Fulbright Highlights
Wake Forest University faculty and staff have accomplished many things while teaching and doing research abroad while on Fulbright grants. The following are just a few of the highlights of the impact Wake Forest faculty and staff have had over many decades.
During my Fulbright visit in Bogota, Colombia in 1993-1994, I met Professor Francisco Reyes. My research in Colombia was on comparative corporate governance, a topic that interested Professor Reyes. As part of our collaboration, we decided to produce two comparative law pieces: (1) an article for a US audience describing intra-company dispute resolution in Colombian companies, and (2) another piece for a Colombian audience describing intra-corporate dispute resolution in US corporations. After I sent him my draft of the US situation, I did not hear back from him. For years. Then out of the blue I received from him a (modest) royalty check for: Arbitraje Comercial Y Otros Métodos De Resolución De Conflictos En Sociedades Comerciales En Los Estados Unidos [Non-Judicial Dispute Resolution In the United States] (2001, published by Chamber of Commerce, Bogotá, Colombia) (with Prof. Francisco Reyes, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia).
In the meantime, my colleague Professor Reyes was busy taking some of the ideas we had discussed and putting them into practice. What emerged was a piece of legislation that simplified the process and costs of forming a corporation in Colombia. What had been a 6-9 month process involving lawyers, accountants, notaries, government officials, and even judges became one that could be accomplished on the internet in a couple days. The new business form went from nowhere to accounting for 95% of new companies in the country. To celebrate this remarkable achievement, I wrote a preface to Professor Reyes’s book describing the new company form: Nuevo Derecho Societario: SAS En Colombia [“New Company Law: Simplified Corporation in Colombia”], by Professor Francisco A. Reyes (Legis Colombia, 2013).
– Alan Palmiter