WELCOME AND OPENING OF THE 42ND CUSLI ANNUAL CONFERENCE.

• Author: Petras, Stephen J., Jr.
• Position: Proceedings of the 42nd Canada-United States Law Institute Annual Conference: Back to the Future: The Canada-United States Relationship at a Crossroads

Speaker: Stephen J. Petras Jr.

PROFESSOR PETRAS: All right, everyone. Welcome to the 42nd Canada-US Law Institute Annual Conference. I am Steve Petras. I am the U.S. National Director, and it is a pleasure to welcome everyone here for "Back to the Future," a look at US-Canada trade relations. So this is going to be an outstanding conference. I think everybody is going to have a great time. And I will just go through a couple of preliminary things before we start.

First of all, I would like to thank our sponsors for the conference. The Canada-US Law Institute depends on our sponsors so that we can afford to do programs like this.

Our Platinum sponsors are DLA Piper and Cleveland Cliffs;

Silver sponsors: Parker Hannifin Corporation, Formica Corporation, the Office of the Consul General of Canada in Detroit, Steptoe & Johnson, Dickinson Wright, Baker McKenzie, and Baker Hostetler, my law firm.

Bronze sponsors, all new this year, are Barudan America, which is an automatic embroidery machine company, the largest such company in the world; Biodynamics, a pile drive and foundation testing company; GRL Engineering, its sister company; and The Noramar Corporation, which makes specialty testing equipment.

So I would also like to congratulate today our winners of yesterday's Niagara Business Negotiation competition. It was a very complicated problem. Two law schools competed: University of Windsor Law School and University of Buffalo Law School.

The University of Windsor Law School won the competition. It is interesting because for the competition, Ted wrote the problem, but the University of Buffalo actually got the better deal because they came out ahead of their negotiation strategy. So it was a great competition, and we are hoping to expand that for next year.

There are a couple of announcements that I would like to make. Some of you will notice that this is the first year in many, many years that one of our tried and true attendees is not here, Dick Petry. Dick died last year and the Cleveland Bar Association is going to have a memorial service on Monday, April 16th at noon for all the Cleveland bar lawyers who have died in the past year, and Dick will get to be among them. So we miss Dick. He was a great contribution, former international counsel for Eaton Corporation, and a big supporter of the Canada-US Law Institute.

Another announcement is one of our related organizations, one that we helped found, called the Council of the Great Lakes...