Law Review: Phila. law schools are a U.S. wellspring

If, during the great boom in the legal economy of the last decade, law firms in Philadelphia have become huge export engines that send legal products far beyond their traditional base along the Eastern Seaboard, so, too, have the region's law schools.

Law-school faculties are not only in the business of preparing young lawyers for work on Wall Street or in county courthouses or in industry, they also feed a hungry market in Washington and beyond for expertise that spans a broad spectrum - including international trade, contract law, and the potential exposure of foreign governments to lawsuits by U.S. citizens.

One of those law-school faculty members is William Burke-White, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who will be leaving his post shortly for a two-year assignment at the State Department. There he will be advising Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on long-range policy questions involving Russia and international law as a member of the Office of Foreign Policy Planning, an internal think tank founded by seminal foreign-policy thinker George F. Kennan.

Burke-White, 32, will report to the head of the office, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Harvard Law School professor whom Burke-White met when he was a law student there. But it seems a safe bet that when Clinton, whose office will be only a few doors away, seeks long-range planning advice on Russia, Burke-White will be in the room.

At law schools around the country, international law in all its many permutations has become a hot - one might even say sexy - subject. Even now, huge deals are being done abroad, and lawyers over the last few years have been scrambling to get ever larger pieces of that business by opening offices in India, China, and other go-go markets, invoking all manner of international trade issues.

But the rules of engagement, not only for commercial relations but also on matters of security, are hammered out between governments.

No law school can hope to explain how this process really works without faculty members such as Burke-White who have been there and done it.

"I will certainly have a different understanding of international law and its practice for having been in government," Burke-White said.

In fact, government at all levels has turned to law schools in Philadelphia and beyond for experts to provide ideas and intellectual energy. The names of prominent law professors and other academics in the region regularly turn up on lists of potential nominees for prominent jobs.

The most notable recently was Temple Law School Dean JoAnne Epps, whose name has been tossed around as a potential nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. Temple Law School also has supplied government agencies locally and in Washington with faculty experts. Law professor Jan Ting had been an assistant commissioner with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington; professor Phoebe Haddon, an expert on constitutional law and torts, was with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority for a time.

Slaughter had been head of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School before being named to head up Clinton's foreign-policy planning office. Obama, himself a Harvard-trained lawyer, selected former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan to be U.S. solicitor general. She also has been prominently mentioned as a Souter replacement.

Burke-White, whose class on international law at Penn routinely is oversubscribed and is arguably one of the law school's most sought-after classes, brings long experience abroad to his new assignment.

As a teenager in 1990, he traveled with his mother, a college professor, to Russia and watched as the former Soviet Union dissolved. A fluent speaker of Russian, he served on a panel as an undergraduate with former Soviet leader and reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in San Francisco, a meeting that evolved into an invitation from Gorbachev for Burke-White to come to Moscow to work on conflict-resolution strategies.

Burke-White has advised the Republic of the Congo and other governments on establishment of international criminal tribunals to prosecute war crimes and other atrocities.

He is an expert witness for the government of Argentina in litigation stemming from that country's financial collapse.

And in 2000, he assisted in the trial, conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, of a Serbian warlord accused of running a rape camp during the Balkans war. In the camp, Muslim women were forced to become the warlord's sex slaves.

"It was a remarkable experience watching these women testify as to what was done to them, but also to watch the perpetrator testify that the women consented," Burke-White said.

The warlord was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Working in government can differ radically from practicing or teaching law, though, and Burke-White is bracing himself for the change. Issues will no longer be academic, or purely legal. There will be a political dimension.

"One of the things that I have loved about being a law professor and taking on a client and advocating positions and advising governments is that it is based on what I as an academic believe to be right," he said. "One of the challenges in transitioning to government service will be recognizing that there are other concerns of a political nature."

Maybe that, too, would be a good thing to explain to young law students.