Professor Emerita Leah Wortham spoke at UCLA International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC) on August 14 regarding "Protecting Judicial Independence through Regional and International Standards." Professor Wortham is a co-reporter for the European Law Institute (ELI) project on European Standards of Judicial Independence. The ELI was founded in 2011, inspired, in part, by the American Law Institute on which the ELI cooperates on some projects. This ELI project grows from the Mt. Scopus International Standards of Judicial Independence, a project of the International Association of Judicial Independence and World Peace. Professor Wortham’s co-reporters are Shimon Shetreet, Greenblatt Professor at Hebrew University; Fryderyk Zoll, Professor of Law at Jagiellonian University and the University of Osnabrueck; and Sophie Turenne; University Lecturer at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, University.

Professor Wortham discussed the ELI-Mt. Scopus Principles European Standards Project. She was joined by Carolyn Hammer, Rule of Law Advisor for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR), based in Warsaw, Poland. Hammer talked about the OSCE’s current review of the organization’s 2010 Kyiv Recommendations on Judicial Independence.

More than 150 people from around the globe attended the ILEC conference — the ninth since 2004. ILEC conferences are sponsored by the International Association of Legal Ethics. American Bar Association President Deborah Enix-Ross; Rachel Moran, former President of the American Association of Law Schools; and Judge David Carter, from the federal bench in the Central District of California, were opening plenary speakers.