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Donahue Lecture Series 2016-2017

furlong-headshotJordan Furlong of Ottawa, Canada, is a nationally renowned legal analyst and futurist. He served as editor of three leading Canadian legal periodicals: The Lawyers Weekly National, and the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association Magazine. He writes Law21: Dispatches From a Legal Profession on the Brink, the only non-American blog to be included for six straight years in the ABA Journal’s list of the most read law blogs: The Blawg 100.

Furlong has addressed dozens of law firms, lawyer associations, state bars, law societies, courts, and law schools throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, forecasting the impact of the changing legal market and providing advice to both students and practitioners.

He is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, a Policy Advisory Board Member of Responsive Law, and an Advisory Board Member for the ABA’s Center for Innovation. Furlong also serves as Legal Strategist in Residence and Co-Chair of the Board of the Institute for Law Practice Technology & Innovation at Suffolk University Law School, where he has taught courses on the future of legal practice.

The Pivot Generation: Why the Old Lawyer Guild Is Dying and
How You’ll Help Create a New Legal Profession

Thursday, November 10, 2016
4:00 P.M.
Suffolk University Law School
120 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02108


fisk-headshotProfessor Catherine Fisk is the author of Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard University Press 2016), and the prize-winning Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The Journal of American History calls the latter book “remarkable… with a fresh perspective on the truly decentralized and diverse mechanisms that led to the corporate control of innovative activity we so often see today.”

Fisk is Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on workers at both the high and low end of the wage spectrum. She has written on union organizing among low-wage and immigrant workers as well as on labor issues in the entertainment industry, employee mobility in technology sectors, the rights of employees and unions to engage in political activity, and labor law reform. A past civil appellate attorney at the United States Department of Justice, Professor Fisk has briefed and argued numerous appeals pro bono and has served as a labor arbitrator.

 

Writing for Hire:  Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue
Thursday, February 23, 2017
4:00 P.M.
Suffolk University Law School
120 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02108


smith-headshotCatherine Smith is the Associate Dean of Institutional Diversity and Inclusiveness and Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. She is the recipient of the 2016 Clyde Ferguson Award, given by the American Association of Law Schools Minority Groups Section. The Ferguson Award recognizes an outstanding law teacher who has achieved excellence in the area of public service, teaching and scholarship.

Professor Smith teaches torts; employment discrimination; family law; and sexuality, gender and the law. She has been honored by students with the “Most Engaging Professor” and the “Most Outstanding Professor” awards.

Professor Smith’s scholarship is wide ranging, with articles on civil rights, critical race theory, implicit bias, the rights of children, and the drafting of the first openly-gay football player in the NFL (co-authored with Suffolk Professor Frank Cooper). She received two prestigious honors for her scholarship on the rights of children of gay and lesbian couples, and her co-authored amicus brief was cited by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark decision on same-sex marriage.

After graduating from the University of South Carolina School of Law, Professor Smith clerked for the late Chief Judge Henry A. Politz of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for U.S. Magistrate Judge William M. Catoe Jr. She then served as a legal fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Before joining the faculty at the University of Denver, Professor Smith was an assistant professor at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law from 2000 to 2004.

State Action Punishing Children as “Evidence of Discrimination
of an Unusual Character” Against Their Parents

Wednesday, April 5, 2017
4:00 P.M.
Suffolk University Law School
120 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02108