Welcome to the Fall 2020 edition of Global ENews, a publication of the Office of International and Non-J.D. Programs of Fordham Law School.

This semester has truly been unlike any other, a reality shared by all our friends worldwide. While prioritizing the health and safety of our community, we are thrilled to have been able to hold a range of in-person classes this semester and hope to do the same in the spring semester. Our administration and instructors have worked hard to provide an outstanding learning experience.

Our degree programs continue to thrive. Our in-person degree programs are somewhat smaller than in the recent past but remain robust. We have a total of 115 LL.M. students, 38 in-person M.S.L. students, and 11 students in the S.J.D. program. The online M.S.L. program in compliance continues to grow and currently enrolls 112 students. Our students are incredibly smart, dedicated, resilient, delightful, and committed as ever to finding ways to build a strong community amongst themselves.

Among our wonderful new students are Venla Stang (Finland), a prosecutor with expertise in criminal prosecution and international judicial cooperation in cross-border crimes, recipient of the John D. Feerick scholarship; Dalma Kovacs (Hungary), an associate attorney with Bird & Bird who specializes in dispute resolution, recipient of the Michael M. Martin scholarship; and Muhammad Umar Ali, a former judicial law clerk at the Supreme Court of Pakistan who is with us under the auspices of a Fulbright scholarship. We also welcome three recipients of the prestigious Vivian Leitner Global South scholarship: Mambu Feika (Sierra Leone), director of Prison Watch Sierra Leone; Moses Nyanzi Kayima (Uganda), associate legal officer at the African Centre of International Criminal Justice (ACICJ); and Hijab Siddiqui (Pakistan), former research associate and communications lead at Research Society of International Law. Also among our new cohort are the first students in our LL.M. program in Real Estate Law.

We also are delighted to welcome three new candidates to our S.J.D. program: Prosper Batinge and John Mensah, who both hail from Ghana and whose work will be supervised by Professor Paolo Galizzi; and Mariarosa Cutillo, from Italy, whose work will by supervised by Professor Martin Flaherty. They follow in the footsteps of our other outstanding S.J.D. candidates and graduates. This past June, the University conferred doctoral degrees on Daniel Gomez Mazo (Colombia) and Muhammet Uzeyir Karabiyik (Turkey).

In other happy news, LL.M. student Ana Isabel Camara (Brazil) gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Julia, on September 1. We cannot wait to meet Julia and officially welcome her to the Fordham family!

It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention. We have taken this maxim to heart and see today’s challenges as exceptional opportunities. Empowered by these possibilities, we have focused our energies on meeting new realities and student expectations.

As a result, we have taken certain programs online. Our LL.M. in U.S. Law and our LL.M. in Compliance will be offered in a fully online format beginning in January in addition to our traditional in-person programs. Our Legal English Institute moved online this semester and will remain so for the spring semester. Our Pre-Law Institute was online this past summer and will stay online in summer 2021. We also are planning to hold our Summer Institute online next July.

We have developed some new programs as well. In July, we teamed up with Professors Nestor M. Davidson and Olivier Sylvain to host an online program on Current Issues in Privacy and Technology Law, with a special focus on privacy and technological issues we face in the COVID-19 era.

From February-May 2021, we will host an online program on Structural Issues in Law Firm Management in collaboration with the Brazilian law firm Mattos Filho. The program brings together in an online format leaders from top law firms and companies from around the world to discuss best practices for law firm management, especially during these disruptive times.

We hear a lot about social distancing. Social distancing? No way! We physically distance, but our community is as strong as ever!

We celebrated our May 2020 graduates and their families with a virtual diploma ceremony and an additional remote event for our LL.M. and M.S.L. graduates and their families and friends. We will also celebrate the accomplishments of students finishing their academic programs in December with a remote event, and we hope that our May 2021 diploma ceremony can return to an in-person event.

Earlier this November, we hosted a wonderful family day for our LL.M. students so that we could meet their family members, and they could meet their loved ones’ new home-away-from-home.

We have built an online professionalism program for current and prospective LL.M. students featuring Fordham Law alumni and friends offering advice on professional development. Recent speakers include the following:

We also offer special thanks to Judge Denny Chin, who spoke with our students about his experiences as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Professor Jerry H. Goldfeder for leading a conversation with our students about the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The compliance program also has been busy keeping our students connected through various remote programming, including a series of speakers:

We all share a common goal of defeating COVID-19 soon. We have missed seeing all of you in person and hope that things will normalize soon so that we can again welcome all of our alumni and friends back to campus. Until then, we hope you all stay safe and healthy!

Warm regards,
Toni Jaeger-Fine
Assistant Dean, International and Non-J.D. Programs