Permanent link All PostsI attended Admiralty Law Institute for the first day of the three-day conference yesterday. This year's topic, "Maritime Catastrophes: Marine Investigation & Mass Claims Practice" features a host of wonderful programs and continues through this Friday. I was able to be there for the welcoming remarks by Dean Meyer and Bob Acomb, one of our wonderful maritime adjunct professors, the address by Patrick Bonner, current President of the Maritime Law Association, and the first panel on Developments in Cargo Law. I was very interested to see one speaker in particular during the Cargo Law panel, Ms. Denise Krepp, Chief Counsel at the US Department of Transportation, Maritime Administration (MARAD). Ms. Krepp came to Tulane Law last semester to speak to the Maritime Law Society, and during her visit she met with Dean Meyer as well as Amanda Moeller, the government counselor at the CDO. From those meetings, Ms. Krepp graciously offered to accept resumes from Tulane students for summer internships with MARAD, and along with Michaela Noble (a staff attorney at MARAD and a Tulane Law alumna), hired two of our Tulane first-year students for this summer. I was looking forward to simply saying hello to Denise and Michaela and welcoming them to Tulane, but to my surprise, Denise took the opportunity during her speech to mention the interns and express her excitement about her incoming Tulane law clerks. She also invited other students attending the conference to speak to her about careers at MARAD. What a great opportunity to promote Tulane students to the other practitioners at the conference!
I was also pleased to see so many of the practitioners flipping through the resume books that I made featuring resumes from Tulane maritime students. A book went in the conference bag of every attendee at ALI, and I saw many of the bright blue resume books floating around the conference yesterday. I was also happy to see student representatives of both the Tulane Law Review and Maritime Law Journal handing out the latest journal volumes at ALI. There was also a wonderful networking reception at the New Orleans Board of Trade last night, and many students took my advice to attend the event (free of charge for students) and meet some of the most well-known maritime practitioners in the world.
So far, the Admiralty Law Institute is going very well. I'm sure our maritime professors, Martin Davies and Bob Force, must be very pleased. I'm excited to see what today brings at ALI.