William Burke-White
About
William Burke-White is a Professor of Law at Penn Law. An expert on international law and global governance, Burke-White served in the Obama Administration from 2009-2011 on Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff, providing the Secretary direct policy advice on multilateral diplomacy and international institutions. He was principal drafter of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), Secretary Clinton’s hallmark foreign policy and institutional reform effort. From 2014-2019 Burke-White has served as the Inaugural Director of Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s interdisciplinary international affairs institute. Building Perry World House from the ground up, Burke-White established a cutting-edge policy think tank embedded within Penn’s academic community and recruited staff, faculty, and visiting policy fellows from across the globe. Burke-White has written extensively in the fields of international law and institutions, with a focus on international criminal and international economic law. His work has addressed issues of post-conflict justice; the International Criminal Court; international human rights, and international arbitration. In 2008 he received the A. Leo Levin Award and in 2007 the Robert A. Gorman award for Excellence in Teaching.
Selected Publications
Burke-White, William. 2015. “Power Shifts in International Law: Structural Realignment and Substantive Pluralism.” Harvard International Law Journal 56(1): 1-79.
Burke-White, William. 2014. “Crimea and the International Legal Order,” 56 Survival 65 (2014).
Burke-White, William. 2011. “The Adoption of the Responsibility to Protect.” In The Responsibility to Protect the Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in our Time. edited by Jared Genser and Irwin Cotler. Oxford.
Burke-White, William and Andreas von Staden. 2010. “Private Litigation in a Public Law Sphere: The Standard of Review in Investor State Arbitration.” 35 Yale International Law Journal 283.
Burke-White, William. 2010. “Reframing Positive Complementarity: Reflections on the First Decade and Insights from the US Federal Criminal Justice System.” In The International Criminal Court and Complementarity: From Theory to Practice. Cambridge University Press.
David Gest
About
David Gest is a real estate attorney and Partner at Ballard Spahr. He has worked with city planners, architects, landscape architects, and environmental consultants on major real estate development projects. Gest has also worked with city agencies and community groups on zoning and historic preservation matters. Gest is a member of the American Planning Association and the American Bar Association. His focus areas include zoning and land use.
Muira McCammon
About
Muira McCammon is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and a master’s in law candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She studies how detention takes shape in the everyday lives of people whose job is to sustain it, focusing on U.S. military servicemembers and their families and communities at Guantánamo. She is particularly interested in how social media connects active-duty personnel with urban spaces during their deployment. With support from the Annenberg School of Communication’s Center for Media at Risk and the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, she is examining the legal and economic challenges Philadelphia journalists face in obtaining government documents and data through Right to Know requests.
Under the auspices of the Beinecke Scholarship, McCammon received an M.A. in Translation Studies/Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she wrote her thesis on the history of the Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library. Additionally, she holds a B.A. in French/Francophone Studies and a B.A. in Political Science/International Relations from Carleton College. She has previously held fellowships at the Sitka Fellows Program, the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab, and the Turkish Fulbright Commission. Before beginning her doctoral program, McCammon worked as a freelance investigative reporter and covered issues in defense and technology for VICE, Slate, and others.
Publications
McCammon, M. (2015). “A Short History of the Gitmo Undersea Cable No One Is Talking About.”Slate Magazine, October 2. https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/the-undersea-internet-cable-connecting-the-u-s-and-guantanamo-bay.html
McCammon, M. (2016). Stories, Scandals, and Censorship: Telling the Story of the Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library Facilities. The Massachusetts Review, 57(3), 463-487.
McCammon, M. (2018). “Federal Agencies Have Far Too Much Leeway to Delete Tweets.” Slate Magazine, April 17. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/can-federal-agencies-really-just-delete-tweets.html.
McCammon, M. with N. Bell. (2018). Competing Visions of the Global Order Colloquium Report, Perry World House. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QVBxBCRU096eE6YozvsYNnbdKx6UZQ4K/view
Melanie Franco Nussdorf
About
Melanie Franco Nussdorf has been a partner in the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson LLP in Washington, DC, since 1987. Her practice spans the entire range of employee benefits, focusing on fiduciary issues, including prohibited transaction exemption questions under ERISA, especially in connection with financial products and services. Current projects include the consideration of ESG factors in employer sponsored benefit plans, underfunded public and collectively bargained plans, and current issues in employer sponsored group health plan arrangements.
Lawrence Parks
About
Lawrence H. Parks is a co-founder of Forethought Advisors, an advocacy, lobbying and strategic corporate solutions firm specializing in financial services. He has authored parts of several groundbreaking banking legislative initiatives, including key provisions in the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010.
Prior to the formation of Forethought Advisors, Mr. Parks spent 21 years as Senior Vice President of Legislative and Regulatory Affairs at the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. He has also served as Senior Advisor and Director of Strategic Regional Growth and Finance for the Department of Commerce, and as Associate Legislative Counsel and Director at the Mortgage Bankers’ Association.
Mr. Parks has worked closely with Congress, presidential administrations, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as well as member institutions and national housing and community development advocates to shape regulatory policy in the housing finance and banking industries. He has a J.D. from Yale and graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Political Science from Temple University.
David Arthur Skeel
About
David Skeel is S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is the author of True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (InterVarsity, 2014); The New Financial Deal: Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and Its (Unintended) Consequences (Wiley, 2011); Icarus in the Boardroom (Oxford, 2005); Debt’s Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton, 2001); and numerous articles on bankruptcy, corporate law, financial regulation, Christianity and law, and other topics. Professor Skeel has also written commentaries for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Books & Culture, The Weekly Standard, and other publications. He has received the Harvey Levin award three times for outstanding teaching, as selected by a vote of the graduating class, the Robert A. Gorman award for excellence in upper level course teaching, and the University’s Lindback Award for distinguished teaching.
Selected Publications
Skeel, David A. “True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of our Complex World.” IVP Books, 2014.
Skeel, David A., with William Warren and Daniel J. Bussel. “Brankruptcy.” Foundation Press 9th ed., 2012
Skeel, David A. “The New Financial Deal: Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and its (Unintended) Consequences. Wiley, 2011