A Justice, a Dean, an Adventure

“Are you still in Boston?”  It should have been an easy question to answer, a simple text message, but it had me all a flutter and unsure how to answer.  It was quarter after one, I’d been at the airport since 10am, hoping to get on standby for a flight earlier than my scheduled 5:40 departure.  No luck, 5:40 it was.

I looked at the text in my hand.  Could I do it?  Could I leave the airport, get to Harvard and take advantage of this amazing opportunity that had just been offered to me, and get back in time to make my flight?

A friend of mine, a new friend, I hope a continuing friend for the future, Mr. Nice Lawyer, had just offered me his extra ticket to go see Justice Souter speak at the afternoon ceremony part of Harvard’s graduation.  Wow!  Chances to hear a retired Supreme Court Justice don’t just pop up everyday.  Plus, as I’m sure you can guess by his name, Mr. Nice Lawyer is really nice and fun to hang out with.  The ceremony started at 2:30.

Google map, some math, a call to Mr. Nice Lawyer, a trip to the ticket counter to check what was no-longer my carry-on bag, and the next thing I new, I was back on the T and headed to Harvard, Daddy Bunny in tow.  Good thing I didn’t throw out my 7-day pass for the T, Boston’s public transit system, when I got to the airport.

Hah-vahd

The campus was a bustle of commotion.  Men in coat tails and top hats directing people.  Signs left-over from the morning graduation portion posted here and there.  A maze of people in jeans, in dresses, in long black robes, in bright red robes, caps and gowns and cameras and smiles everywhere.  A long line of alumni, old white-haired alumni in crimson baseball caps filed slowly to their special seats in the front.

Mr. Nice Lawyer and I cut down a side-aisle and through a row, making a bee-line for some great seats next to the recording platforms.  Both blessed with long legs, we gracefully stepped over a fee rows of chairs, avoiding the people all ready seated, and took our seats.

The day was gorgeous, bright and sunny.  We sat under the shade of two large, green trees that celebrated the day by dropping a confetti of little green seedpods onto our hair and down my shirt throughout the ceremony.

The Ceremony

Things kicked off with some sort of alumni meeting.  The president of the alumni was this spunky Cuban woman with a delightful accent.  She welcomed new graduates to alumni association, introduced the Dean of the University and awarded medals to distinguished alum. 

The marching band came down the center aisle, horn angles all askew, music attached to their instruments -  Hey, even Harvard students aren’t perfect – but they did sound good.  And the tuba player had a little rubber duckie glued inside the bell of his tuba, which highly amused both me and Mr. Nice Lawyer.

The Honorable Justice

After many long speeches and frequent, nervous checkings of my watch, Justice Souter finally rose to speak.  It was a very interesting speech, mostly a criticism of what he called “fair reading” of the Constitution.  I believe this is also called strict interpretation, or something like that.  And it happens to be the rallying cry of one, if not both, of my favorite Supreme Court Justices.

Justice Souter talked specifically of two famous cases.  One, the Pentagon Papers case in which the US government argued “no law” did not mean “no law”.  And the other, Brown v. Board of Education.  Souter’s argument was that if one were to follow the fair reading approach, these cases could not be correct the way they were decided.

He spoke eloquently, and made good use of pauses – the speech coach that came to CC a few weeks back would be proud.  He also spoke for awhile, which combined with the late start, made me nervous.  It was after 4, I was at least 45 minutes from the airport and my flight was boarding at 5:15.  As soon as the speech was over, while everyone else was standing for an ovation, I jetted out of there, running across Harvard Yard to the T stop.

The Stranger on the T

A nicely dressed gentleman joined me on the last leg of the T journey to the airport.  I had caught all the trains I needed immediately and was relaxing a bit, though still checking my watch now and then.

The gentleman started up a pleasant conversation, asking about the T, explaining that although he had lived in the Boston area most of his life, he had never taken the T to the airport.  I told him what I knew and explained I had minimal experience, mostly from that morning.

Being at the gate, leaving the airport, jumping on the T to Harvard and running back to the airport – the gentleman told me I was crazy.  He also told me he appreciated the effort.  He was the Assistant Dean of Harvard and had also been at ceremony.  But he had left before Justice Souter’s speech.  “David’s a great guy,” he said, explaining that he knew Justice Souter well and been able to spend some time with him earlier in the day, even though he couldn’t stay for the speech.

We had a nice chat on the bus ride, about Boston, Florida, Wisconsin and Cali.  And before I knew it, we were at my terminal.  Time to jump off and go back to running.  I did make my flight.  Thanks in part to the security man who took me to the front of the line and in part to the flight’s 30 minute delay.

What a great adventure!  Thank you, Mr. Nice Lawyer.

1 Million Toilets for India

Did you know that there are more cell phones than toilets in India?   My goodness, can you imagine having to share a toilet with 3, 4 or 5 other people?

The people of India are suffering horribly for this lack of toilets.  Sharing toilets with more than one other person is highly unhygienic.   The facilities get dirty quickly and can not be cleaned as often as necessary to keep them free from deadly bacteria.  Obviously, since we in America require one toilet for every two people, if not one for each person, everyone else in the world deserves the same amount of toilets.  It’s a human right.

This is why my dear friend, Tremainz and I have decided to start 1 Million Toilets for India, so that children across India can grow up safe and happy, without the degradation and disease that comes from having to share a toilet with too many people.  We’re going to include everyone on the Indian subcontinent, too.  After all, country, continent, it’s all the same to us.

You Can Help!

Here’s how the project works.  You, rich white people who have never been outside your little bubble world, save for that two-week vacation to a third world country that totally changed your life, you are going to donate money and stacks of toilet tissue to us.  See how simple it is for you to help save the world!

Then we, the people of 1 Million Toilets for India, will solicit donations of old toilets from people in Africa.  We will take your money and buy more toilets from African toilet manufacturers.  Now, we’re helping those starving people in Africa, too!  Next, we’ll have those toilets and tissue packages shipped across the country of Africa to India.  This will help all sorts of local economies by employing drivers.

Once we get to India, we’ll use a group of volunteers sourced from our program staff, the African companies that donated and delivered the toilets, and some lucky donors who win our special contest to go to India and get their life totally changed, again.

What about the Indian toilet manufacturers and installers?  Who cares!  Clearly, if they knew what they were doing, India wouldn’t have this awful toilet shortage.  They must be terrible at making toilets, so we’re going to ignore them.

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I hope, dear readers, that you realize what is written above is totally tongue-in-cheek.  Tremainz and I did develop this idea together.  The joke amused us for several days at least.  Spawned by the 1 Million T-Shirts for Africa ridiculousness [I’m not giving it a link, google it], we went off on a sarcastic binge against junk aid.

But this foolishness about junk aid has made me begin to question what I always thought of as decent aid.  I started wondering where to draw the line.  Is any aid really decent or good?

Donations of Infringing Goods

This past week, I attended INTA, the International Trademark Association’s annual meeting.  In the Exhibition Hall, generally full of vendors peddling their oh-so-useful trademark services, was a booth for World Vision. 

World Vision was there to solicit donations.  Donations of infringing goods that would otherwise be destroyed because of their violation of trademark law.  Their display featured a series of pictures of smiling African children and adults wearing Chicago Bears Super Bowl XLI Champion t-shirts and hats.  For those of you who don’t know, the Bears didn’t win that Super Bowl.

I looked at those pictures, at first slightly amused.  It didn’t last too long.  I soon learned where those pictures were taken.  Zambia.  Monze, Zambia.  The Monze, Zambia I called home for two years.

The Local Economy

My first thought was the tailors that sit outside the store fronts in Monze or under an insaka on their family compound in the village.  My second thought was of the people sitting in the dusty, crowded market in downtown Monze, selling salaula (used clothing imported from the West) and new clothing imported from Asia.  All these people lost something when the Bears swept down on Zambia as Champions.

Setting an Example

My third thought came not from my experiences in the Zambian community where these clothes were deposited, but from my training in intellectual property law.   What message does it send when we say, “you must stop counterfeit goods” with our mouths, and with our hands, fill the country with counterfeit goods?

The US government, the Zambian government, most of the other governments in Africa, are trying to teach their citizens the value of trademarks and not to infringe others’ marks.  There are many reasons for this, I’m not going to get into all of them here.  But I will mention the one most important in this instance.

Weak protection of trademarks discourages investment in the country.  It discourages new companies from forming within a country and it discourages foreign companies from entering the local market.  Bad, bad, bad.

Long Term Effects

How can we convince Company X that it should invest in Zambia, that it should open a facility and employ thousands of people and that its company will be protected from imposters when the population is taught that there is nothing wrong with infringing goods?

How can we convince Mr. Banda he should start a new business in Zambia instead of abroad when he’ll be subject to imposters and to having his company’s market overrun by free donations from abroad?  (This later issue is addressed well in Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid.  I highly recommend it.)

Final Thoughts

I remain conflicted on World Vision’s program.  In general, I like World Vision and the organization's work.  But this clothing thing has made me question their other work as well.
I understand the idea that donating something is better than destroying it.  But how about just not making it at all?  Do we really need to have our Super Bowl champions shirts available immediately after the game?  What’s wrong with waiting a day or two? 

As for the infringing goods, how about removing the mark when possible, and recycling the materials when not.  There must be other solutions than drowning developing countries in our excess and illegal goods.

Wowsers, What a Week

Most of us have role models, those people in our lives who we aspire to follow.  In terms of our careers, these role models are often the experts who came before us.  The ones who wrote the big books, discovered the great formula or developed the best procedures.  And once in awhile, if we’re truly lucky, we get to see our role model in person, maybe attend a lecture, or watch a demonstration.  If we are amazingly lucky we may even get to meet our role model.  I am amazingly lucky.  :)

  That’s him, Jeremy Phillips.  If you don’t believe I met him and took that picture myself, you can check out the group picture on Afro-IP.  I was so incredibly lucky, he even set aside some time from his busy schedule to meet with me!

Besides being one of the foremost experts on intellectual property and one of the most respected scholars in the world, Jeremy is also one vampire of a nice guy.  I think that’s the part I admire the most.  He’s kind, extremely considerate and always cheerful.  (Unless you trick him into attending a poorly done haughty Ameri-centric panel.)

I ran into Jeremy often during the conference, partly due to some similar interests.  I also met a number of other wonderful people including the founder of Afro-IP, Darren, another Afro-IP contributor, Paul, and a number of Yoruba attorneys who I startled by greeting them in Yoruba.  …hee hee…  The conference was amazing, people from all over the world.  Singapore, Malaysia, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the UK, Dubai, Switzerland, Romania, Cameroon, Russia… that’s just people I met!  And I learned so much.  I can’t wait for next year’s meeting in Boston. :D

INTA Day 1 (or Posing as a Professional Again)

Yesterday was the first day of the International Trademark Association Annual Meeting. (It’s the 131st annual meeting!)  I had a great time!

I started my events by attending a special luncheon talk about enforcement of trademarks in Africa.  It was a small group, but very interesting and very rewarding.  An attorney from Zimbabwe, two Yoruba attorneys from Nigeria and an attorney from a large pharmaceutical company in the UK who’s in charge of the African region for her company.   I learned a lot and had a very little contribute.  One of the most amazing parts was when the lady from Zimbabwe recognized my name from the Afro-IP blog!  And of course, the Nigerians were surprised I could tell what tribe they were by their names.

The big opening event ceremonies later in the day were nice.  Elle McPherson was the keynote speaker.  It’s kind of funny, her face doesn’t look 45 but her arms, shoulders and body skin do.  Always remember to put your age-reducing make-up on your décolletage as well as your face!

After the ceremonies was the obligatory giant reception.  I wasn’t too keen on going.  I’m not a fan of large crowds and there’s 7500 attendees at this meeting!  But, my friend wanted to check it out so I agreed to go for it and munch a bit.  Glad I did – met some neat people and didn’t have to buy dinner. :)

Registration included the requisite schwag and name badges.  Everyone got a black shoulder bag. Many people are still using theirs.  Not me – I don’t want to carry the same bag as everyone else!  I transferred the important info stuff to my new special bag that Alfred got me for graduation.  It’s made out of two old record sleeves: Sleeping Beauty (my fav Disney movie) and Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (an album we had when we were little).  Much more appropriate for me than a black bag.  I think it goes nicely with my black suit ;)