The Chile Summer Program is directed by Professor James Cooper, Director of International Legal Studies at California Western School of Law, where he teaches International Trade Law, Comparative Law, and the Law of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Professor Cooper is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society and served as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and a Visiting Professor at University of California, San Diego.
A Barrister and Solicitor, Professor Cooper has worked at the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie, consulted for ministries of justice around Latin America and the United States and German governments and taught in law schools in Canada, Chile, Italy, Mexico, Paraguay, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His work has been commissioned by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the leading political foundations in Germany. He writes for newspapers in Bolivia, Chile, and the United States and has appeared on radio and television in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America. Professor Cooper has produced and directed reality TV show pilots in Mexico and Chile featuring U.S. law students and public education campaigns for governments around Latin America. Professor Cooper has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The San Diego Union Tribune, The Los Angeles Daily Journal, and The San Diego Daily Transcript and appears regularly on TV, radio and in print media about Latin America.
Jörg Stippel studied law at Münster University in Germany and the Catholic University of La Paz in Bolivia. After graduating in law, Dr. Stippel did his mandatory two-year internships at different state and private institutions such as the German Embassy in Quito, Ecuador and at Interights, a human rights non-governmental organization based in London, England. Starting in 1999 as a German lawyer he began to work for the German Government Technical Cooperation Agency (GIZ) in La Paz, Bolivia, Caracas, Venezuela, and Santiago, Chile. From 2001 to 2006, Dr. Stippel was based in Santiago, Chile, and headed the German Government project that assisted the Chilean Ministry of Justice and the institutions of the penal justice system, in the implementation of a radical reform on the criminal proceedings. Here he co-authored a human rights manual for public defenders and edited various publication evaluating the advances in the implementation of the criminal justice reforms in course in South America.
In 2007 he started a Ph.D. thesis at Bremen University in Germany on the efficiency of legal remedies available to prisoners in Chile, which he finished in 2010 with distinction (summa cum laude). Beside his academic effort, he worked as an advisor to the Chilean Ministry of Justice on the reform of the prison legislation (2008 to 2010). From 2009 to 2011 he headed a German Government project that assisted the Liberian Supreme Court and the Ministry of Justice in rebuilding the justice system. Part of this effort was the establishment of a judicial training institute and the implementation of a system of probation. From 2012, Dr. Stippel has worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights as part of the team of the former U.N. Special Rapporteur against Torture, Manfred Nowak (2004 -2010). Here he worked as an advisor on prison reform and torture prevention in Uruguay and the Republic of Moldova. Starting in 2014, Dr. Stippel will serve as an advisor to the public defense institution in Ecuador. He has participated and organized different seminars and congresses and has written articles and books on prison reform, criminal proceedings and human rights. He has drafted legislation in Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and Liberia concerning human rights and fundamental freedoms and has launched legal proceedings in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Christine D. Ver Ploeg has long been interested in ways to resolve legal disputes outside of the court system. This interest has provided her with opportunities to serve as an arbitrator and mediator, and those experiences have in turn given her an additional perspective that she incorporates in all of her courses. She received her J.D. degree with honors from Drake University Law School and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center.
Before joining the William Mitchell faculty, she was a trial attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. She has arbitrated and mediated labor and employment disputes throughout the United States and has been a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators since 1988. In 1993 she helped found an international charitable organization, Mano A Mano International Partners, which has now become the largest and most influential non-governmental oragnization in Bolivia, building clinics, schools, housing, airstrips, roads and reservoirs to improve the lives of the rural poor in South America’s poorest country. Professor Ver Ploeg will teach Cross-Cultural Negotiations and Dispute Resolution.
Professor Dan Downey is a former Texas District Judge and member of the Texas House of Representatives. Judge Downey has been an adjunct professor of law at South Texas College of Law for over 20 years, receiving the Professor Excellence Award in 1990. Since leaving the bench in 1994 Judge Downey has acted as arbitrator, mediator and special judge, (under the Texas Civil Practices and Remedies Code), in hundreds of commercial cases, many of which involved international disputes in the oil & gas context.
Judge Downey is a frequent lecturer at continuing legal education programs including international and comparative law seminars. He has recently written a casebook on Entertainment Litigation and has published several articles in law journals and publications. A listing of such publications appears at dandowney.com