Dominique M. Custos
A Ph.D. graduate from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Professor Custos joined the Loyola Faculty in August 2002. She is a laureate of the prestigious French “Agrégation de Droit Public.” Educated in the civil law tradition, she has held teaching positions in several French universities. She began her academic career as a teaching and research assistant at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She then moved back to her native Guadeloupe (French West Indies) as an assistant professor. In 1994, she was appointed professor of law at the University of Caen (Normandy, France). Custos’ first appointment in the United States was as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University Law School in 1997 - 1998. In 1995 - 1996, she presided over the participation of Caen School of Law in the launching of the HUMANITIES Program, a distance program based on the use of new information technologies, for the Coimbra Group which is composed of the oldest European universities.
Custos has taught classes on the topics of European law, comparative law, administrative law, constitutional law, local government law, and civil law. Her publications include French, European, and comparative questions. Her book The Federal Communications Commission and the Regulation of the Information Superhighways, published in France in 1999, is considered a leading reference in the legal literature relative to Independent Regulatory Agencies.
Custos is a member of the European Union Studies Association, the Commission pour l’Etude des Communautés Européennes, the Société d’Etudes Nord Américaines, the Société de Législation Comparée, and the Institut Français de Science Administrative.
Henry Gabriel
A nationally and internationally recognized expert in commercial law, Professor Henry Gabriel is a delegate from the United States to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Working Group on Electronic Commerce. He has also served as an adviser to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Working Group on Transport Documents. He has combined his international and comparative work with the domestic commercial law, and as the reporter for the revisions of the sales and leases articles of the Uniform Commercial Code, he recently completed the first revisions of these provisions in 50 years. He is also presently the chair of the Uniform Commercial Code Revision Committee for Documents of Title. His work in electronic commerce also has a comparative perspective, and in addition to his work with UNCITRAL, he was also on the drafting committee of the American Uniform Electronic Transactions Act.
Gabriel has held visiting professorships at the University of Queensland, Monash University, Deakin University and Victoria University in Australia, the University of Lapland in Finland, and Kyushu University in Japan. He has also lectured worldwide in such universities as the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the Universities of Padua, Rome, and Verona in Italy, the University of Gent in Belgium, the University of Vienna in Austria, the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu, Carlos III University in Spain, and the University of Tasmania in Australia.
In addition to authoring texts in international commercial law and international commercial arbitration, he has also published articles in these areas in such American journals as the Columbia Business Law Review, Journal of Law and Commerce, Tulane Law Review, Indiana International and Comparative Law Review,
International Lawyer, Pace International Law Review, Hastings Law Review, Business Lawyer, and the Wake Forest Law Review, as well as several foreign journals, including the Monash Law Review, International Trade and Business Law Annual, Acta Facultatis Politico-Iuridicae Universitatis Scientiarum Budapestestinensis, Uniform Law Review, and the Vindabona Journal. In addition, he has published chapters in the proceedings of major international legal conferences in Canada and Malaysia.
His lecture “How International is the Sales Law of the United States,” which was delivered at the University of Rome’s Centro Studi Ricerche Diritto Comparato E Straniero, was subsequently published in the famous UNIDROIT Bluebook Series. He has also given the keynote address to the International Trade and Business Law Forum at the Australian Institute of International and Comparative Law at the University of Queensland.
A member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and the London Court of International Arbitration for the last nine years, Gabriel has successfully organized and coached the Loyola School of Law team for the Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot in Vienna. For the last three years, the team has been the highest-ranking team from America in the competition.
As chair of the faculty colloquium committee, in recent years he has facilitated the visit of many international visitors from various universities such as Oxford, the University of Toronto, the University of Bologna, Carlos III University, the University of Gent, and Tilburg University, as well as many distinguished jurists from courts such as the European Court of Justice.
David Gruning
Professor David Gruning’s knowledge of the law and language of France has led to teaching positions in law schools in Caen, Lyon, and Paris. At these universities, he has taught a variety of courses from a comparative perspective. In private law, he has presented trusts, adoption, marital or community property, contracts, and international commercial arbitration. He has also presented a general introduction to the legal system of the
U.S. at several law schools, as well as courses and seminars on constitutional law.
Gruning has also been sought as a consultant by government and non-governmental organizations with projects in francophone countries. For example, he traveled to Madagascar in 1997 as a consultant on constitutional revision. In 2000, he gave seminars for judges of the commercial and administrative court in Morocco. The project, undertaken by the International Foundation for Election Systems, aims to acquaint the judges with solutions to legal problems in the American system.
In 2001 - 2002, Gruning taught at the University of Montreal School of Law in a program he helped launch that presents American common law to students with a French-speaking students who have already earned a degree in civil law. In addition to taking some part of the American legal experience abroad, he also believes that Americans should profit by the experience of foreign countries, particularly France. In that effort, he has translated two works on French law (one on constitutional law, the other private law), both of which he uses in teaching comparative law or civil law subjects, such as obligations, sales, and security rights.
Patrick Hugg
Professor Patrick R. Hugg, the John J. McAulay Professor at Loyola, is the law school’s director of International Programs, as well as director of the Vienna Summer Legal Studies program, which is presented each July in cooperation with the University of Vienna Law School. Hugg teaches European law and comparative law courses in New Orleans and in Europe. In Vienna, he co-teaches the three-credit-hour course Comparative Legal Systems: Austria, Germany, and the United States, with Professor Herbert Hausmaninger of the University of Vienna law faculty, and in Budapest, a one-credit hour seminar, Current Issues in the European Union, as a part of Loyola’s program there. In New Orleans, Hugg annually teaches a three-credit hour course entitled Law of the European Communities.
Hugg has published extensively in this area, including the recently published book, A Guide to European Union Commercial Practice, as well as numerous law review articles on the EU, its monetary union, enlargement, and on Turkish and Cypriot accession. He participates in numerous foreign conferences on the European Union. Hugg was a guest professor at the University of Vienna during the fall semester 1995, and at Yeditepe University in 2002.
Each December, following the Law of the European Communities course, Hugg leads interested students on an instructional tour of the key institutions of the European Union. The group hears lectures and tours institutions in Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, culminating in a visit to Paris. The tours are highlighted by personal contact with European Council, Commission, and Court officials who present instruction on the functioning of the European Union. The group also enjoys a reception at a European law firm in Brussels, and hears an oral argument at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Each year the group participates in a tour of the spectacular new Parliament complex in Strasbourg.
Finally, Hugg has consulted for the ABA’s Central and Eastern European Law Initiative, contributing to CEELI’s 1999 advisory report on civil service reform in Albania and its 2001 advisory report on civil service reform in Slovakia.
James M. Klebba 
Professor James M. Klebba has been the director of Loyola’s Russia/Hungary program since 1993. In Russia, Klebba teaches comparative judicial systems, which compares the American federal and state court systems with the court structures in other countries. Particular emphasis in this course is placed on the host countries of Russia and Hungary, as well as the role of the European Constitutional Courts as compared to that of the U.S. Supreme Court. Additionally, Klebba is currently writing a book on comparative judicial systems.
As a key person in arranging President Gorbachev’s lecture at Loyola in April 1997, Klebba also arranged for the Russia/Hungary summer students to have a private meeting and photo opportunity with Gorbachev in June 1997. Moreover, he arranged for former Gorbachev’s interpreter, Pavel Palazchenko, to be the Biever Guest Lecturer on campus in fall 1999.
Klebba is extensively published in this area including articles about issues of American federalism in the law reviews of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and the University of Belgrade School of Law. Additionally, he has given lectures and participated as a panelist in discussions on American law or comparative law in Amsterdam, Belgrade, Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest, Cuernavaca (Mexico), Moscow, Novi Sad (Yugoslavia), Prague, Tblisi (Republic of Georgia), and Vienna.
As an active member of the ABA’s Central and Eastern European Law Initiative (CEELI), Klebba co-authored six assessments of proposed foreign law reform efforts involving the judicial systems of Armenia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Republic of Georgia, the Russian Federation, Montenegro, and the Slovak Republic. Further, his December 1999 paper “Second World Conference on New Trends in Criminal Investigation and Evidence” is being published.
Other accomplishments include moderating and commentating for the meeting of the International Association of Procedural Law in October 1998. In March 1999, he was a panelist in a discussion sponsored by the Tulane Environ-mental Law Society on the topic of “Peace-making Operations in the Middle East and the Former Yugoslavia.” In September 2003, he spoke at a seminar on the topic of “Doing Business with Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova” sponsored by the World Trade Center of New Orleans.
M. Isabel Medina
Professor Medina, Ferris Family Distinguished Professor
of Law, returned to Loyola in fall 2003 after visiting as a
Fulbright Scholar at the University of Athens, Greece. At the
University of Athens, she taught law students American
Constitutional Law. In addition, she studied Greek legal
norms on gender, including sexual harassment, domestic
violence, and citizenship. While on her Fulbright, she
lectured at the University of Leipzig and the Technical
University of Chemnitz on gender, globalization, and
American constitutional norms of citizenship.
Medina is a native of Cuba whose family migrated to
the United tates in 1961. She received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in 1977 and her law degree from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1987. In her first year at Tulane, she was selected as an oralist for the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court competition. That year, the Tulane Jessup team came in second in the nation. In addition to her moot court activities, she served as a managing editor of the Tulane Law Review. After clerking for the Honorable Morey L. Sear, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, she joined the law firm of Arnold and Porter where her practice involved primarily products liability litigation and international trade. She joined the Loyola law faculty in 1991.
Medina’s work at Loyola has focused on constitutional law and human rights, in particular, gender and immigration. She has taught international law and international trade. Currently, she is serving as chair of the Immigration Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools. Her work has explored sexual harassment, domestic violence, refugee and asylum law, separation of powers, and regulation of immigration offenses from a comparative perspective. She has taught in the Loyola summer programs in South Africa and Mexico and has directed the Mexico program.
Raphael j. Rabalais, Jr.
Professor Raphael J. Rabalais, Jr., the Eleanor Legier Sarpy Professor of Law at Loyola, has specialized in the areas of international financial services, investment law, and legal history. He graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1968 and the Harvard University School of Law in 1971. He received a master’s degree in history from Michigan State University in 1974.
Rabalais currently teaches the courses Western Legal Tradition, Business Organizations, International Financial Services Law, International Investment Law, and Financial Institutions Law. He has also taught the courses Law of European Communities, Conflict of Laws, Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, and the Constitution and Foreign Affairs.
Rabalais is the sole general editor of International Regulation of Finance and Investment (seven vols. with quarterly supplements) (Oceana Publications, Inc.). Rabalais has delivered scholarly papers at conferences in Paris, France, and Madrid, Spain, as well as in the United States. He has also hosted visiting jurists from Chile, France, Hungary, Japan, Tunesia, and the United Kingdom. He has served as a visiting law professor at Tulane University School of Law (1977); the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge (1989); and Louisiana State University Law Center (1990). Rabalais has also taught in the Loyola Summer Sessions in Cuernavaca, Mexico (1994); Capetown, South Africa (1996); Budapest, Hungary (1997); Vienna, Austria (2001); and at Louisiana State University’s Summer Session at Aix-en-Provence, France (1992).
Gerard Rault
Professor Gerard Rault is a widely traveled and long tenured member of the Loyola law faculty. He enjoyed the honor of having been named Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Law for the People’s Republic of China, 1997 - 1998, and gave lectures and workshops in such diverse venues as Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Nanning, Guilin, Lanzhou, and Chungquin, Tibet. He assisted in drafting the contract articles of the Chinese Civil Code, and served with the U.S. State Department’s Rule of Law Initiative in Shanghai and elsewhere.
Rault returned to China in the 1999 - 2000 school year as a visiting professor of law at Fudan University in Shanghai.
His interests have also extended to the legal systems of Belize and Thailand, where he has lectured on varied comparative law topics.
He has taught in the Loyola Summer Sessions in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and San Jose, Costa Rica. Through the Council for International Visitors he has served as host for visitors from many countries, and particularly from the People’s Republic of China. For many years he has served as host for international students through the Tulane International Hospitality Program.
At Loyola, Rault teaches the Comparative Law and Introduction to Chinese Law courses and continues to lecture about China and Sino-American relations, stressing that the United States can and should create a friend and ally of the world’s most populous country.
Bernard Keith Vetter
As a member of the Loyola faculty, Professor Bernard Keith Vetter served as the director of Foreign Summer Programs at the School of Law from 1989 until 1999. During this time, Loyola evolved from an institution with no foreign summer programs to one of the top four United States law schools in terms of the number of summer programs abroad.
In the international arena, Vetter has served as the director of the 49th Congress of the Societé Internationale pour l’Historie des Droits d’ Antiquité, held at Loyola and the first Congress to be held in the United States. Additionally, he served as a member of the three-person Comité Directeur of the Societé Internationale pour l’Histoire des Droits d’Antiquite with Peter Burks, professor of civil and Roman law, Oxford, and Dean Peter Peiler of the University of Vienna Law School. In 1994, he also served as a visiting professor of law at the Institut de Droit Comparé, Faculté de Droit, Université-Jean Moulin, Lyon, France.
Vetter has spoken on international topics at numerous universities abroad including the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Saint Catherine’s College, Oxford University; Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia; Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary; University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia; Doshisha University Law School, Kyoto, Japan; Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; University of Costa Rica Law School, San Jose, Costa Rica; University of Ankara School of Law, Antayla, Turkey; and the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos, Cuernavaca, Mexico. In addition, he gave a speech at the 150th anniversary of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He has published books and articles on civil and comparative law topics in English, French, and Spanish.
Jeanne Woods
Professor Jeanne M. Woods teaches courses in public international law and human rights. She received a juris doctor degree from Temple University in 1981, having been a member of the Law Review and dean’s honor list. She is a member of the American Society of International Law, and currently serves on the sections on International Legal Theory and Human Rights.
Woods has long been an advocate for internationally recognized human rights; for more than 25 years she was active in the international movement against apartheid and for majority rule in southern Africa. From 1983 until 1987, she served as a consultant to the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid and the United Nations Council for Namibia, where she prepared legal analyses of issues such as state responsibility with respect to apartheid and economic sanctions. She also served as the United Nations liaison officer of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, a position that involved addressing General Assembly Committees on legal issues related to questions of decolonization and apartheid. In 1985, she served as rapporteur of the Commission on Decolonization during the General Assembly of the Congress of Non-governmental Organizations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Also in 1985, Woods co-directed a U.N.-sponsored project to investigate and document South Africa’s military and economic destabilization of neighboring independent states. Over a period of six months, she toured seven countries in the region, and prepared an exhaustive report on the crisis in southern Africa.
In 1994, Woods was an accredited international observer of the first democratic elections in South Africa. She monitored pre-election campaign activities, met with representatives of the government, opposition parties, and non-governmental organizations, monitored voting in hospitals, prisons, “colored” and African townships, and rural areas, and observed the counting of the ballots.
In 1995, Woods returned to South Africa where, at the request of the South African Association of Democratic Lawyers, she led workshops on legislative advocacy for members of the legal academy, bar, and the judiciary. Returning again in 1997, Woods served as an international monitor of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She attended hearings in Gauteng, the Western Cape, and Durban, meeting with Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other leaders. Woods has published two law review articles inspired by these experiences: “The Fallacy of Neutrality, Diary of an Election Observer,” in the Michigan Journal of International Law, and “Reconciling Reconciliation,” in the UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs.
Woods has also been an advocate for women’s rights on the international front. She was a member of the International Preparatory Committee for the World Congress to Review and Appraise the United Nations Decade for Women in Nairobi, Kenya, in July 1985. She was a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., from 1989 until 1993, where she specialized in national security and foreign policy issues. She has testified before Congress as an expert witness on these questions on numerous occasions, and has presented scholarly papers on national security, decolonization, apartheid, and human rights at conferences in places as diverse as Cairo, Helsinki, Lagos, New Haven, Manila, and Vienna.
