Category: History

Call for Applications: Summer Ethics Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics

kparas Leave a comment

The Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) uses a unique historical lens to engage law students in an intensive course of study focused on contemporary legal ethics.  FASPE Fellows are granted an all-expenses paid 12-day trip to Germany and Poland to learn about the roles played by legal practitioners — lawyers and judges — in Nazi Germany, underscoring the reality that moral codes governing the legal profession can break down or be distorted with devastating consequences.  This historical perspective then becomes a launching point for discussions about ethical dilemmas facing lawyers in American today.  The program integrates historical, cultural, philosophical, and literary sources; survivor testimony; and on-site workshops in Berlin, Auschwitz, and Nuremberg.

FASPE Law was initially developed with the assistance of Professor Tony Kronman, former Dean of Yale Law School and other Yale Law School faculty members.  Since piloting the program in 2009, 43 Fellows have participated from law schools including Berkeley, Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Arizona and Yale. The summer 2013 program will include 12-15 new Fellows chosen through a national application process.  The lead instructor for the 2013 program will be Eric Muller, the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at UNC School of Law. The Fellowships include all costs associated with the 12-day program, including international and European travel, lodging, and food.

FASPE Law Fellows examine such topics as:

  • Ethical approaches to truth and disclosure in the adversarial process.
  • The ethical challenges of ambition in professional development.
  • Ethics and government lawyering.
  • The Nuremberg Trials and post-war justice, in historic and modern contexts.
  • Ethics in the day-to-day practice of law.

The Fellows are provided with reading materials prior to meeting in New York; and the academic component of the program is intensive and interactive.  Daily Seminars are led by faculty and local experts who engage the Fellows in legal issues associated with the locations visited.

The tentative program dates for FASPE Law are May 26 – June 6, 2013.

Completed applications must be received by January 11, 2013.  Candidates of all religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are encouraged to apply. To apply or to learn more about FASPE, please visit:  https://www.FASPE.info If you have any questions, please contact Thorin Tritter, Managing Director of FASPE, at ttritter@FASPE.info.

The Evolution of Public Health Law Research

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

By: Scott Burris, JD

Law has been used to protect and promote public health from the early days of European colonization of North America. Quarantine statutes and orders are reported from the mid-17th century. The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, where our office is based, inspired the federal government’s first public health statute, authorizing relocation of the capital in the event of an outbreak.

By the mid-19th century, sanitarians like Boston’s own Lemuel Shattuck were articulating the idea that a considerable proportion of death and illness was preventable, and arguing that it was moral, feasible, and economical for the state to do the preventing. Law was a primary tool for prevention, and throughout the 19th century, and into the early twentieth, the extent and limitations of federal, state and local public health authority was litigated, debated in legislatures and defined in voluminous treatises by scholars like Freund, Tiedeman and Tobey.

And then, it got quiet.

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