Examining Law in Difficult Places, by Theodore Parnall

When: Mon, Feb 18 2019 6:00pm

Where: UNM SUB

The 21 Club wishes to thank our speaker, Professor Ted Parnall, Professor Emeritus of Law, for an excellent presentation.

A quick and personal look (not technical) at a few Law Reform efforts that have succeeded, and some that have not: examples from Egypt, Tunisia, China, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia and Afghanistan.

Ted Parnall grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He attended Atrisco School, Ernie Pyle Junior High and Rio Grande High School in the South Valley, spending many of his non-school hours on his horse, riding long distances across the open mesa.

He graduated to motorcycles when he went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Sorbonne in Paris, before going on to get a JD degree at the University of New Mexico School of Law.

Professor Parnall has had a long career in U.S. legal education, including serving five years as Dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law. He has been a part of the UNM School of Law community for more than fifty years, entering as a student in 1963, and later serving as law professor, dean, and now Professor Emeritus.

He worked in the private sector as a lawyer at the New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, and has worked in the public sector in the area of law development for projects under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the World Bank, and Asian Development Bank.

His work has taken him and his family to long term assignments in several developing countries to assist with law reform and economic development projects in Africa, Southeast and Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

He was the first Western legal advisor in post-1975 Laos, and helped design the UNDP’s first law reform program in Vietnam.

He has taught in law schools in Africa, and Asia, and helped Indonesia’s efforts to adopt new corporate and capital markets law in the mid-1990s.

More recently, he has undertaken several legal education assignments in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Africa.