College Columns December 2016 | Page 10

2017 Induction Education Sessions

We hope to see you in March at the upcoming Class 28 Induction Ceremony & Related Events. The educational portion of the Induction programming begins on Friday, March 10th, at 2:15 p.m. with Supreme Court Update and Outlook, a discussion of the Supreme Court’s recently decided and pending bankruptcy cases, including the implications of the vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia and of the appointment of his successor.

On Saturday, March 11th, sessions kick off at 9:00 a.m. with a brief introduction of our 2017 Distinguished Law Students from the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. The first panel, Interest-ing Issues, follows at 9:15 a.m. and presents a discussion of several significant developments regarding interest and interest rate issues, including cramdown interest rates, the enforceability of make-whole premiums in bankruptcy, and whether a cure payment must include default interest in order to “unimpair” and reinstate the original terms of a defaulted loan.

At 10:15 a.m., Fellows can learn about The Latest on Chapter 15 and Other Cross-Border Cases, a discussion of current topics regarding Chapter 15 cases and a preview of the implications of the new EU Insolvency Regulation that takes effect in June 2017. After a short break, the educational portion of the programming concludes with a Judges’ Roundtable from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., a discussion by sitting judges on a potpourri of current caselaw controversies, developments, and trends.

We anticipate the programming will be approved for four (4) general CLE credit hours. Many thanks to our Scholar-in-Residence, Prof. Ralph Brubaker, for coordinating what promises to be exciting and informative sessions.

For more information about these and other Induction events, click here or visit www.amercol.org and search for Class 28 Induction Ceremony & Related Events under Upcoming Events.

Kremlin Excess

A Senior Fellow Committee Book Review by Michael L. Cook

“It was hard to be a tsar,” says Simon Sebag Montefiore in his magisterial The Romanovs, 1613-1918 (Alfred A. Knopf 2016) (654 pps). Montefiore, a British historian of Russia has written, among other books, Catherine the Great and Potemkin; Young Stalin; and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. He knows his Russian history and culture well, stressing that this book is “a portrait of absolutism in Russia…[,] its culture, its soul…a singular nature which one family [the Romanovs] aspired to personify” over a period of 304 years. Because of its many characters, Montefiore includes convenient charts of royalty, courtiers, ministers and mistresses plus their portraits and, from the mid-nineteenth century, telling photographs.

The book details how Tsarist monarchy worked in Russian society. The Romanovs (20 monarchs and many regents), Montefiore tells us, “continue to define Russia and the world as we know it….[T]he rise and fall of the Romanovs remains as fascinating as it is relevant, as human as it is strategic, a chronicle of fathers and sons, megalomaniacs, monsters and saints.” According to Montefiore, he has not written “a full history of Russia nor an economic, diplomatic or military survey.” Instead, he intends the book to be “the first Romanov history to blend together the personal and political into a single narrative, using archives and published works.”

The book is packed with juicy details of horror and excess. We learn, for example, that Peter, the nominal husband of Catherine the Great, was either “impotent, infertile or just inept,” with Catherine admitting “that their marriage was consummated [only] after five years….She could have loved him, she claimed, if only he had loved her….” By 1752, “Catherine was pregnant, yet her marriage was miserable. Peter captured a rat which he sentenced to death in a military

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