University of Toronto Law School Faculty Blog

Do Interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada Make a Difference?

2009-11-02T17:22:49-05:00

Andrew Green and I have just posted a draft of a new paper to SSRN, Interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada: Accuracy, Affiliation, and Acceptance. This is a work in progress that has been prepared for this Friday's Symposium on Interventions by the Asper Centre here at the Faculty of Law. Here is the abstract to the draft paper (comments and suggestions are welcome):

Do interveners matter? Under Chief Justice McLachlin the Supreme Court of Canada has allowed an average of 176 interventions per calendar year and interveners have cumulatively made submissions in half of the cases heard by the Court. This level of activity suggests that interveners are doing something. But what is it that they are doing?

In the abstract, there are at least three functions that the practice of intervention might perform. First, hearing from interveners might provide objectively useful information to the Court (i.e., interveners might promote the “accuracy” of the Court’s decision-making). A second possibility is that the practice of intervention allows interveners to provide the “best argument” for certain partisan interests that judges might want to “affiliate” with. A third possibility is that interventions are allowed mainly (if not only) so that intervening parties feel they have had their voices heard by the Court and by the greater public, including Parliament, regardless of the effect on the outcome of the appeal (i.e., the Court might be promoting the “acceptability” of its decisions by allowing for an outlet for expression).

It is disconcerting that until now the effects of interventions on the decision-making of the Supreme Court of Canada have not been systematically explored through empirical analysis. A growing body of literature has examined the role of amicus curiae at the Supreme Court of the United States. To date, however, the related literature in Canada is slim and, to the extent it exists, does not deploy the empirical methods necessary to test independently for the influence of interveners on the decisions of individual judges. This work fills this gap in the existing literature and expands our collective understanding of the consequences of the practice of intervention at Canada’s highest court. We find evidence that interveners matter more than many observers might expect.

This paper builds on a number of other writing projects we have done over the last little while analyzing the decision-making of the justices of the Court, including:

Policy Preference Change and Appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada (2009) 47(1) Osgoode Hall Law Journal 1;
Charter Decisions in the McLachlin Era: Consensus and Ideology at the Supreme Court of Canada (2009) 47 Supreme Court Law Review (2d) 475; and
Should They All Just Get Along? Judicial Ideology, Collegiality, and Appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada (2008) 58 University of New Brunswick Law Journal 73.

Profs. Trebilcock and Iacobucci - "Patent protection, the new mother of invention"

2009-09-30T11:23:36-04:00

This commentary was first published on the Globe and Mail website on September 22, 2009.

After years of effort, a Toronto startup company called i4i invented an important piece of technology to dramatically enhance software programs, such as Microsoft Word. Recognizing its potential, i4i obtained a U.S. patent to protect, and hopefully prosper from, the invention. The company also began marketing the technology as a separate product that worked with Word. A Texas court ruled last month that in 2003, Microsoft began to bundle i4i's patented technology in its dominant software without i4i's knowledge or consent. The smaller company was successful in establishing willful patent infringement, winning damages for the past and an injunction to protect i4i in the future. Microsoft strongly objects to these remedies, arguing at trial that i4i is analogous to a banker seeking a bailout. This analogy is entirely inapposite, and the remedy the court awarded is entirely appropriate in light of its finding of infringement.

Patents are essential to the modern system of innovation. Once produced, information can be transmitted at zero cost. In the absence of patent protection, would-be inventors become vulnerable to competition that would drive the value of their discovery to zero, leaving them with no compensation for the costs of producing that information in the first place. Patent protection allows inventors the benefit of limited competition for a limited time period, giving them an incentive to invest without concern about their innovation's appropriation by others.

The trial judge found that Microsoft used i4i's technology in Word without i4i's consent. This is a matter of serious social concern for two reasons. First, infringement undermines the socially desirable incentives provided by the patent system. Second, Microsoft's decision to bundle i4i's technology with Word tends to lessen competition: Once Microsoft includes its technology in its dominant word-processing package, i4i loses its market. The i4i technology could have provided a rival software package an edge that might have enhanced market competition. That edge was dulled enormously when Microsoft simply appropriated the technology and included it in Word.

Microsoft objects that the injunction ordered by the trial judge goes too far. (It has been put on hold until after the appeal, which is to begin Wednesday.) But injunctions are almost always ordered to prevent continuing infringement, and for good reason. To simply order money damages for future infringement would be to force i4i to license out its technology at a court-imposed price.

Just as there are good reasons not to compel citizens to sell or rent out their homes at prices set by judges, there are very good reasons in general to avoid compulsory licensing of intellectual property. Court determinations of the value of intellectual property are necessarily somewhat conjectural, yet damages awards require courts to act, in effect, as price regulators. By contrast, injunctions do not prevent a licensing deal from being done, but rather cede to the owner of the property the authority to set a price. Just as giving homeowners the right to decide whether to sell or rent out their houses does not destroy the housing market, in terrorem arguments about the death of Word under this injunction are without merit.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has vociferously argued that despite the trial judge's careful vetting of the evidence, i4i did not establish at trial a firm basis for its damages claim for past infringement. This claim about the speculative nature of past damages sits uncomfortably with Microsoft's opposition to injunctions. Given the complexity of measuring supply and demand for a unique product, it must be true that there is some empirical uncertainty about the precise level of past damages. But if patents are to have value, this uncertainty is unavoidable: A damages award is the only available remedy for infringement that has already taken place. Injunctions going forward, in contrast, allow courts to remove themselves from the price-setting process. Microsoft appears to want to avoid both damages as too speculative and injunctions as going too far.

Protecting i4i's patent protects incentives to invent and the competitive process. In this case, the trial judge wisely offered such protection, while recognizing the court's own institutional limitations, by ordering damages for past infringement and injunctions going forward. While the decision was not a good one for Microsoft, it was clearly in the best interests of society.

Prof. Anita Anand - "Why macro is prudent"

2009-09-24T17:05:11-04:00

This commentary was first published in the Financial Post on September 23, 2009.

The G20 leaders meet today in Pittsburgh. While macroprudential regulation is likely to be on the agenda, countries continue to wrestle with how, if at all, this concept fits within existing legal frameworks and indeed whether new regulators or committees will be created in each country. But, taking a step back, what does "macroprudential regulation" mean? Should Canada proceed down this road? If so, how?

Macroprudential regulation focuses on the financial system as a whole, seeking to minimize system-wide distress in order to avoid reductions in aggregate output (GDP). This is unlike microprudential regulation which seeks to minimize distress in individual institutions in order to protect depositors. Macroprudential regulation focuses on common exposures across financial systems and institutions rather than the entity-specific focus of microprudential regulation.

Underlying the concept of macroprudential regulation is the idea that rational behaviour on the part of individual institutions may lead to unstable aggregate outcomes. Those charged with dispensing macroprudential regulation will be obliged continuously to examine the financial system as a whole (including financial markets, financial instruments, and financial infrastructure as well as individual players, such as institutional and retail investors, depositors etc.). By contrast, those committed to microprudential regulation may not see such surveillance as important as they seek to ensure that institutions are liquid and well-capitalized (for example). They may not consider that if all financial institutions, acting in their rational self-interest, simultaneously adopted tighter lending standards, the system as a whole may become insufficiently liquid, with lending grinding to a halt.

To some extent Canada has macroprudential regulation in place already. In its preamble, the Bank of Canada Act provides the bank with the mandate “generally [to] promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.” The bank is tasked with regulating credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation and controlling national monetary policy. It has the authority to act as a liquidity provider of last resort in our financial system and has responsibility for the oversight of clearing and settlement systems for the purpose of controlling systemic risk.

But macroprudential regulation in the G20 context means more than this. It would entail an obligation to assess potential vulnerabilities in the financial system and to issue early warnings that alert financial sector stakeholders to the buildup of systemic risk. It may involve making recommendations to various regulatory bodies and other stakeholders about prevention of activities that cause systemic risk. It may include sharing information about Canada’s financial system with regulatory agencies nationally and internationally.

Some argue that the Canadian financial system exhibited resilience through the credit crisis and that Canadian banks are risk averse in any case. They contend, therefore, that the case for macroprudential regulation in Canada has not been made. However, Canada had its own crisis manifested in asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP). The crisis revealed an “asset-liability mismatch” (as Chant explains) where investors lost confidence in the values of the longer-term assets backing the short-term commercial paper. It was difficult for them to determine the quality of the collateral backing their claims. ABCP implicated numerous aspects of our financial system, including securities, mortgage markets, and securitizations. Given that existing regulators generally believed that ABCP fell outside of their respective mandates, ABCP indicates why we need a macroprudential regulator (and indeed why existing regulators need to be involved in the process of institutionalizing this regulation).

Viewing ABCP as a wake-up call, it seems “prudent” to endorse the G20 call for macroprudential regulation. Broadly speaking, two options exist. The first, to use existing agencies as macroprudential regulators, appears to be the option favoured by Nicholas Le Pan in a recent report. Le Pan argues that “macroprudential regulation is ill-defined and has the potential to conflict with both the regulation and supervision of individual institutions.” He argues against assigning responsibility for the stability of the financial system to a single agency because “what matters more are processes to promote the realistic consideration of risk …to resolve tradeoffs among different policies, and to strengthen the will to act.”

On this model, the regulatory structure changes only slightly to accommodate macroprudential regulatory concerns. Le Pan cites OSFI’s mandate which includes “monitoring and evaluating system-wide or sectoral events or issues that may have a negative impact on the financial condition of financial institutions.” The implication is that no new regulatory authority is needed, and to the extent that Canada is “going macroprudential,” OSFI is the institution for the task. However, it seems that OSFI’s mandate to evaluate system-wide conditions relates to microprudential purposes (i.e. assessing the impact on the depositors, policyholders and creditors of financial institutions) and when read in the context of the OSFI Act as a whole, this interpretation is persuasive.

But does this mean that OSFI couldn’t engage in macroprudential regulation on a prospective basis? While macroprudential regulation relates to the functioning of financial institutions, it also involves markets and institutions outside OSFI’s purview. For example, both derivatives trading and mortgage markets were central to the securitizations at the heart of ABCP. But OSFI’s current mandate doesn’t extend to securities markets and doesn’t cover many issues that arise in mortgage transactions. In short, OSFI’s ability to engage in macroprudential oversight is limited.

Another option is to create a separate committee with a specific mandate to focus on the system as a whole and to ensure that information sharing occurs among existing regulators. This body could be comprised of representatives from the relevant institutions: the federal Department of Finance, the Canadian Securities Commission (to be formed), OSFI, the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada and the Bank of Canada. The committee would be charged with assessing systemic risks on a regular basis and discussing measures for mitigating those risks. The relevant regulators would bear responsibility for implementation where policies fall within their respective domains and could be accountable to this committee.

Some may argue that Canada has too many regulators, and adding an additional body — even a committee of this sort — would detract from the focus on their individual mandates. However, Canada’s multi-faceted institutional landscape is the very reason that Canada needs a separate body with a specific mandate to oversee its complex financial markets. Given their individual responsibilities over separate aspects of the financial system, none of these bodies can realistically be charged with monitoring the entire system.

There are many issues to be resolved in moving down the path toward macroprudential regulation: How do the stakeholders involved develop shared understandings about what “macroprudential regulation” means? What structure will be put in place to ensure that our markets have macroprudential oversight? To ensure accountability, will the body have legislative authority? As we work towards resolving these and other issues, Canadians would do well to heed the call for macroprudential regulation, responding positively, decisively and collectively.

Discussion of Prof. Ayelet Shachar's new book

2009-08-17T11:03:41-04:00

As noted in an earlier post, Prof. Ayelet Shachar recently published her latest book, The Birthright Lottery. It has received a considerable amount of attention.

A story on the front page of the "Insight" section of the Saturday Toronto Star ("Born lucky? Then pay for it," May 2, 2009) discussed Prof. Shachar's book and proposals in detail, and concluded that "Shachar has raised the bar on the discussion of equality." Read the full article on the Toronto Star website.

It was also the subject of a feature review by Andrew Coyne in the July/August 2009 issue of the Literary Review of Canada (LRC).

Prof. Shachar's work has also been profiled in the Spring 2009 issue of Edge, the magazine about research at the University of Toronto. Read the Edge profile (PDF).

Prof. Shachar and The Birthright Lottery are also profiled in the Summer 2009 issue of the Faculty of Law magazine Nexus. Read the Nexus profile (PDF).

Copyright Collectives: Good Solution But for Which Problem?

2009-08-14T11:06:38-04:00

With the Public Copyright Consultations moving full steam ahead, various stake-holders raise proposals for expanding the scope of collective administration of copyright. This trend is not new. Over the past two decades or so, collective administration of copyright has been touted as a solution to many of the ills of the copyright system and to many of the legal challenges brought about by the encounter between copyrights and the digital realm. It has been viewed as the magic bullet that bridges the unfortunate trade-off between incentive and access; a mechanism that allows both rewarding creators and unfettered access to works. And indeed, while not at all a new phenomenon - music performing rights have been administered collectively in many countries for most of the 20th century - collective administration has recently proliferated across many other areas of copyright, often with enthusiasm.

I have recently completed a paper that offers a less enthusiastic account of this trend. The paper examines several types of collective administration and argues that with rare exceptions, the various justifications for collective administration are too weak to justify departure from the competitive paradigm that underlies market economies. It suggests that in most cases collusion and rent-seeking mainly drive the formation of copyright collectives, and suspects that only rarely such rent-seeking may be justified as a matter of policy, either as a way to improve the incentives to create socially valuable works or on distributional grounds.

I presented an earlier draft of the paper at the NYU Engelberg Center's 2007 conference at La Pietra, Florence, and the revised version will appear as a book chapter in a forthcoming book: Working Within the Boundaries of Intellectual Property Law (Harry First, Rochelle Dreyfuss, and Diane Zimmerman, eds., Oxford University Press). The paper can be freely downloaded from here.

Prof. Ed Morgan: A Terrorist on the Faculty?

2009-08-10T10:10:56-04:00

Cross-posted from www.NewMajority.com (first published July 31, 2009)

The Middle East dispute may seem interminable, but its shadow conflict – the one being waged on university campuses – appears every bit as complex and insoluble.

The latest round in Canada involves Hassan Diab, an Ottawa-based lecturer who for a number of years has had a part time appointment teaching Introduction to Sociology at Carleton University’s summer program. French authorities have asked for his extradition from Canada, accusing him of being the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist that blew up a Paris synagogue in 1980. Four people died in the bombing on Rue Copernic, and the incident signaled a wave of attacks against Jewish targets that brought the ongoing Israeli-Arab fight home to European Jews in a startlingly new way.

In November 2007, French authorities, acting on information supplied by German intelligence and gleaned from the files of the old East German Stasi, put out a warrant for the arrest of a Lebanese-born PFLP operative named Hassan Diab. In October 2008, the fugitive was identified as the Ottawa academic and he has been fighting against extradition in the Canadian courts ever since.

Dr. Diab’s defense is, quite simply, that Hassan Diab is a common Lebanese name and that they’ve got the wrong man. French police have supplied some dated witness statements and, possibly some supporting forensic evidence, but as of now it is not clear how the case will come out. The fact that the primary information comes from East German secret police files – not a favored source for most western courts – lends an element of uncertainty to the entire legal proceeding.

Meanwhile, Carleton University announced that Diab would be teaching Soc. 101 this summer. He has offered the course before, the university argues, and there has never been an incident or complaint. The hiring of Diab for the summer course, in turn, prompted a predictable outcry from B’nai Brith Canada, who accused the university administration of poisoning young minds with the teachings of a terrorist. The university then relented, replacing Diab with a full time faculty member.

What a university should do with an accused terrorist on its staff is not an easy question.

Diab’s defenders, of course, point out that the professor is innocent until proven guilty and should be treated as such by his employer. Jewish student websites, on the other hand, have warned prospective enrollees away from yet one more venture into the landmine infested area of anti-Israel academia.

The National Post, Canada’s most conservative newspaper, has reported that there is no indication that Diab has been a political activist since starting his Canadian teaching career, or that he has been particularly engaged with the Palestinian cause. Indeed, in one of its funnier observations, a Post editorial points out that this might make Diab the only sociology teacher on a Canadian campus not to be obsessed with the Palestinians.

All of this comes during summer session, the one season in which Canadian university life usually takes a break from the Middle East campus battles. But with campuses now in a permanent state of occupation and intifada, even the summer hudna is now at an end.

Prof. Ed Morgan: "An insidious cultural campaign"

2009-07-21T15:51:38-04:00

This commentary by Prof. Ed Morgan was first published in the National Post on July 2, 2009.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are being exhibited this week at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), have survived time, weather, sand--and now the political storm caused by protests at their being toured by the Israel Museum, which houses the scrolls in Jerusalem.

Opponents of the exhibit include the Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Canadian solidarity groups supporting the Palestinian cause. They accuse the Israel Museum of having taken the scrolls from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities upon Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967. Israel's actions are alleged to be contrary to international conventions protecting cultural artifacts and prohibiting their removal.

The ROM is right to stare down the protests.

In the first place, prior to 1967, the part of the West Bank in which the scrolls were discovered was illegally occupied by the Kingdom of Jordan -- an occupation condemned by virtually every existing international organization, including the Arab League and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. If one doesn't like Israel's current possession of the scrolls because of Israel's occupation of the territory from which they come, one cannot possibly like the Jordanian claim any better.

More to the point, the Palestinians have expressly recognized Israel as custodian of all artifacts found in the West Bank and Gaza pending a final resolution of the conflict. Annex II to the 1994 Oslo Agreement, setting out the Protocols on Civil Affairs in the territories, preserves the status quo with respect to archeological finds and artifacts. Israel's current custodianship of the Dead Sea Scrolls was good enough for Yasser Arafat, who signed the accord on behalf of the PLO as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people." It is certainly good enough for the ROM.

Most important of all is that the Palestinian claim to the scrolls not only lacks a basis in formal law, it lacks a basis in principle. The primary international legal source cited in this campaign -- the 1954 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property -- addresses the evil of cultural misappropriations. The age of imperialism saw European powers seize artifacts from former colonies with impunity.

To take a famous example, the Rosetta Stone, one of the great monuments of the ancient world, has for two centuries been displayed in the British Museum sporting an inscription painted on its side by an aide to Lord Elgin: "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801." It is the goal of the UNESCO treaty to ensure that such plunder does not occur again.

The UNESCO principle has nothing to do with Israel's possession of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls, after all, are part and parcel of Jewish, not Arab, history. The Hebrew language parchments graphically demonstrate a society practicing Judaism and living a Jewish life in biblical times in what is today Israel and the West Bank. They predate by at least seven centuries the arrival in the region of an Arabic speaking population and the Islamic religion, and give a portrait of the existing Israelite culture well before the birth of Christianity.

In exhibiting the scrolls, the state of Israel can hardly be said to have appropriated a Palestinian artifact in the way that the British appropriated Egyptian treasures. The Jewish state is preserving nothing more than Hebrew-speaking, Jewish cultural history.

Indeed, the argument that Israel's possession is illegal seems designed not to preserve, but to bury the very heritage that the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect. This is in line with a rhetorical tactic that has been periodically advanced by Palestinians, including the current Mufti of Jerusalem who has stated that as far as he can tell, "the Jews have no relation to [the Western Wall]," Judaism's holiest spot.

The theme of "no Jewish connection" was reportedly expounded upon in 2000 by Yasser Arafat himself at Camp David. According to Dennis Ross, president Bill Clinton's (and now President Barack Obama's) senior expert on the Middle East, Arafat came to the peace conference bereft of political solutions, but "did offer one new idea, which was that the Temple didn't exist in Jerusalem."

It is no exaggeration to say that Palestinians are conducting not just a political campaign, but a "cultural battle" against Israel as a Jewish state. In fact, this characterization was coined by Palestinian scholar Edward Said.

Attempts to obscure the Dead Sea Scrolls, with their unabashed portrait of ancient Jewish life in the land of Israel, may be dressed up as the imposition of international law, but in reality they are part of an insidious cultural campaign. Fortunately, the ROM has risen to the challenge.

Prof. Mohammad Fadel on Family Pluralism

2009-07-02T12:02:12-04:00

I have recently posted a draft of a chapter to be published in a forthcoming work on family law pluralism (MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN A MULTICULTURAL CONTEXT: RECONSIDERING THE BOUNDARIES OF CIVIL LAW AND RELIGION, Joel A. Nichols, ed., Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming 2010) to my ssrn page (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421978). Against the background of the controversy engendered by the proposal in Ontario by some Muslims to use the Ontario Arbitration Act to resolve family law disputes among Muslims using binding arbitration, I have attempted to lay out an argument as to why a liberal system of family law - at least one that is committed to a version of political liberalism - is required to recognize at least a limited amount of autonomy within the family, and to that extent, it cannot have a categorical objection to the recognition of binding family law arbitrations, at least to the extent that it would otherwise recognize and enforce private agreements within the family (whether pre-nuptial agreements or separation agreements) of the parties to the arbitration.

At the same time, I try to outline what limits a politically liberal state must place on the internal autonomy of the family, and by extension, the normative limits on the recognition of private arbitration in the context of family law arbitration. After laying out the liberal framework in which private ordering of the family can take place, I then turn to whether Islamic conceptions of the family have a legitimate place in a liberal family order. I argue that Muslims have important reasons to support a system of family law pluralism that are rooted in their own theological and legal commitments, commitments which gave rise to a form of Islamic family law pluralism. I also argue that those Islamic commitments in turn tip the scale in favor of a system of liberal family law pluralism, rather than an alternative form of family law pluralism that, for example, would entail ceding greater regulatory authority over family life to religious institutions. This is largely because of political liberalism's commitment to metaphysical neutrality, a stance which lessens the risk of conflict between legal conceptions of the family and Islamic religious doctrines of the family. Family law pluralism in the Islamic context was largely a result of the existence of disparate (and in some respects, irreconcilable) religious and legal conceptions of the family and the respective roles of men and women within the family. Many of these conceptions could not be admissible in a liberal family order, and to that extent, Islamic family law arbitration would have to be subject to legal review to ensure that the results of Islamic family law arbitration are consistent with public norms. This problem, however, is simply a particular manifestation of the larger dynamic within a liberal system of family law whereby the autonomy of families (and the individuals within families) is both recognized and circumscribed. I argue that within these limits, Islamic religious and legal norms offer rich doctrinal resources out of which religiously committed Muslims can order their family lives in a manner that is both unquestionably Islamic and satisfies the mandatory requirements of a liberal family law. The chapter concludes with the example of Jewish family law arbitration in the State of New York, demonstrating that New York courts have shown competence in supervising Jewish family law arbitrations to insure that their results are compatible with public law, a fact that demonstrates the ability of public courts in a liberal jurisdiction to enforce public norms while respecting the autonomy of religious citizens.

Prof. Jacob Ziegel writes: Mike Rosenberg Wins Strosberg Prize

2009-06-08T10:17:06-04:00

Students and Faculty members will be delighted to learn that Mike Rosenberg, JD III, has won this year's prestigious Harvey Strosberg prize, worth ten thousand dollars, awarded each year for the best student paper on a class action topic. The paper will be published in the Canadian Class Action Law Review under the title of "The Rise and Imminent Fall of Waiver of Tort in Class Proceedings."

The paper began its career as a term paper in the Class Actions course offered by Professors Ziegel and Watson in the spring term of 2008. Mike continued to work on the paper last summer while working at McCarthys, then refined it further while taking Prof Ernest Weinrib's restitution course in the fall 2008 term. The topic is of great practical and theoretical importance in class action proceedings and is currently being litigated before Canadian courts. The debate will determine whether class members will have a remedy against a defendant whose product is defective or injurious even though class members cannot prove that they were individually injured by the defect. The plaintiffs have sought to overcome this difficulty by arguing that the defendant was unjustly enriched at the expense of class members and should therefore be required to disgorge its ill gotten gain.

Mike was an excellent law student and will be clerking for Chief Justice McLachlin at the Supreme Court of Canada after he graduates this June. He has a very engaging personality, delights to debate and, according to those who know him, is a joy to teach. It is safe to predict that Mike has a very promising career ahead of him.

Warmest congratulations, Mike.

Jacob Ziegel

Prof. Mohammad Fadel - "President Obama Passes the Muslim Test"

2009-06-08T10:03:32-04:00

I have written some very brief comments on President Obama’s speech yesterday in Cairo on the web page of patheos.com. Essentially, I stated that Obama’s speech could genuinely represent an important break from U.S. policy towards the Islamic world in general and the Arab world in particular. Clearly, one speech cannot change the world, but if Obama follows through with the ideas that he announced in yesterday’s speech, there may be renewed cause for optimism.

Read my full comments at:
http://www.patheos.com/Explore/Additional-Resources/Mohammad-Fadel.html

Mohammad Fadel