CAL is excited to introduce our newest staff member, Dean Pinkert. In this introductory blog, Dean discusses his background and what led him late in his career to join CAL and focus on international human rights and environmental sustainability.
Dean is highly motivated to “give back” after having achieved his goals in private practice and in government. He takes this to mean embracing a wider agenda--leveraging the law to advance global human rights and environmental sustainability--as well as serving as a resource for CAL colleagues and allies.
Early in my legal career, I was an associate and later a partner at a small labor law firm in which for the most part I handled administrative litigation on behalf of public employees who lacked collective bargaining rights under state law. I learned that litigation was often the best way to give voice to my clients, and it also afforded them an opportunity to overturn unreasonable personnel actions.
After obtaining an LLM degree from the London School of Economics (where my studies included international economic law, international institutions, and law and social theory), I decided to shift over to international trade law, and spent many years working for the federal government on trade policy and trade litigation. This culminated in my appointment in 2007 to the U.S. International Trade Commission, which handles a wide range of trade disputes and is tasked with analyzing a substantial number of trade policy issues.
As one Commissioner out of six (there are generally three from each political party), I immersed myself in the process of developing the written record, asking questions at hearings, discussing the potential outcomes of cases with my colleagues, voting, and then explaining my views to the public.
In addition to antidumping, countervailing duty, and safeguard cases, with which I was already well acquainted, I learned on the job about Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a flexible tool that can be used to address "unfair acts" and "unfair methods of competition" affecting imports into the United States. Claims under Section 337 are not limited to intellectual property, although those are the kinds of claims that are most often brought to the Commission.
My intensive exposure to Section 337 really began with an unusual two-day hearing on remedy before the full Commission in a patent infringement case involving Broadcom and Qualcomm. Much of that hearing focused on whether a remedy of barring certain cell phone chips from U.S. commerce was inconsistent with the public interest provisions of the statute because of its likely economic impact. As it turned out, I and another Commissioner, largely because of that concern, dissented from the Commission majority on remedy.
That case sensitized me to the importance of economic considerations across the full range of trade cases, not just in antidumping, countervailing duty, and safeguard investigations (where economic factors are necessarily central to the Commission's analysis). In a later Section 337 dissent, in Samsung v. Apple, I highlighted among other public interest factors a contractual obligation to license certain standard-essential patents on a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory basis as well as the likely impact of an exclusion order on low-income consumers. The Obama Administration later overturned the Commission's order.
After ten years on the Commission, I went into private practice. In the solar cells and modules safeguards case, on behalf of a client opposed to the continuation of tariffs and other trade restrictions on solar imports, I was able once again to focus on the likely impact of remedies on the public interest, in that case the public interest in rapidly expanding the deployment of renewable energy resources. Both as an advocate and in my participation in public discussion, I continued to highlight the economic implications of trade policy actions, and I began to see the deepening of global human rights and environmental sustainability standards as increasingly inseparable from the advancement of economic welfare, particularly for at-risk individuals and communities.
In fact, in comments filed in trade cases by governmental and non-governmental entities, there has been an increasing emphasis on environmental sustainability, and there has been much public discussion about incorporating violations of human rights into companies’ risk assessment and supply chain compliance programs, in part because of the potential that trade restrictions might be sought in response to such violations. In addition, the Biden Administration’s whole-of-government approach to global climate change and its emphasis on human rights makes this a particularly apt time to be fully engaged on these issues.
Having had many discussions with CAL over the last few years, I decided to leave private practice and join CAL as Special Advisor, with the intention of utilizing my expertise in the service of CAL’s objectives. Designing innovative legal strategies to hold companies accountable for human rights and environmental abuses is central to those objectives, and my experience has prepared me to bring fresh thinking to what might appear at first glance to be intractable problems.
In some respects my move to CAL brings me full circle, closer to the kinds of issues I focused on early in my career. But I’ve played many different roles over the past four decades, and at each step of the way I have enriched my understanding of how the legal and political worlds interact and inform one another. I’m truly excited by the opportunity at CAL to put that understanding to best use.
Dean Pinkert joined CAL as a Special Advisor in November 2021.
