From the Director
Greetings from the Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession. We hope you are having a wonderful spring semester. The last several months have been packed! Below we outline our global projects and programming, the range of external funding we continue to be fortunate to receive, and the research our amazing Center faculty has been producing.
We hope you have a productive summer ahead.
Milt and Judi Stewart Professor of Law, and
Director, Milt and Judi Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession
The Stewart Fellows Class of 2026
The Center has selected its 2026 summer class of 22 Stewart Fellows. With this year’s cohort, more than 320 students will have served as Fellows since the program was established in 2010. As in years past, the students will travel to a number of different countries ranging from Argentina to Thailand. More to come on this year’s class in the next few months, and we wish to express our immense gratitude to our primary benefactors, Milt and Judi Stewart, as well as to the rest of our supportive donors and internship employers from around the world!
AALS Program on U.S. Anti-Corruption Policy and International Enforcement
The Center has been invited to host a nationwide webinar program sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools in late April 2026 examining the future of foreign anti-bribery enforcement in light of recent actions by the Trump administration. Participants will include Kunle Ajagbe (Aidan Partners, Lagos, Nigeria), Rachel Brewster (Duke University School of Law), Hannah Buxbaum (University of California, Davis School of Law), and Paul Stephan (University of Virginia School of Law). The Center director and Dean Christiana Ochoa (Indiana-Bloomington) will co-moderate the session.
USFQ-Ecuador Conference on Law and ESG
Also, in late April 2026, the Center is holding a joint conference in Ecuador with our new partner, Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), on environmental, social, and governance challenges that lawyers in Latin America are currently confronting. The lead USFQ colleagues organizing our visit, Professors Verónica Chiriboga Arteta and Andrés Martínez Moscoso, will be visiting our Center to deliver a set of lectures during the next academic year as well.
Brazilian Delegation Visits Maurer
In early April 2026, the Center welcomed a delegation of Brazilian lawyers from the prominent São Paulo law firm, ASBZ Advogados. Partners Adriano Silvério and Alexandre Gleria, along with chief economist João Pedro Zucca, met with faculty, staff, and students, where they discussed the firm’s leading law and tech practice. ASBZ has been a generous host and donor to our Stewart Fellows program over the years.
Symposium in Mexico City
In March 2026, with support from IU’s Office of the Vice President for International Affairs and in collaboration with IU’s NAGPRA Office, the Center co-hosted a workshop in Mexico City on cultural heritage repatriation across the Americas, bringing together legal, policy, and humanities experts to share case studies from multiple countries. The event fostered meaningful dialogue, built new collaborations, and further strengthened IU and Maurer’s engagement in Latin America.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Conference
In February 2026, the Center was invited to be part of a workshop hosted by the University of Wisconsin Law School on challenges to the rule of law in a comparative perspective. Speakers from the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Asia participated during this important two-day event.
JGLS Symposium
In January 2026, the Center's Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies held a symposium titled "Courts in a Fractured World: Judicial Power and the Politics of Legal Order." Initially planned for two days, inclement weather forced the event to be held all on one invigorating (but long) day! The seminar was a tremendous success. All of the papers are forthcoming in Issue 2 of Volume 33.
Thailand Legal Professions Conference
In December 2025, the Center and its Stewart Fellows law firm partner, Tilleke & Gibbins, hosted a conference in Bangkok entitled "The Future of Legal Skills: Lawyers for the Next Decade." Speakers included Andrew Stoutley (Tilleke), Nuttaphol Arammuang (Tilleke), Kittithorn Bunyakiat (Samsung Electronics), Suppanat Kasettratad (Bitkub Group), and the Center director. Over 150 people attended the event.
The Center’s Interaction with the Supreme Court of India and JGU
In November 2025, Jindal Global University – a key partner of IU and the Stewart Center – hosted a conference in Sonipat, Haryana, to commemorate the opening of one of the world's largest moot courtrooms on JGU’s campus. Several members of India's Supreme Court were present, including the Chief Justice of India. The Center director delivered a keynote speech at this event.
Engagement in Europe: Luxembourg & Hungary
The Luxembourg Centre for European Law partnered with the Stewart Center to strengthen ties through exchange visits and joint workshops. In October 2025, Jay Krishnan visited the LCEL, delivered a keynote lecture, and attended an LCEL-sponsored international conference on continental judicial values that was held at the Court of Justice of the European Union. Shortly after that visit, Krishnan traveled to Budapest and gave a series of lectures on the legal profession at ELTE University – another strong partner of the Stewart Center. This upcoming fall, the Stewart Center will welcome ELTE's Professor Gellér Balázs to Bloomington.
Immigration and Legal Education Symposium
Also, in October 2025, Dean Christiana Ochoa and the Center director were invited to deliver papers at UC Davis Law School at a conference celebrating the professional career of Davis Dean Kevin Johnson. Dean Johnson was the Stewart Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Center in the spring of 2025.
Great Thanks to Our Additional Supporters
Without the philanthropic generosity of our many supporters and partners, our Center’s work could not continue to thrive. In this issue, we specifically wish to acknowledge the contributions of Robert Kassing '67, Pakkhapon Ngamlak '04, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Luxembourg Centre for European Law, Erasmus-ELTE, IU's OVPIA, Jindal Global University, and Tilleke & Gibbins. To support the center, donations may be made here.
Stewart Center Faculty Research
Hannah Buxbaum, who was a crucial member and wonderful supporter of our Center while she was here at IU, has moved to UC Davis. Hannah will remain closely affiliated with us, and we congratulate her on her election to the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and to the Institut de Droit International. Her recent research includes her editorship of Extraterritoriality in Comparative Perspective (Brill, 2025), and her two articles: The New Unilateralism in EU Cross-Border Regulation: Objectives, Methods, Institutions, 89 Rabels Zeitschrift 411 (2025) and Adhesive Forum Selection Agreements and Access to Justice: The Function and Limits of Anti-Waiver Protections, 26 German Law Journal 876 (2025).
Kenneth Dau-Schmidt has two projects to which he is presently devoting attention: Non-Compete Covenants: Current Economic Perspectives and Regulatory Approaches in the United States and Europe, forthcoming in the Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal (with Brandon Borgemenke) and a work in progress titled The Intelligent Use of AI in Employment Arbitration: The Need for Guardrails (with Ashok Kumar Pindiga).
Vitor Dias continues to write on the multiple roles of lawyers in catalyzing change or reproducing inequalities. After co-editing a special issue on Law in a Changing Climate for the Law & Society Review, his recent work has focused on legal actors, democratic backsliding, and climate change. Dias has published the following articles on these topics: Resisting Democratic Backsliding from within the State: Evidence from Bolsonaro's Brazil in the Policy Studies Journal and Rule by Law in Democratic Regimes: How Legal Actors Undermined Democracy in Brazil in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies.
Charles Geyh will be delivering the prestigious, keynote Miller Becker Lecture at the University of Akron later this month. His talk will be titled "Partisanship, Court Legitimacy, and Judicial Ethics," which will then be published as a feature article in their law school’s flagship journal.
Bill Henderson was informed that IU’s central administration will be funding his important applied research practicum proposal that he leads, which will result in Bella Bennett being the project manager for this initiative.
Jayanth Krishnan has several of his articles coming into print in, respectively, the Fordham Law Review (with Kunle Ajagbe), the UC Davis Law Review, and the Virginia Journal of International Law. His forthcoming paper examines immigration legal deserts and the role of nonlawyers in providing access to justice, which will be published in the William & Mary Law Review.
Christiana Ochoa has an article forthcoming in the UC Davis Law Review titled The Role of Law Schools in Upholding the Rule of Law. She was also recently named to the executive committee on rural access to justice for the Association of American Law Schools' Deans Committee. And she is part of the Global Deans Initiative on the rule of law.
Carole Silver published Rethinking Legal Careers Through the Lens of Relocation and Rerouting, in a review of Sida Liu and Anson Au's article, Mobility Spaces: Geographical and Professional Distances in Career Mobility in Jotwell. She will soon publish a chapter, International Student Diasporas in Global Legal Education (with Ritika Giri), in the forthcoming Research Handbook on Global Legal Education, edited by Swethaa Ballakrishnen and Bryant Garth.
Additional Award Received
Professor Krishnan received Indiana University’s John W. Ryan Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Programs and Studies, which serves as a career achievement award by honoring faculty members for their outstanding commitment to international engagement and scholarship.
We hope you have a productive remainder of your fall semester.
Jayanth Krishnan and Lucero Guillen