Public Lecture: The Relationship Between Public Courts and Private Arbitration: Complementary or Competitive? By Judge D. Brooks Smith and Professor Jack Coe

Lecture details

Thursday, April 3, 2014

4:30pm – 6:00pm

C303, PKU Shenzhen

D. Brooks Smith has been a federal judge for more than 25 years. He serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, having been appointed to that court in September of 2002. Prior to his elevation to the Third Circuit, Judge Smith was the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. He joined the District Court in November of 1988, and in his first years of service, supervised the opening of both a temporary court facility in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the permanent District Court quarters that are in use today. Judge Smith was the managing partner in the law firm of Jubelirer, Carothers, Krier, Halpern and Smith in Altoona, Pennsylvania in the early 1980s. He served as District Attorney of Blair County, Pennsylvania from 1983-84, and later became a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas of that County. Judge Smith is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College and Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law. He is an adjunct professor at Penn State Law where he teaches a course on class actions, and was named an Alumni Fellow in 2011. He has served as a trustee of both Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, and Mount Aloysius College. Mount Aloysius conferred an honorary doctorate upon Judge Smith in 2012.

A specialist in private international law, Professor Jack Coe’s training includes advanced studies in Europe. He received his LL.M. at Exeter, where he was a Rotary International Graduate Fellow, and holds the Diploma of the Hague Academy of International Law, and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He clerked for the Honorable Richard C. Allison at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, the Hague, and now consults with governments and multinational corporations in relation to commercial and direct investment disputes under the NAFTA and Bilateral Investment Treaties. Professor Coe, a regular speaker in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, has helped organize numerous conferences and programs related to international dispute resolution. He has taught in international programs for Notre Dame and University of San Diego Law Schools. He has authored numerous articles on arbitration, private international law, and related topics and authored the books Protecting Against the Expropriation Risk in Investing Abroad (co-authored with R.C. Allison) (1993), International Commercial Arbitration-American Principles and Practice in a Global Context (1997), and NAFTA Chapter 11 Reports (ed., with Brower and Dodge) (2006). Professor Coe is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an associate reporter for the Restatement (Third) on the Law of International Commercial Arbitration. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and is admitted to practice in California and Washington. He has been chair of the Disputes Division of the ABA International Law Section, and chairs the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration. Professor Coe has argued international arbitral claims under NAFTA, and has for several years been admitted to the panel of the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (AAA).