Law & Leadership Conference 2022

Conference Schedule – Friday, March 25, 2022

Dean Gordon Smith

Dean Smith is a leading figure in the field of law and entrepreneurship and has done foundational work on fiduciary theory. He has also made important contributions to the academic literature on corporate governance and transactional lawyering.

After writing extensively about venture capital contracts early in his career, Dean Smith began thinking more broadly about the connections between law and entrepreneurship. Among other works, two articles with Darian Ibrahim of William & Mary Law School are aimed at advancing the nascent field of law and entrepreneurship. Law and Entrepreneurial Opportunities, 98 Cornell L. Rev. 1533 (2013); Entrepreneurs on Horseback: Reflections on the Organization of Law, 50 Ariz. L. Rev. 71 (2008). Dean Smith served as the associate director of the Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin, where he launched the annual Law & Entrepreneurship Retreat. More recently, he co-founded (with Brian Broughman of the Indiana University School of Law) the Law & Entrepreneurship Association, a scholarly society that encourages the study of law and entrepreneurship by organizing conferences and building networks of scholars. He is also one of the founding faculty members of the Crocker Innovation Fellowship at BYU.

A Delaware corporate lawyer, Professor Smith has written extensively on fiduciary law, including two foundational pieces — The Shareholder Primacy Norm, 23 J. Corp. L. 277 (1998) and The Critical Resource Theory of Fiduciary Duty, 55 Vand. L. Rev. 1399 (2002) — that have become standard citations in the field. One of his more recent works, Fiduciary Discretion, 75 Ohio State L.J. 609 (2014) (with Jordan C. Lee), continues his effort to build an overarching theory of fiduciary law. Professor Smith also co-authors a popular teaching casebook, Business Organizations: Cases, Problems & Case Studies, with Professor Cynthia Williams of Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, and he is editing The Research Handbook on Fiduciary Law (Edward Elgar) with Andrew Gold of DePaul University College of Law.

Throughout his career, Dean Smith has been active in developing scholarly communities. In 2004 he co-founded (with Christine Hurt, also of BYU Law School) The Conglomerate Blog, a popular law professor blog focusing on business law. He has served as Chair of the Section on Business Associations in the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), and he participated in the creation of the Section on Transactional Law and Skills, for which he currently serves as Secretary. In 2009 he served on the planning committee for the AALS Workshop on Transactional Law. During that same year, he co-founded the annual Rocky Mountain Junior Scholars Forum. In 2012 he co-founded (with Afra Afsharipour of UC Davis School of Law) the Transactional Law Workshop, a monthly virtual gathering of transactional law scholars. And in 2013, he co-founded (with Colleen Baker) the Business Ethics Book Club, a virtual book club of law professors, who meet once a semester to discuss a recent work on business ethics.

During his five years as the Associate Dean of Faculty and Curriculum (2009-14), BYU Law School developed a large number of new course offerings, including a Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic. He has taught at six law schools in the U.S., as well as law programs in Australia, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, and Hong Kong. Before entering academe, Dean Smith clerked for Judge W. Eugene Davis in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and was an associate in the Delaware office of the international law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Peter Coleman

Dr. Peter T. Coleman is Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University where he holds a joint-appointment at Teachers College and The Earth Institute. Dr. Coleman directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR), is founding director of the Institute for Psychological Science and Practice (IPSP), and is executive director of Columbia University’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4).

Dr. Coleman is a renowned expert on constructive conflict resolution and sustainable peace. His current research focuses on conflict intelligence and systemic wisdom as meta-competencies for navigating conflict constructively across all levels (from families to companies to communities to nations), and includes projects on adaptive negotiation and mediation dynamics, cross-cultural adaptivity, optimality dynamics in conflict, justice and polarization, multicultural conflict, intractable conflict, and sustainable peace.

In 2003, Dr. Coleman became the first recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), Division 48: Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence, and in 2015 was awarded the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award by APA and a Marie Curie Fellowship from The European Union. In 2018, Dr. Coleman was awarded the Peace Award from Meaningful World, in celebration of their 30th anniversary and the UN’s International Day of Peace. Dr. Coleman edits the award-winning Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (2000, 2006, 2014) and his other books include The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (2011); Conflict, Justice, and Interdependence: The Legacy of Morton Deutsch (2011), Psychological Components of Sustainable Peace (2012), and Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations (2013). His last book, Making Conflict Work: Navigating Disagreement Up and Down Your Organization (2014), won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from The International Association of Conflict Management. He recently published a book with Columbia University Press on breaking through the intractable polarization plaguing the U.S. and other societies across the globe, titled, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.

Dr. Coleman has also authored well over 100 articles and chapters, is a member of the United Nations Mediation Support Unit’s Academic Advisory Council, is a founding board member of the Gbowee Peace Foundation USA, and is a New York State certified mediator and experienced consultant. In 2017, he received the International Association of Conflict Management 2017 Best Conference Theoretical Paper Award for his article Conflict Intelligence and Systemic Wisdom: Meta-competencies for Engaging Difference in a Complex, Dynamic World, and in 2018 The Emerald Literati Award for the paper Adaptive mediation: An evidence-based contingency approach to mediating conflict. Dr. Coleman also founded and edits the MD-ICCCR Science-Practice Blog, the WKCR (89.9 FM) monthly radio program Peace and Conflict at Columbia: Conversations at the Leading Edge, and is a frequent blogger on Huffington Post and Psychology Today. Dr. Coleman’s work has also been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribute, Nature, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Wired, This American Life, Time Magazine, Fox Business, CBS, Fast Company, Chicago Public Radio, and various international outlets.

Clifford Rosky

Clifford Rosky is Professor of Law at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, where he teaches courses on constitutional law, criminal law, sexuality and law, and mindfulness and law.

Rosky’s recent scholarship includes “Anti-Gay Curriculum Laws,” 117 Columbia Law Review 1461 (2017); “Scrutinizing Immutability,” 53 Journal of Sex Research 363 (2016) (with Lisa Diamond); “Same-Sex Marriage and Children’s Right to Be Queer,” 22 GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 531 (2016); “Still Not Equal: A Report from the Red States,” in After Marriage Equality: The Future of LGBT Rights (NYU 2016).

Rosky is a two-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the best legal scholarship on sexual orientation and gender identity published each year.  In addition, he has received multiple awards for both his teaching and pro bono service.  In 2015, Rosky received an Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve equality for LGBT people.

Rosky has provided legal commentary on issues related to sexuality and gender to numerous press outlets, including the N.Y. Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Associated Press, The Economist, Newsweek, and National Public Radio.

In recent years, Rosky has helped draft and advocate for SB 296 (2015), SB 196 (2017), R277-613 (2018), SB 103 (2019), R156-61 (2020), five Utah laws that protect LGBT people from bullying, conversion therapy, hate crimes, and discrimination in education, employment, and housing.  In addition, Rosky has served on the legal teams that filed Equality Utah v. Utah State Board of Education, Equality Arizona v. Hoffman, and Gender and Sexuality Alliance v. Spearman, the country’s first lawsuits successfully challenging the constitutionality of statewide anti-gay curriculum laws.

In 2019, Rosky began teaching a new course called Mindful Lawyering, which examines the relationship between the practice of meditation and the practice of law.  Rosky has been practicing meditation for 20 years, and has spent more than 30 days on silent retreat.  He is a member of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association, the Board of Directors of the Mindfulness in Law Society, the Executive Committee of the Balance Section of the American Association of Law Schools, and the Utah State Bar Lawyer and Judge Well-Being Committee.  He has been trained as a mindfulness facilitator at UCLA’s Mindfulness Awareness Research Center in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and is certified as a professional mindfulness teacher by the International Mindfulness Teachers Association.

Alexander Dushku

Alexander Dushku is a shareholder in the Salt Lake City law firm Kirton McConkie.  He graduated summa cum laude from Brigham Young University in 1990 and magna cum laude from the J. Reuben Clark law school at BYU in 1993.

After law school, Alexander clerked on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals for the Honorable Judge Daniel A. Manion.

In 1996, Alexander joined Kirton McConkie, Utah’s largest law firm, where for many years he was head of the firm’s constitutional and appellate law section, specializing in appellate brief writing and critical law and motion practice.  He has authored numerous briefs in important religious liberty cases before appellate courts across the United States, including the United States Supreme Court, and has consulted with legislators and advocates across the country on religious liberty issues.  He was a primary negotiator of the 2015 “Utah Compromise” legislation that received national attention for reconciling religious and LGBT rights.  He is lead outside counsel for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in matters of religious freedom, public policy, and First Amendment law.

Alexander is past president of the Constitutional Law Section of the Utah State Bar and the current chair of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society’s Religious Freedom Committee.  He is listed as one of Utah’s “Legal Elite” by Utah Business Magazine.

He and his wife Jennifer live in Centerville, Utah and have eight children and seven grandchildren.

Kristen Smith Dayley

Kristen Smith Dayley is a partner with Scale LLP in its corporate division. In this role, Kristen advises clients on commercial matters from contracting to strategic transactions, including mergers and acquisitions. In this role, Kristen advises companies at all stages, from start-ups to NYSE-listed corporations in industries including health tech, software, commercial goods and fintech.

Kristen is also the Executive Director of Their Story Is Our Story (TSOS), an international nonprofit founded in 2015 that collects and shares first-hand refugee stories to educate, advocate and encourage and facilitate integration on behalf of those who are forcibly displaced. Apart from TSOS, Kristen works with a number of legal nonprofits to provide pro bono representation for those seeking asylum and humanitarian parole. She also serves as a Sponsor Circle lead in the Seattle area, a new program launched by the State Department at the end of 2020 to allow the private sponsorship of refugee families for the first time since 1980. As a natural corollary to this work, Kristen serves as co-lead of Scale LLP’s pro bono practice.

Kristen has practiced law for more than 25 years. Prior to joining Scale LLP, Kristen began her legal career clerking for Justice Charles Fried on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and then joined Sullivan & Cromwell, where she specialized in corporate finance, representing underwriters and private equity groups during the intense days of the dot-com boom, as well as M&A and project finance transactions.
After a change in personal circumstances, Kristen relocated to Seattle, Washington, and joined the legal department at Safeco Corporation, where she served as Associate General Counsel and created, built and led its Strategic Transactions group, which oversaw everything from procurement to outsourcing, until 2008 when Kristen oversaw the sale of Safeco to Liberty Mutual for $6.2 billion. Following Safeco, Kristen and two colleagues started Prism Law Group LLP, which provided virtual general counsel services to small- to mid-size companies for ten years.

Kristen is also the author of For All the Saints, published in 2012, which explores the growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the New England area, using over 200 oral interviews collected by former Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen.

Kristen holds a B.A. from Brigham Young University (1993) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1996).

Sara Sievers

Sara Sievers is the Associate Director of Graduate Medical Education at Mass General Brigham. She was an associate professor of the practice in the Keough School of Global Affairs, where she was also previously the associate dean of policy and practice. Formerly senior director at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, she has extensive experience in advocacy, policy, and governance issues pertaining to development. Most recently, she advised the government of Nigeria on implementing the Millennium Development Goals. Sievers has led global health and advocacy efforts at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, served in the Foreign Service and was founding executive director of Harvard University’s Center for Global Development and the Earth Institute’s Center for Globalization and Development. She holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chad Ford

Chad Ford has been living five lives simultaneously for nearly 20 years. He’s been:

An international conflict mediator.

A college professor.

A senior consultant and facilitator for the Arbinger Institute.

An executive board member for PeacePlayers.

A writer, analyst and entrepreneur covering the NBA and NBA Draft for ESPN.

While most people know him for his work at ESPN, being a basketball analyst and writer was actually his side-gig for most of the last two decades. Chad’s peacebuilding work is what defines him.

After completing a Master’s degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University and a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law School in 2000, Chad was poised to begin his career as a conflict mediator and facilitator.

However, Chad sold a small internet start-up, Sportstalk.com, that he co-founded while in graduate school to ESPN right after he graduated and spent the next four years working full-time with ESPN as a senior editor and writer covering the NBA and NBA Draft. The experience of covering NBA games was a lifelong dream, but Chad yearned to do something more impactful with his conflict resolution skills. In 2005 he left his full-time work with ESPN to become the Director of the David O. McKay Center for Intercultural Understanding at BYU-Hawaii.

In Hawaii, Chad created a major and certificate program in intercultural peacebuilding, mediation and facilitation. Chad and his wife Amanda, who teaches courses in family conflict transformation and mindfulness, have worked with thousands of students from over 90 countries in the world. Chad’s work has earned him Professor of the Year honors at BYU-Hawaii and made Intercultural Peacebuilding one of the most popular programs on campus.

Chad’s work has frequently taken him out of the classroom and into conflict zones around the world. He’s made nearly 50 trips to the Middle East and has worked on numerous other conflicts around the world as both a mediator and a facilitator.
Chad has served as a senior consultant, speaker and facilitator for the Arbinger Institute since 2006 — working with governments, NGOs and corporations like Nike and the US Olympic team. He’s also helped Arbinger develop trainings and curriculum on conflict resolution as well as a training guide on reconciliation based on the documentary Beyond Right and Wrong.

He’s been able to combine his expertise on both sports and conflict by serving as an executive board member of the non-profit peacebuilding organization PeacePlayers. His work has included designing the peacebuilding curriculum used by PeacePlayers in the Middle East, training thousands of coaches, staff and participants in workshops and most recently, guiding PeacePlayers through the process of creating the Friendship Games and PeacePlayers Leadership Academy that will bring together participants from conflict areas around the world.

The book Dangerous Love weaves Chad’s experiences from those five lives into a deeply personal exploration of how we transform fear and conflict. Chad’s work with young people in the classroom, athletes on the basketball court, struggling families in the living room, executives in the boardroom, and divided communities in some of the most challenging conflicts in the world gives him a unique perspective and voice to the conflicts that plague our families, our organizations and the world.

Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett

Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett serves as President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, established in 2008 to continue the legacy of her father, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, who served as Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the US Congress. Congressman Lantos was the founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and was widely acknowledged as one of our nation’s most eloquent and forceful leaders on behalf of human rights and justice.

Under her leadership, the Lantos Foundation has rapidly become a distinguished and respected voice on key human rights concerns ranging form advancing rule of law globally and fighting for Internet freedom in closed societies, to combating the persistent and growing threat of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

Dr. Lantos Swett is the former Chair and Vice Chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and teaches Human Rights and American Foreign Policy at Tufts University. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Board of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) and the Budapest based Tom Lantos Institute. In addition, Dr. Lantos Swett serves on the Advisory Board of UN Watch, the annual Anne Frank Award and Lecture, and the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership and Public Policy. She also currently serves as Co-Chair of the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit, alongside former Ambassador-at-large for IRF Sam Brownback.