any representation of the Western Hemisphere from this panel. The conference organizers seem to have taken a conscious determination to avoid US domination of the conference - but I think there was little fear of that happening, as the number of delegates from the US was relatively small.

There were no breakout sessions following this panel. Rather, there was a refreshment break that stretched for more than half an hour as many animated informal conversations took place, and then reassembly for some plenary discussion of the teaching panel followed by a brief closing phase. Then there was a repeat of the buffet luncheon in the courtyard, after which the formal annual meeting of the Association took place. I was sorry that there was no breakout session after the teaching panel, as I thought it would have been very useful to get more perspectives from delegates from many different countries about the contents and methodologies of labor and employment law instruction. Limiting this part of the program to the three panelists unduly restricted the range of discussion, in my view.

The Annual Meeting of the IALS was primarily a business meeting, although the incoming president also provided for breakout sessions so small groups could do some brainstorming about future projects for the Association. The IALS is only five years old, and was formed out of a determination that there would be some value to establishing links among the legal educational community internationally in light of the impact of economic and political globalization on law. It is an organization still struggling to find its proper role on the world stage. So far the main accomplishments have been to sign up a significant number of law schools (188 at last count) and legal education associations as members, and to hold annual conferences in a variety of locations. But there is a feeling among the leadership that there needs to be more, especially as an incentive to get more law schools to join. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) was a principal instigator in getting this organization started and provides the administrative and clerical backup, but there is a regionally-balanced international board of directors that conducts its business through conference calls and emails, and a determination to make this a truly international body and to avoid the possibility of the US dominating the organization. Conferences have been conducted in English, as the most widely used common language of law practice these days, which makes some barriers to participation because although English is a common language of legal education in much of the world, there are areas where English speaking and reading ability is less widespread. The result is that there is under-representation especially from Latino countries, and out of whatever personal pride, French legal academics have proved resistant to participating in conferences where they could not deliver their remarks in French and have simultaneous translation - or so I was told this was the reason for the lack of French law schools participating. I also noted no participation from the Scandinavian countries, and only slight representation from Eastern Europe. Even the Italian law schools seemed largely absent, despite the location of this conference. But there were delegates from Turkey, Jordan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, a handful of South Americans (including the outgoing president of the IALS from Argentina), and many south and southeast Asian countries, for whom English was evidently not a big deterrent. Indeed, India, Malaysia and Indonesia seemed very well and eagerly represented.

The final part of the meeting was devoted to considering suggestions from the breakout groups about projects the IALS could undertake in the future that might attract more members and make the Association more valuable to its existing members. These were to be taken up at an executive board meeting on Sunday. Meanwhile, the Law School Admissions Council from the US is sponsoring a final reception tonight.

I thought it a very worthwhile conference to attend. I learned about a variety of approaches to labor and employment law issues in different countries, as well as the varied treatment of labor law in the legal educational systems, and made some interesting contacts with law professors from around the world. I hope to stay in contact with people with whom I had more extended discussions from Jordan, Nigeria, India, Canada, and Italy. And if the IALS embraces some of the suggestions discussed during the meeting today, there should be other interesting opportunities to be involved.

Next year’s annual meeting and conference will be held in Buenos Aires on April 14-16, 2011.

Comments

[Steve]

You would LOVE Buenos Aires!

[Art Leonard]

I know that. But I got to go to this conference because the subject matter was Labor and Employment Law. Next year's conference is on a different theme AND is being held while spring term classes are still in session. The theme is intended to appeal to law school deans, so I suspect my dean will be going himself for that one.