Since January 1, 2008, Norway has enforced a gender quota requirement for corporate board membership at all public limited liability companies. For most of these companies, the quota requires 40% female board membership. While it is too early to tell exactly how this quota has impacted Norway, the positive effects associated with women on corporate boards indicate the value of increased gender diversity. Quotas like the ones passed in Norway are the most viable means for increasing board diversity and, ultimately, adding value to firms in other countries as well.

Dwain Chambers, a sprinter, established himself as the fastest European at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. He became involved with the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) scandal, which is perhaps the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports. In this scandal, the BALCO laboratory provided prohibited substances to many elite athletes in both track and field and U.S. professional baseball. As part of the scandal, Chambers consumed the steroid Tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) and upon getting caught, was suspended from competing in athletics for two years. This triggered the BOA’s Bylaw 25, which prohibits athletes with doping offenses from competing for Britain in the Olympics for life. Chambers admitted to using prohibited substances, came back to the track world, and ended up running faster than he did while he was doping. Nonetheless, because of the Bylaw, Chambers is prohibited from representing Britain at the Olympics again even though athletes from other countries who have completed their doping suspension will have no legal obstacle preventing them from competing in this summer’s games. The Court of Arbitration for Sport held a hearing regarding the validity of this rule on March 12th, with a decision to be released in early April.

The Second Circuit managed to mangle several doctrines at once, creating a number of problems. First, FNC should be a narrowly restricted doctrine that relates to the trial of underlying facts and not to the enforcement of a resulting award or judgment. Once an award is rendered, assets should be deemed convenient to attach wherever they are located, a point that is the essence of enforcement. Second, public policy concerns have nothing to do with FNC; rather, the public policy exception of the New York Convention is a wholly separate section of that treaty. Third, it is not the blanket “public policy” of the United States to defer automatically to the laws of other countries, especially where those laws interfere directly with the multilateral commitment made by both the United States and Peru to enforce international arbitration awards. By cloaking its public policy holding in FNC garb, the Second Circuit misapplied one doctrine, misstated another, and left enforcement of future international arbitration awards—at least in the critical commercial center that is New York—potentially in considerable disarray.

Although JILB has stayed the course of being relevant to practice while exploring issues in an in-depth and research-intensive manner, the world is markedly different than it was in 1979. In the late 1970s, Westlaw and Lexis were in their infancy, fax machines were rare, and personal computers were just beginning to enter homes. The world communicated primarily by telephone and paper correspondence, and JILB was distributed to subscribers solely by mail. JILB continues to be mailed to subscribers in 2011, but it is also available online, as is its archive. Practitioners and scholars now interact through blawgs and other online publications, which can vary in reliability, but share an immediacy that is difficult to achieve in a traditional print journal. Practitioners and their business clients alike have begun to demand fast and up-to-date information in a digestible format, particularly when they do not have the time to review large quantities of scholarship. The academy, meanwhile, has taken advantage of the ability to publish time-sensitive and often shorter pieces online, which can lead to immediate feedback and impact.

The Ambassador is launching into these exciting and fast-moving waters. It is the hope of JILB’s editors, including its new dedicated Ambassador Editor, that the Ambassadorwill be especially relevant to practitioners, and particularly of-the-moment. To that end, the Ambassador will consider pieces that are time-sensitive and shorter than JILB’s typical print articles, and will endeavor to bring an enhanced practical focus to all of its offerings. It will also, of course, adhere to the same high standards of selection and editorial quality as the print journal—it will just offer something different: more timely, more practical. As the new faculty advisor to JILB and a practitioner-academic myself, I believe there has been no more exciting moment in JILB’s history since its founding.

This Note also examines how § 525(b) has a disproportionate effect on older populations since the largest constituent of those who have filed for personal bankruptcy since 2007 have been older workers. This unintended effect directly undermines Congress’s recent efforts to protect older workers in the workplace, such as the through the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. This Note proposes a number of solutions to § 525(b)’s adverse effect on debtors through legislative amendment rather than judicial interpretation. The recent increase in the practical importance of bankruptcy protection must be paralleled with the meaningful and consistent application of its policies.

During the latter half of the twentieth century, courts seized on Illinois Central as a useful tool for protecting environmentally sensitive waterways while generally ignoring a century of caselaw applying the public trust doctrine to non-submerged infrastructure, namely municipal streets. The latent potential of the doctrine to protect public infrastructure from corporate monopolization remains relevant because private investors are increasingly pursuing property rights in such assets. A prominent example is the Chicago parking meter privatization, conveying to a Morgan Stanley subsidiary the rights to all on-street parking meter revenues for seventy-five years.

This Note analyzes the Chicago parking meter privatization under Illinois Central, and subsequent Illinois public trust caselaw, and concludes that the agreement represents precisely the sort of conveyance the Illinois Central Court sought to proscribe, namely, one that sacrifices public “management and control” of a highway “for commerce, trade, and intercourse” essential to Chicago’s continued economic and urban development. In the absence of judicial intervention, shortsighted state and local governments will continue to succumb to the temptation of selling rights in vital public infrastructure for temporary, short-term profit, in opaque, potentially corrupt transactions, sacrificing the ability of future generations to regulate as public necessity, safety, and welfare require.