Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law will present the 2013 Carhart Symposium on Friday, April 12, at 11 a.m. in the Small Moot Court Room. Titled “Law and Religion in Conflict: Problems for Ethical Lawyering,” the program will feature a presentation by Jon Eddy, professor of law and director of the Asian Law Center at the University of Washington’s School of Law, detailing his work training lawyers in Afghanistan
This event is open to the public.
Since 2004, Eddy has headed a State Department-funded initiative to support legal education in Afghanistan. Growing from a small start, the program now engages faculties of law and political science and faculties of Islamic Law at 11 Afghan universities. The program is widely regarded as one of the most successful justice sector initiatives in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Eddy’s career has been equally divided between academia and private practice, and he has extensive experience in legal education and law reform in Africa, East and Southeast Asia, the Arabian Gulf and Afghanistan.
Eddy’s presentation will be followed by a group of panelists addressing issues of conscience, religious tradition and the requirements for the rule of law. This four-member panel will feature experts in the legal profession and international law reform.
John M. Breen is a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. At Loyola, he teaches or has taught contracts, professional responsibility, sales, negotiable instruments, jurisprudence and Catholic social thought. He has published numerous articles in law journals such as the University of Miami Law Review, the Connecticut Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. His scholarly writings have addressed a wide variety of topics, including commercial law, statutory interpretation, abortion, law and religion, professional responsibility, and legal education.
Zachary Calo is the Michael and Dianne Swygert research fellow and associate professor of law at Valparaiso University School of Law. At Valparaiso, he teaches secured transactions, property law, comparative law and theology, law in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, international religious freedom, and Islamic law and legal thought. His scholarly publications focus on topics such as human rights, theological jurisprudence and bioethical issues in health law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of Law and Religion and the Journal of Christian Legal Thought. He also is a member of the Organizing Committee of the American Association of Law Schools, Section on Law and Religion.
Asifa Quraishi-Landes is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, specializing in comparative Islamic and American constitutional law and theory. A 2009 Carnegie Scholar and 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, Quraishi-Landes is currently working on a book project titled “New Islamic Constitutionalism: Not Secular. Not Theocratic. Not Impossible.” Her latest publications include a chapter in the recently published “Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity” and “What if Sharia Weren’t the Enemy: Re-Thinking International Women’s Rights Activism and Islamic Law,” published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law. She has served as a public delegate on the United States Delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (2010), on the Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and as adviser to the Pew Force on Religion and Public Life.
David Pimentel is a visiting associate professor at Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law. Before commencing his academic career in 2007, Pimentel headed the Rule of Law efforts in South Sudan for the United Nations Mission in Sudan; he has led court reform projects in Bosnia and Romania as well. He spent four years as the chief of court management at the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Netherlands. He has researched and consulted on issues of judicial structure and legal pluralism in Nepal, South Sudan, Mozambique and Turkey. Pimentel spent the 2010-11 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Sarajevo, researching the impact of post-war judicial reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Fred L. Carhart Memorial Program in Legal Ethics was established at ONU’s College of Law in 2007 through an endowment from the estate of alumnus Dwight L. Carhart in memory of his father, Fred L. Carhart, a lifelong attorney in Marion, Ohio, until his death in 1948. The program brings eminent scholars, jurists and lawyers to Ohio Northern to actively engage in lectures, seminars and panel discussions for the benefit of students, the college and University communities, the public, and the bench and bar. The Carhart Program funds lectures and symposia in alternating years.
