Workshop-NY2007-Meeting

NACLE BUSINESS MEETING 
NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 14, 2007 

NACLE’s New York City workshop concluded with a business meeting of members The following members attended the business meeting: Bruce Archibald (Dalhousie); Mary Anne Bobinski (UBC); Gabriel Cavazos (Monterrey Tec); Esteban de J. Lara (UP); David Gantz (Arizona); Fabien Gelinas (McGill); Francisco Ibarra (UNAM-IIJ); Susan Karamanian (GWU); Nicole La Violette (Ottawa); Tom Oldham (Houston); Joel Reidenberg (Fordham); Carlos Vilalta (CIDE); Claire Young (UBC); and Stephen Zamora (Houston). Also present were NACLE Coordinators Julian Mithani, Jeremy Binkley and Natalie Kurz. 

NACLE COORDINATORS 

Steve Zamora introduced NACLE’s Coordinators to the group. For the past two years, University of Houston law students have served as NACLE Coordinators, led by senior coordinator Julian Mithani. Coordinators Mithani and Binkley (who also serves as the NACLE webmaster) will be leaving their positions at the end of this fiscal year; Natalie Kurz, a second-year law student, has replaced Julian Mithani as NACLE Coordinator in charge of budget and programming; we are in the process of choosing a second Coordinator to replace Jeremy Binkley as NACLE webmaster and Coordinator. We will use 2 coordinators in FY 2008 rather than 3, for budgetary reasons. 

BUDGET 

Steve Zamora presented a report on NACLE’s budget. NACLE’s Fiscal Year (FY) runs from September 1 to August 31; Professor Zamora’s report covered FY 2007, from Sept. 1, 2006 to Aug. 31, 2007. The addition of four new members brings NACLE’s annual dues to 26,000 per year. NACLE expenditures exceeded this amount in FY 2007, totaling $39,543.65 but we had carried forward $2,732.90 from FY 2006. The extra funds carried forward were used for additional expenditures in the design and implementation of new software for the NACLE website. NACLE is expected to finish FY 2007 without any deficit, but also without any funds to carry forward to FY 2008. 

The projected income and expenditures for FY 2008 (the coming academic year) are as follows. We will be careful to live within our means. Since we will not be holding a full-fledged Spring workshop (see discussion below), we should be able to carry forward some income from FY 2008 into FY 2009, to help with the expenses of the Fall 2008 CD workshop (discussed below).

¹ See following section on future workshops. This amount will provide moderate travel grants for NACLE members. 
² See following section on future workshops. We expect that there will be advanced cost related to the October 2008 workshop. 

FUTURE WORKSHOPS 

We turned to the question of the NACLE annual workshop. Steve Zamora asked the group whether the current format, of a single, large Curriculum Development workshop, involving faculty with different areas of specialization, was still considered the best model. Alternatives could include smaller workshops in discrete subject areas. Steve Zamora also pointed out that it was difficult to find a time during the Spring semester when the single-meeting format would be convenient for faculty and students to attend – if held too early, students would not have time to produce papers for the paper competition; if held too late, the workshop conflicts with exams and commencement in member law schools. There was some discussion of the possibility of scheduling the NACLE workshops at the same time as the meetings of other organizations, like the ASIL annual meeting or the AALS annual meeting, but the sense of the group was that this would detract from the NACLE meeting, and we abandoned the idea. 

The general sense of the meeting was that we should continue to hold an annual, general CD workshop, but after some discussion, the group decided that we should convert the meeting to a Fall format – that is, the NACLE workshop would be held in October or early November each year, beginning Fall of 2008. We took note of what this would mean for the student paper competition – that papers written during the preceding academic year would be eligible for consideration. This would mean that, as a practical matter, the paper competition would likely involve students in their penultimate years of study, who would still be in school the Fall semester in which they would attend the workshop to present their papers. This might actually be beneficial for the student paper competition, giving our members time during the summer to judge papers, and giving us extra time to make travel arrangements for the student winners. 

Bruce Archibald of Dalhousie expressed the view that if we wait until October 2008 to hold the next workshop, it would be unfortunate to let an entire year pass without a NACLE meeting. There was general agreement with his point. Fortunately, Carlos Vilalta of CIDE stated that CIDE was planning to hold an international conference in April or May of 2008, in Mexico City, on legal education, and he felt that it would be appropriate that NACLE participate in such a meeting. There was general acceptance of this idea – we will have to determine how the meeting would work, but we would invite members to attend the Mexico City meeting, and would include some NACLE sessions in, or alongside, CIDE’s conference. The Mexico City meeting would not have a student paper competition, however – that would take place in the Fall of 2008. 

We agreed that NACLE will work with faculty at CIDE to see how NACLE can be involved in CIDE’s conference to the advantage both of NACLE and of CIDE. 

Since the 2007 workshop was held in the United States (New York City), and the 2006 workshop was held in Mexico (Monterrey), the expectation is that the Fall 2008 NACLE workshop will be held in Canada -- possibly in Ottawa, Montreal or Vancouver, since we have not held a NACLE workshop in these locations. 

STUDENT EXCHANGES 

There was general discussion of the need to promote more balance in student exchanges – a constant refrain of NACLE.

One way to increase student interest in NACLE exchanges would be to form “friends of NACLE” groups at each NACLE campus. The group would include former NACLE exchange students, faculty, student paper competition winners, etc. Steve Zamora suggested that our NACLE Coordinators work with representatives at each NACLE member to organize such groups, and to find ways to link the group. 

NACLE WEBSITE 

Jeremy Binkley, our NACLE Webmaster, gave a brief report on the NACLE website. There was general agreement that last year’s redesign of the website was a great improvement. Steve Zamora spoke of the difficulty of receiving the information from out members that is required to make the website useful – this includes information for incoming and outgoing NACLE exchange students, news of members, etc. 

We discussed the usefulness of enhancing the faculty page of the website – to list names and biographical information of professors at NACLE law schools who have an interest in NACLE. Our new webmaster will make this a priority in the coming year. 

There was general agreement that the NACLE website is a potentially important resource. However, to be useful, NACLE’s members must do a better job of supplying to our webmaster the information we need to make the site a useful tool for faculty and students. SO PLEASE HELP US IN THIS REGARD.