The article, by Daphne Eviatar, is titled “Clinical Anxiety: Rebellious Lawyers are Shaking Up Law School Clinics.” The title is derived from the writings and teaching of NYU School of Law Professor Gerald López. As the article explains:

If the [clinical legal education movement’s] visionary of old was Harvard’s Gary Bellow, today’s prophet is Gerald López. In 1992, while teaching at Stanford, López wrote Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice.

López argued that the traditional legal-services model does a disservice to the very groups it is trying to help by squelching community activism. By assuming the roles of “preeminent problem-solver” and “political hero,” lawyers exclude clients from shaping solutions to their problems and narrow those solutions to what courts can provide. Widely recognized, the book has inspired a body of scholarship building on López’s theories and an annual student-run “Rebellious Lawyering” conference at Yale Law School.

The article describes the community outreach and organizing clinic that López currently teaches at NYU School of Law and also the community research project in which he is currently engaged:

López’s view of good training is expansive. This summer, about 80 volunteers, mostly college students, worked for him for free, conducting a telephone survey of 2,000 people in low-income communities, asking them about their problems and how they’re trying to solve them. He sends his law students into innercity neighborhoods to interview social service organizations to find out what they’re doing to help. “As activists, we should have been doing this all along,” he said, claiming that studies like his are essential for lawyers who work with poor people. “This is second nature to management and business schools.”

López’s clinic is not the only clinic at NYU School of Law profiled in the article. The article begins with a detailed description of the work of NYU School of Law Professor Michael Wishnie in the Immigrant Rights Clinic, which Wishnie created with NYU School of Law Professor Nancy Morawetz:

When Mike Wishnie, a New York University law professor, heard that immigrants seriously injured in factory jobs were waiting up to ten years for their workers’ compensation benefits, he considered how he could help. He and the students in his immigrants’ rights clinic could represent each worker individually, but that wouldn’t solve the underlying problem. They could represent a group of workers against the state in federal court, but that would mean long and complicated litigation. They could lobby to change the law (which some students eventually did), but that might not help workers who’d already been hurt.

Then Wishnie hit upon another idea: Under a little-used side agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the clinic could file a claim against New York for failing to enforce its labor laws. Although a NAFTA petition would take far longer than one to a local court, it would be the first such claim against a U.S. state — a good way to call attention to the case and boost organizing efforts by local community groups.

Last fall, a teaching fellow from the clinic flew to Mexico City along with two workers and representatives of four different community groups. They filed a petition and held a press conference on the steps of the National Administrative Office of Mexico. Back in New York, the community groups followed with a boisterous demonstration, spawning a flurry of newspaper articles about their novel claim.

As the article explains, the NYU School of Law clinics taught by López, Morawetz, and Wishnie reflect a new vision of lawyering that embraces a broad definition of the mission and role of the lawyer. Quoting Randy Hertz, director of the clinical program at NYU School of Law, the article explains:

“Our definition of lawyering skills has broadened,” said Randy Hertz. “Now, to be an effective public-interest lawyer, you need to have legislative drafting and organizing skills and know how to use the media.” Though Hertz admits that most public interest lawyers outside the academy still don’t approach their work in that way, he hopes recent graduates will take what they’ve learned into the field.

“In some places, that’s happening,” the article explains. The example it gives is the program “Make the Road by Walking,” a community organization in Bushwick which, as the article explains, was started by NYU School of Law alumni “Oona Chaterjee and Andrew Friedman … when they were students in NYU’s public policy clinic,” largely due to the inspiration of “books like [López’s] Rebellious Lawyering.”

The article also traces the current vision of clinical legal education to a 1992 ABA Report by the Task Force on Law Schools and “Profession: Narrowing the Gap” (commonly known as the “MacCrate Report,” after task force chair Robert MacCrate), which had as its centerpiece a comprehensive model of lawyering skills and professional values developed by Hertz and Anthony Amsterdam, NYU School of Law professor and former clinic director.

The article discusses how changes in clinical teaching have paralleled changes in the professional background of clinical teachers. Using Wishnie as a prototypical example, the article explains:

Wishnie is part of a new breed [of clinical teacher]. He was hired a few years out of law school following a Supreme Court clerkship and two prestigious fellowships, and he and others like him are blurring the old distinctions between “academic” faculty who write and teach about the theory of law and “clinicians” who devote themselves to its practice. Increasingly, clinical professors, after years of lobbying for equal status in the legal academy, are joining the tenure track. That means that in addition to supervising students and their cases, they’re expected to publish academic articles. Wishnie has devoted himself to exploring theories of immigrants’ constitutional rights. Others have created a new genre of academic writing focused on clinical pedagogy and lawyer-client relationships.

The article recognizes the contribution that NYU School of Law made to the enterprise of clinical scholarship in 1994 by joining with the Association of American Law Schools and the Clinical Legal Education Association to create the Clinical Law Review, a journal “edited by clinical professors,” for which Hertz serves as editor-in-chief. As the article explains, “[t]he Clinical Law Review has dramatically increased the amount of clinic-generated scholarship.”

The accomplishments identified in the Yale Law School magazine article are representative, but certainly not a full picture, of the many ways in which NYU School of Law clinical faculty are influencing the field of clinical legal education and the legal profession itself. Working in close collaboration with the teachers of the first-year Lawyering Program, the clinical faculty strives to improve what is already the country’s most dynamic interdisciplinary approach to training lawyers as problem solvers. Together they aim — through their teaching, research, and the work they do with clients and in communities — to illuminate what lawyers do and how they might do it better. Their field of interest encompasses the ever-evolving world of legal problem-solving. Across civil and criminal boundaries, clinical faculty are involved with such diverse matters as litigation, legislative advocacy, policy-making, business transactions, community education campaigns, institutional and programmatic evaluations, systems design, and management.

Clinicians at NYU School of Law have taken an active role in national organizations concerned with legal education. For example, Paula Galowitz serves on the board of directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association; Randy Hertz serves on the Council of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar; and Holly Maguigan is the co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). Law School clinicians have similarly assumed leadership positions in public interest law organizations. For example, Claudia Angelos serves as the president of the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The successes of clinicians at NYU School of Law in the fields of clinical legal education and public interest have resulted in many awards. Most recently, SALT recognized Professor Bryan Stevenson’s great achievements in the capital punishment field by giving him the organization’s Human Rights Award, and the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar in August 2002 gave Professor Anthony Amsterdam the Robert J. Kutak Award for the most significant contributions to bringing together the legal academy and the practicing bar.

NYU School of Law has been an innovative force in its approach to public service. LRAP began providing benefits to graduates who completed their degrees in 1984. The class of 2003 will be the 20th class to benefit from this Program and the Law School’s longstanding commitment to public service. Currently, 257 participants in the Program serve underprivileged and underserved populations all over the world.

“A commitment of this magnitude is extremely expensive,” Revesz says. “But the needs of millions of people who have no access to justice in our nation are so great that I’ve decided to make this commitment without waiting for the external fundraising that we will need to fully finance the Program.”

Since summer 2002, approximately $6 million has been raised to ensure the commitment.

PIC Grants Expanded

Revesz also significantly increased the Law School’s support for students who choose to do public service work in their first and second summers by broadening its program of Public Interest Committee (PIC) grants.

[SIDEBAR: Helping Students Pursue Their Dreams]

For many years, NYU School of Law guaranteed PIC funding for second-year students and also devoted substantial resources to fund first-year students. However, because the number of public interest students at the Law School has been steadily growing, many first-year students who wanted to do public service internships this past summer received low numbers in the lottery and, despite the Law School’s generous funding of summer internships, it seemed that they might not receive funding. In February 2003, the dean announced that he would guarantee summer funding for all J.D. students, an announcement that was received by the students with relief and gratitude. In summer 2003, more than 300 students performed public service across the nation and around the world.

Moreover, to ease the financial pressure on students working in public service jobs over the summer, the Law School also increased the amount of the grants. First-year students now receive $4000 and second-year students receive $5000.

“With the significant expansions that we are now adopting, we further strengthen our institutional commitment as ‘a private university in the public service,’ ” Revesz says.

The expanded PIC program is supported in part by grants for environmental work by the Korein Foundation, the family foundation of alumna Elysabeth Kleinhans (’88); grants for students interested in international public interest placements established by Root-Tilden alumnus Eric Koenig (’84); and funds raised by the student-run annualPublic Service Auction.

More International and Government Placements

Revesz plans to expand the Public Interest Law Center’s (PILC) capabilities. As an example, Revesz and new PILC Director Deborah Ellis (’82) want to increase PILC’s international and government job placements, which will capitalize on the Law School’s leadership in both public interest law and international and global programs. The Public Interest Law Center, created in 1992 at the Law School, is a national model for the promotion of public service and one of the largest programs of its kind in the nation.

New Directors Named

This year, Dean Revesz appointed Deborah Ellis as assistant dean for public interest law, a newly created position. NYU President John Sexton also appointed Professor Vicki Been (’83) as the new faculty director of the Root-Tilden-Kern Program. For the first time in the Program’s history, both its director and faculty director are graduates of the Root Program. The appointments signal the Law School’s dedication to strengthening its commitment to public service and developing new public service initiatives.

Deborah Ellis (’82)

Ellis, as the assistant dean for public interest law, will direct both the Public Interest Law Center and the Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship Program. Since 2001, Ellis has been an acting assistant professor in the Lawyering Program and also taught Sex Discrimination Law. “The appointment of Deb Ellis is a critical part of our initiatives to extend NYU’s historic mission as the leading law school for public interest law,” Revesz says. “Deb’s passion, experience, and dedication will undoubtedly help launch a whole new generation of lawyers into public interest law.”

[SIDEBAR: Five Students Awarded Skadden Fellowships]

Prior to joining the Lawyering faculty, Ellis had a distinguished public interest career, including four years as legal director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. She also served as legal director of the ACLU of New Jersey, and as a staff attorney at the ACLUWomen’s Rights Project and at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She has previously taught at Rutgers and Yale College.

“I believe NYU School of Law has the No. 1 public interest program in the country, with our committed students, dedicated faculty, generous financial support, and extensive alumni network,” Ellis says. “I’m excited to build on this superb foundation and take the Law School to the next level in public service.”

“As an NYU alumna myself, I have always been proud of NYU’s motto, ‘the private university in the public service.’ My goal is for all graduates to incorporate public service into their careers.”

To do this, Ellis believes that PILC should promote an expansive paradigm of public service. She notes that there are a multitude of opportunities for lawyers who want to do public service, including direct egal services; impact organizations; international human rights organizations; public defender offices; prosecutorial agencies; national, state, and local governments; foundations; community-based organizations; mediation services; “low bono” firms (representing clients who are middle income); and labor unions. Ellis acknowledges that there may be critics of this expansive view. For example, some of her public defender friends are not comfortable with calling prosecutors public interest lawyers. But to Ellis, the criminal justice system will work best if we have excellent lawyers on “both sides of the cases.”

“The network of Law School alumni doing public service is unparalleled,” observes Ellis. “In my own class alone (1982), many of my classmates are running significant public interest organizations throughout the country.”

In her new position, Ellis hopes to increase the connections between current students and alumni. For example, she is encouraging all alumni doing public service to join the PILC email alumni network, so that current students may contact them for career advice. Interested alumni can sign up for this network at www.law.nyu.edu/depts/ publicinterest/career/network/register.html.

Vicki Been (’83)

Been, a Root graduate and professor at NYU School of Law, was named faculty director of the Root-Tilden-Kern Program this year. In accepting this appointment, Been continues to demonstrate her commitment and dedication to the success of the Program and to its many students and alumni.

“The appointment of Vicki Been as faculty chair of the Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship Program is a critical step forward in our plans to further strengthen our historic role as the nation’s first law school to establish a scholarship program for training lawyers for public and community service,” states NYU President John Sexton, who announced Been’s appointment. “Professor Been has been at the cutting edge of legal scholarship in environmental and land use law for more than a decade.”

Been graduated from NYU School of Law in 1983 and clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and for Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Been, who joined the Law School’s faculty in 1990, teaches Property; Land Use Regulation; State and Local Government; and seminars on topics ranging from environmental justice to the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. She co-teaches the Colloquium on the Law, Economics, and Politics of Urban Affairs.

Been writes extensively about land use regulation. Her recent work has explored the effect investor protections in the North American Free Trade Agreement and a growing number of other bilateral and multilateral investment agreements may have on environmental and land use regulations. Been also is a leading authority on environmental justice: She authored one of the first major articles on the distributional fairness of environmental and land use policies, “What’s Fairness Got to Do with It: Environmental Justice and the Siting of Locally Undesirable Land Uses.” She also documented the extent and nature of environmental discrimination in a nationwide longitudinal study of the demographic characteristics of communities asked to host undesirable land uses.

Been also writes about the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the taking of property without just compensation, often serving pro bono to advise nonprofit environmental and land use groups faced with takings challenges to environmental protections. She is the co-author of the leading land use casebook, Land Use Controls, with Robert Ellickson.

The Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship Program Celebrates 50 Years of Inventive Legal Education

It was 1951. Dean Emeritus Arthur Vanderbilt had nurtured a vision for New York University School of Law during his tenure as dean, and was seeing it come alive. Vanderbilt had successfully moved the Law School, then known as the Law Center, from three floors of a factory building in Washington Square to a Georgian structure named Vanderbilt Hall. The dedication ceremony, held that September, was attended by “internationally famous jurists, lawyers, educators, and laymen,” and received press attention from the New York Times, Post, and Newsweek.

In the same month, “20 top-flight students, fresh from the campuses of as many American universities” arrived at NYU School of Law and graduated in 1954, the first of more than 800 Root-Tilden Scholars who have graduated to date.

Vanderbilt, who was dean from 1943 to 1948 and then chief justice of New Jersey, conceived of the Root-Tilden Scholarship Program in the 1940s, setting into motion the transformation of the Law School from a neighborhood law school to a nationally and internationally esteemed institution. Vanderbilt was troubled that some of the best students and lawyers had become more concerned with making a living than they were with participating in American democracy. He feared that students were no longer receiving the proper encouragement and guidance to become “unselfish and competent public leaders,” and to serve as leaders of the bar.

In creating the Root-Tilden Scholarship Program, Vanderbilt put NYU School of Law on course to its top-tier level, and laid the groundwork for a model of public service legal education and scholarship that has influenced law schools nationwide. He named the Program for two alumni, Elihu Root and Samuel Tilden, who exemplified his ideal lawyer.

Elihu Root, who graduated in 1867, was a U.S. attorney in New York, a leading member of the American bar, secretary of war under President McKinley, and secretary of state under President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, he received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to international law. Samuel Tilden, a graduate of the class of 1841 and a renowned prosecutor, was a popular New York governor who ran for president in 1876 against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. The results of this election were so close and hotly contested that a few news outlets even pronounced Tilden the winner in a Bush/Gore story of yore.

Interestingly, both Root and Tilden had played leading, and opposite, roles in the prosecution of the powerful New York City “Boss” Tweed in 1873, epitomizing the different forms public service can take. Tilden led the Citizens Committee of Seventy that combated the notorious Tweed Ring. Root, at 28, was a junior member of a distinguished defense team representing Tweed.

Program Architecture

The original structure of the Root-Tilden Program, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the graduation of its first class in 2004, has largely remained intact, although it has evolved to fit contemporary needs and culture. Vanderbilt designed the Program as a multipronged effort to build the reputation of the Law School, while also resolving what he saw as the “major shortcomings” of legal and pre-legal education: inadequate instruction in procedure, judicial administration, and public law and an insufficient undergraduate education.

To enhance legal education, Vanderbilt’s Program required scholars to take special courses in the humanities, social sciences, history, and natural sciences. In the early decades, they were also required to live together and to share mealtimes, for lunch and dinner, five days a week. To instill Vanderbilt’s values of public service, scholars regularly met with leaders in government, industry, and finance, just as the scholars do today through events like the Monday Night Speakers Series.

The Program was first funded by a $360,000 check from the Avalon Foundation. It was described as a five-year “experiment” in a lengthy letter from the foundation’s trustees that outlined the terms of their financial support.

“The whole purpose of this project is to attempt to determine whether it is possible to train promising young men so as to help attain again for the American bar the high position which it once held as the reservoir of altruistic and competent public leadership,” they wrote.

Twenty scholars were selected for the first class, two from each of the country’s then 10 judicial circuits. They were all, by requirement, unmarried men, under the age of 28, who each received $2100 a year to cover full tuition, books, and living expenses. Their success following graduation convinced the trustees at the Avalon Foundation that Vanderbilt’s Program had achievable goals, and they extended the Program with a gift of $875,000, which was matched by the Law Center Foundation and the University.

“The original idea was to bring in people who would have the highest respect for the laws of the country, and who would uphold them in the most ethical manner,” says Thomas Brome (’67), a Root alumnus. “These men would live together and dine together, forming a community of scholars who were infused with interests beyond the mechanical practice of law.”

Additionally, the Program’s promise of a debt-free legal education attracted students who might otherwise choose what were then more prestigious national schools.

“It was clear from my father’s comments that I would be crazy to choose Yale or Harvard when NYU offered what it did,” says David Washburn (’55), a Root-Tilden alumnus who had these three options. “We were a poor family from a small town in Vermont.”

Traditional Public Service

Like many of the Root alumni from the ’50s and ’60s, Washburn and Brome went on to work for prestigious firms in the private sector. Throughout their careers, both of them have been leaders in public service and also have given back to the Law School as substantial contributors, donating money and time.

Brome has been an instrumental force in bringing Roots together around the country for discussions about the Program’s financial issues and future framework, and to encourage active alumni support of the Program. An intern at the Legal Aid Society while a student at the Law School, Brome later served as Legal Aid’s board president while working as a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. According to Professor Anthony Thompson, who served as faculty director of the Program for four years beginning in 1999, Brome is emblematic of Root alumni of his generation.

“The earliest generation was charged with the task of being successful in both the public and the private sector,” Thompson says.

Thompson notes that the definition of public service law has been through several iterations, shaped by social and economic changes. However, he believes that certain core values and a commitment to upholding the highest standards of the law are preserved, and regardless of the generation, Root Scholars all share an “incredibly strong allegiance” to the Program.

A Case in Point

Former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Stewart Pollock (’57), for one, felt that it was his duty to go into public service if tapped for it, which he was — literally.

Pollock, who like Brome is a Law School trustee, worked in private practice for the better part of his early career, first for a firm that was a successor to Arthur Vanderbilt’s own firm, and then joining Clifford Starrett (’54), also a Root graduate, at Schenck, Price, Smith & King in Morristown, New Jersey.

“I was with Schenck, trying a case before our assignment judge who (after rendering a decision against me) resigned from the bench to run for governor,” says Pollock, referring to Judge Brendan Byrne.

Later that year, after Byrne won the New Jersey governor’s seat, Pollock went to file papers to appeal Byrne’s judgment and bumped into a friend who was soon to be sworn in as the New Jersey commissioner of human services. She invited Pollock to attend her swearing-in ceremony, and during the ceremony Pollock was tapped on the shoulder by a state trooper and invited to speak with Governor Byrne.

“There was a huge energy shortage at this time due to the oil embargo, and the New Jersey legislature responded by making the Board of Public Utilities full time and bipartisan,” Pollock says. “The [Democratic] governor told me he needed a Republican lawyer, someone he could trust, to serve full time on this board.”

The salary for this position was about a third what Pollock was making in private practice, and his oldest child was about to start college with three siblings lined up behind her. Pollock recalls losing 15 pounds in a week over the anxiety this decision caused.

“What kept bugging me was that I had accepted a public interest scholarship, and one of Vanderbilt’s tenets was that you should accept public service when offered,” he says. After conferring with his wife, he committed to two years in the position. Two years later, Pollock returned to private practice, but it was only a short while before he was tapped again. When Byrne was reelected, he called on Pollock to serve as his chief counsel. Again, Pollock assumed that he would return to a private firm upon completing his term. Yet, two years later Byrne appointed him to the Supreme Court of New Jersey, and the Honorable Stewart Pollock served on the bench for the next 20 years.

“I saw Byrne recently and told him, ‘I wonder what would’ve happened if I won that case!’” says Pollock, laughing. “I wouldn’t have been down there filing those papers, but life is like that — serendipity rules.”

In reality, serendipity would have played an entirely different role if not for the impact of the Root-Tilden Scholarship. Pollock may not have set forth on the path that led to the New Jersey Supreme Court, and from there to his seat on the board at the Law School’s Institute of Judicial Administration and a teaching post in the Institute’s appellate judges program. His sense of public service inspired his law clerks to make a gift in his name to the Law School’s public interest programs after he retired from the Supreme Court in 1999 and reentered private practice with Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Perretti. Without Vanderbilt’s mission to revive the role of lawyers as unselfish public leaders, Stewart Pollock’s legacy — and that of others to come — might have been quite different.

Women Rally for Admission

In the years that have elapsed since the earliest classes of scholars graduated, the law has undergone radical changes, as in 1963 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of Clarence Earl Gideon. In validating the right to free counsel in criminal cases, this decision created public defender offices across the country. Gideon broadened the scope of public service/public interest law, as did developments such as Ford Foundation funding for law reform organizations and the emergence of legal services offices. These advances, combined with the Vietnam War abroad and civil rights battles at home, ushered in a new era, during which the absence of women Roots became a frontline issue at the Law School.

That the inclusion of women was overdue was evidenced by the fact that some women just assumed they were eligible candidates and applied to the Program. In fact, one woman applicant had an ambiguous name and was inadvertently selected to be interviewed for the Program. Consideration was revoked when she arrived on campus and the administration saw that she was, quite plainly, not a man. Though most people were in favor of admitting women Roots, it was not until the end of the ’60s that this change occurred.

According to Janice Goodman (’71), it took power in numbers to lead a campaign for the inclusion of women into the Program, and in this respect the campaign had direct ties to the Vietnam War.

“I was part of the entering class of 1968, which was between 30 and 35 percent female,” she says. “The class before mine was about 10 percent women, but our numbers grew significantly because the government was no longer giving draft deferments for men in law school, so they were going elsewhere.”

The increasing number of women led to the formation of the Women’s Rights Committee, and as a member, Goodman rallied for the inclusion of women Roots. The administration had long operated by the misconception that allowing women into the Program would violate the terms of a trust agreement. In fact, when the matter was explored further with the Avalon Foundation, its representatives said that including women was not prohibited. The Women’s Rights Committee built its case and took it to the administration, which was overwhelmingly on their side. The scholarship began accepting women in 1969.

Erica Steinberger McLean (’72) was one of three women Root Scholars admitted that year, and while the “odd woman out” when it came to having a Root roommate in the dorms, she did not feel on the outs in any other respect. It was a natural progression to have women in the Program, not a radical change. The Program was made stronger for having advanced and adapted along with social and economic changes.

Days of Struggles

In the 1970s, a hotly politicized era, it became commonplace for law students to use their education to advocate for change within the Law School as well as on matters of domestic and international policies. This atmosphere of reform led to a period that is often described as the Program’s “mid-life crisis.” Students and members of the administration began to question the structure and value of the Root-Tilden Program as it was originally conceived, and often clashed in their opinions of how it should move forward.

Part of the “problem” was that Vanderbilt’s dreams had been realized. NYU School of Law had established itself as a national law school in no small part because the Root Program had attracted the “best of the best” students from every region of the country, elevating the caliber and expanding the geographic composition of the entire Law School. It was no longer necessary to waive tuition to attract top students, and the Law School had less need to recruit from the judicial circuits to achieve geographic diversity.

Most challenging, however, was the question of whether Roots should be obligated to take jobs in the public sector, be they with government agencies or nonprofit organizations. This question spoke to the Program’s philosophical core, as well as a changing financial reality.

“In 1967, a Root-Tilden Scholarship, which paid for full tuition, room and board, books, and a monthly allowance, was worth about $10,000,” Thomas Brome says. “The average salary to work for a firm was about $7500 a year and a legal aid salary was about $6500.”

By 1970, economic conditions in the country had changed. The income gap between many public and private sector positions began to increase dramatically, and tuition costs shot up. Financial support for Root Scholars was reduced to the cost of tuition with no additional stipend.

In hindsight, this moment in history is marked by unfortunate irony. Just as opportunities for lawyers to serve the public interest multiplied and broadened in scope, rising tuition costs made public service/public interest scholarship programs harder for law schools to sustain, and debts harder for graduates to pay. The widening income gap demanded that new sacrifices be made by lawyers who took public service jobs, and many top students nationwide were frustrated by what often seemed like a choice between earning a decent living and doing the work they believed to be important. These changes placed great pressure on the Root Program, as people began to question the validity of a program that funded the entire education of someone who might end up taking a highpaying job with a private firm. How could this be justified to loan-strapped alumni who weren’t in the Root-Tilden Program, but who worked in low-paying public sector jobs after graduation? And yet, how could the Program mandate an absolute definition of what was, and was not, a job that served the public interest?

Retooling for the Future

This crisis of the early ’70s inspired then-Dean Norman Redlich to appoint a special review committee in 1978 to evaluate the Program. This committee recommended that the dean appoint an administrator to reform the Root-Tilden Program. Another committee was formed in 1980, chaired by Professor Norman Dorsen. Its review of the Program was presented in the Dorsen Report, which has become the governing document for today’s Root Program. The report began by reaffirming the four major premises that Vanderbilt set forth:

• The scholarship should not be used as a general scholarship based solely on academic record.
• The scholarships should be awarded nationally, divided as equally as possible among the judicial circuits.
• The scholarships should be awarded by selection committees that include nonacademics, such as federal judges and public service practitioners.
• The scholarships should promote a curriculum beyond what is normally required by the Law School and foster a sense of public responsibility.

The committee then offered several recommendations. It stated that Root applications should filter first through the Law School admissions process and then through several additional screenings, with attention to a student’s geographic location, academic achievements, and commitment to public service/public interest work.

In another recommendation, the committee addressed recruitment based on the judicial circuits. While the Program’s reputation drew applicants from around the country, the committee continued to support the judicial circuit model to continue to ensure a broad geographic distribution in the Program.

The committee also saw it as essential for the Program’s survival that it live within its financial means, and to that end, the committee recommended that scholarship amounts be reduced to two-thirds tuition; the change was implemented in 1984.

While the committee addressed the question of whether students who went through the Program could, in good conscience, take jobs in the private sector, it was not able to entirely resolve it. In exploring the philosophical side of this issue, the Dorsen Committee asked: Is it morally justifiable, in the modern age, for recipients of a merit-based scholarship to accept high-paying jobs in the private sector?

First, the committee acknowledged that “young people develop and alter their perspectives,” which could mean entering the private sector despite having enrolled with different intentions. Further, the committee was not convinced that working outside the private sector necessarily meant working for the public interest, saying:

“Would an ardent environmentalist regard a lawyer for a construction union who argues for Westway or a lawyer for the Mountain States Legal Foundation who urges fewer restraints on strip mining as public interest lawyers?”

The Dorsen Report did not attempt to simplify this extremely loaded issue, but to ease tensions it suggested that an explicit payback system be instituted, so that a Root who made enough money was morally obligated to repay the scholarship as if it were a loan. This suggestion paved the way for the income-based loan repayment assistance programs that were developed later for non-Roots. In recent years, the debate over Root career choices has been addressed by an explicit moral obligation stating that Root graduates who earn a salary above the prevailing public interest salary should repay their scholarships.

The question of what defines public service and public interest, however, remains open, and perhaps always will be. However, the Root-Tilden-Kern Program, as the pioneer in public service scholarship programs, has worked through its growing pains and matured, allowing it to remain relevant and respected today.

“We have the widest range of public interest programming of any law school in America, and a central part of that is the visibility that the Root Program has received in the last 50 years,” Professor Thompson says.

Because NYU School of Law is so well known for its extraordinary program in public interest law, the Root Scholars have now become completely integrated into the extensive public interest community at the Law School. The activities sponsored by the Program, like the Monday Night Speaker Series, are open to all Law School students. Additionally, Thompson points out that tuition funding is available for the general population of students who enter public sector positions.

“What we are able to do with Roots on the front end, we are able to do for other public interest students on the back end, with loan repayment,” he says.

Continuing the Success

Currently, the Law School is involved in a financial campaign initiated by Jerome Kern (’60), whose name was added to the Program’s title in 1999. Kern, along with NYU Board of Trustees Chair and former Law School Board Chair Martin Lipton (’54) and Herbert Wachtell (’54), both Root graduates, and Leonard Rosen (’54) and the late George Katz (’54) founded Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, Katz & Kern in 1963. Kern is now a Law School trustee and chief executive officer of Kern Consulting. He donated $5 million to the Program, and jump-started the campaign to raise $25 million more to ensure the future and continued renown of the Program.

Kern is among others who would like the Program to be able to again offer full-tuition scholarships to 20 students each year. The Root-Tilden-Kern endowment campaign is well under way and, based on the positive progress so far, those involved in the campaign expect to meet the $30 million goal.

Kern’s support and continued involvement with the Program is, he says, inspired by the caliber of the candidates.

“I served on a selection panel four years ago and I was amazed by the quality of the
people who were applying for it, forget about those who won it,” he says.

Today’s Root-Tilden-Kern Scholars graduate from a top law school with an honor that has been celebrated for five decades. Three recent Root alumni, Alex Reinert (’99), Andy Siegel (’99), and Monica Washington Rothbaum (’99), clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justices and the list of prestigious public interest fellowships that Root and non-Root students at the Law School receive annually is, in a nutshell, very, very long.

“The Program enhances NYU School of Law’s reputation among the top law schools in the country, but it also provides a great public service,” Kern says. “It would be greatly satisfying to see it get more support from the universe at large.”

On Course for Another 50 Years

Stewart Pollock also sees the future of the Program through a wide lens.

“The horizons of the law, and therefore NYU School of Law, have expanded over the past half-century, and hence the public interest that graduates can serve has also expanded,” he says, explaining that he would accept a categorization of his own career in public service as provincial. “NYU School of Law students generally, and Roots in particular, now have the opportunity to serve on a much larger stage, in this country and other countries.”

Pollock admires the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan’s philosophy about interpreting the U.S. Constitution as a living document, and he believes that the constitution of the Root-Tilden-Kern Program should be interpreted in kind — as relevant to the time in which we live. “The next generation will be fulfilling their obligation as 21st-century lawyers,” Pollock says.

True to Vanderbilt’s ideals, the Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship Program continues to foster a great tradition of public service within the legal profession. As the Program celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first graduating class in 2004, it is fitting that a new Program director, Deborah Ellis (’82), and a new faculty director, Professor Vicki Been (’83), both Root graduates, have taken the helm (see p. 80), setting the Program on course for a centennial celebration.

Project on International Regulatory Conflicts Over Genetically Modified Crops and Foods

Global conflicts in trade and regulation of bioengineered foods and crops containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are being addressed through a three-year research project by the Center on Environmental and Land Use Law under the leadership of Professor Stewart. The most dramatic example of such conflict is the case recently filed by the United States against the E.U. before the World Trade Organization (WTO), complaining that the E.U. (driven by public opposition to GMOs) has shut out exportsof transgenic U.S. soy, corn, and other crops that have been modified with genes to make the crops resistant to pests and herbicides. The E.U. defends its GMO regulations based on potential environmental and health risks and the uncertainties posed by the new agricultural biotechnologies. Proponents of GMO crops contend that they provide significant economic and environmental benefits (including reduced use of chemical pesticides) and are not fundamentally different from other agricultural technologies, such as the use of hybridization techniques to create new “Green Revolution” crop varieties, that are widely accepted. GMO regulatory issues are an emerging concern in many other countries, including developing countries faced with the need to feed growing populations that look to GMO technologies to enhance crop yields, but that are concerned about potential risks.

The project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, involves NYU students as well as researchers from 10 different countries around the world. It was launched by Stewart; Professor Philippe Sands of the University of London, former Global Law Faculty member at the Law School; and the late Professor Nelkin, University Professor and member of the Law School faculty. Jane Bloom Stewart (’79), director of the Center’s International Environmental Legal Assistance Program, is also participating in the project. The project will issue a report proposing options and recommendations for managing international GMO regulatory conflicts so as to minimize damage to the international trade governance system, and ensure that countries, especially developing countries, have the legal and other capacities to make their own informed judgment about the appropriate role of GMO technologies.

The project is conducting studies of GMO regulatory policies in 10 different jurisdictions, including the United States, E.U., Switzerland, Japan, China, India, Kenya, South Africa, Costa Rica, and Brazil. NYU School of Law students have contributed research on GMO regulatory policies in Mexico and Egypt, and on international trade and GMO regulation in China. In addition, students in the project-related seminar on Law, New Technologies, and Risk, taught by Nelkin and Stewart (see p. 36), contributed papers on GMO food-labeling controversies, GMO-related issues of intellectual property rights for crop products in India and the United States, and the regulation of transgenic animals. The project has also completed a published study on the “Starlink” controversy, in which GMO corn that had regulatory approval for use solely in animal feed ended up in taco shells for human consumption. Through these studies, the project seeks to understand the roots of international conflicts in the divergent economic, political, social, and cultural factors that affect policies toward food and agricultural and GMO regulation in different countries.

In addition, Sands and Stewart are addressing the principles of international law and the institutions of international governance for dealing with such conflicts, including the principles and procedures used by the WTO for resolving GMO trade/regulation disputes; the role of the Biosafety Protocol to the Biodiversity Convention, which regulates international transfers of GMO crop and food products; and the activities of the Codex Alimentarius, an international body that sets safety standards for food and plant products. The roles of environmental and consumer organizations, groups representing the interests of developing countries and farmers, and business in international regulatory governance of GMOs are also being examined. Important issues being addressed by the project include the extent to which countries should be allowed, consistent with international trade rules, to invoke a “precautionary principle” to ban or restrict GMO products in the absence of specific scientific evidence that they pose a significant risk of harm, and the extent to which countries can invoke cultural or social values (for example, the desire to preserve traditional agricultural practices or foods) to justify such restrictions.

The project, initiated in 2002, recently held a meeting at the Rockefeller Foundation villa in Bellagio, Italy. The project leaders and researchers were joined by a group of international advisers, including important figures from government, environmental and consumer groups, and industry in the United States, Europe, and developing countries.

International Environmental Legal Assistance Program

NYU School of Law’s International Environmental Legal Assistance Program, directed by Jane Stewart, enlists NYU School of Law faculty, students, and outside experts to provide assistance to developing countries in strengthening and better enforcing their environmental and land use laws and policies. The Program has conducted major projects in China and Eastern Europe; Law School students have been significantly involved in research, law drafting, policy development, and other legal assistance activities of the projects. The Program is currently launching a major new project, funded by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), to assist four countries in the Danube region of Central and Eastern Europe to promote public access to environmental information. The Program provided legal assistance over a four-year period to the Environmental and Natural Resources Protection Committee of China’s National People’s Congress to revise and strengthen China’s environmental, land, and natural resources protection laws. Student work contributed to the enactment of a new land administration law and a significantly strengthened water pollution prevention and control law for China.

[SIDEBAR: Fellow Manages Hungary/Slovenia Project]

Recently, the Program successfully completed a two-year pilot project to assist government officials and environmental groups in Hungary and Slovenia to improve public access to environmental information and public participation in decision-making, with a special emphasis on water pollution issues. Isaac Flattau (’00), the Center’s first legal fellow, assisted Jane Stewart in directing the project. Law School students contributed research and helped develop legal options for improving public involvement in environmental decision-making in these countries. The pilot project was funded by GEF and implemented in partnership with the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe and Resources for the Future.

Based on the success of the pilot program, the Program and its partners were invited by GEF to create a similar, follow-on project to improve public access to environmental information in support of public participation in four other Central and Eastern European countries in the Danube River Basin. GEF recently approved the expanded project and provided $2 million to finance it; work is expected to begin in Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro in late 2003 and will continue through 2006. NYU School of Law students will play a significant role in the new project.

The Danube has suffered extensive contamination by discharges of nutrients and toxics. These discharges, including discharges from the Danube countries involved in the GEF projects, have significant transboundary impacts, including contamination of downstream reaches of the river and the Black Sea. The pilot project was designed to enable Hungary and Slovenia to provide better public access to Danube and other water-related environmental information, thereby increasing opportunities for informed public involvement in efforts to reduce discharges to the Danube River Basin. Experience in the United States, Western Europe, and elsewhere demonstrates that enhancing public access to environmental information promotes, through a variety of mechanisms, more effective environmental protection. Hungary and Slovenia, like the four other Danube River Basin countries that will participate in the new Follow-On Project, are in economic and political transition and currently experience significant barriers to effective pubic access to information, including the legacy of state secrecy and public passivity from prior undemocratic regimes; inadequate laws, implementing regulations, and guidance to public officials; and lack of government and NGO know-how.

Among these barriers, government and NGO participants from both pilot project countries agreed that the lack of guidance to government officials and their broad discretion to decide whether and how to provide water-related environmental information was a priority problem. The pilot project assisted Hungary and Slovenia in developing practical and effective measures to overcome these barriers, through a two-year program of capacity building and technical assistance. The project also assisted them in implementing the Aarhus Convention, a U.N.-sponsored international agreement to promote public access to environmental information and participation in environmental decision-making to which Hungary and Slovenia are parties. The measures developed through the pilot project for Hungary include a handbook for government officials who are responsible for providing environmental information to the public that explains how to carry out their responsibilities to provide this information. A similar measure, a set of guidelines for public officials, was developed for Slovenia. In addition, the pilot project developed recommendations for reforms of Slovenia’s current laws to improve public access to environmental information and a citizens’ guide to accessing water-related environmental information in Hungary. The project brought nine Hungarian and Slovenian representatives to the Law School and to Washington, D.C., for two weeks in Spring 2001. All project resource materials and measures developed through the project can be accessed on the Web site, www.rec.org/ REC/Programs/PublicParticipation/Danube Information/Outputs.html, which was created to help disseminate the results of the project.

The Follow-On Project in Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Serbia will be based on the successful experience gained in the pilot project in Hungary and Slovenia and will be directly linked to a larger, GEF-funded effort to restore and clean up the Danube River.

Global Administrative Law Project

Professors Kingsbury and Stewart are launching a major new NYU School of Law research Project on Global Administrative Law under the auspices of the Institute for International Law and Justice with the participation of the Center on Environmental and Land Use Law. The project will enlist NYU School of Law students and leading academics from around the world to help develop and shape an entirely new field of law — global administrative law — in order to promote greater public accountability and participation with respect to the decisions of international authorities in environmental and other regulatory fields.

[SIDEBAR: Stewart on Administrative Fatigue and Revivification]

Increasingly, decisions by international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, and by informal coordinating networks of national governmental officials in fields such as antitrust, telecommunications, and food and drug regulation, have significant social, economic, and environmental impacts in the context of intensified globalization at both the domestic and international levels. For example, some decisions by the WTO have held that domestic environmental regulatory measures in the United States and other countries are inconsistent with international free trade rules. In addition, the rules for implementing important international environmental treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol, Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, and the Biosafety Protocol to the Convention of Biodiversity, are established by international bodies. Yet, these decisions are made with only imperfect political accountability to domestic governments and their citizens. The project will consider whether techniques of administrative law, including procedural and participation requirements for decision-making and review mechanisms, could be a workable and desirable means of promoting greater accountability for international regulatory decisions. This goal might be accomplished by extending domestic administrative law requirements and procedures to international regulatory decisions, or by creating new bodies of administrative law at the international level. These arrangements will also have to take account of the important role of non-governmental organizations and multinational businesses in international regulatory governance.

The intellectual foundations for the project include prior work on accountability by the Institute for International Law and Justice, and a lecture by Stewart on Administrative Law in the 21st Century, delivered last fall on the occasion of his installation as the John Edward Sexton Professor of Law, which emphasizes international administrative law as an emerging major new field (see p. 43). The project will be conducted over several years, and will include the research and publication of a major scholarly book as well as workshops and an international conference on the subject of global administrative law. NYU School of Law students will be engaged in all phases of the project. For example, global administrative law will be the focus of this coming Spring’s Law School Colloquium on Globalization and Its Discontents, taught by Kingsbury and Stewart. The colloquium will enable students to research and write papers on this important emerging subject, including papers on the applications in the field of environmental law and other regulatory topics. Students will also be engaged in research and other work for the project book, workshops, and conference.

The project will document and assess existing applications of national or international law to the administration of global governance; evaluate the need for new or modified administrative law mechanisms to meet new demands for accountability arising from globalization; and frame the practical issues presented in relation to an integrated set of theoretical ideas that will help carry global administrative law forward as an academic field as well as an important area of practice. Building on experience with administrative law in countries in Europe and elsewhere as well as in the United States through studies by participating scholars from around the world, the project will consider how far global administrative law should focus on ensuring the legality of international regulatory decisions, or on broader objectives including promoting more informed and responsive exercise of policy discretion by international decision-makers, expanded participation, and effective regulatory performance. In doing so, it will need to confront some important distinctive characteristics of global governance arrangements, including their multi-level character, shared responsibility for decisions, informality of decision-making, the general absence of strong international courts or tribunals with power to review the decisions of international actors, and the substantial direct involvement of the private sector. These characteristics will make it difficult to simply transplant domestic administrative law arrangements to the global administrative level. At the same time, domestic experience should provide an important source of ideas and experience for the development of global administrative law. Further, there are emerging international practices, including the institution of an Inspection Panel at the World Bank to review compliance by World Bank officials with its environmental and other policies and the submission of amicus briefs by non-governmental organizations to WTO dispute settlement tribunals, that could also provide a foundation for the development of a global administrative law.

Program on Environmental Regulation

Project on the Valuation of Environmental Benefits

Four years ago, Dean Revesz embarked on a series of projects to develop and encourage a more progressive approach to the use of cost-benefit analysis in the environmental regulatory process. First, he explored the policies many regulatory agencies had adopted of discounting the value assigned to the saving of human lives in the context of latent harms (those in which there is a time lag between the exposure to a harmful substance and the resulting death), and in the context of harms to future generations. His work was published as “Environmental Regulation, Cost-Benefit Analysis, and the Discounting of Human Lives,” 98 Columbia Law Review 941 (1999). It revealed serious conceptual problems, not previously recognized, with treating the two situations alike, and with discounting the value of lives saved in future generations.

Next, working with Samuel Rascoff, a post-graduate fellow at the Center on Environmental and Land Use Law (see p. 64), Revesz examined the anti-regulatory bias of risk tradeoff analysis, in which the value of risk reductions are discounted to account for the fact that decreases in one risk sometimes perversely promote increases in other risks. When the risk of death in a car accident is reduced by the use of seatbelts or airbags, for example, the benefits of the risk reduction are discounted by the fact that people sometimes drive faster because of the security they feel from the safety features, thereby offsetting the reduction in risk from those safety devices. But the ancillary benefits of risk reduction, such as the fact that policies to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions associated with greenhouse gases may have the ancillary benefit of reducing other air pollutants as well, are not similarly taken into account. Revesz and Rascoff revealed the systematic inattention to such ancillary benefits in “The Biases of Risk Tradeoff Analysis: Towards Parity in Regulatory Policy,” 69 University of Chicago Law Review 1763 (2002). They argued that ignoring ancillary benefits while accounting for risk tradeoffs results in institutional and methodological biases against environmental and health and safety regulations. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funded Revesz’s work on risk tradeoff analysis.

Revesz currently is working with Laura Tesser (’00), the Center’s 2003-04 post-graduate fellow, to determine whether methodologies being used in pending regulatory proceedings to estimate the potential benefits of proposed environmental regulations have an anti-regulatory bias.

[SIDEBAR: Clean Air Litigation]

Revesz serves as a member of the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science Advisory Board, and participated in the committee’s review of various policies the EPA had adopted concerning the cost-benefit analysis of environmental regulation. The committee provided the peer review for EPA’s Guidelines for Preparing Economic Analyses (1999), and for its Cancer Risk Whitepaper (2000), which focused on the proper valuation of fatal cancer risk reduction benefits. Revesz also testified on issues concerning the valuation of human lives before the Committee on Environment and Public Works of the U.S. Senate.

Revesz describes his ongoing work on cost-benefit analysis as “an effort to move environmental regulatory processes toward a more rational approach, one that treats the valuation of environmental benefits no less sympathetically than the valuation of the costs of regulation.”

Program on Common Property Resources

Project on Market Mechanisms in Environmental Regulation

For more than 20 years, economists and legal scholars, led by Professor Stewart, have been arguing that many of the regulatory tools currently used to manage pollution and natural resources should be replaced with economic instruments. Nonetheless, regulators have been slow to adopt economic instruments, such as tradeable environmental allowances and taxes. The Center’s Project on Market Mechanisms, directed by Professor Wyman, is concerned with understanding the factors that promote and delay changes in the choice of environmental regulatory instrument.

A native of Canada, Wyman brings a comparative perspective to her work on environmental regulation. Reflecting her background, she is particularly interested in the implications of different institutional structures, and cultural and historical traditions for the choice of regulatory instrument.

This past year, Wyman spent a considerable amount of time studying the regulation of fisheries in the United States and other countries, a subject of considerable concern given the depleted state of many world fisheries and recent proposals for reforming U.S. fisheries regulation. Indeed, fisheries have been on Wyman’s mind so much recently that she gave her first-year Property students a final exam about a law professor (imaginary, of course) who decided mid-career that she would rather be a fisherwoman in a gentrifying New England fishing community.

Wyman’s work on fisheries builds on her previous research on the choice of instrument for regulating air pollution. In 2002, she published an article that challenged the conventional explanation for the greater openness that the United States has demonstrated for experimenting with air pollution markets compared with other countries. Conventionally, the United States’ greater willingness to experiment with pollution markets has been explained as a product of a greater enthusiasm here for markets and property rights more generally. But drawing on a case study of air pollution regulation in Canada, Wyman argued that the large number of potential market participants in the United States, and the U.S. environmental regulatory institutions, may have been more influential in prompting the early openness to markets than a pro-market culture. In 2003-04, Wyman will convene a roundtable on the use of market mechanisms to manage commons resources such as air, water, and fisheries. The roundtable will bring together parties who have been actively involved in implementing property rights and market approaches for regulating commons resources to explore the factors promoting, and complicating, the introduction of tradeable environmental allowances.

Program on Land Use Law Project on Regulatory

Expropriations in International Law — Update

In April 2002, NYU School of Law hosted a stellar group of academics, practitioners, and policymakers from environmental, land use, comparative, and international law to debate how far international trade and investment agreements should go in requiring legal protections for foreign investors who complain that a host government’s environmental or land use regulations have diminished the value of their investments. That issue is a focal point in the broader debate over the tensions between liberalizing international trade and investment and maintaining domestic protection for the environment, public health, and labor. It is central, for example, to current controversies over the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control that the World Health Organization recently opened for signature, and the possibility that the World Trade Organization might seek to negotiate a multilateral investment agreement.

The conference, organized by Professors Been and Sands, along with Lenore Marquis (’02) and Stephanie Toti (’03), and the colloquium editors of the NYU Environmental Law Journal, continues to have a significant impact on debate in Washington and abroad over what kind of investor protections should be included in trade and investment agreements. Articles resulting from the conference were published in volume 11 of the Environmental Law Journal. In addition, as a result of the conference, Been has published a series of works exploring the challenges investor protections in international agreements may pose for environmental and land use regulators around the world. Her recent work includes:

> “The Global Fifth Amendment: NAFTA’s Investment Protections and the Misguided Quest for an International Regulatory Takings Doctrine,” 78 New York University Law Review 30 (2003) (with Joel Beauvais (’02));

> “Will International Agreements Trump Local Environmental Law?,” in New Ground: The Advent of Local Environmental Law (John R. Nolon, ed. 2003);

> “NAFTA’s Investment Protections and the Division of Authority for Land Use and Environmental Controls,” 32 Environmental Law Reporter 11001 (2002).

Project on Pricing Development

Fundamental economic principles require that the price of a good or service include all of the costs and benefits that the production of that good creates. If producers are able to “externalize” some of the costs of their activities on others, such as neighboring landowners, taxpayers, or consumers, they will decide to make more of a product than is efficient, or socially desirable. The problem of how to force decision-makers to internalize all the costs of their activity drives much of property and tort law, as well as environmental, land use, and health and safety regulation. Many of the nation’s land use regulatory systems currently allow land development projects to externalize some of the costs of the development. Taxpayers, neighboring landowners, neighboring jurisdictions, and future generations often subsidize part of the expense of the infrastructure needed to support the development, or of the clean-up or mitigation of the environmental damage the development creates, for example. Professor Been, who has long been a student of local government policies designed to force land developers to bear, or “internalize” the social costs of their development projects, has launched a series of initiatives designed to help land use and environmental policy-makers understand how local governments can more effectively deploy user fees, development impact fees, and local tax policies to ensure that the costs development projects impose on a community do not outweigh the benefits the projects bring.

As a first step, Been, working with Elizabeth Stein (’03), is using a nationwide survey of local governments to document the prevalence and nature of local government efforts to value or “price” development projects accurately. The survey seeks to remedy substantial gaps in our understanding of how local governments employ fee and tax policies. It probes how municipalities assess the potential costs and benefits of development, and seeks to understand the legal, political, and methodological barriers local governments face in their efforts to conduct more accurate assessments.

The results of the survey, along with interviews of local government officials, will form the basis of a conference designed to bring the most innovative and thoughtful legal, urban planning, and economic experts together to chart out an agenda for the research needed to help local governments better assess the costs and benefits of development proposals. The conference, which will be held in spring 2004, will identify the conceptual, methodological, and technological advances needed to help local governments more accurately assess the likely impact of proposed developments and the costs and benefits of those impacts, and will attempt to jump-start the research necessary to secure those advances. Conference participants will grapple with such questions as how local governments should address the distributional impacts of better pricing, whether and how intergovernmental institutional arrangements may promote better cost-benefit analysis, and how legal restrictions on the use of impact fees and taxes can promote efficient fees and deter over-regulation or abusive regulatory practices by local governments.

Depending on the results of the survey and the conclusions reached in the conference, Been then plans to develop both research projects, and training and legal assistance programs to help local governments overcome the barriers they face in assessing the potential costs and benefits of development projects accurately. “There is currently no ‘information bank’ that local governments could turn to with confidence to get the latest research on cost-benefit analysis of development projects,” Been noted. “There is no ‘best practices’ library of analytical tools that have proved helpful, or even of the assessment policies or user and impact fee or tax policy tools that local governments have used successfully. One initiative NYU School of Law might undertake would use the model of our clinical programs to develop a ‘policy analysis clinic’ in which law, planning, and urban economics students and faculty would provide research and policy analysis as well as legal advice to local governments seeking to improve their cost-benefit analysis of development projects, design better impact fee or tax policies, or defend those policies against legal challenges.” Been cautioned that “the ‘solutions’ must await better information about the problem,” but she sees “enormous possibilities for our students to help local governments develop better policies, while improving their own research, analytic, and problemsolving skills.”

The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy

Founded in 1994, the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy is widely acknowledged to be the leading academic research center in New York City devoted to the public policy aspects of real estate development. The Center, which is directed by Professor Schill, is dedicated to the following three missions:

> Conducting objective academic and empirical research on the legal and public policy issues involving real estate, housing, and urban affairs, with a particular focus on New York City.

> Providing a forum for discussion and interchange among leading practitioners, policy-makers, scholars, faculty, and students about real estate and urban policy.

> Promoting innovative teaching techniques and learning experiences in real estate and urban-related topics.

The Center draws on the strengths of the university’s faculty. Fifteen faculty members from NYU School of Law, the Wagner School of Public Service, the Stern School of Business, and the Economics Department of the Faculty of Arts and Science participate in the Center’s interdisciplinary research, teaching, and programmatic activities. In addition, the Center employs two full-time research fellows, as well as several student research assistants.

Studies

The Center and its staff have completed numerous studies on issues of housing, development, and planning in New York City, including the projects described below.

The Impacts of Housing Development, Crime Reduction, and Education Quality on Housing Values in Low- and Moderate- Income Neighborhoods

Center faculty have published two articles and completed three additional papers on the impact of city housing programs, crime reductions, and school quality on neighborhood housing values. The first article, which found that middle-income homeownership projects generated significant property value increases, was featured recently in an article in the New York Times. Future work in this area will examine the link between economic development and environmental amenities and home values.

Reducing the Cost of New Housing Construction in New York City

The Center’s study on how to reduce the cost of housing construction, co-sponsored by the New York City Partnership and the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, has had considerable influence since its publication in 1999. The study’s recommendations were published in an article in the New York Times, were endorsed by Mayor Giuliani in his 2001 State of the City Speech, and inform many of the proposals Mayor Bloomberg set forth in his 2002 New Marketplace housing plan. In May 2003, Schill presented the findings to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Understanding Differences in Cooperative and Condominium Apartment Values in New York City

Schill and Furman Fellow Ioan Voicu, in partnership with appraiser Jonathan Miller, have begun a series of studies on the valuation of cooperatives and condominiums in New York. The first paper examined whether the difference in legal form affects value and was featured in a cover story in the New York Times Real Estate Section. Future papers will examine the relationship between cooperative/condominium prices and the stock market, the city’s economy, and distance from amenities.

Tracking Changes in New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods

The Center publishes an annual report, titled The State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods, which contains more than 300 pages of the latest data on housing and neighborhood conditions. In 2002, the Center received a $457,000 matching grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce to create an interactive Web-based data system for New York City that would make all of this data and mapping capability available to all New York citizens, free of charge. The New York City Housing and Neighborhood Information System (NYCHANIS) is scheduled to become operational in September 2003 (see p. 108).

Events

Each year the Furman Center sponsors a series of events to bring members of New York’s real estate and development community together with academics, students, and policy-makers to discuss important policy issues facing New York City.

Research Conferences

The Center has sponsored several conferences over the past eight years on a variety of issues. These conferences have featured academic papers and discussants from a variety of fields. The results have typically been published in conference volumes. The topics included housing and community development policy in New York City; rent regulation (co-sponsored with the Rent Guidelines Board); immigration in New York City (co-sponsored with Fannie Mae); research on housing and economic development, and policies to promote affordable housing (both co-sponsored with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York).

International Housing Conferences

The Center has co-sponsored three conferences with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development that have brought together housing and community development officials from around the world to discuss creative solutions to housing and urban planning problems. The most recent conference took place in March and featured housing professionals from Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Northern Ireland, Norway, and Poland, as well as the United States.

Housing Breakfasts

Over the past year, the Center has hosted breakfasts for members of the housing and community development industry as well as the academic community. Recent speakers included Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, Housing Commissioner Jerilyn Perine, Finance Commissioner Martha Stark (’86), and Center Research Fellow Shaun Donovan.

VU 2002 and VU 2003 Real Estate Market Panels

The Furman Center has co-sponsored with the New York Times biannual panels on the commercial and residential real estate markets. Recent guests have included Daniel Brodsky, Barbara Corcoran, William Rudin, Stephen Spinola, and William Zeckendorf.

Students

Students are at the center of all the Furman Center activities. NYU students participate in all Center conferences. In addition, instruction takes place in several other ways:

Segal Real Estate Roundtable

Through the generosity of NYU School of Law alumni Andrew (’92) and Justin (’96) Segal, the Center funds monthly lunches for students modeled after the Dean’s Roundtable. Speakers have included Henry Elghanayan (’66), chief executive officer, Rockrose Development; Jay Furman (’71), principal, RD Management; Fran Reiter, former New York City deputy mayor for economic development and planning; Jonathan Rose, president, Jonathan Rose Associates and Jonathan Vogel (’96), general counsel, Jonathan Rose Associates (see p. 60); Joseph Rose, partner, Georgetown Company; Jack Rudin, chairman, Rudin Management; Larry Silverstein, president and chief executive officer, Silverstein Properties; Martha Stark (’86), commissioner of the New York City Department of Finance; and Carl Weisbrod (’68), president, Alliance for Downtown New York.

Student Research Fellowships

Through the generosity of two alumni — Herbert Gold (’40) and Ronald Moelis (’82)— two student fellowships have been endowed in the Center. Each year students compete for the opportunity to receive the fellowships, which also include the opportunity to work on research projects with Center faculty.

The Authority

Four students work on The Authority, a quarterly journal devoted to the law of housing and urban redevelopment. The Authority is edited by Schill for the Housing and Development Law Institute in Washington, D.C.

Center faculty and staff also advise or consult with several city agencies, governmental officials, and non-profit organizations. For example, Schill serves or has served as a member of the Housing Task Forces of City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. In addition, he is vice chair of the New York City Loft Board and a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Neighborhood Investment Advisory Panel. He is also a member of the board of directors of Neighborhood Restore.

In the first year, students are exposed to environmental and land use issues in their property and torts courses. Professors Been, Schill, and Wyman teach first-year Property, and regularly use land use and environmental problems as a springboard to discuss basic property law concepts. The modern-day property course (which is a far cry from the tortured study of the rule against perpetuities that many alumni may recall) focuses on such issues as the tragedy of the commons, and the regulatory responses to the broader problem of externalities that “tragedy” embodies; the convergence of property, contract, and tort law in the landlord/tenant revolution of the 1970s and ’80s; and the special challenges posed to property law by residential racial segregation and the need for affordable housing. Today, the Property course focuses less on the details of the estates system, and more on how the law might respond to Dr. Seuss’s classic warning, The Lorax, which illustrates the cover of this magazine. Similarly, in firstyear torts, Professor Stewart and others introduce a range of environmental examples to illustrate the basic principles of tort law.

In addition, students may elect to take a section of the Law School’s new Administrative and Regulatory State course that focuses on environmental regulation. The Administrative and Regulatory State recently was added to the first-year curriculum to give students a basic grounding in public law and regulation, and to counterbalance the long-standing dominance of private law subjects in first-year courses. The section of the course that focuses on environmental regulation, taught by Stewart, uses the Clean Air Act as an example to help students examine the interplay between the legislative process, administrative implementation of regulatory statutes, judicial review of administrative action, and statutory interpretation in the development and implementation of regulatory programs. The course equips students to understand and work with legislative and administrative procedures and materials and to analyze statutes closely. It supplies an invaluable foundation for the many upper-year courses and fields of law practice that involve statutes and administrative programs. For students with an interest in environmental law, Stewart’s section provides an invaluable introduction to many of the important themes and issues in current U.S. environmental law, including the reasons for adoption of environmental regulatory programs and their basic design; issues of federalism in environmental policy; the choice of regulatory instruments, including economic incentives and informationbasedsystems as well as traditional command regulation; and the relevance of economic analysis and other normative foundations for environmental regulation.

Upper Years

The Foundational Courses

Students interested in environmental or land use law usually begin their second years by taking one or more of several introductory survey courses.

Environmental Law offers an introduction to the legal regulation of environmental quality. The course considers the theoretical foundations of environmental regulation, including economic and non-economic perspectives on environmental degradation; the scientific predicate for environmental regulation; the objectives of environmental regulation; the valuation of environmental benefits; the distributional consequences of environmental policy; and the choice of regulatory tools, such as command-and-control regulation, taxes, marketable permit schemes, liability rules, and informational requirements. The course then analyzes the role of the various institutional actors in environmental regulation, the allocation of regulatory authority in a federal system, and public choice explanations for environmental regulation. After laying that foundation, the course analyzes the principal environmental statutes, particularly the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act; the Endangered Species Act; and the National Environmental Policy Act.

International Environmental Law surveys the customary law and treaty-based principles, rules, and institutions whereby states cooperate to respond to transboundary and global environmental challenges. After a general overview of the legal and political landscape, the course focuses on those challenging issues currently shaping international environmental law, including global warming, declining fish stocks, loss of biological diversity, the regulation of genetically modified organisms, and the potential clashes between environmental objectives and the rules and institutions of the World Trade Organization. The course combines framing lectures with interactive sessions in which students are encouraged to test the boundaries of international environmental law by arguing opposite sides of these controversial issues.

[SIDEBAR: Administrative and Regulatory State]

Land Use Regulation examines how land use is shaped and controlled through government regulation. It begins by discussing the circumstances under which regulation might be needed to temper the private market ordering of land use patterns. It develops a typology of the kinds of regulatory and market-based tools that are available to control land use, and provides a framework for evaluating the appropriateness of alternative tools. It also explores the rights an owner of land has if a particular regulation of land is inefficient, unfairly burdensome, or unfairly disruptive of the owner’s settled expectations, or an infringement on the owner’s civil liberties. The course then switches sides to examine the rights those who oppose the landowner’s plans may have to stop, or require modifications to, those plans. Finally, the course focuses on particular problems that plague the land use regulatory system, such as the financing of development, exclusionary zoning, the fair distribution of undesirable land uses, and “smart growth.”

Other areas of the law. In addition to the introductory environmental and land use courses, students interested in these areas usually take related foundational courses, such as Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Corporations, International Law, Local Government Law, Real Estate Transactions, Remedies, and Taxation.

Seminars and Colloquia

To build on the foundational courses, students take a wide variety of more specialized seminars and colloquia.

Advanced Environmental Law Seminar

Advanced Environmental Law, which will be taught in 2003-04 by Professor Wyman, concerns prominent issues in environmental and natural resources law and policy in the United States and abroad. Topics covered include the ongoing debates about the use of analytical tools such as cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle in establishing environmental objectives, and current concerns about the factors now influencing the choice of instrument in environmental regulation, especially the obstacles to greater use of economic instruments such as tradeable permits. The seminar also considers interjurisdictional disputes over the allocation of water, current controversies in the regulation of fisheries and marine mammals, and environmental issues specific to densely populated urban areas. The interaction between international trade and the environment also is discussed, and in this context the seminar considers the ongoing conflict between the United States and Europe about the regulation of genetically modified organisms.

[SIDEBAR: Globalization and Its Discontents Colloquium]

Colloquium on Globalization and Its Discontents

The Globalization and Its Discontents Colloquium provides a weekly forum in which leading scholars from diverse fields present papers on legal and institutional responses to the consequences of globalization, and discuss those papers with students and faculty in a lively roundtable format. The colloquium is one of a number of curricular innovations resulting from the Law School’s recent recruitment of five outstanding new faculty in international law—Professor Kingsbury and Professors Philip Alston, David Golove, Mattias Kumm, and Joseph Weiler— joining the Law School’s extraordinary senior international law faculty. In Spring 2003, the colloquium was convened by Professors Kingsbury and Stewart.

Over the semester, students use class discussion and written work to consider core theoretical issues about globalization. They consider, for example: the meanings and usages of concepts such as “governance,” “civil society,” “democracy,” and “accountability” in the context of increasing international interdependence; the significance of global inequalities; relations between international and national law; arguments for and against international regulation by formal institutions; the need for and prospects of international administrative law; and unmet demands for justice and fairness at the global level.

These theoretical issues are then applied and developed in the concrete setting of current global problems and controversies, including many involving environmental and land use law. In Spring 2003, sessions tackled the following issues:

> Governance of Plant Genetic Resources: A Regime Complex (paper presented by Professor Kal Raustiala, UCLA Law School, co-authored with David G. Victor, Stanford University)

> Taking Embedded Liberalism Global: The Corporate Connection (paper presented by Professor John Gerard Ruggie, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, formerly U.N. assistant secretary-general and senior adviser for strategic planning to Secretary-General Kofi Annan)

> Regulating Genetically Modified Organisms (paper presented by Professor Stewart)

> The Jurisprudential Achievement of the WTO Appellate Body (paper presented by Professor Robert Howse, University of Michigan Law School)

> The New Transformation of Europe (paper presented by Professor Charles Sabel, Columbia Law School)

> The Constitutional Challenge of New Governance in the European Union (paper presented by Grainne de Burca, European University Institute, with comment by Professor Francesca Bignami, Duke University Law School, and Emile Noël Visiting Fellow, Jean Monnet Center, NYU School of Law)

> Competition Law and Policy: Global Governance Issues (paper presented by Professor Frédéric Jenny, ESSEC, Paris, and vice-chair, Conseil de la concurrence; chair, OECD Competition Law and Policy Committee; and chair, WTO Working Group on Trade and Competition Policy; with comment by NYU School of Law Professors Harry First and Eleanor Fox)

> Climate Change and the Rules vs. Standards Problem in International Governance (paper presented by Professor Daniel Bodansky, Emily and Ernest Woodruff Professor of International Law, University of Georgia, formerly climate change coordinator, U.S. Department of State, 1999-2001)

> Is There Really a “Democratic Deficit” Problem in Global Governance? (paper presented by Professor Andrew Moravcsik, Government Department, Harvard University)

In 2004, the colloquium will focus on international administrative law and the development of mechanisms for participation and accountability for international decisionmakers and institutions. This is part of a major research project convened by Kingsbury and Stewart along with Institute for International Law and Justice Hauser Research Fellow Nico Krisch, in which students are actively involved.

[SIDEBAR: Colloquium on the Law, Economics, and Politics of Urban Affairs]

Colloquium on the Law, Economics, and Politics of Urban Affairs

This colloquium, taught jointly by Professors Been and Schill from the Law School and Professor Ellen from the NYUWagner School of Public Service, allows students to explore current debates about critical urban policy issues. Leading scholars from planning, law, economics, and political science present early drafts of new research, which students then critique and discuss. The colloquium also is widely attended by faculty from the Wagner School and its Taub Urban Research Center, and from the Metropolitan Studies Program of the College of Arts and Sciences. Faculty from other area law schools and urban planning and economics programs, government officials, and policy-makers from both New York City and Washington, D.C., also frequent the colloquium. Topics addressed in Fall 2002 included:

> Local Land Use Controls and Demographic Outcomes in a Booming Economy (by John Quigley, I. Donald Terner Distinguished Professor and Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley)

> Housing and Political Participation (by John Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York)

> Gated Communities: Protecting Public Values in the Private City (by Richard Briffault, Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation, Columbia Law School)

> Medium-term Economic Prospects for New York City in the Aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks (by Andrew Haughwout, senior economist, Federal Reserve Bank of New York)

> School Vouchers: A Critical View (by Professor Helen Ladd, Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University)

> Gentrification and Displacement in New York City (by Lance Freeman, assistant professor, Urban Planning Department, Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, and Frank Braconi, executive director, Citizens Housing and Planning Council)

Housing and Urban Development: Law and Policy

This seminar, which will be taught in Fall 2003 by Adjunct Professor Walker, explores a broad range of issues concerning U.S. housing policy. Students study the historical development of interventions in the housing market as well as the economic justifications for these interventions, and compare and contrast various regulatory and spending programs, with special attention to the comparative advantages and disadvantages of government programs designed to stimulate supply and those geared to increasing demand. The course also addresses nonprofit, community-based housing; discrimination in the housing market; housing finance; and homelessness. Throughout the semester, students draw comparisons and contrasts between housing laws and policies in New York City and those of the nation as a whole.

Indigenous Peoples in International Law

Issues concerning indigenous peoples (including descendants of pre-colonial inhabitants in the Americas and Australasia, and groups in Asia and elsewhere) are increasingly significant in many countries and in the United Nations, World Bank, Organization of American States, and other international institutions. The Indigenous Peoples seminar, taught by Professor Kingsbury, discusses challenges to standard liberal concepts and to democratic theory posed by such issues as the meaning and problems of the concept of indigenous rights; the nature and meaning of the right to self-determination; tensions between individual rights and group rights, such as those that arise over discriminatory membership rules; minority rights regimes in international law; removal of children from indigenous communities; the activities of multinational corporations; tensions between indigenous peoples’ rights and environmental law; and indigenous peoples’ rights under international trade and intellectual property regimes.

[SIDEBAR: Environmental and Land Use Topics Featured in Other Law School Colloquia]

Several student papers in the Spring 2003 seminar focused on environmental issues. Kristen Genovese (’04) wrote on “Alaska Native Corporations, Oil Development, and Environmental Management”; Deborah Im (’04) analyzed “Korean Transnational Logging Companies and Indigenous Land Rights in Nicaragua”; and Nicholas Olmsted (J.D.-M.P.P. ’03) explored “The Central Kalahari Game Reserve and San Land Rights in Botswana.” Many students wrote on environmental problems facing indigenous peoples in other courses also. Aderito Soares (LL.M. ’03), a member of the East Timor Constituent Assembly, for example, drew on his firsthand experience to write on “Community Responses to the Freeport McMoRan Mine in West Papua.” Some of the students developed their seminar papers into publishable notes. Gerald P. Neugebauer III (’03) is publishing his exploration of recent attempts to use human rights to protect Latin American indigenous groups from harmful petroleum exploration, for example, as “Indigenous Peoples as ‘Stakeholders’: Influencing Resource-Management Decisions Affecting Indigenous Community Interests in Latin America,” New York University Law Review (2003). His note argues that such legal protections have failed to fully safeguard indigenous communities, and explores whether increased corporate use of the “stakeholder” theory of corporate decisionmaking would be a better approach. Kingsbury is editing a special issue of the International Journal of Minority and Group Rights that is publishing a collection of intensively revised papers by students in the seminar dealing with indigenous peoples’ issues in East and Southeast Asia. Many of these papers make available to the scholarly community source materials and commentary not otherwise available in English.

Law, New Technologies, and Risk Seminar

Professors Stewart and the late Dorothy Nelkin introduced this seminar in 2002. It explores the role of law and legal institutions in addressing the environmental risks of new technologies, focusing on the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in foods and crops. The seminar examines the emerging conflicts over GMOs, including the arguments of proponents that the technology will enhance food productivity while lessening use of agricultural chemicals, and those of opponents, who emphasize the novelty of the technology and claim that it poses uncertain but potentially significant environmental and health risks. The seminar considers the role of public values and attitudes in relation to government regulation and consumer acceptance of GMO products, international trade/regulatory conflicts over GMOs between the United States and the European Union, and the potential role of GMOs in developing country efforts to meet the food needs of their growing populations. Guest speakers addressed the following issues in the seminar:

> Environments at Risk: Norms and Public Policy (by Mark Sagoff, The Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland at College Park)

> Technology-Based Health Risks, Corporate Practices, and Regulation in Historical Perspective (by David Rosner, Columbia University)

> The Biotech Wars (by Susan Sechler, Rockefeller Foundation)

> Scientific Uncertainties and Conflicting Expertise (by Rebecca Goldburg, Environmental Defense)

> A Business Perspective on Biotech (by Jonathan Malkin, ATP Capital, LP)

> Consumer and Environmental Protests (by Carol Foreman, Consumer Federation of America)

> Questions of Liability and Risk Management (Gordon Stewart, Insurance Information Institute)

> Domestic Regulatory Frameworks (Emily Marden (’98), Sidley, Austin, Brown &Wood LLP)

Property Theory

The concept of private property arguably has been more central to U.S. law and legal scholarship in the past 25 years than it has been any at any point since the period from the 1880s through the 1930s — the Lochner era. Now, as then, contentious debates in society at large about the appropriate role of government often are translated into conflicts about the boundaries of private property, and the related question of the constitutional limits of government regulation of private property. The Advanced Property Law seminar, which will be taught in Fall 2003 by Professor Wyman, examines contemporary debates about property using a range of legal, historical, and philosophical materials. Among the topics students explore are the classic rightsbased and utilitarian justifications for property, and the contemporary use of these theories. Throughout the seminar, students apply such theories to current debates in areas such as environmental and land use law, as well as intellectual property law.

Seminar on Community Development Law

This seminar, taught by Adjunct Professor Tesdell, introduces students to major policy and legal issues related to housing, economic development, and development finance activities of community-based organizations. It examines such recent legislative initiatives as creating empowerment zones, altering the Community Reinvestment Act, and capitalizing community development financial institutions. In simulation exercises, students grapple with policy concerns raised in class as they negotiate community control of resources, draft restrictions on the use of housing, design and create corporate structures, deal with regulatory constraints, and debate adoption of various corporate forms. Students learn and apply the legal skills of the corporate, tax, and real estate transactional and regulatory lawyer.

Seminar on Land Use, Housing, and Community Development in New York City

This seminar, co-taught by Professor Schill and Adjunct Professors Gerecke and Salama, analyzes the roots and consequences of urban distress, and assesses federal, state, local, and community responses to urban distress. It reviews initiatives to build housing and commercial projects in low-income communities and analyzes several aspects of these initiatives, including policy underpinnings, real estate financing, the role of subsidies, community participation, legal procedures for undertaking various land use actions, environmental review processes, and legal challenges to these projects. Students work together in groups to provide research and policy analysis for local community- based organizations. Last year, for example, students analyzed proposed reforms to the city’s land disposition policies for New York City Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff; explored how to legalize or enforce the building code against illegal residential dwellings in New York for Asian Americans for Equality; evaluated the city’s tax lien sale process for New York City’s Housing and Preservation Department; examined a new tenant cooperative initiative of the city’s Third Party Transfer Program for Neighborhood Restore; and assessed housing preservation in the financial district for New York City Councilman Alan Gerson.

Clinics

To put what is learned in foundational courses, seminars, and colloquia to the test, many students take one or more of the Law School’s clinical courses.

Environmental Law Clinic

The Environmental Law Clinic, co-taught by Adjunct Professors Chasis and Goldstein, involves students in public interest environmental litigation and policy initiatives in the New York City office of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the nation’s leading public interest environmental groups. Students recently have worked, under the close supervision of NRDC attorneys, on projects involving protection of New York City’s drinking water, global fisheries, energy efficiency and conservation, new source review of proposed power plants, the Everglades National Park and Florida Bay, mercury contamination, lead abatement, and environmental justice litigation. Students attend a weekly NRDC seminar to review and discuss a range of cases and projects being undertaken by the organization.

[SIDEBAR: Environmental Law Clinic]

International Environmental Law Clinic

The International Environmental Law Clinic engages Law School students in major projects exploring international environmental issues, such as climate change, environmental law reform in developing countries, biodiversity protection, resolution of international water conflicts, public access to environmental information, and controls on genetically modified organisms. The clinic places students with public and non-profit clients, including U.N. organizations, developing countries, international and domestic environmental groups, and international development banks. Students research and prepare legal briefs, position papers, and law reform strategies for the negotiation and implementation of international and regional environmental agreements and domestic law efforts to ensure sustainable development. The clinic is linked to the International Environmental Law course, which provides students with a grounding in the basic elements of international environmental law and a forum to explore cross-cutting issues in the field. Students have an opportunity to share and discuss with other students the insights they have gained through their client work.

[SIDEBAR: International Environmental Law Clinic]

Community Economic Development Clinic

NYU School of Law is pleased to introduce a new clinic on community economic development, taught by Professor López. The clinic responds to the growing recognition that a wide variety of lawyers now find themselves dealing increasingly (some say, inescapably) with economic development work, but lack the training and tools to address the issues such work poses. The clinic will address that gap through a classroom component in which students will study theories about and actual dynamics of political economies; the degree to which many familiar and notable development initiatives characteristically reflect and respond to the needs and aspirations of low-income, of color, and immigrant communities; how lawyers and other problem solvers (and the offices, organizations, coalitions, and networks of which they are a part) might conceive of and follow through on their work to help shape future initiatives responsive to these concerns and aspirations; how the use of sophisticated empirical research might inform and make accountable public, private, and mixed ventures (particularly in terms of promoting social wealth, equality, and civic participation); and the problem-solving practices of all those (including lawyers) involved in community economic development work. Students will regularly participate in simulated exercises designed to identify and enhance those ideas, skills, and sensibilities central to community economic development practice.

The classroom component will be supplemented and enriched through fieldwork in which students will work on such projects as evaluating whether, and influencing how, empowerment zones and redevelopment proposals accountably respond to community needs; assessing how best to incorporate minority, immigrant, and exoffender populations into neighborhood, metropolitan-wide, and regional planning processes; assisting in the enforcement of laws governing access to capital; and providing advice and counsel to small and micro-businesses. The clinic will work closely with the Center for the Practice & Study of Community Problem Solving, which López recently founded at NYU School of Law.

UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

The environmental and land use program at NYU School of Law is seriously committed to training lawyers to help make things “get better.” Blessed with outstanding students who come to the Law School caring deeply about the environmental threats that face our nation and world, the Law School’s world-class faculty offers a rich array of foundational courses, specialized seminars, cutting-edge colloquia, and innovative clinical programs designed to equip those students with not only the will, but also the intellectual tools, problem-solving skills, and practical experience to tackle those threats. Under the umbrella of the Center on Environmental and Land Use Law and the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, J.D. and graduate students, post-graduate fellows, and an extraordinary collection of core faculty, affiliated faculty from other University departments and schools, global professors, and adjunct faculty from the top of the New York bar collaborate to produce path-breaking research and practical solutions to conundrums that besiege environmental and land use regulation. As the home of the Hauser Global Law School Program and its transformative approach to legal education for a globalized world, NYU School of Law provides unparalleled training for students to confront the challenges of environmental problems that know no jurisdictional boundaries. The depth, breadth, and strength of the Law School’s environmental and land use programs will splendidly equip a new generation of lawyers to forge and implement new tools to restore, preserve, and protect the environment fairly and efficiently.

Environmental and Land Use Law at New York University School of Law

How should the law mediate between claims that genetically modified organisms offer the promise of cheaper, better food for malnourished children while reducing dependence on polluting pesticides and herbicides, on the one hand, and charges that genetic modification poses the risk of far-reaching, irreversible ecological damage on the other? How should the World Trade Organization balance the demands of free trade against differing national views about the need for, and the appropriate tools to achieve, conservation of the world’s fisheries or endangered species? What value should be assigned to a life saved in the next generation by an environmental regulation that will impose significant near-term costs in order to secure environmental benefits decades later? What role do and should cultural values play in how nations (and within nations, local governments) choose among regulatory goals and instruments? How should undesirable land uses, and desirable amenities such as parks, be distributed among communities and neighborhoods? How can we best provide affordable housing to the poor? How can land use law be sufficiently local to reflect, and encourage, differences among communities while addressing impacts from development that cross local borders? What role do land use and housing regulations play in differences in the cost of building housing across cities and countries?

These are the kinds of problems that will confront our students upon graduation, and will be central to the work of environmental and land use lawyers in the 21st century. Solving such problems will require a far broader set of analytical and practical legal skills than sufficed for prior generations.Today’s environmental and land use lawyers must understand economic theory, be able to problem-solve within the sociological and political dynamics of different communities, be conversant in fields of law ranging from local government law to the law of the sea, be prepared to draw on diverse laws from nations and international organizations around the globe, and know enough to ask the right questions about an expert’s use of methodological tools ranging from regression analysis to biological markers.

NYU School of Law’s environmental and land use law program takes on those challenges. Its superb faculty and collaborative intellectual atmosphere produce innovative research and path-breaking theoretical advances. The Law School offers extraordinary opportunities for students to develop and apply their skills in both academic and practice settings through specialized seminars, interdisciplinary colloquia, state-of-the-art clinical programs, and internships and fellowships with governments and environmental organizations. Debate and inquiry are enriched by a vast assortment of symposia, speaker programs, roundtable and brown-bag lunch discussions, and lecture series addressing current environmental and land use issues.

The pages that follow detail the extensive and wide-ranging resources that NYU School of Law devotes to training our students to be leaders of the environmental and land use bar, and to be creative policy analysts and strategists. That commitment, unmatched by any of our peer schools, along with the dynamism and innovativeness of NYU School of Law’s approach to teaching, research, and problem-solving makes NYU School of Law’s environmental and land use program the best venue to study, learn, and develop practical experience to resolve the vexing environmental problems the coming years will present.

Faculty

The Law School’s core environmental and land use law faculty are widely recognized as among the most distinguished academics of their generations. The six full-time members of the faculty at the center of the program—Professors Vicki Been, Benedict Kingsbury, Michael Schill, Richard Stewart, and Katrina Wyman, along with Dean Richard Revesz—are national and international leaders in their fields.

Among them, they have published more than 35 books and hundreds of articles, many of which have been reprinted in the annual “best of” environmental and land use scholarship volume published by the Land Use and Environment Law Review. Their research and writing offer many of the most innovative ideas in environmental and land use law, both in the United States and internationally. The core faculty also are actively involved in law reform efforts on a wide variety of current policy issues, including climate change, the role of cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulation, “smart growth,” regulatory federalism, the use of economic incentives for environmental protection, “next-generation” approaches to environmental regulation, challenges to land use and environmental regulations as “takings” of developers’ property, and the regulation of genetically modified foods and crops. The faculty often appear as counsel or amici in prominent litigation over environmental and land use regulation, and frequently contribute to the public debate over environmental and land use policy through testimony to Congress and state legislatures, service on advisory committees, and membership on the boards of non-profit environmental and land use organizations.

The core faculty is augmented by several very talented full-time faculty members from other NYU departments, who offer courses and research opportunities in urban policy, state and local government law, environmental economics, law and science, and other fields that are closely related to environmental and land use law. The core faculty also is bolstered by a stellar array of adjunct professors—distinguished practitioners in the public and private sectors who teach a range of specialized courses to enrich the curriculum, and who serve as a valuable resource for students interested in careers in environmental law.

Vicki Been, Professor of Law; Director, Program on Land Use Law

Vicki Been has long been at the cutting edge of legal scholarship in the intersection of land use and environmental law. She currently is examining the increasing convergence of land use and environmental law, and the implications that convergence may have for judicial review of environmental regulations. She also is exploring how local land use “impact fees” can be used as environmental taxes to ensure that development fully internalizes the costs it imposes on the surrounding natural and built environment. She has written extensively about the effect the expropriation requirements contained in the North American Free Trade Agreement and a growing number of other bilateral and multilateral investment agreements may have on environmental and land use regulations. Been also is a leading authority on environmental justice. Her nationwide study of the demographic characteristics of communities asked to host undesirable land uses set the standard for empirical research about environmental discrimination. She is the co-author of one of the nation’s leading land use casebooks, Land Use Controls: Cases and Materials (with Robert Ellickson), and is currently completing Foundations of Property Law, a multidisciplinary reader for first–year property courses. Been teaches Property; Land Use Regulation; State and Local Government; and seminars on topics ranging from environmental justice to the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. She co-teaches a Colloquium on the Law, Economics, and Politics of Urban Affairs with Professors Ellen and Schill.

David Bradford, Adjunct Professor of Law

David Bradford, a professor of economics and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University, visits NYU School of Law each year. Bradford has directed the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Program at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His research has focused recently on greenhouse gas emissions trading and innovation in energy policy. As part of an interdisciplinary, decade-long research effort to understand and manage the global carbon cycle, for example, Bradford is developing a model to estimate the health changes caused by an incremental ton of NOx emissions from power plants in the northeastern United States, a first step toward assessing policy alternatives for NOx emissions. He also is exploring the implications that certain abrupt climate changes might have for global climate policy. At NYU School of Law, Bradford co-teaches the Tax Policy Colloquium, and serves as a valuable resource for Law School faculty and students interested in environmental and land use law.