Speakers

Conrad O’Brien partner Kevin Kent presented at the Pennsylvania Bar Insitute’s Environmental Law Forum on “Municipal Water and Sewer Authorities: When Wall Street Comes Knocking,” discussing the legal landscape surrounding efforts at water privatization and risks investor-owned utilities, water authorities and municipalities may face.

Kent represents clients nationally on risk management in high-legal-exposure industries.

His recent risk management work involves advising private companies and government entities on litigation risk emanating from public-private partnership projects, privatization issues, federal and state funding and procurement programs, and other risks inherent in the interaction between public entities and the private sector.

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Peter Steinfels, university professor emeritus at Fordham University and former co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, is set to present “The Church and the Scandal: New Challenges, New Questions” at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law at 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

The program is approved by the Pennsylvania Continuing Legal Education Board for 1 substantive CLE credit.

Steinfels was the senior religion correspondent for The New York Times from 1988 to 1997 and a columnist until 2010.

His publications include “A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America” (2003).

He held positions at Georgetown University, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Dayton.

He also served as editor of the journal Commonweal, and was a consultant for the PBS series Religious and Ethics Newsweekly.

He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Announcements

The Philadelphia Bar Association’s commission on judicial selection and retention launched ElectQualifiedJudges.com, an online judicial candidate tool to help voters make an informed decision about judicial elections during the upcoming May 21st Pennsylvania primary election.

Along with the launch of the online judicial candidate tool, the commission also released its first batch of judicial candidate ratings ahead of the election.

The 35-member commission is independent and nonpartisan, and its ratings are based upon study and investigation by its own 120-member investigative division.

The members of the commission include community leaders, the president judges of the Court of Common Pleas and Municipal Court, representatives from the offices of the public defender, district attorney and city solicitor, and representatives from many diverse legal groups and sections of the association.

Candidates rated “highly recommended” and “recommended” satisfied a cumulative review of criteria including qualifications such as legal ability, experience, integrity, temperament, community involvement and judgment.

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The Delaware Business Court Insider is seeking contributors to provide analysis and insight into recent Delaware Court of Chancery decisions, as well as litigation and issues currently of interest to the business law community.

Potential topics that would be appropriate include, but are not limited to, arbitration, books-and-records requests, breach of contract lawsuits, controlling stockholder litigation, derivative claims, discovery disputes in commercial litigation, corporate dissolution, breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits, intellectual property litigation, jurisdictional battles in corporate litigation, merger and acquisition lawsuits, special committee decisions, corporate governance, limited liability company litigation and limited partnership agreement litigation.

Examples of articles written for DBCI are available online at www.delbizcourt.com. For more information, contact Kristie Rearick at krearick@alm.com.