Upon his arrival at the Juvenile Justice Project as a staff attorney (he is now the senior staff attorney), Bunton said that he wrote letters to Governor Mike Foster documenting the appalling level of abuse reported by his clients inside Louisiana’s juvenile prisons. When he got no response, Bunton sued.

Once the suit commenced and discovery proceedings at the prison sites began, Bunton was shocked to discover the extent to which the institutions used physical repression, violence, chemical restraints administered by untrained staff, and corporal punishment to subdue and dehumanize the children. The worst, he said, was the Tallulah juvenile corrections facility where he found numerous children with untreated broken jaws from beatings.

Tallulah was closed in June of 2004. Furthermore, during the Tallulah suit, Louisiana opened another juvenile corrections facility that also generated intense complaints of abuse. Bunton filed another suit, and closed the new prison down in just six weeks.

As Interpol’s chief executive officer, Noble is responsible for the day-to-day work of international police cooperation. Recent accomplishments include an investigation to retrieve items stolen from a Baghdad museum during the war in Iraq; a new international notice for warning police, public institutions, and other international organizations about potential threats posed by disguised weapons, parcel bombs, and other dangerous materials; and the launch of a state-of-the-art global communication system called I-24/7, which provides the capacity to instantly reach law enforcement contact points across the globe and permits police to communicate a range of information, including photographs, fingerprints, and eventually video and audio transmissions.

Noble maintains strong ties with the Law School. He was the moderator at the recent antiterrorism conference held in Florence at NYU’s La Pietra campus (please see story on page 57), he gave the Law School’s 2002 commencement speech, and he moderated a panel on post-September 11 national security for the 2003 Reunion.

Professors Anthony Amsterdam and Bryan Stevenson are nationally renowned for their litigation in the area and both have won numerous awards including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Prize, also known as the “genius award.” They teach courses on capital litigation and have written highly influential articles on the subject. Amsterdam’s 1972 Supreme Court victory in Furman v. Georgia struck down all capital punishment statutes of the time. Stevenson recently represented a death-row inmate before the Supreme Court in Nelson v. Campbell, where he successfully argued that a prisoner could challenge the means of execution through a section 1983 action. Professor Randy Hertz, director of the Law School’s clinical program, is the co-author of the country’s leading treatise on federal habeas corpus practice and procedure, which is regularly used by capital defenders in challenging convictions and sentences. Professor David Garland, who is known for his landmark work in criminology and the sociology of law, teaches and writes about the death penalty and American culture. (Professor Philip Alston’s recent appointment by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights as Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions adds even more depth to the Law School’s expertise on issues of capital punishment.)

The Law School offers two capital defender clinics. In one, taught by Amsterdam with Deborah Fins, an NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney, students work on capital cases throughout the country, drafting briefs for use in the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. In the other—which works in conjunction with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the Alabama-based organization headed by Stevenson—students work on Alabama capital cases with Stevenson and EJI managing attorney Randy Susskind, who is on the Law School’s adjunct faculty. Students spend an entire semester in Alabama, finding witnesses, gathering facts, and drafting pleadings on behalf of death row inmates.

Inspired by their exposure to these professors’ teaching and writing, the students of the Law School acted on their own initiative to create Law Students Against the Death Penalty, a student-run organization that brings in speakers, disseminates information, and provides assistance to capital defender offices in New York and around the country.

A pioneer in the field of language rights, Cristina Rodríguez joins the faculty as assistant professor of law after spending the last year here as an Alexander Fellow. She is currently working on “Language Rights: Four Fundamental Questions,” a four-article progression exploring the principal theoretical questions that she believes should direct the creation of language law and policy worldwide. Rodríguez hopes to use this piece and her other work-in-progress, a comparative study of American and Canadian legal approaches to language diversity, as the heart of a future book.

Rodríguez’s academic work concerns how the law and public policy should approach a linguistically diverse society. She suggests that “one way to deal with the demands made by linguistic minorities is through the creation of ‘language rights,’ or rights to use one’s mother tongue in certain contexts and under certain circumstances,” offering examples from around the world, like the right for Anglophones and Francophones in Canada to have laws enacted in their language.

Rodríguez, who grew up in a bilingual family in largely bilingual South Texas, began her work in the area of language rights as a Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School during the 2001-2002 academic year. She pursued a range of writing projects on U.S. language law and policy while auditing classes at Harvard Law School. Last spring, as an Alexander Fellow at NYU, she taught a seminar on Language and Cultural Rights.

Rodríguez earned her B.A. in history magna cum laude from Yale, then went on to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She finished at Oxford with a Master of Letters in Modern History, writing her thesis on the role of trans-Atlantic female abolitionists in the development of antislavery beliefs in the United States.

After Oxford, Rodríguez returned to Yale for her J.D., where she served as articles editor of the Yale Law Journal and lent her time to the Yale Law School Workers’ Rights Project. Rodríguez worked as a professor’s research assistant for two years, investigating the history of desegregation and civil rights law and helping to revise portions of a constitutional law casebook.

Before coming to the Law School, Rodríguez was a law clerk for the Honorable David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals, for the District of Columbia Circuit, and the Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rodríguez says she has always had an interest “in the effects of immigration on society and culture and on the strategies different societies adopt to absorb immigrant populations—hence the interest in how to manage linguistic diversity.” Because of this long-standing interest and her personal upbringing, she says, “I have always believed in the possibility of a bilingual public sphere and a non-monolingual conception of national, political, and cultural identity, and I’ve always been attuned to the ways in which people use language to identify social and economic status, as well as to establish effective ties.” At the Law School, Rodríguez hopes to continue her work in language rights while expanding her repertoire to include issues related to religious accommodation, international human rights, and immigration law.

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Return to “Café Society”

A widely published writer on issues relating to nonprofits, contracts and commercial law, and law and development, Kevin Davis joins the NYU School of Law as professor of law. He was formerly a tenured member of the faculty at the University of Toronto.

Davis received his B.A. in Economics from McGill University in 1990. After graduating with an LL.B. from the University of Toronto in 1993, he served as Law Clerk to Justice John Sopinka of the Supreme Court of Canada and later as an associate in the corporate department of Torys, a well-known Canadian law firm.

Since receiving his LL.M. from Columbia University in 1996, Davis has traveled widely in pursuit of intellectual and educational goals. He began in familiar territory as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, but soon journeyed to the University of Southern California Law School, where he was a visiting assistant professor and John M. Olin research fellow. After being tenured at the University of Toronto, Davis spent time as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University’s Clare Hall and as a visiting lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He came to the NYU School of Law as a visiting professor in 2003, and says he is delighted to spend more time in an educational environment that “has such a buzz about it.”

“A big part of the draw to NYU is the city,” he said. “The global dimension of the Law School is also very attractive. It’s just a really vibrant intellectual community.”

Davis is currently working on a book with University of Toronto colleague Michael Trebilcock, tentatively titled Law, Institutions and Development Reconsidered, which will top off the ten articles, five manuscripts, six essays, and five government agency and industry group reports he has already authored or coauthored since 1996. While he plans to continue this focus on law and development by looking at the English-speaking Caribbean and the theoretical aspects between law and social welfare, his interests do not stop there.

“I’ve typically been interested in topics on the boundary between commercial law and criminal law,” he said. “For example, the limits of commercial morality, and what should count as immorality or fraud in the commercial world.”

A passionate teacher, Davis tries to show his students not only “how to think like a lawyer and understand how to engage in legal reasoning,” but, beyond that, “to recognize that they don’t always have to take legal rules as given. Some rules vary across time and place; they’re malleable. I want my students to see that there’s room for debate around the margins, while still recognizing the boundaries.”

—

Return to “Café Society”

“When it would get dark and I was losing, I would always say, ‘We can play another inning’,” he remembers.

Now fast-forward to the Vietnam War era to roughly 1970, when Neuborne, a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, was defending an artist who had been arrested for sewing a 7 1/2 foot-long American flag into the shape of a penis, stuffing it, and displaying it near the window of a Madison Avenue gallery. A three-judge criminal court panel convicted the artist of desecrating the flag and a seven-judge New York State Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling. But displaying his legendary doggedness, Neuborne twice took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court and eventually got a lower court federal judge—the 37th judge to rule on the matter—to declare the flag-desecration statute in violation of the First Amendment’s right of free speech. Exhausted prosecutors called it a day, and Neuborne had won the game in extra innings.

It’s 1973, and this time, in a more momentous case, Neuborne displayed even more fevered persistence. Now assistant legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, he was defending American bomber pilots in Thailand who were facing courts-martial for refusing to carpet-bomb Cambodia. To Neuborne’s astonishment, Federal Judge Orrin Judd of the Eastern District in New York upheld his argument—that the pilots could not be punished since Congress had not authorized the war. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Judd’s ruling, allowing the bombing to continue. It was summer, so Neuborne could not appeal to the full Supreme Court, and the circuit justice, Thurgood Marshall, despite his anguished personal misgivings, declined to step in. But Neuborne knew that there was at least one more inning he could play.

The ACLU had a “Douglas watch” to keep tabs on the whereabouts of the Court’s most liberal jurist, Justice William O. Douglas, whenever capital punishment and other irreparable-harm cases required emergency stays. Neuborne flew to Washington State, where Douglas was vacationing, and, in a scene evocative of Henry IV’s humbling call at Canossa in 1077, he knocked one morning on the door of Douglas’s rustic cabin in Goose Prairie. Douglas, unfazed, agreed to hear oral arguments in the Yakima post office.

Douglas, as Neuborne recalls it, was frail and tired at the end of his career. “People sort of knew this was his last hurrah.” The canny Douglas found a sly way of warning Neuborne not to be too hopeful, that even his blessing could be futile. “Mr. Neuborne,” the judge asked, “what happened when I was asked to intercede 20 years ago?”

Neuborne remembered that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in 1953, for spying, a step taken after the full Supreme Court overruled a Douglas stay. But Douglas’s pessimism didn’t dissuade Neuborne. He anticipated that this time there would not be enough justices lingering in the steamy capital to overrule Douglas.

Douglas indeed ruled in his favor. But the next day the Supreme Court held a conference call to reinstitute the stay. Yet it never heard the case on its merits. The Nixon administration, figuring that a Supreme Court hearing might jeopardize its Cambodia policy, simply arranged to have all the pilots honorably discharged. From Neuborne’s point of view, playing after the sun went down paid off once more.

“I verge on the obsessive,” Neuborne said, recalling this episode. “My wife has a wonderful quote from Santayana that she adapted: ‘My husband is a man who redoubles his efforts once he loses sight of his goals.’ ”

For a man who supposedly loses sight of his goals, Neuborne, 63 years old, has managed to carve out a life that has been elegantly coherent—of pioneering litigation, teaching, and scholarship that has revolved around a few signature themes like the First Amendment and civil rights. He has argued cases six times before the Supreme Court and briefed some 200 others. His imprint on civil-liberties laws and his ability to analyze the pertinent issues has made him the go-to guy over the years for dozens of journalists and scholars seeking insights on those laws. He shows no signs of slowing down, either. During the last year or so, Neuborne was a key player in two of the seminal cases of our time.

He helped defend the groundbreaking McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reforms, advising the bill’s sponsors throughout the process—even helping to craft the legislation. Neuborne also has been deeply immersed in two major Holocaust cases. He is plaintiffs’ counsel in a lawsuit against Swiss banks over their handling of Nazi-era bank accounts and was the principal lawyer in a series of Holocaust suits involving compensation for slave laborers of wartime German industry.

Yet, for the past three decades, the chief institutional anchor of his life has been not an opulent law office but a podium at the New York University School of Law, where he started teaching in 1972 as an adjunct and now has the title of John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law. There he also serves as the legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice, which was started in 1995 by Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan’s family with a broad mission of trying to clear the hurdles to a more democratic society. The center’s most notable Supreme Court victories have been its successful defense of the McCain-Feingold campaignfinance reform bill, where Neuborne wrote the brief, and Velazquez v. Legal Services Corp., where Neuborne briefed and argued a landmark First Amendment challenge to the government’s effort to muzzle lawyers for the poor. While juggling these enormously important cases, Neuborne has consistently prepared and inspired NYU School of Law students with his lively Evidence and Procedure lectures.

“Burt has tremendous energy,” said Judge Edward R. Korman of Federal Court in Brooklyn, who decided how to distribute the money in the settlement of the Swiss banks case. “While everything’s going on he sends me law review articles he’s written, he’s speaking in various places, he’s filing papers in this lawsuit, and in the German lawsuit. I asked him a couple of weeks ago if he was on steroids. He’s absolutely brilliant.”

Neuborne has the balding, bespectacled look of a stereotypical scholar, but his face is leavened by the kind of chipmunk cheeks that a mother loves to pinch and the springing steps of a long-distance runner who has completed two marathons (New York and Paris) and still jogs five miles a day on the treadmill. His speech has a slight New York inflection and his voice something of a Mel Brooks rasp, yet he has an impressive Professor Higgins-like gift for well-parsed sentences. Any formality, though, is lightened by a ready smile and a puckish sense of humor.

All of these attributes are evidently arrows in his instructional quiver, qualities that in 1990 won him the University’s Distinguished Teacher award—almost never given to teachers who confront large lecture classes of 100 or more, as he usually does. “I’m an unreconstructed ham,” he said. “That’s why I love being in court, that’s why I love teaching. I love the performance, the standing up in front of a group and performing for them. But I also love the intellectual challenge of it. There’s something splendid about seeing the material each year through the eyes of an idealistic and smart student who asks hard questions about it.”

It may seem paradoxical, but as a professor Neuborne has generally avoided the topics that have earned him his legal stripes. He spurns courses on the First Amendment or affirmative action or women’s rights, topics that as he puts it are “close to my politics.” Rather, he teaches workhorse courses in Evidence.

“If I were to teach affirmative action I’d have to be careful not to teach it as a cheerleader,” he explains. “If you’re going to be a teacher and not a cheerleader you have to force students to confront, to realize there are reasonable arguments that can go the other way and force students to develop those arguments. And I can do it. But it’s not something I try to do.”

Indeed, when he does teach a rare constitutional law class he will often take a contrarian position by, say, advocating censorship. “I force them to argue me off of the position they know I don’t agree with,” he said. “The purpose of the classroom is to exercise their minds, not to find out what I think.” He has learned, he said, that “the students have absolutely no fear of me and chase me around the classroom.”

A visit to a run-of-the-mill Evidence class in March, when students were just back from their spring break, makes palpable Neuborne’s zest as a teacher. Neuborne clips a small microphone to his gray V-necked sweater and spends the first 15 minutes of the two-hour class reacquainting students with the differences between statements made assertively and those made more obliquely or through behavior (an opened umbrella declares it’s raining, for example). At trial, it’s the nonassertive statements that can avoid being classified as hearsay. As he talks, Neuborne’s voice rises to a singsong. The students seem riveted.

“He’s the best,” said Lauren Smith (’04), who shopped around for teachers by auditing classes. “He’s very clear and he has a kindness and a sense of humor that comes through in every lecture. He does a good job of mixing the practical and the theoretical, which not all professors do.”

[SIDEBAR: Neuborne Goes Hollywood]

When you ask Neuborne what he likes about teaching, he quotes John Sexton, who was dean of the Law School between 1988 and 2002 before becoming University president. “Sexton used to say when you became a teacher you were blessed because you entered into cyclical time instead of linear time. Everything starts fresh all the time. Each new year is a new beginning. This is at least the twentieth time I’ve taught Evidence and the novelty is still there. I learn something new every year.”

Neuborne tells of modeling himself on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was head of the women’s rights project at the ACLU at the same time she was a professor at Columbia Law School, arguing six cases before the Supreme Court that changed the way the law treats gender. “I watched how a superb academic could also be a remarkably effective litigator and actually change things,” he said. His teaching, he said, is always enhanced by his work as a lawyer. “I’m a good, strong teacher, but I don’t think I could be anything like the force I can be in the classroom if I were teaching just abstractions or my reading of what other people did. The fact that I actually do this stuff is what gives me confidence.”

Three or four times a year Neuborne moderates a panel of lawyers and other experts in a role-playing exercise on a controversial issue. In February he ran an Anti-Defamation League-sponsored panel at the Law School on how to handle anti-Semitism on campus. The panel included Tom Gerety, a former president of Amherst who is now the executive director of the Brennan Center, and S. Andrew Schaffer, general counsel of New York University. Neuborne had the panelists pretend they were students, deans, college presidents, journalists, lawyers, and judges handling a mock case where a campus newspaper prints a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in an SS uniform with a caption: “Stop Israeli Nazi Apartheid.”

The mock case raised questions about the parameters of free speech, and as he prowled the stage, Neuborne ratcheted the issue up, probing whether hateful speech can be so extreme that it can incite readers or listeners to violence, discussing differences in speech made on public or private college campuses, asking whether it matters if the offensive newspaper is distributed publicly or on the doorsteps of Jewish students, and considering whether it matters if the president is Jewish or not.

Neuborne certainly doesn’t shrink from controversy. The class-action lawsuit against Swiss banks, aside from being astonishingly complicated—some legal papers had to be translated into 16 languages, for example—has also rankled some interested parties. The suit settled for $1.25 billion, almost $700 million of which already has been distributed to descendants of bank account holders, inmates of slave-labor camps financed by Swiss banks, refugees who were turned away from Switzerland, and people whose assets were looted by the Nazis and fenced through Swiss banks. A few American survivors or spokesmen like lawyers Thane Rosenbaum and Samuel J. Dubbin have assailed the settlement for giving the bulk of the looted-assets money to survivors in the former Soviet Union and leaving only a small percentage for U.S. survivors. In an interview, Neuborne (who took on this case pro bono) contended that the needs of elderly American survivors, protected by this country’s social safety net, were not as profound as those of 135,000 elderly Soviet survivors, who lack such basics as food, winter fuel, and emergency medical care.

As if that case were not consuming enough, Neuborne also was a principal counsel representing slave laborers owed money by German industry and then became one of two U.S. trustees of the German Foundation, which is now distributing the $5.2 billion in compensation. Both Holocaust cases involved many flights to and from Europe, and Neuborne admitted in a conversation last February that he was tired and “very rundown.”

How does he conduct two or three careers at once—lawyer, teacher, writer? Neuborne self-effacingly credits the help of his Brennan Center research assistants and the computer access arranged for him by NYU through which he can connect to relevant databases anywhere in the world. But he also admits that he permits his work to occupy much of what, to another human being, would be free time.

“I work all the time,” he said. “I cannot remember a weekend I haven’t worked a very substantial part of the weekend. When I’m working on a case that I care deeply about it’s the closest thing to me to being creative. I would have given anything in my life to be a writer or a painter, but the talent that was given to me was to be an imaginative lawyer—and I put that imagination at the service of issues I care deeply about.”

Even when supposedly relaxing at their summer house in the Hamptons, he and Helen Redleaf Neuborne, his wife of 42 years who is now a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation specializing in poverty work, have what they call “study dates.” They will sit in the same room with a fire going and take out their laptops. “And we’ll be very happy,” he said. “We spend four or five hours together, close the computer, go out to dinner and feel terrific.”

He has been able to continue working this hard despite open-heart surgery in 2002 and a tragedy that has cast a shadow over his autumnal years. Lauren, one of his two daughters and a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, died suddenly in 1996 at the age of 27. She had a heart condition that required a pacemaker and a misfiring brought on a massive heart shock. For months afterward Neuborne walked the streets of Greenwich Village, crying. Friends told him to take the Holocaust cases to find something to animate him again, and it was more than a coincidence that those cases connected him to his daughter’s interest in Judaism. “The reason friends urged me to take this was I was in despair, I was just in despair,” he said.

Neuborne’s older daughter, Ellen, her husband, David Landis, and two children, Henry, 9, and Leslie, 5, moved from Washington to New York to be near him. “That has been a salvation,” he said.

The first of four children, Neuborne was born in the Riverdale section of the Bronx on New Year’s Day, 1941, an event he likes to view with a dose of wit. “Even then I was a bad tax planner,” he said. “I deprived my father of his tax exemption for 1940.” His family soon moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and moved again when he was four years old to Queens.

Young Neuborne was close to his maternal grandfather, Louis Danovitch, an immigrant from Odessa, Ukraine, who taught him how to read the stock tables and gave him a taste for intellectual seriousness. He also gave Neuborne’s father, Sam, a tailor, a job managing his sportclothes factory loft.

Sam, who died five years ago, was clearly the strongest influence in Neuborne’s life. He was the kind of principled individual who after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki returned his war medals to the Pentagon. But he was also a more interesting puzzle, a political leftist who at the same time was a crack swimmer and Navy frogman—an underwater demolition specialist—during World War II. In fact, he had a front-row seat at the D-Day invasion, having been sent into Omaha Beach hours before the actual invasion to blow up the spikes Germans had planted underwater to tear the bottoms out of Allied landing craft. Later, he visited a liberated concentration camp and returned from Europe telling Burt that he would “never set foot on the continent of Europe again.” During the war, Neuborne’s mother, Sylvia, promised that when his father returned he would take Burt to a Major League baseball game. But when the chance came his father declined. “We can’t go to a baseball game because they won’t let black people play,” he told his son. “We don’t support that.” But Burt remembers fondly that his father did take him to see a Negro League game between the Homestead Grays and the Cuban X-Giants.

Though his dad believed religion did more harm than good, Burt remembers being bar-mitzvahed in a storefront Conservative synagogue as “an affirmation of the right of Jews to continue to exist.” Whatever his political sympathies, he read a wide assortment of writers; some of Neuborne’s most indelible memories are of reading Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Dreiser with his father. Today, Neuborne’s taste in books ranges widely, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Seamus Heaney to Anthony Trollope. “Till he died there was always a book the two of us were reading together,” Neuborne said of his dad. “He also got huge pleasure out of my academic career—when I became a teacher it was a fulfillment of his wish.”

His mother, Sylvia, spent her time caring for her home and giving her children a deep sense of affection. “If I had turned out to be a terrorist, my mother would sit on this couch and tell you that terrorism was the right thing to do,” Neuborne said. The feminist era did not deter her from her traditional convictions. Neuborne, whose wife, Helen, was the long-time executive director of the NOW (National Organization for Women) Legal Defense Fund, tells of once growing annoyed at seeing his mother fetching his father’s food and cutting it up at a wedding.

“I finally said to him, ‘You don’t have legs? You can’t get up and get your own food?’ ” Neuborne recalled. “ ‘Helen is going to kill you.’ ”

His mother shot back: “Shut up. I don’t need anybody to tell me I can’t get my husband’s food.” She died at 86 in 2001, and Neuborne thinks that the fact his father died two years before was not irrelevant. “There’s a price to having a great marriage,” he said. “You’re so fused with the other person you can’t exist without them.”

In his teens, despite the budding concern about the abuse of black civil rights and the excesses of the McCarthy era, Neuborne was not politically active. On Sundays, though, he would take an F-train to Washington Square Park to hear Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets read at the fountain.

“I thought that was the center of the universe,” he recalled. “There were only two places—Washington Square Park and Paris. There’s a wonderful sense of closure that I really feel. When I was a boy, if you had told me that I would some day do what I do, I would say it is so far out of my reach that it is utterly incomprehensible. I walk through the park every night when I go home.”

His parents had wanted their only son, the first of his family to go to college, to be a doctor, so in 1957 he entered Cornell at age 16 as a pre-med. But by junior year, his mediocre science grades and physical clumsiness made him wonder if medicine was his calling. In a comparative anatomy class, he remembered, he reached for a dead shark specimen in a tank filled with formaldehyde. “I was so nervous and tense about being there that I fell into the formaldehyde. I stank for weeks. No matter what I did I couldn’t get the smell off.” In organic chemistry, he smashed a glass globe and splashed his eyes with sulfuric acid. “I thought, ‘Somebody’s trying to tell me something.’”

He finally told his parents that he couldn’t be a doctor, but that perhaps he would become a lawyer. “My father said, ‘Don’t be a lawyer, you’ll sell insurance for the rest of your life.’ In the Depression, the people he knew who went to law school wound up selling insurance.”

He chose law because it was an intellectual field that allowed you “to live like a gentleman”—comfortably but not lavishly. (He points out that he harbored such notions before “the Rolex years” of the 1980s, when the wave of mergers made lawyers wealthy and changed earning expectations.) He met his wife at Cornell; she was a sophomore and he was a junior who belonged to Tau Epsilon Phi. “We were the squarest pegs in the squarest holes,” he said. “My fraternity was the last fraternity to serenade a sorority.” And, though his contemporaries included fellow New Yorker Andrew Goodman and Cornell classmate Michael Schwerner, who went south to register voters and were slain and buried in Mississippi, Neuborne did not participate in the civil-rights movement in a fullthroated way.

[SIDEBAR: On-Campus Cameo]

Instead, he graduated in February 1961 and joined the Army Reserves, spending seven months at Fort Dix, where he was known as the “college idiot” because he couldn’t take his rifle apart. He then entered Harvard Law School while his wife, who had better grades and spoke three languages, went to work as a secretary to support him. “I loved Harvard,” Neuborne said. “It was a place of great intellectual excitement.”

He then joined a small Wall Street firm, Casey, Lane & Mittendorf, choosing tax work because, he confesses, that was the quickest route to a partnership. It was happenstance that brought him into civil liberties work—a lawyer in his Reserve unit was active in the NYCLU. Neuborne started doing briefs for the NYCLU at night and, by 1967, he realized he was “intrinsically out of place” in his day job. “I was uncomfortable spending all my energy defending very privileged people in ways that reinforced their privilege,” Neuborne said. (He took a leave of absence that the firm jokingly extended for 25 years.)

In those days, the NYCLU and ACLU were both located in a building in the Flatiron district honeycombed with left-wing organizations. Aryeh Neier was the NYCLU director. Ira Glasser was associate director. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a director of the ACLU’s women’s rights project. “By the second day I knew this was what I was going to do,” said Neuborne.

The years between 1967 and 1973, when Neuborne served first as the NYCLU’s staff counsel and then as the ACLU’s assistant legal director, were heady times and Neuborne talks about them with brio. “It was the Vietnam era, the high point of the egalitarian revolutions, and you couldn’t lose. You threw something into court and you won. We used to sketch things out over lunch in the delicatessen. We developed something—I still remember writing it on the napkin—the enclave theory of constitutional justice. What we tried to do was to identify enclaves in American life from which the constitution had been shut out: prisons, schools, mental institutions, the military. The students’ rights cases came off of that napkin. The mental commitment cases. All of the cases dealing with free speech in the military.”

He is proudest of the cases that challenged the Vietnam War, because for a long time “they were existential cases: they couldn’t be won, but they had to be brought.” Neuborne also handled school desegregation cases, writing a Supreme Court amicus brief for the integration of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, school system. There, too, his father’s influence made itself felt. Neuborne can never forget how as a 13-year-old in 1954 he traveled with his father on a business trip to Charleston, South Carolina, and there saw black-bordered newspapers announcing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. His father happened to visit a local black minister that night and Neuborne remembers the jubilation.

“You have to look at Brown as a symbol,” he said. “It sent an enormously important message around the world that the law was not what Marx said. Marx said that law was a device to keep the weak in place, that the dominant economic class would use law as a club to prevent competition. Brown allowed the United States to compete in the Cold War with a different vision of law—that one could actually change the status quo on behalf of the poor and the weak. No one had ever thought about law that way. That set off a legal revolution in this country.”

It was in 1972 that he began teaching as an adjunct at NYU, and by 1974 he was asked to teach Evidence full time. The 20-hour workdays of the previous few years—the Vietnam War and civil rights cases and briefs flowing out of Nixon’s impeachment—helped spur his decision. So did his wife’s graduation in 1974 from Brooklyn Law School. Neuborne hoped that teaching law would allow him more time with his two young daughters while Helen launched her career as a Legal Aid lawyer for poor children. He took another leave of absence. “I didn’t tell them about my history of leaves,” he said.

Although he returned to the ACLU as national legal director from 1982-86, teaching became the center of his work life and has remained so.

“I love this place,” he said. “It has tolerated what is a quirky career. I don’t have a traditional academic career in that I don’t spend my time in my office writing law review articles. I actually go into court and try to put my ideas into practice. Very few schools would have tolerated that. I would have been told by many of my peers to make a choice.”

Neuborne has been fortunate that during his 30 years at NYU, the Law School has been on an upward spiral. The school acquired the pasta-making company C.F. Mueller in 1947, and in the late 1970s sold it for $115 million, netting a nice portion of the profit, even after the University got its share. The Law School’s administration wisely used the money to provide scholarships for top students, reward deserving faculty, improve its tuition subsidies and loan forgiveness program, and build more inviting housing. The fact that New York became a nicer place to live has not hurt. And NYU benefited by being among the very first law schools to be genuinely open to women.

“When five percent of the Harvard class was women, we were making it known in the 1970s that we were happy to have a 50-50 class,” Neuborne said. “We mined that vein of enormous talent of women who had missed the boat when it wasn’t possible for them to get into law school.”

Neuborne is not the reflexive liberal that he may appear to be, nor is he as convinced as he once was of the sweeping power of a legal decision that squares with his ideology. As a young lawyer, he was champing at the bit to challenge every wrong that came down the pike, but experience has taught him that even a favorable decision doesn’t always work out the way one hopes. Brown, he said, ended state-supported apartheid in many areas, but it also showed the limits of the law. “You can’t say that it successfully led to school integration,” he said. We’re still a society where by and large people are educated with their own race. It’s housing patterns that do it now. So Brown was a lesson about what law can’t do, the limits of the law.”

He also takes some nuanced views on more recent issues. In a conversation last winter just after the Massachusetts Supreme Court said that the state would have to marry gays equally with heterosexuals, Neuborne did not leap to praise the ruling. “I think I’m getting old,” he confided. “I think you must provide some form of relationship for gays that is identical to marriage—in terms of property and any kind of legal formulation. Whether you have to call it marriage is a different story. It may be that marriage has a religiously based connotation. Marriage was a sacrament before it was law. And the notion that the law will now turn marriage into something that historically it was not simply to achieve equality strikes me as at least problematic.”

Neuborne doesn’t look back with regret at not having built a career as a fulltime lawyer. The panel discussion on anti-Semitism drew powerful lawyers from Wall Street and midtown, yet Neuborne seemed completely in his element. “I’m certainly not intimidated,” he said. “My career as an academic has also included so much litigation, so much actual lawyering that I move very easily in that world. That’s a world where I think people respect me and I respect them. They know I know how to do what they do.”

His major regret, he said, is “the unwritten scholarship.” He has written perhaps 50 papers, and the piece he is proudest of was one in 1977 about “The Myth of Parity,” that business between federal and state courts shouldn’t be allocated randomly since each set of courts has certain advantages. But overall, he describes his scholarship as “adequate—I give it a B plus, not in quality, but in quantity.”

“For all my talk about being a litigating academic I still believe that the principal and irreducible responsibility of an academic is to produce scholarship,” he said. “Our major role is to comment critically on the world in which we live.”

“I question whether my litigation victories are more ephemeral than hard thinking would have been, and whether putting my energy into the production of serious thought would have changed things more than winning the lawsuits.” Still, such musings don’t diminish his retrospective savoring of his career as a law professor. “To be at NYU during the years I’ve been here,” he said, “is like being on a roller coaster that only goes up.”

—Joseph Berger has been a reporter at the New York Times for more than 20 years. Berger is also the author of  Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (2001).

As more than 500 guests sipped champagne and admired spectacular views of the city, one alumna in the crowd, Carol Robles-Roman (’89), the deputy mayor for legal affairs of the City of New York, quietly prepared to make a surprise announcement: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had proclaimed that day, January 22, 2004, to be Furman Hall Day in New York City. The mayor wanted to thank NYU President John Sexton and Law School Dean Richard Revesz for, as Robles-Roman put it, “producing the lawyers who make our city tick.”

Bloomberg was also implicitly acknowledging the building’s symbolic meaning: Furman’s groundbreaking took place as scheduled on September 28, 2001, just 17 days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center—the first large-scale construction to begin in the city after that terrible day. “This project affirms our commitment to prepare our students to seek justice through law,” then-Dean Sexton said on that day. “We also reaffirm our University’s resolute commitment to a great city. We build our Law School’s future, as our city must rebuild its future, on a foundation of justice, the bedrock of our republic.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who attended the ceremony, echoed Sexton’s sentiments. “The need for lawyers does not diminish in times of crisis,” she said. “It only increases. NYU has played, and will continue to play, an important role in training lawyers who understand the need to convince a sometimes-hostile world that our dream of a society that conforms to the rule of law is a dream we all should share.”

A little more than two years later, their ambitious plan was realized, and clusters of alumni and other members of the Law School’s extended family were touring the state-of-the-art classrooms and checking out the comfortable lounges and clinic offices before heading over to the flower-filled, candle-lit law library in Vanderbilt Hall for the rest of the festivities. The event, by incorporating both sites, was designed to pay homage to the older building’s dedication a half century earlier as well; the new building created a sense of excitement in the reading room, and the grand dame bestowed a bit of gravitas on the upstart across the way. The programs mirrored each other as well. In 1951, the four speakers were: John W. Davis, president of the New York City Bar Association; Roscoe Pound, dean emeritus, Harvard Law School; Sir Francis Raymond Evershed, the Master of the Rolls of England; and Arthur T. Vanderbilt, chief justice of the Supreme Court of New Jersey and dean emeritus of the NYU School of Law. In 2004, the four were: A. Thomas Levin (’67, LL.M. ’68), president of the New York State Bar Association; Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School; the Right Honorable Lord Slynn of Hadley, Law Lord, House of Lords; and Richard Revesz, dean of the NYU School of Law.

Dean Kagan, for her part, underscored her commitment to the psychological cornerstones laid by Roscoe Pound: “Harvard and NYU have followed Pound’s blueprint,” she said. “Go global and keep comparative law at the center.” Kagan also emphasized the value of Furman Hall’s cutting-edge technology and generous allocation of space for international legal studies. “Never has there been a more important time to create the facilities to allow us to connect with opposite shores,” she said. “As a law school dean, I share your joy in this simply splendid achievement.”

RED BRICKS AND GOLDEN SCISSORS: OPENING THE DOORS

“Ours would be an impressive campus anywhere,” said Dean Revesz at the January 12, 2004, ribbon-cutting ceremony. “It’s wonderful to think we have it right here in Greenwich Village.” Furman Hall, at 245 Sullivan Street, between Washington Square Park South and West Third streets, comprises 170,000 square feet, almost doubling the Law School’s space, while the number of students holds steady at around 1,900. Early on, the Greenwich Village community voiced concerns about the building’s effect on the neighborhood, but the Law School, with the guidance of architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, worked with the community and city preservation groups to ensure that Furman Hall reflected the history and feel of the neighborhood. The building’s facade re-creates aspects of the two structures that previously occupied the site: Judson House, an annex of Judson Memorial Church that was renovated by McKim, Mead & White in 1899, and the Poe House, a row house from the 1830s, occupied briefly by Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the new building is that it was finished on time and under budget. “We are grateful to the members of the Greenwich Village community,” said Dean Revesz. “They ended up being our partners.”

The dean also expressed gratitude to other key players, including University President John Sexton; Lester Pollack (’57), chair of the Law School’s Board of Trustees; Martin Lipton (’55), former chair of the Law School’s Board of Trustees and currently the chair of the University’s Board; and, of course, Jay Furman (’71), one of the country’s leading real estate developers and the building’s namesake. “Jay contributed not only generous resources,” said Revesz, “but worked tirelessly over several years, with enormous creativity and imagination, to make sure that the project was completed on schedule. Even more to the point, Jay, a devoted alumnus whose generosity has also helped establish our Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and the Furman Academic Scholarship Program, personifies a love and commitment to learning. No name could fit more perfectly on this structure than his.”

Standing in the bright winter sunlight during the ribbon cutting ceremony on a freezing January morning, Board Chairman Lester Pollack, flanked by festive purple and white balloons, reviewed highlights of the Law School’s history—the creation of the Root-Tilden Scholarship Program, the building of Vanderbilt Hall, the formation of the clinical programs—and added Furman’s inauguration to the list of big moments. “This building,” he concluded, “is an act of transformation.”

Then the speakers lifted a pair of enormous golden scissors and snipped the ribbon, officially opening Furman Hall’s doors. The group, along with students and faculty, headed inside to scatter crumbs and spill coffee (that is, to have breakfast for the first time in the new building) in the John Sexton Student Forum, a cozy lounge with couches and wooden booths. “Furman Hall is firstrate,” pronounced Barry E. Adler, Charles Seligson Professor of Law and associate dean for Information Systems and Technology, as he tried out a booth. “It’s as convenient and functional as it is attractive.”

WIRED FOR THE RIGHT REASONS: TECH SOLUTIONS

Aside from being an enormously welcoming and well-thought-out space, Furman is also one of the most technically advanced educational facilities in the country. Each of the six classrooms is like a mini-production center where lectures and activities can be recorded, edited, and made available on the Web. Instructors use SMART Sympodiums—basically a kind of touch screen with a computer behind it, allowing teachers to easily incorporate computer and DVD elements into their lectures. The Sympodiums also allow annotating and writing on screen.

All nine seminar rooms have built-in fullcoverage miking of both the professors and students, and the four Flexcourts, classrooms with easily changed set-ups that are ideal for various moot court exercises, are equipped with a broadcast-quality video camera, and an on-site control room featuring a production switcher and nonlinear editing system. That means students can simulate a trial, produce a video, and then stream it to the Web. Best of all, the storeroom of old moot court videotapes that could not be accessed efficiently has been replaced by a system where, once captured, the video (and audio) is indexed and saved to a database, from which it can be easily called up and viewed on the Web.

When not in class, students can work and congregate in a multitude of meeting areas, including a study lounge overlooking a garden and several email bars—spots where they can log on and check or send messages. Benches and lounges are liberally scattered throughout the building. The street-level Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Student Cafe, named for the prestigious law firm that carries the name of four of the Law School’s most distinguished alumni (Herbert Wachtell (’54), Martin Lipton (’55), Leonard Rosen (’54), and the late George A. Katz (’54)) looks onto West Third Street through floorto-ceiling windows. Corridors are intentionally wide so that students can gather between classes, and the building is linked to Vanderbilt Hall through a basement walkway for convenience on cold or rainy days.

“We appreciate the adjustable-height seats in the lecture halls, the amount of space set aside exclusively for students, and the southern exposure in the clinic offices,” said Nicholas Kujawa (’04), then-president of the Law School’s Student Bar Association. “Students clearly were first and foremost in the minds of everyone involved in the creation of Furman Hall.”

“I like the new space very much,” said Burt Neuborne, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law and legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice. “The symposium space on the ninth floor where the faculty meets is the clubhouse I always wanted as a kid—only it’s not in a tree. The seminar rooms teach well, and the snack bar serves good coffee.”

VANDERBILT’S LEGACY: A MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

At the Weinfeld dinner, Dean Revesz expressed confidence that Arthur Vanderbilt would have been thrilled by the new building. “Vanderbilt bemoaned the fact that law schools were failing to train students in the various skills essential to the work of a lawyer,” Revesz said. The Jacob D. Fuchsberg Clinical Law Center, named after one of the Law School’s most distinguished alumni who served for many years on the New York Court of Appeals, occupies two floors, neatly addressing that concern. Students here try (and frequently win) actual cases, write legal briefs, and learn how to deal with unpredictable clients. Furman Hall also houses the Lawyering Program, the intensive mandatory first-year research and writing course, encompassing interview workshops, negotiation exercises, and other practical assignments.

Vanderbilt also worried about the lack of instruction in international and civil law, said Revesz, pointing out that the [Gustave (LL.M. ’57) and Rita (’59)] Hauser Global Law School Program is located on the third floor, and attracts more than a dozen leading faculty members from foreign countries to teach courses and seminars at NYU each year. The program funds 10 of the most outstanding young international lawyers to obtain their LL.M. degrees as Hauser Scholars, while also encouraging collaborations on scholarship between full-time faculty and top scholars from around the world.

“Vanderbilt also would be proud if he visited the Lester Pollack Colloquium Room on the ninth floor,” said Revesz, because it addresses that great educator’s assertion that the relationship between law and the humanities was not as strong as it should be. “Surrounded on three sides by terraces, the bright and airy space offers an impressive place for flagship intellectual events of legal academia, including the prestigious Law and Philosophy Colloquium.”

Finally, Vanderbilt articulated his desire for law schools to address problems of the legal profession itself, Revesz said. Administrative offices—including the Public Interest Law Center (PILC)—located on the fourth floor, answer that need. “PILC works tirelessly to ensure that our graduates are able to play leading roles in public service,” the dean said. “We led the way in designing an extraordinarily generous Loan Repayment Assistance Program in the mid-1990s and make enormous efforts to fund students who are interested in summer jobs in the public services.” PILC also administers the Root-Tilden-Kern program, launched by Vanderbilt himself, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. A newer initiative, the Global Public Service Law Program, brings lawyers from developing countries to the Law School to help them hone the skills necessary to strengthen the rule of law when they return home.

There is no doubt that adding Furman Hall to the NYU School of Law campus is cause for celebration—and that it would have earned Vanderbilt’s robust approval. “We have lofty aspirations to be not only the leading law school, but also the law school that leads in providing social good—with the education, scholarship, and vision needed to improve our nation and the world,” Dean Revesz said during the festivities. “Furman Hall brings us a great deal closer to this ambitious goal. For that, I am deeply grateful.”

By the time Gupta arrived in Tulia in 2001, direct appeals by her 35 clients had already been denied. In short, they had been convicted and were without legal representation. After her initial fact-finding mission, Gupta went back to New York, organized a team of top pro bono attorneys from around the country, and returned as the LDF’s lead counsel for the cases. Nonetheless, the situation looked bleak. “The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is not known to be a progressive court,” said Gupta, “and in any case it had already affirmed the convictions. So we really needed to blow open the case and expose the law enforcement officials for what they were.”

It may have been temerity for a 26-year-old to take on Texas, but for someone who had grown up in a leafy suburb in southern England, Gupta proved to have the tenacity and resourcefulness of a coyote. She realized she was going to have to turn up the heat on the Panhandle; so Gupta went to the media. In a series of ten articles over eleven months, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert described a justice system that seemed little more than a cruel farce.

The attention of the national press forced the Texas media into action. Local papers that had been effusing over Tom Coleman’s status as Texas lawman of the year were suddenly shamed into doing some reporting. The cartel of Tulia drug dealers, it turned out, included a fork-lift driver, a pig farmer and a number of young moms with small children who didn’t know what hit them. The dawn-raid arrests produced no drugs, money or weapons. Officer Coleman, on whose sole testimony the convictions were based, made frequent mistakes in identifying suspects, used racist language in reference to the defendants, and was in the habit of writing down evidence on his leg. And yet, on his unsubstantiated testimony, Gupta’s clients were sentenced to such brutal prison terms that many of them would have died in jail. One defendant received 341 years.

Intense media pressure outside the courtroom was vital, but it had to go hand in hand with an iron-clad argument in front of the bench. Judge Ron Chapman was struck by how well Gupta’s team handled the appeal. “Very impressive,” said Judge Chapman. “They stayed with this case for years when others would have given up.”

Gupta and her team were nothing if not relentless. The first petition was filed in January 2002 on behalf of Jason Jerome Williams. In it were the key arguments that would bring Coleman to court, and eventually undermine all 35 wrongful convictions. In September, with the glare of the national media full in the face of the Texas judiciary, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in William’s favor. In the meantime, however, Judge Self, who had presided over most of the original trials, had made public comments to the Tulia Herald that suggested the defendants would not receive an impartial hearing in his courtroom. In November 2002, the LDF team upped the pressure by filing for his recusal. Two days later Self stepped down, and was replaced by Judge Chapman. In March 2003, the case for the prosecution dramatically collapsed as Officer Coleman crumbled on the stand. Finally, on August 22, 2003, Texas Governor Rick Perry granted full pardons to all of the defendants.

Gupta, who went to law school intending to do just this sort of work, was in her element. She applied for a Soros Justice Fellowship with the LDF specifically “to work toward reform of a broken system,” she says. Even with that perspective, says Gupta, “Tulia took my pre-existing concerns to a whole new level.”

“There were a couple of moments,” she admits, “when I felt that due to the state of the courts, and the unwillingness of anyone in the justice system to see that an injustice had taken place, we would just never get our clients out of prison.” But Gupta says the clinical training that she received at NYU gave her crucial preparation. “The experience of having clients and discussing strategy in a classroom setting was invaluable in giving me the skills I needed. In my opinion, NYU is unique in having such a strong commitment to clinical education.”

Awarded the 2004 Reebok Human Rights Award in May for her role in coordinating the Tulia trial, Gupta says that the accolade came with mixed emotions. On one hand, she says, “I felt so humbled to be honored alongside such outstanding individuals from Brazil, Afghanistan and Nigeria.” But, she adds, “I thought it was incredible that racial injustice in our criminal justice system should be seen as an international human rights issue. We continually look outside our boundaries for human rights violations, yet they are taking place here on our own soil.”

Adam Levin (’97), another NYU School of Law graduate, worked alongside Gupta and became a key advocate during the hearing. At the time, Levin was senior associate in the pro bono department of Hogan & Hartson in Washington D.C. He went on to lead the civil rights litigation that brought their clients a $6 million settlement, and instigated the disbanding of the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task Force.

In October 2003, the Black Allied Law Students Association (BALSA) and the Law Student Drug Policy Forum invited both Gupta and Levin back to the Law School for the first time since Governor Perry pardoned their clients. “My favorite audience when I speak about the case is law students,” says Gupta, who clearly hopes that the trial will inspire others to do criminal defense and social justice lawyering. “It’s wonderful to talk about the possibility of changing people’s lives, and to have them hear from someone who has just graduated and is making a difference.”

But there’s still one more twist to the tale of Tulia; Paramount Studios is due to make the trial into a 2006 feature film. Who will play Vanita Gupta? Halle Berry.

The First Year’s Core Curriculum

The first-year introductory course in Criminal Law covers the general principles and elements of criminal liability and defenses. Learning the basics of criminal law in the 21st century does not entail paging through the penal code and memorizing the definitions of particular crimes. Rather, the course is organized by general concepts that cut across all criminal conduct: act and omission, causation, mental state, attempt, and conspiracy, and defenses such as necessity, duress, self-defense, and insanity. In addition, the syllabus explores the theoretical underpinnings of such topics as justifications for punishment, grounds for exculpation, culpability for inchoate and anticipatory crimes, and group criminality. What truly distinguishes NYU’s criminal law course is the passion its faculty brings into the classroom. Professor David Richards, who has taught the subject matter for almost 30 years, explains how he continues to ignite his students’ interest: “As a teacher you have to frame things from your gut, from what really interests you.”

Two other first-year courses offer valuable skills and perspectives to students interested in pursuing careers in criminal law. The required first-year course on the Administrative and Regulatory State equips students to evaluate critically the many important criminal justice decisions that are made outside the courtroom and in administrative settings, for example, initiating a criminal investigation, drafting the charge, plea bargaining, establishing sentencing guidelines, managing correctional institutions, and ruling on and monitoring parole. The first-year Lawyering Program, with its closely structured, collaborative experiences of law in use, is especially critical to the training of a criminal lawyer, a career which typically allows for only the briefest apprenticeship before a young lawyer is thrust into positions of life-or-death responsibility. Many of the lawyering faculty are specialists in criminal law, and regularly participate in the criminal law group’s programs. Faculty members include Jenny Roberts (’95), a staff attorney and trial trainer at the New York City Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Defense Division; Marshall Miller, a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District; Tigran Eldred, a criminal defense lawyer who has worked at the Criminal Appeals Bureau and the Federal Defenders Division of the Legal Aid Society, and at Appellate Advocates; and Babe Howell (’93), who was a criminal defense lawyer in Legal Aid’s Criminal Defense Division and the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

Advanced Coursework: The Upper Years’ Foundational Courses

Students interested in criminal law usually begin their second year by taking Evidence and one or more of several advanced courses in specific areas of substantive and procedural criminal law. The most essential of these is a course in criminal procedure. While most law schools offer a single, basic survey course in criminal procedure, NYU law students can choose among a variety of approaches to the subject. A comprehensive survey course is taught by Adjunct Professor S. Andrew Schaffer, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan and general counsel for New York University. This class examines all of the investigative and adjudicatory stages of the criminal process, through trial, including an analysis of constitutional and statutory provisions and judicial decisions governing the various procedural steps in the administration of criminal justice in federal and state courts. Drawing on Professor Schaffer’s knowledge of how the criminal justice systems works at ground level, the course covers arrests, stops and frisks, searches and seizures (including wiretapping), interrogation, grand jury proceedings, and trial-related problems such as competence of counsel, the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, guilty pleas and plea bargaining, discovery and the prosecutor’s duty to disclose exculpatory evidence, and jury selection.

[SIDEBAR: A View from the Aisle]

A second option for students interested in criminal procedure is Criminal Procedure 1: Police Investigations, which covers the first half of the criminal process—police investigation of crimes. Taught alternatively by Professor Stephen Schulhofer or Barry Friedman, the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law, who is a prominent constitutional scholar, this course deals with the federal constitutional limits on government authority to gather evidence and investigate crime. It covers Fourth Amendment limits on search and seizure, arrest, electronic surveillance, the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, especially in their relation to police interrogation and identification procedures such as lineups. While it emphasizes current law and the evolution of Supreme Court doctrine, the course also considers related policy questions as well as approaches to similar problems in other countries and in the emerging international human rights jurisprudence.

Alternatively, or in connection with the Police Investigations course, students may take Professor James Jacobs’s Criminal Procedure: Bail to Jail. This course covers criminal procedure from the point of the suspect’s first appearance in court, through the appointment of counsel, charging, discovery, plea bargaining, trial, sentencing, appeals and habeas, and finally, defense and prosecutorial ethics throughout the process. Students also can take Jacobs’ Federal Criminal Law, a substantive criminal law course that examines the jurisprudence of a whole range of complex federal crimes, including mail fraud, securities fraud, RICO and Hobbs Act infractions, money laundering, criminal civil rights violations, and corruption and bribery. Attention is also devoted to the federal sentencing guidelines. An overarching theme of the course is the proper role of federal criminal law and federal law enforcement agencies. Students explore such topics as how to account for the inexorable expansion of federal criminal law, and what are the consequences for this expansion.

[SIDEBAR: Making a Federal Case]

In his popular course Juvenile Justice, Jacobs covers the full range of criminal procedures applicable to juveniles. These include: searches and seizures, pretrial interrogation, confidentiality, intake and diversion, pretrial detention, transfer to adult court, right to counsel, sentencing, and conditions of confinement. Students augment casebook study with scrutiny of juvenile criminal records, analysis of empirical studies and materials on juvenile crime and the handling of juvenile offenders in other countries. The course takes students beyond recent sensational headlines of high school shootings and child prostitution to the jurisprudential and sociological underpinnings of juvenile crime and the possible legal and policy alternatives that are available.

Rounding out the substantive foundational courses is Business Crime. NYU is one of the few law schools in the country that offers this course on a regular basis, with two faculty members on hand to teach it—Professors Jennifer Arlen and Harry First. The two are now collaborating on a casebook dealing with this topic, as mentioned earlier. The course examines the substantive and procedural law problems associated with highimpact economic crime committed by corporations and their managers. An overarching topic of the course is the question of whether criminal liability is appropriately imposed on organizations for economic behavior. On the substantive side, topics include discussion of the basic federal criminal laws used against economic crime (including mail and wire fraud, and violations of RICO and the Sherman Act), principles for imposing individual and corporate criminal liability under these statutes, and the sanctions that can be imposed under the federal sentencing guidelines. On the procedural side, topics include constitutional and common law corporate privileges, the grand jury, immunity, and government evidence gathering. In the wake of the recent wave of high-profile prosecutions for securities and accounting fraud relating to Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom, among others, the Business Crime course has been fully subscribed and student interest in the subject matter only continues to intensify.

Seminar Offerings

Seminars offered by the Law School’s adjunct faculty have shown particularly strong appeal, starting with Corruption and Corruption Control taught by adjunct professor Ronald Goldstock. Goldstock can count among his many accomplishments in the field of criminal justice the creation of the Independent Private Sector Inspector General Program, through which business organizations are required to hire private sector watchdogs to monitor their affairs for unethical and illegal conduct. His seminar analyzes the types of corruption that exist in both the public and private sectors, the means by which a variety of criminal and nontraditional remedies may be used to reduce the frequency and impact of corrupt activities, and the constitutional and statutory problems that are implicated by such schemes. Goldstock journeys through the various provinces of corruption—each of the three branches of government and assorted sectors of industry. “I want the students to think about why vulnerabilities to corruption exist, and the types of controls that would work in each setting,” he says.

With his experience as director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force for 13 years, and as a consultant to the Northern Ireland Organized Crime Task Force, it is no surprise that Goldstock also teaches the seminar on Organized Crime Control. This class explores the variety of challenges organized crime poses to society and to traditional law enforcement techniques. Goldstock tries “to get the students to think about the practical problems of controlling organized crime, using the law as a means, not an impediment, to breaking up criminal organizations.” In simulated investigations, Goldstock and his students explore how search and seizure law, physical and electronic surveillance tools, documentary evidence, undercover investigations, and grand jury proceedings can be used to gut the mob. At one point, students examine a recalcitrant witness before the grand jury. The RICO statute is also explored in detail as are a variety of noncriminal remedies including forfeiture and court-imposed trusteeships. Student papers written for this seminar have ranged from defining probable cause to the comparative jurisprudence of electronic surveillance in the United States and Japan.

[SIDEBAR: A Clash of Conscience and Responsibility]

With Professor Jacobs, Goldstock will be teaching a new seminar this year, Privatization of Criminal Justice. In recent years, there has been a trend toward private firms providing guard and protective services, building and managing penal institutions, and providing mediation and conciliation services as a substitute for the state-run legal system. Even those of us who have little interaction with the criminal justice system experience the effects of its increasing privatization in the form of gated communities, private video surveillance, business loss prevention methods, office building security, and citizen foot patrols and radio-alert networks. This seminar looks at the ramifications of outsourcing to private firms the various functions of criminal justice administration that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of the state. Students are encouraged to consider the comparative effectiveness of the private versus state-run criminal justice system.

The seminar Complex Federal Investigations is taught by the two former federal prosecutors who convicted John Gotti: Judge John Gleeson of the Southern District of New York, and Jamie Orenstein (’87), who also helped convict Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and who is now a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York. In examining the problems and issues that arise in complex federal investigations, the seminar addresses topics such as the powers and use of the federal grand jury, including recent efforts to reform it; the investigative use of immunity, contempt, and perjury; the use of bugs, wiretaps, and confidential informants; the negotiation of cooperation agreements and the use of accomplices witnesses; investigative contacts with persons represented by counsel; the various ways such investigations can intrude upon the attorney-client relationship (including through attorney subpoenas and disqualification); the joint defense privilege; and the fundamentals of the RICO statute.

Judge Gleeson also teaches the popular seminar Sentencing. This course looks at the purposes of the federal sentencing guidelines and the extent to which they actually inform sentencing today. The seminar examines the sentencing reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in the United States Sentencing Guidelines, which students study in great depth. Current themes in sentencing reform also surface, including the issues of sentence bargaining and judicial discretion under the guidelines. Drawing on Judge Gleeson’s wide contacts in the criminal justice system, the seminar involves the various participants in the sentencing process: judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers, and inmates.

Professor Randy Hertz, the director of the Law School’s clinical program, teaches a seminar entitled Criminal Litigation, which uses a simulated criminal case to explore the ways in which lawyers use substantive criminal law, criminal procedure, and the rules of evidence in the course of prosecuting or defending a criminal case. The focus is on litigation planning, particularly the development of a coherent theory of the case and strategies for implementing that theory. Students research applicable law, investigate facts (by planning and conducting a series of investigative interviews), devise an overall litigation strategy (including a suppression motion), think through the defense and prosecution theories of the case at both the suppression motion and the trial, and conduct simulated witness examinations at both proceedings.

Of the full-time faculty, Professor Jacobs has offered the most eclectic group of seminars over the years, in addition to the ones he co-teaches with Judge Gleeson and Goldstock, reflecting his diverse interests in criminology. Fans of his highly acclaimed book Can Gun Control Work? can search for answers in Gun Control: The Regulation of Weaponry in Democratic Society. In this seminar, Jacobs takes a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary look at the regulation of weaponry. Time is spent first discussing the nature of the problems that can arise out of private gun ownership. Then, the course examines the conception, implementation and enforcement of federal law (for example, the Brady law) that seeks to keep firearms out of the wrong hands, and of other gun controls like the assault rifle ban and efforts to ban “Saturday Night Specials.” Time permitting, Jacobs also looks at the regulation of knives, chemical weapons, and explosives. The seminar examines the way that criminal sentencing law handles crimes committed with deadly weapons and deals with questions of federalism and the Second Amendment. It also covers tort suits against gun manufacturers and a range of new proposals including smart-gun technology, trigger-locks, and one-gun-per-month.

Anticipating his next book, Jacobs also teaches a seminar on Labor Racketeering and Union Democracy, which covers the relationship between organized crime and organized labor. Jacobs and his students examine the range of labor racketeering schemes including extortion of employers (labor peace) and union members, thievery from the union, pension and welfare fraud, violence against dissidents, and the policing of employer cartels. The seminar also probes governmental responses to labor corruption and racketeering, including the Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934, the Hobbs Act, the Taft-Hartley Act, ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act), the Landrum Griffin Act, and the use of civil RICO (and court-appointed trustees) to purge racketeers from mobbed-up unions. Jacobs encourages his students to think independently on these issues: “I want my students to analyze whether union democracy is a viable strategy for combating labor racketeering.” As co-director with Jacobs of the Law School’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice, Jerry Skolnick keeps pace in mounting seminars that excite and edify. In Police, Law and Society: Issues in Democratic Policing, he brings 30 years’ experience studying the history, sociology, and politics of the police. The course explores the origins of democratic policing in law and politics, and the way police departments are organized and function. Students are encouraged to ask why law enforcement officials act the way they do—in patrolling, searching, seizing, and interrogating—and what are the occasions, explanations, and remedies for police brutality, corruption, and perjury. As the nation’s leading expert on police integrity and accountability, Skolnick is uniquely situated to guide his students in a dialogue about the kind of rules, organizations, and institutions that are appropriate and effective for maintaining police accountability in a democratic society.

In Skolnick’s seminar on the Regulation of Vice, he brings his measured professionalism to bear on such raw subjects as the sextrafficking trade and heroin addiction. The course starts off asking what vice is, and how it differs from crime, and then moves on to explore a range of vices involving gambling, sex, and drugs—legal and illegal. Skolnick digs beneath the penal code definitions to inquire into the etiology of deviant behaviors and the sociological underpinnings of morals legislation. The students weigh the pros and cons of decriminalizing vice, and whether and how to regulate it if it does not violate the penal code. “I am less interested in the specific laws governing the prosecution of vice crimes,” says Skolnick, “than in the social and cultural developments that account for fluctuations in public and law enforcement interest in such crimes.”

Professor Bryan Stevenson teaches two of the most popular seminars in criminal law. In Race, Poverty and Criminal Justice, the class examines the influence of race and poverty in the administration of the criminal justice system. The seminar explores the effects upon the criminal justice system of conscious and unconscious racism and a variety of mechanisms that disadvantage the poor. The subjects covered in the course include racial disparities in charging, discretionary judgments in the prosecution of criminal cases, and the formulation of crime policy in the United States. The course considers the effectiveness of anti-discrimination law in the area of crime and punishment.

Stevenson, a nationally renowned capital defender who teaches the Law School’s Capital Defender Clinic in Alabama, also teaches a seminar entitled Capital Punishment Law and Litigation, which examines the constitutional and legal structure of capital punishment and the procedures regulating capital trials, appeals and post-conviction litigation. The seminar explores the factors that may affect the use of the death penalty, including political considerations, perceptions of crime, race, and poverty. The course appraises the degree to which litigation strategies have and have not succeeded in responding to problems in the administration of the death penalty.

Professor of Law Emeritus Harry Subin’s course on Sex Crimes allows students to explore in depth the complex and sensitive issues that arise when the criminal law is used to prevent and deter what might most inclusively be called unwanted sexual conduct. The course reviews developments in statutory and case law defining sex crimes, with particular emphasis on the crime of rape. Students also explore problems of proof that impede prosecution in sex crime cases, and the evidentiary reforms designed to address those problems. In addition, the seminar examines the efforts of mental health professionals to identify and treat sex offenders suffering from various forms of mental disorder, as well as the constitutional and policy issues surrounding various preventive sanctions, including civil commitment, chemical castration, and sex offender registration laws.

Subin also teaches Federal Criminal Practice, a study of the process by which a federal criminal case is developed and resolved by prosecutors and defense attorneys. Students scrutinize a hypothetical case from the point at which the initial decision to prosecute is made through each stage of the process, to disposition by trial or plea and sentencing. Students interested in continuing beyond doctrinal analysis of criminal procedure and evidence law appreciate the seminar’s emphasis on how the rules are applied in practice and on the written and oral advocacy skills required of lawyers.

David Garland teaches The Death Penalty: Social and Historical Perspectives, an in-depth analysis of the institution of capital punishment. Using historical and sociological research, students first explore how the forms, functions, and social meanings of capital punishment have changed over time, and what social forces have driven these changes. The class then focuses on the modern American death penalty, and the specific characteristics of the institution that have taken shape in the post-Furman era.

With the richness of these substantive course offerings, three years of law school is simply not long enough to exhaust NYU’s criminal law curriculum. Students seeking to construct a “major” in substantive criminal law from NYU’s course offerings might consider modeling their schedule on Weston Eguchi’s (’04) transcript. Building on the first-year criminal law course, Eguchi studied Business Crimes with Professor First, for whom he later worked as a research assistant, helping update the fraud section of First’s Business Crimes casebook. Eguchi also signed up for the two-semester criminal procedure sequence, taking Police Investigations with Professor Friedman and Bail to Jail with Professor Jacobs. The two criminal law seminars taught by Judge John Gleeson also made it onto Eguchi’s schedule—Sentencing and Complex Federal Investigations. “I was most impressed with his credentials as a practitioner,” says Eguchi, explaining why he double-dipped in Gleeson’s classroom. “It’s important to experience the practical-minded approach of a judge and a prosecutor, which is where the decisions are made in the criminal justice system.” Although Eguchi plans to practice bankruptcy law after graduation, he credits his criminal law coursework with preparing him to deal with the similarly complex procedural environment of bankruptcy proceedings, where the lawyer’s role is often to help reconcile multiple opposing interests.

Practical Experience

The NYU School of Law’s clinical offerings are unparalleled. From established clinics such as the Juvenile/Criminal Defense Clinic to groundbreaking programs in capital punishment and offender reentry, the Law School enables students to put their legal education to work while helping people with real problems.

The clinical program is premised on the three-tiered vision of University Professor Anthony Amsterdam, one of the nation’s leading law teachers and advocates. The NYU School of Law’s first-year Lawyering Program, upper-level simulation courses, and fieldwork clinics are the building blocks for constructing a practical education in the law. As Randy Hertz, professor of clinical law and director of clinical and advocacy programs, puts it, “Clinics and simulation courses place students in role so that they can analyze every legal, factual, or strategic issue from the perspective of how it will affect the individual case and the individual client.” Clinics teach students a variety of lawyering skills, including problem-solving, working with facts, developing a theory of the case, and making decisions in collaboration with the client.

[SIDEBAR: Going the Extra Mile for Death Penalty Defendants]

Fieldwork clinics take newly gained lawyering skills to the streets, where in the unsheltered, unpredictable world of legal practice, they start to make sense. “Three years of law school realistically is too short to learn all the skills a lawyer needs to function,” Hertz remarks. “The best we can do is teach students cognitive skills, how to work with the law and the facts, and how to learn from experience.” Law School graduates credit the dynamic structure of the clinical program with allowing them to “hit the ground running” when they joined a public defender’s office or prosecutorial staff after graduation. “I cannot imagine a criminal law program that better prepares one for the day-to-day practice of criminal law,” says Robert Radick (’97), assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Students with this kind of training are hot commodities when they graduate. In the Bronx Defenders office, six of 20 public defenders in the community-based alternative defense office are graduates of the clinical program who get to put their training to the test each day. The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, universally regarded as the best defender office in the country and the most difficult one at which to get a job, currently employs no fewer than 10 Law School clinic alumni, including five graduates of the Juvenile/Criminal Defense Clinic.

[SIDEBAR: Saving the Children]

A distinctive feature of the NYU School of Law’s clinics is that the faculty who teach them are tenured or tenure-track professors whose sole professional interest is the research and teaching they do at the Law School. Most tireless among these is probably Hertz, who in addition to directing the clinics, runs the innovative Clinical Law Review, serves on numerous bar association and court committees, and teaches a triple course load most years. Hertz, who has been with the program since 1985—and was awarded the American Association of Law Schools’William Pincus Award for Outstanding Service and Commitment to Clinical Legal Education last year—is quick to deflect attention from himself: “The superiority of the clinical program derives from the fact that the NYU School of Law continues to hire the best talent available, who teach what they are interested in. We are not filling niches here; we are constantly interacting and learning from each other. It is an amazing experience to be working with my colleagues on the clinical faculty.”

Anthony Thompson: Life Guide for Ex-Offenders

Anthony Thompson, one of Hertz’s many accomplished clinical colleagues, founded and supervises the first-of-its-kind Offender Reentry Clinic, which focuses on the complex problems faced by individuals returning from prison to the community. Students represent individual clients and also work to reform policies that, on the basis of a criminal record, deny many ex-offenders public housing, certain kinds of jobs, public assistance, educational student loans, and voting rights. The clinic grew out of Thompson’s experience working with the U.S. Department of Justice in the late 1990s, when it started focusing on the imminent return of large numbers of exoffenders to communities with limited resources to provide them safe, affordable housing or viable employment. These individuals frequently faced the painful irony that the training they received in prison to pave their way to a law-abiding life was rendered useless because of state law occupational bars. In New York, for example, most prisons offer vocational training, but many areas of New York occupational law prohibit ex-offenders from obtaining licenses to work in a range of jobs. As Thompson, a former public defender and private criminal lawyer, became interested in the challenge of representing such a client base, he realized that students could benefit from clinical training in the subject. “Students need to be prepared for the full range of challenges they would face as lawyers representing ex-offenders,” he says.

Thompson has become well known in the reentry field as other law schools have begun to identify the issue as key to practical problem-solving for criminal justice clients. He has even helped another law school set up a smaller version of his clinic. The NYU School of Law, he says, offers a unique advantage: “The best criminal justice faculty in the country is on hand to speak to the students, faculty members like David Garland, whose work on penal theory embodies exactly the approach that resonates with reentry programs.” Above all, what Thompson wants his students to take away from their clinical experience is a “sense of balance.” Students in the reentry clinic are taught that “they have to be sensitive to legitimate concerns employers and others have about folks with criminal records,” Thompson says. “We teach students a nuanced approach to convincing people that their biases about ex-offenders are causing them to make bad policy decisions.”

Bryan Stevenson: Advocate for the Condemned

Few clients are in as bad straits as those on death row in Alabama. Professor Bryan Stevenson believes that there are too many problems of fairness and reliability with American’s criminal justice system to permit capital punishment, especially in a state like Alabama, where he founded and directs the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama (EJI). In windowless offices in a concrete building, 200 yards from where slaves were auctioned 150 years ago, Stevenson and his students in the Capital Defender Clinic—Alabama, work on death-row cases in a state that has no public defender system. “My interest in doing this is to provide the poor with legal assistance,” Stevenson says. “I am not just bringing students down here for the sake of training them, but to meet a critical legal need.”

There they engage in fieldwork representing death-row clients in appellate and collateral litigation filed in the state appellate courts, federal district and appellate courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Students find themselves frequently on the road to Alabama’s three maximumsecurity prisons, interviewing death-row clients. They also travel the state interviewing clients’ family members and other potential mitigation witnesses; reviewing local court files; examining state documents and evidence; and collecting information from jurors, trial lawyers, and other critical bystanders. “Most of the students are in a completely unfamiliar setting,” Stevenson says, “and they learn the importance of understanding cultural context, and the dynamics of race, class, and language.”

Students also help to prepare briefs, petitions, motions, and on occasion, work on impact litigation designed to reform the environment in which capital cases are litigated. Stevenson is justly proud of the results: “The clinic is the perfect nexus of legal training and education while helping defendants that are literally dying for representation. No other law school offers a program where students spend an entire semester handling a death penalty case at these close quarters.”

For Stevenson, the opportunity to involve the Law School in the work of EJI counters the isolation and alienation of working in an underserved area with few colleagues or peers. The collaboration has
allowed him to think critically about his work while “connecting with a community of inspiring and talented scholars and lawyers.”

Aaryn Urell (’01), a staff attorney at the EJI, is grateful: “I cannot imagine another criminal law faculty capable of rivaling the Law School’s in the manifest commitment of its professors to social justice and passion for preparing young lawyers to do meaningful, innovative work in the criminal justice field.”

Holly Maguigan: Gender Defender

How the criminal justice system serves and disserves battered women is the concern of the Comparative Criminal Justice Clinic: Focus on Domestic Violence. Taught by leading battered women’s advocate and Clinical Professor Holly Maguigan along with Ehrenkranz School of Social Work Professor Shamita Das Dasgupta, the clinic has three components: fieldwork based in New York City representing battered women who are complainants and defendants in cases involving domestic violence; simulations in which students take on the varying roles and perspectives of attorneys, social workers, and clients in a domestic violence situation, coming to understand how to handle the often conflicting agendas each brings to the table; and a comparative look at the utility of criminal justice interventions in domestic violence cases in the United States and in India.

For the fieldwork component, half of the students work with court-appointed attorneys or public defenders representing women who have been charged with a crime, typically in the context of defending themselves against their abuser. When he represented a woman charged with felony assault against her abuser, Arun Thiruvengadam (LL.M. ’02, J.S.D. ’05) commented: “This case provided me with a fascinating window into the workings of the U.S. legal system, including from the perspectives of criminal law, comparative constitutional law, and the immigration control regime. I participated in the full range of pretrial criminal law practice from conducting factual investigations to attending hearings on discovery and evidentiary matters.”

[SIDEBAR: A Clinical Victory]

The other half of the students in the clinic are assigned to community- based organizations or government agencies that assist battered women who are complainants in criminal cases. Organizations that have collaborated with the Clinic include Sanctuary for Families, New York Asian Women’s Center, and STEPS to End Family Violence. Often the assistance offered by the clinic develops into a strategic alliance to devise and implement new strategies for dealing with domestic violence. The year Irina Taka (’03) enrolled in the clinic, she was assigned to assist Mayor Bloomberg’s domestic violence initiative, known as the Domestic Violence Response Team Program or DiVERT. Taka sat in on meetings among city agencies and law enforcement officials wrestling with the problems of improving coordination and availability of resources to battered women. She helped mediate among overlapping and sometimes conflicting agency mandates, developing protocols for handling domestic violence cases. The program ultimately decided to focus on high-risk precincts, improving coordination with the city’s Housing Authority and Administration of Children’s Services. Taka says, “I wanted to be in on the ground floor of a project like this because I am going back to my native country Greece to work on these issues. Even if the Mayor’s initiative fails, I will have learned something.”

Kim Taylor-Thompson: Cultural Translator

Kim Taylor-Thompson’s Community Defender Clinic takes a different tack in providing defense services to local communities, by partnering with local agencies. Police departments have been experimenting with new forms of crime prevention that emphasize communitybased strategies, prosecutors’ offices have begun to acknowledge the importance of maintaining relations with the communities in which they operate, and the judiciary has created drug and youth courts to address recurring problems in a more targeted way. The Community Defender Clinic is similarly premised on the proposition that public defender offices need to emerge from their isolation and engage in the political and social dialogue about criminal justice policy. Says Taylor- Thompson: “Comprehensive representation of people charged with crimes means paying attention to the communities from which they come and to which they will ultimately return.”

Taylor-Thompson’s experiences before entering academia lend special weight to her words. She spent a decade working in the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, the last three as director of the office, supervising 75 lawyers and 75 staff. More recently, she served as a consultant to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts’ federal defender program, working on ways to provide more comprehensive representation of individuals charged with crimes in the federal system. She helped organize and develop conferences and training sessions on what it means to provide excellence in public defense. A 2003 conference focused on issues such as the various meanings of excellence in terms of individual representation, and collaborating with state defender systems for clients who are charged with both federal and state crimes. Attended by judges and representatives of 50 public defender offices across the country, the conference helped develop a network of people and expertise that federal defenders could go to for advice and information.

Taylor-Thompson also has consulted for the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. She testified before the working group on the issue of race in governance and judicial systems, drawing lessons from the issues facing African-Americans in the U.S. criminal justice system. Her testimony has dealt with effective assistance of counsel, racial demographics of public defender offices, and the role of the jury. The recurring theme of Taylor-Thompson’s presentations is that judicial systems need to reflect the diversity of the population, or at least provide training so that judges from different racial or ethnic backgrounds are sensitized to other communities to bring considered judgment to the case at hand. “Decision-makers in criminal justice systems must be sensitive to racial and ethnic differences and how those differences may affect a fact-finder’s understanding of how a person reacted in the situation at issue, whether the behavior was justified in some way, whether punishment is necessary, and what would be a just punishment,” she says.

Beyond the Courses and Clinics

Dean Richard Revesz’s monthly roundtable lunches with alumni, including criminal law practitioners, inject even more stimulating discussion into this mix. The 2003-04 schedule included a lively conversation with Stephen Hammerman (’62), deputy commissioner of legal matters for the New York City Police Department, essentially serving as the police commissioner’s general counsel. Hammerman, who went to law school at night so that he could work a job to support his young family, inspired the students with his obvious love of the law. Selected students are also invited to the Center for Research in Crime and Justice’s weekly luncheons featuring guests speaking on criminal law topics. The Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship Program’s Monday Night Speaker Series on Public Interest Law routinely invites scholars and practitioners who work in criminal justice. Last year, speakers included the Law School’s death penalty expert Bryan Stevenson; G. Douglas Jones who revisited “The Prosecution of the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Cases”; and Derwyn Bunton (’98), senior staff attorney of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, who described the horrifying conditions he discovered in the juvenile prisons there, and what he did about them.

The activities of several student organizations also intersect with criminal law topics. In 2003, the Law Student Drug Policy Forum hosted a symposium, which featured panels on such topics as the collateral consequences of the war on drugs, drug crimes sentencing, and federal constraints on state drug-policy innovation. The group also seeks to create internship and volunteer opportunities for students, and to collaborate with local drug policy organizations and student organizations in local political activities.

Law Students Against the Death Penalty, formed in response to the passage of New York State’s death penalty law in September 1995, offers assistance in fighting the death penalty both in New York and around the country. Members do legal research and review trial transcripts for organizations, such as the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, the Georgia Resource Center, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The student group also sponsored a symposium on the future of the death penalty movement, featuring the Innocence Project’s Peter Neufeld (’75) and Donald Paradis, a former death-row inmate.

The Prisoners’ Rights and Education Project provides inmates in New York state prisons with legal research skills. Each semester, it conducts a seven-week course at prison libraries, mirroring what first-year law students learn in the Lawyering Program.

Other student organizations find fertile ground at the Law School to create programs with a connection to criminal law and justice. Over the past academic year, the NYU chapter of the Federalist Society hosted a half-day conference on “Enforcing Corporate Responsibility Through Criminal Law,” debating the extent to which criminal law should be used as a tool for business regulation. Alumni Vanita Gupta (’01) and Adam Levin (’97) visited the Law School as guests of the Law Student Drug Policy Forum and the Black Allied Law Students Association (BALSA) to discuss their work overturning the infamous Tulia, Texas criminal cases where one-tenth of a town’s African-American population was convicted of trumped-up charges. The NYU Review of Law and Social Change presented a colloquium on the 50th anniversary of the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, including a panel on what its legacy of equal protection jurisprudence has to say about community policing and racial profiling.

At the colloquium, Liyah Brown (’04) joined Lieutenant Eric Adams, co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, and Lawrence Rosenthal, deputy corporation counsel for the City of Chicago Department of Law, to examine the effect of the Brown decision on U.S. policing strategies. The subject matter was anything but theoretical for Brown, an African-American who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn—“Bed-Stuy” as it is popularly known, especially through rap songs that use it as shorthand for murder and mayhem. Brown remembers it differently: “My neighbors were and still are poor, hard-working people, struggling to get by.” She returned to that community after spending the latter half of the 1990s in Washington, D.C., first obtaining her B.A. from Georgetown University and then working for the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry and a public interest law firm. Brown appreciates the transformation of Bed-Stuy, where the murder rate has decreased by more than 70 percent since she was a teenager there. But she still sees an economically desperate community, vulnerable to a police force that has not yet weeded out all officers who cross the line. She explored the question of how community policing can be a means of achieving racial justice in her note, written while she was still in school, Officer or Overseer?: Or Why Integration of Police Forces Has Failed to Improve Policing in Inner Cities.

Adams, a 20-year veteran of the New York City Police Department, offered the perspective of a watchdog cop active in challenging police practices that may offend civil liberties. But Rosenthal drew on Chicago crime-fighting experiences to counter that innercity residents would rather have the city send more police into their neighborhoods than redeploy cops to wealthy enclaves. He described the dramatic reduction in violent crime rates over the past 10 years as a triumph of sociology over jurisprudence.

Brown doubted the efficacy of community policing methods, pointing out that experts disagree on the reasons for declining crime rates. Clearly passionate about criminal justice, Brown will clerk for a U.S. district judge and plans to work for a public defender’s office. When one panelist reported that a U.S. Department of Justice survey found that 76 percent of African-Americans are satisfied with their neighborhood police, Brown announced, “I am not satisfied.” And she intends to do something about it.

Brown, and others like her, is a successful reflection of the NYU criminal law faculty’s dedication to nurturing a sense of mission in their students. The program is part of a proud NYU School of Law tradition, one of mixing practical goals about working to right wrongs with intellectual engagement in the theoretical underpinnings of the profession. When it comes to the practice of criminal law at its finest that really means, essentially, trying one’s best to help deliver justice for all.

Professor David Garland: Exhibit A

Widely considered one of the world’s leading sociologists of crime and punishment, Garland joined the NYU faculty from Edinburgh University. His publications on the sociology of punishment, penal policy, and criminological theory can be found on course syllabi from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Adelaide, Australia. He was the founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Punishment & Society and is currently on the board of The British Journal of Sociology and the journal Law and Social Inquiry. In addition to his Arthur T. Vanderbilt chair at the Law School, he holds a full professorship in the NYU Department of Sociology.

Over the last academic year, Garland’s preeminence in the field was definitively affirmed by three separate academic conferences honoring his work. In September 2003, the Scottish Criminology Conference celebrated the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Power to Punish, the seminal book edited and, in part, authored by Garland. As he explains, the book laid out a program for the development of a new sociology of punishment and identified the key issues, ideas, and arguments that have come to define this area. Twenty years later, the conferees assessed what has been accomplished, mounting a retrospective of scholarship in this field, much of which was influenced by Garland’s prizewinning studies Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (1990) and Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (1985).

Later that same month, the University of York’s biennial conference on political theory was entirely devoted to a discussion of Garland’s tour de force, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (2001). The book charts important changes in the social response to crime in the United States and Britain over the past 25 years and offers a sociological explanation of how we came to rely on mass imprisonment and a pervasive culture of control to deal with the risks and insecurities that are part of contemporary social organization. In March 2004, there was a third conference honoring Garland’s work when 400 delegates met at the Universitá degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca to mark the publication of an Italian edition of The Culture of Control, and to hear several of Italy’s leading scholars and jurists discuss its relevance to Italy and other contemporary societies.

The Culture of Control’s interpretation of the current scene is grounded in a detailed empirical knowledge of how the criminal justice system works, together with a broad grasp of the social forces shaping everyday life. Because of its broad range and synthesizing vision, the book has resonated in many different countries and in many different fields of scholarship. To date, it has generated more than 60 reviews in scholarly journals, authormeets- critics sessions at several conferences here and abroad, and a forthcoming book—Politics and the Culture of Control, edited by Matt Matravers—in which other scholars comment on or take issue with its theses.

Garland is currently studying the American system of capital punishment, showing how its specific form and character have been produced by America’s distinctive governmental structures, political history, and cultural conflicts. He seeks to explain why, even though most Western countries abolished the death penalty in the 1960s, the United States continues to execute offenders. Garland rejects the prevailing view that American culture is somehow predisposed toward a punitive response to crime, and argues instead that explanations need to focus upon the specific institutional features of American law and government, and a detailed history of the political and cultural currents that operate through them.

Just as Garland’s scholarship is enriched by the dual perspectives of law and sociology, he enjoys interacting in the classroom with both law students and sociology graduate students. “My sociology grad students are training to be academics: they will write dissertations and make careers in the areas that I teach, so they tend to have a deep and long-term engagement with the issues,” Garland says. “But it’s also exciting to listen to the law students in my seminars on the death penalty, prison law, or sentencing. Many have real, practical experience or detailed policy knowledge in criminal justice. When they bring these perspectives to bear they usually stimulate a terrific classroom dialogue.”

Professor James Jacobs: Godfather of the Department

Professor James Jacobs is a prolific and creative legal scholar. Beginning with his 1977 sociology dissertation, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society, which is still the classic monograph on the social and legal transformation of the prison in post-World War II America, through his recent book Can Gun Control Work? (Oxford University Press, 2002), which provoked nationwide debate on U.S. gun laws, Jacobs has produced thoughtful work on an extraordinary range of subjects. In addition to scores of articles, he has written 15 books covering topics like prisoners’ rights, civil-military relations, drunk driving, public corruption, organized crime, hate crimes, and gun control. Jacobs describes his work as “driven from the ground up” he says. “I don’t come to a subject with a preformed ideological framework. My approach to scholarship is sociological, criminological, empirical, and policy- oriented.” Incorrigibly curious and original in his thinking, Jacobs’ interests typically take him ahead of scholarship trends.

His book on gun control is a prime example, anticipating the recent flurry of interest in this topic. In researching Can Gun Control Work? Jacobs first spent time learning how guns actually operate and who owns and uses guns, concluding that complete disarmament is not a realistic option for the United States. He next looked at the history of gun control in this country, deducing from the statistical evidence that gun control has not made, and is unlikely to make, a noticeable dent in violent crime. Refusing to align himself with any one political perspective, Jacobs examined the various existing and proposed gun controls, refocusing the debate on sensible strategies for reducing gun-related crime. He reached conclusions that annoyed both gun rights’ advocates (gun shows are impossible to police and should probably be banned outright), as well as anti-gun activists (a ban on handguns would be just as impossible to enforce as our drug laws).

Jacobs’ unapologetic distaste for absolutes and abstractions makes it difficult to pigeonhole his view on any particular issue, with the result that both sides of the political divide have had occasion to blacklist him. When former President Bill Clinton convened a White House conference on hate crime, the U.S. Department of Justice invited Jacobs to attend, but later rescinded the invitation under pressure from activists who did not want the creation of hate-crime categories questioned. Similarly, during the Reagan administration’s campaign against drunk driving, the National Institutes of Health were not allowed to cite Jacobs’ book on drunk driving because he is not categorically in favor of deterrence and punishment as a strategy. Not surprisingly, Jacobs has never testified before Congress. “I’m not a campaigner or a politician,” he says. But people in power pay attention to what he has to say.

Jacobs’ latest work focuses on labor racketeering, which in his view “stands at the intersection of two powerful 20th-century institutions—organized crime and organized labor.” Jacobs has been revisiting the issue of organized crime since the mid-1980s, fascinated by the strength of its position in the country’s economic and political power structure. In writings such as Busting the Mob in 1994, and Gotham Unbound: How New York City was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime in 1999, both published by NYU Press, he has documented and analyzed law enforcement’s attack on the Mafia, focusing on the systematic purging of crime families, with hundreds of mobsters sent to prisons and the major crime families in most cities rendered dysfunctional. Jacobs finds it remarkable that so few scholars have shown any interest in this massive legal campaign. “This is not what stimulates most criminal law scholarship in the U.S.,” Jacobs says. “Most criminal law academics are more interested in civil liberties issues, are more doctrinally oriented toward what the Supreme Court does.”

In turning his attention to mobbed-up unions for his new book, Organized Crime & Organized Labor, to be published next year, Jacobs hopes to illuminate the impact of organized crime on the labor movement and on U.S. politics. He is also taking a close look at the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lawsuits launched against labor racketeering, 19 of which have already resulted in the appointment of trustees to purge the mob and restore democracy in local, regional, national, and international unions. One example is the trusteeship over the Teamsters, the country’s largest private union, with 530 union leaders purged since 1989. This litigation crusade “is one of the great episodes of court-ordered reform in the history of American law,” Jacobs says, “and no one is writing about it.” Nor is anyone evaluating its efficacy, according to Jacobs. After 20 years of a “massive experiment in directed sociopolitical change,” he has found that “very little is known about what works and what does not work, or even about what court-appointed trustees in union reform cases actually do.”

Jacobs’ teaching schedule is no less energetic. He regularly takes the lectern in the first-year criminal law course and the upper-level criminal procedure course as well as teaching Federal Criminal Law and Juvenile Justice courses. He has designed and taught more than a half-dozen different seminars through the years in subjects ranging from sentencing to the drug war. He was recently inducted into the American Society of Criminology, and his seminars reflect his multidisciplinary approach to subjects in criminal law. In a class called The Regulation of Weaponry in a Democratic Society, he explores whether gun control is bad for women. In his Labor Racketeering and Union Democracy seminar, students read an analysis of corruption and racketeering in the New York City construction trades. “The reason I took a class with Professor Jacobs,” says Weston Eguchi (’04), “is that he does not let us make any unchallenged assumptions about a subject.” In the Winter/Spring 2005 semester Professor Jacobs and Adjunct Professor Ronald Goldstock will be launching a new seminar on Privatization in Criminal Justice, dealing with private police, private investigations firms, private prisons, and private dispute settlement (through restorative justice mechanisms).

Professor Jerome Skolnick: A Life of Crime

Professor Jerome Skolnick’s seminars on policing and on the regulation of vice also take a nuanced approach, probing the history, sociology, and politics that underlie the law. Although honored for his scholarship by just about every major criminal law and justice organization, Skolnick likes to point out that he is not a lawyer. A native New Yorker, Skolnick’s career path has included sojourns writing an award-winning moral philosophy dissertation at the City College of New York and a groundbreaking family law casebook while teaching at Yale Law School, serving in an Army Reserve’s South Asia strategic intelligence unit, and winning a National Science Foundation grant to gather materials for his book-length study of the regulation of casino gambling in Nevada. Skolnick spent most of his academic career at the University of California at Berkeley where he was the director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society.

Skolnick offers a distinctive sociological perspective on criminal law and its administration, befitting the former president of the American Society of Criminology and board member of the American Sociological and Law and Society Associations. He is probably best known for his classic book Justice Without Trial, which examines how the subculture of the police influences their enforcement of the criminal law. For the better part of 30 years, Skolnick has been recognized internationally as a premier expert on democratic policing. His theories of police integrity and accountability, most recently developed in his book Above the Law with James J. Fyfe (currently the New York City Police Department’s Deputy Commissioner for Training) continue to provide a framework that defines the research in this field, most notably in recent examinations of excessive force by police racial profiling practices. “The issue of racial profiling offers an example of how the Law School, and in particular the Center for Research in Crime and Justice, pulls together diverse interests in the criminal justice area to influence scholarship on a subject,” Skolnick says. Recollecting his interactions with Thomas Tyler, NYU professor of psychology, at Center events, Skolnick gratefully acknowledges the debt his current work owes to Tyler’s seminal studies on what makes a society law-abiding and how practices such as racial profiling undermine police legitimacy and compliance with law.

Skolnick also credits the Law School’s new Center on Law and Security for advancing the interdisciplinary approach to issues in criminal law. A regular last year at the Center’s colloquia on the legal dimensions of counterterrorism, Skolnick is interested in terrorism as a special type of crime, concentrating police resources into international intelligence, risk prevention, and post-attack planning. “Crime prevention typically involves community relations, targeting high-crime areas, things the police are already doing,” Skolnick says. “How does and should this differ when conpolice are expected to prevent and respond to terrorist acts?” The exchange of ideas stimulated by the Center influenced Skolnick’s recent thinking and research into the role of the law enforcement authorities in national security efforts. Skolnick has recently written two papers on torture and interrogation. “On Controlling Torture” was published last year in a volume edited by Stanley Cohen and Thomas Blomberg. Skolnick’s paper “American Interrogation: From Torture to Trickery” is about to be published in an Oxford University Press book on torture, edited by Sanford Levinson with a forward by Ariel Dorfman.

International Dimensions

Criminal law intersects with many other specialties of law, and many would say this reality is personified in Professor Theodor Meron as he stands at the crossroads of human rights, humanitarian, criminal and international law. A 25-year veteran of the faculty, Meron is currently on leave serving as president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, headquartered at The Hague, Netherlands. This appointment caps off a venerable career in international public service, including his time in the Israeli Foreign Service in the 1970s and, since then, as an active member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Along with being a forceful presence on the international stage, Meron has written prolifically on human rights, humanitarian law, and international criminal law.

Having traveled in his life from a Nazi labor camp in Poland to the NYU School of Law, Meron was profiled earlier this year in The New York Times as a dedicated scholar who is passionate about the principles of humanitarian law and the quest to avoid the worst excesses of war. (Please see the reprinted article on page 99.) He believes that the Hague tribunal will serve as a model for dispensing international justice for such courts as the International Criminal Court. More important, Meron believes the tribunal marks a growing international acceptance that the world must reckon with war crimes and other massive human rights abuses. As he told the Global Policy Forum earlier this year, “The tribunal serves an essential role in the region itself by showing the victims of those terrible crimes that, in fact, some of the principal offenders will not go unpunished, that there is accountability, that it really presents an opportunity to put an end, in a some way, to this notion of impunity which has plagued the international community for such a long time.”

Although Meron’s schedule does not permit a full-time teaching load, he continues to supervise student work, including J.S.D. candidates working on dissertations in international criminal law. He also exercises his teaching muscles, delivering the general course on public international law at the Hague Academy this past year, a wide-ranging discourse on the law of war and the criminalization of international humanitarian law, also published in book form as International Law in the Age of Human Rights.

The healthy flow of international visitors is also augmented by the Hauser Global Law School Program, which every year sponsors up to 20 leading foreign law professors and judges from around the world to teach at the NYU School of Law, routinely offering a compelling perspective on worldwide administration of criminal justice. The Law School’s preeminence in the field of international criminal law is epitomized by such distinguished visitors as Richard Goldstone, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, which supervised the country’s transition to democracy. Goldstone periodically teaches a seminar at the Law School on the Law of War and International Criminal Courts, which draws on his remarkable career in the enforcement of international humanitarian law. From 1991 to 1994, he served as Chairperson of the South African Commission of Inquiry regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, which came to be known as the Goldstone Commission. Later career milestones have spanned the globe; from 1994-96, Goldstone served as the chief prosecutor of the U.N. International War Crimes Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; from 1999-2001, he was chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo; and finally, from 2002-03, he served as co-chair of the International Bar Association’s Task Force on International Terrorism.

Current Global Law Faculty member Nicola Lacey, professor of criminal law at the London School of Economics, has taught Legal Punishment: Philosophy and Practice during her visits, examining the institution of legal punishment from wide-ranging philosophical and sociological perspectives, with readings in political theorists such as Jeremy Bentham, H.L.A. Hart, Michel Foucault, and John Braithwaite, who himself was a visiting professor at the Law School in 2001. Lacey’s interdisciplinary scholarship draws on several fields—criminal law doctrine, criminology and criminal justice studies, feminist theory, and political philosophy—all of which she applied to research on moral blaming and judgments of guilt in criminal law, conducted in part during her visits to the Law School. She also participated in “Our Community’s Response to September 11, 2001,” on the first anniversary of the attack, delivering a talk on “Civil Liberties in the Face of Terrorism and Problems of Punishment: The Experience in Other Countries.”

The Hauser Global Law School Program also hosts a steady stream of events and sponsors numerous projects and initiatives, many bearing on issues in international criminal law such as the Project on Transitional Justice, directed by Professor Alexander Boraine, former vice chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Boraine’s project is the first systematic effort to combine intellectual and practical approaches to the new field of “transitional justice,” which studies how countries are moving from authoritarian rule to democracy.

The Law School’s full-time faculty also boasts Professor Jerome Cohen, an expert in East Asian studies, international business transactions, comparative law, and international law. At Harvard University and, since 1991, at NYU, Cohen helped pioneer the introduction of East Asian legal systems and perspectives into the United States’ legal curricula. Considered the leading American scholar of Chinese law, Cohen, assisted by Taiwan-born legal scholar Ping Yu, teaches a course on Chinese law and society that is consistently overbooked.

In addition to his many efforts to assist in the successful integration of China’s burgeoning economy into international markets, Cohen is increasingly involved in criminal defense work. In cases that could be seen as the inevitable result of the clash between China’s new openness and its powerful and corrupt bureaucracies, Cohen has found himself serving as counsel in a number of high-profile cases involving China’s illegal detention of American-based Chinese scholars and U.S. businessmen of Chinese ethnic descent.

The enormous difficulties facing criminal defense lawyers in China have become a recurring theme in Cohen’s public lectures. This focus on China’s criminal justice system is just the latest twist in his career-long exploration of the extent to which China’s traditional legal culture presents an obstacle to modernization. In the last year, he has addressed university audiences in Hong Kong on China’s use of the death penalty, in Shanghai on Chinese perspectives on corporate fraud and governance, and in Beijing on U.S. criminal law. Accompanied on these visits by Law School reinforcements, including Professors Jacobs, Skolnick, and Stevenson, Cohen hopes to establish an ongoing dialogue with their Chinese counterparts in criminal law and criminal procedure.

Given the impact of a nation’s criminal justice system on foreign relations, many of the foreign students who study at the Law School every year, including the specially selected Hauser Global Law Scholars and the Global Public Service Law Scholars, are engaged in serious scholarship in criminal law topics. They are drawn to the NYU School of Law to exchange ideas and have their work reviewed by the faculty equivalent of a world-class editorial board. Millie Odhiambo (’01), a former state attorney for Kenya, grabbed this opportunity when she came to NYU to study international human rights law and comparative criminal law. Working with Holly Maguigan, professor of clinical law and a faculty director of the Global Public Service Law Project, Odhiambo engaged in a case study on using public interest law to vindicate women’s rights in Kenya in the area of domestic violence. As a result, Odhiambo was awarded a Global Public Service Fellowship to work with the Children’s Legal Aid Network in Nairobi, where she developed a family and juvenile court manual for indigent clients and wrote “best practices” guidelines to assist legal aid clinics addressing family law issues.

The international reverberations of the NYU School of Law’s criminal law program are epitomized by Arun Thiruvengadam (LL.M. ’02, J.S.D. ’05), a law professor from India who is visiting the Law School to write his doctoral thesis on comparative constitutional law. In the early 1990s, he was a member of the third graduating class of the National Law School of India University, studying at a time of tremendous intellectual excitement about the law in India. After practicing and teaching law in India and working on significant public interest litigation there, Thiruvengadam says he had grown skeptical of the judiciary and courts as mechanisms for bringing about social change in India. He decided that he needed to expand his thinking about the law in a program with a strong comparative law focus. At the NYU School of Law, he says, “I experienced excitement about the law again.” After completing a one-year LL.M. degree, he was awarded a Global Public Service Law Scholarship to pursue his J.S.D. “I was convinced to continue my studies by the level of academic inquiry at NYU and the opportunities to interact with scholars from all over the world.”

For Thiruvengadam, his semester in the Comparative Criminal Justice Clinic was a turning point. He won an award for his work at the clinic, which primarily involved helping represent an undocumented alien who seriously injured her boyfriend in alleged self-defense, fled to Jamaica after the attack, and was ultimately extradicted back to the United States to stand trial.Thiruvengadam’s efforts on her behalf included substantive research into the law of extradition, mental competency, and the admissibility of foreign confessions, as well as participation in pretrial criminal law practice ranging from factual investigation to hearings on discovery and evidentiary matters. His experiences in the clinic, and his sense of the Law School’s overall commitment to public service, gave him focus for his eventual return to the legal academy in India. “I hope to found a public interest law center in India, modeled on the one at NYU, to provide the training, counseling, job opportunities, and financial support necessary to develop career paths in public interest law,” he says.

U.S. students interested in international criminal law similarly have access to transformative learning experiences, including positions as interns at the U.N. International Law Commission or as judicial assistants at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The Law School has also sponsored students for clerkships with the Court of Justice of the European Communities in Luxembourg, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and the Interamerican Court of Human Rights. These clerkships with foreign and international courts, which are constantly being expanded, reflect the Law School’s determination to broaden the global opportunities available to students interested in criminal law.

Center on Law and Security

Since September 11, 2001, constitutional democracy in the United States has had to confront legal issues regarding national security and policing that present completely novel questions. The expertise that exists on these issues is overwhelmingly concentrated in New York City. The NYU School of Law’s Center on Law and Security, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, is a research and policy program that fulfills a dire need for information, scholarship, policy advice, and debate on counter-terrorism and peace-keeping, the critical legal areas of our times. Richard Pildes, the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, a Center faculty co-director and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy, sees the Center as an example of how scholarship at the NYU School of Law is concerned with practical relevance. The challenge of the age of terror for legal scholars, Pildes says, is “to take the structures, principles, and values developed in other contexts and make sense of them in this new context.”

“We serve as an educational and informational resource for anyone interested in the legal dimensions of counterterrorism,” says Karen Greenberg, the Center’s executive director. “We have interacted with the Homeland Security Department, the CIA, the NYPD, Scotland Yard, many of President Clinton’s former advisers, the staffs of numerous Congressmen and Senators, the RAND Corporation, the Manhattan Institute, and the Brookings Institution, to name a few.” These exchanges often take place in open forums where the well-informed participants—decisionmakers themselves—examine the current legal debate over counterterrorism. Examples from the Fall semester include Guantánamo: The Supreme Court Cases and the Extent of U.S. Power Over “Illegal Combatants”—What Will It Mean?, The USA Patriot Act: Where Do We Go From Here? and Al Jazeera: Propaganda or Investigative Journalism? The Center even hosted an advance screening of the controversial documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War. The Center also collaborates with organizations and agencies engaged in the war on terror, including working with the NYPD’s counterterrorism personnel, to contribute fresh thinking on how to moderate law enforcement reaction in crisis situations.

Professor Stephen Holmes’s work also pushes the boundaries as he explores the hot new field of national security law, in particular its connection to international relations and the enforcement of international criminal law. With degrees in philosophy and political science, Holmes is a specialist on the history of European liberalism and on legal change in Eastern Europe and Russia after communism. His latest work focuses on the evaluation of efforts by institutions, such as the World Bank, to promote the “rule of law” in transitional and developing countries, and on the global implications of antiterrorism measures. As a faculty co-director of the Center on Law and Security, he brings his legal and historical acumen to scholarship involving the apprehension and punishment of terrorists. This year, his students will get a taste of this interdisciplinary framework in his Political Trials: Dilemmas of International Criminal Law seminar.

The Center on Law and Security’s main initiative since its creation in 2003 has been the Program on Law and Security, led by the Center’s four co-directors— Professors Noah Feldman (author of After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy), David Golove, Stephen Holmes, and Richard Pildes. The Center convenes policy-makers, law enforcement officials, and scholars who discuss and make recommendations on security issues, including the rules and regulations of information sharing among agencies; the role of international organizations in rebuilding Iraq; democracy and Islam; preparedness in New York City and other urban areas nationwide and abroad; international codes for apprehension and punishment of terrorists; and secrecy in government and the media. As might be expected, criminal justice themes reverberate throughout the Programs’ efforts, which include study of the legal framework for investigating terrorism, law enforcement methods at home and overseas, the challenge posed by international collaboration in the prosecution of terrorists, and constructing a security apparatus for new democracies. As evidence of the Center’s relevance, it is worth mentioning that last year Holmes, and this year Pildes, were selected for the prestigious Carnegie Scholar grant—the first time a law school’s faculty has been chosen two years in a row.

[SIDEBAR: Constitutional Scholars Debate Guantánamo Bay Detentions]

To carry out the Program on Law and Security, the Center has embarked on an ambitious project called the Colloquium on Law and Security, which gathers law students, faculty members, and interested guests on a weekly basis to delve into the issues and current state of the debate over specific topics in counterterrorism. Last fall, the colloquium was run by Professors Holmes and Pildes. Guest speakers have included noted Middle East scholar Rohan Gunaratna on Al Qaeda’s global network of terror; Daniel Benjamin, senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the current war on terror; Jack Goldsmith, then the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, who is an expert on U.S. civil litigation and international terrorism; and William Wechsler, former director for transnational threats at the National Security Council, on cutting off terror financing. With required readings posted on the Center’s Web site, the colloquium brims with dialogue and debate. This intellectual exchange is at the core of the Center’s mission of facilitating discussion across borders, professions, and perspectives as to how to fight the war on terror. “As we implement our program,” Pildes says, “I can see the Center making special policy recommendations or assisting in designing new institutional structures such as special terrorism courts.”

In addition, the Center hosts two major conferences each year. The one held in November 2003, “Are We Safer? Transformations in Security After September 11,” discussed how to resolve the tension between civil liberties and the need to gird our national security. The other, held in June 2004, gathered antiterrorism experts for two days of intense talk at NYU’s La Pietra campus in Florence. (Please see full story on page 57.)

What Karen Greenberg, the Center’s executive director, has been gratified to learn is that no side of the debate on antiterrorism has a monopoly on respect for the law. Despite how the media reports on the Patriot Act, Greenberg believes that “law enforcement officials, including in the Bush administration, are hesitant to bend the law to accommodate hysteria about terrorism. They have respect for the law and for their profession and are struggling with these issues as much as anyone.”

The Center also sponsors research and scholarship in counterterrorism topics, such as Golove’s and Holmes’ article on terrorism and accountability, published in the Center’s quarterly review. Holmes has also been widely published in journals such as The Nation, The London Review of Books, and the website Salon.com. Rarely has serious legal scholarship so quickly been converted into meaningful policy discussion.

The same could be said of Pildes’ work on the processes of democratic discussion and decision-making within the three branches of government as they each struggle to delimit and deploy the tools of counterterrorism. A frequent commentator on the intersection of domestic and international legal institutions, Pildes recently published “Conflicts Between American and European Views of Law: The Dark Side of Legalism” in the Virginia Journal of International Law. He has shared his scholarship on domestic institutional handling of terrorism cases with gatherings of federal judges, organized by the Law School’s Institute of Judicial Administration. These types of efforts to assist policy-makers, government officials, think tanks, and the media are extended through the Center’s online reading lists and reference materials, including such topics as civil liberties issues, bioterrorism, and ethno-territorial minorities in Western Europe.

Opportunities for student involvement extend beyond the Center’s colloquium and other public events. Each summer, the Center helps support Law School students whose internships are connected with counterterrorism, either on a domestic or a global level. These internships facilitate the development of informed next-generation leaders who can address the issues of counterterrorism with a depth of knowledge and a wealth of experience. Meg Holzer (’05) spent part of her first law school summer as an intern at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. She assisted in information dissemination about the importance of the Chemical Weapons Convention, in operation since 1998, including the treaty’s ban on chemical weapons and its goal of encouraging peaceful uses of chemistry. Each summer a student from the NYU School of Law is selected for an internship at Interpol in Lyon, France. The Center also recently announced a new postgraduate fellowship, the Fellowship in Global Counterrorism at Interpol. Sheridan England (’04) is the first and current fellow. He is working in the Office of Legal Affairs at the agency’s offices in Lyon.

Brennan Center’s Criminal Justice Program

The still-developing Criminal Justice program at the NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice provides a muchneeded outlet for practical advocacy. Part public interest law firm, part think tank, and part advocacy organization, the Program has pursued diverse projects under the leadership of Professor Stephen Schulhofer and the program’s director Kirsten Levingston. The Program challenges popular assumptions about crime and punishment through careful analyses of criminal justice policy and practices, and concerted action to effect reform. Its work thus far centers on effective assistance of counsel, the fair enforcement of the criminal law, and crime and punishment.

The Program’s flagship project is the Community Justice Institute (CJI), a resource for community groups, activists, and defenders working to improve policies at the local, state, and national levels. In designing the Institute, Levingston works to move private and public criminal defense practitioners from political isolation to more active involvement in communities. The Institute addresses the increasing alienation experienced by lowincome communities as a consequence of criminal justice practices, such as “community policing,” that often ignore the views of the communities they purport to protect. Using a methodology known as “community-oriented defense,” the Institute encourages the development of partnerships among community organizations— like schools, churches, and social service agencies—and their local indigent defense service providers, so that they might jointly identify mutual concerns and aspirations.

[SIDEBAR: On Leave for a Noble Cause]

The Brennan Center strives to elevate community voices in the courtroom through its Community Amicus Practice. Using amicus procedures, the Center files briefs in local prosecutions that have policy implications beyond the case at hand, raising issues that the parties may not otherwise bring to the fore. The Center partnered with the Seattle-King County Public Defender’s Office to file an amicus brief in State of Washington v. Lonnie McKinney, on behalf of criminal defense lawyers in the state of Washington contesting the random running of license plates by law enforcement officers. The brief argued that the practice should be unconstitutional because it entails the exercise of infinite officer discretion, which can lead to racially-biased policing. Although running license plates based on a traffic violation or reasonable suspicion of criminal activity may be a reliable police practice, the brief argued that the Washington state constitution protects its citizens’ privacy interests from government “fishing expeditions.”

The Center also submitted an amicus brief on behalf of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group, in People v. Glenn, urging the New York Court of Appeals to maintain its longstanding prohibition against illegitimate traffic stops, in which police claim to stop motorists for a traffic violation but instead are interested in investigating other activity. Partnering with lawyers at Schulte, Roth & Zabel, the Brennan Center filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in HUD v. Rucker, a case challenging the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “one-strike” policy. Under this policy, public housing authorities may evict tenants and their families if a family member or guest engages in criminal or drug activity, on or off the public housing premises, even if the tenants did not know about the activity.

In its monthly Conversation Series, the Brennan Center has touched on many other important criminal justice themes, such as the status of female offenders and the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment. A conversation held in 2003 featuring Dr. Paul Street, vice president of research and planning for the Chicago Urban League, illuminated the contrast between the massive public, media, and policy-maker attention given to welfare reform and the virtual neglect of racially disparate mass incarceration and felony-marking. Street’s talk explored the direct and indirect social, economic, and political damage inflicted on U.S. communities of color by mass incarceration, including its impact on the census, voting power, and budget allocation. Lectures like this pull in students as well as practitioners and policy-makers.

Stephen Schulhofer: Voice of Reason

Stephen Schulhofer, the Robert B. McKay Professor of Law, finds the Brennan Center’s research support indispensable to his work on civil liberties and the war on terrorism, including his recent contributions to amicus briefs in the Korematsu and Guantánamo Bay prisoner rights cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. Research assistance funded by the Brennan Center laid the foundation for much of the briefs’ historical review of U.S. civil liberties violations during wartime. Fred Korematsu first appeared at the U.S. Supreme Court during World War II when he refused, as an American citizen of Japanese descent, to be interned. He was prosecuted and convicted at the time, only to have his conviction thrown out decades later, and to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Korematsu stepped forward again last year on behalf of military detainees being held without charge or access to counsel to argue that the United States must “respect the principle that individuals may not be deprived of their liberty except for appropriate justifications that are demonstrated in fair hearings.”

As part of its ongoing efforts to bring moderation to debates on tactics deployed in the name of counterterrorism, the Center on Law and Security hosted “The USA Patriot Act: Where Do We Go From Here?” The event featured Schulhofer and Alice Fisher, partner in the litigation department of Latham & Watkins and former deputy assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division, and was moderated by Tom Gerety, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice.

In Fisher’s view, the Patriot Act has unjustifiably become “the bogeyman for civil libertarians,” mischaracterized as privacy- invading and rights-denying despite full congressional and judicial oversight of its implementation. Schulhofer responded with the argument he has made in his book The Enemy Within and in his testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9-11 Commission): “The legal issues concerning the scope of the Patriot Act are much less important than people on either side of the debate think.” The main obstacles to effective counterterrorism efforts, Schulhofer says, “are agency culture; human deficits; and budgetary, technological, and organizational deficits that prevented our national security apparatus from using the legal tools they had.” He pointed out that federal law enforcement authorities had identified Zacharias Moussaoui as a risk before September 11 and even had legal authority to search his computer, “but they dropped the ball.”

Since then, many legal experts have been saying that to fight terrorism we need to shift the balance between liberty and security. This analysis is misguided, Schulhofer says, and diverts us from more important needs like upgrading technology, improving training and communications, and resetting law enforcement priorities. Although conceding that some aspects of the Patriot Act were helpful and inoffensive, Schulhofer asserted that there have been “more than a dozen initiatives since 9/11 that impair freedom and are not relevant to fighting terrorism.” In his view, maximizing security does not require more surveillance laws; it requires more resources to protect soft targets like ports, chemical plants, and weapons facilities.

In the long run, according to Schulhofer, it is more critical to the U.S.’s national security that it uses its power responsibly and consistently with the rule of law. He sees overbroad and invasive counterterrorism measures as “purchasing short term gains at the price of fostering animosity of recent immigrants, Muslims abroad, and democratic nations everywhere.”