Zuckerman

Students are thrilled when a paper they wrote wins a prize, but third-year Cornell Law School student Michael Zuckerman '09 was stunned to learn that one of his articles won three national awards.

The paper, "The Offshoring of American Government," explores a trend that most people are unaware of: the outsourcing of state government service jobs to oversees workers. State legislatures have begun to restrict the offshoring, Zuckerman said.

"I became interested in this subject as an undergraduate in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations," he said. "Most recently I decided to pursue it from a constitutional angle. I argue that state government restrictions on offshore contracting are unconstitutional because they violate the Foreign Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which generally prevents the states from interfering with international trade."

"Offshoring" received first place in the Andrew P. Vance Memorial Writing Competition, sponsored by the Customs and International Trade Bar Association and Brooklyn Law School; first place in the American Bar Association (ABA) Public Contract Law Journal Writing Competition; and second place in the Inter-American Bar Association Best Law Student Paper Competition. The first two competitions involved students from across the United States, while the Inter-American competition attracted papers from throughout North and South America. And the ABA Federal Procurement Institute has invited Zuckerman to present his paper at its annual meeting in Annapolis, Md., in March. The paper also appears in the current issue of the Cornell Law Review.

Zuckerman credits associate professor Bernadette Meyler with encouraging him to dig deeper into the issues. "Michael was asking hard questions about the Foreign Commerce Clause and other constitutional provisions restricting state power to act internationally," Meyler said. "His article deserves the high honors and awards that it has received."

After graduation from the Law School in May 2009, Zuckerman will head to Brooklyn for a judicial clerkship with Cheryl Pollak, the U.S. magistrate judge for the Eastern District of New York, and then to Chicago to begin his professional career with the law firm Kirkland & Ellis.

Paul Miller is a writer at the Cornell Law School.