Faculty Focus – NYU Law Magazine https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine The magazine for NYU School of Law Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:21:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 Introducing Jeremy Waldron https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/jeremy-waldron/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:23:45 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=1017 Jeremy WaldronFor a scholar who’s been described as a dynamo, a live wire, an enormously energetic intellect, Professor Jeremy Waldron had a quite uneventful upbringing. He was raised in New Zealand’s Invercargill, a small city in a farming district—“the southernmost city in the British Empire!”—where his father, an Anglican clergyman, served in the same parish for Waldron’s entire childhood. Indeed, Waldron didn’t leave New Zealand until he was 25.

But since then, Waldron, 52, often considered one of the world’s leading contemporary political philosophers, has rocketed through the academic world—to Oxford, to Edinburgh, to Berkeley, to Princeton, to Columbia, and now this fall, to NYU. “In the area of legal philosophy,” he says, “NYU has a hugely successful, vigorous intellectual community. In legal theory, it has people like Ronald Dworkin, Tom Nagel, Liam Murphy, Lewis Kornhauser, David Richards, Sam Issacharoff, David Garland, Philip Alston and my countryman Ben Kingsbury. It’s a very rich community.”

Waldron has visited the Law School before, presenting papers at the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy, run by Dworkin and Nagel. Indeed, his relationship with Dworkin dates back to Oxford, where Dworkin had been his academic adviser. But though they’ve remained close through the years, Waldron hasn’t always followed in his mentor’s footsteps. He wasn’t tempted by the world’s leading legal philosophy chairs that had been Dworkin’s—the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford and the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. “He turned down two of my chairs, so I’m lucky he’s coming to NYU,” jokes Dworkin.

So, does Waldron’s much-heralded appointment mean he is finally set to inherit the unofficial mantle of the world’s top legal philosopher from Dworkin? Not according to Waldron. “I think that’s nonsense,” he says. “First of all, Dworkin shows no signs of giving away the mantle. And things don’t work like that. Everyone works in his own areas. People may use that phrase but it would be wrong.” Professor Liam Murphy agrees: “He doesn’t need to inherit Dworkin’s mantle. He’s famous in his own right.”

A lively, animated teacher, Waldron is a highly prolific writer of books and academic papers. “He’s not just writing more than some of us, he’s writing more than most of us!” Murphy says, laughing. Waldron, who made his mark at 35 in the area of property rights with the book The Right to Private Property, isn’t reticent about policy issues, either, taking strong, sometimes controversial stands on judicial review (should be weakened); torture as a way of eliciting information (should be banned absolutely); and multiculturalism (wrong and silly). His studies take him to the very center and convergence of political philosophy, legal philosophy and political theory. “I’m as comfortable teaching historical political theory—Locke, Hobbes, Aristotle—as I am teaching modern constitutional jurisprudence or as I am abstract political philosophy,” he says.

Even as a teenager, Waldron had an interest in law and history. He earned degrees in philosophy and law from New Zealand’s University of Otago, and went to Oxford in 1978 to do graduate work. He first read about Dworkin in a 1977 Time magazine profile drawn to his attention by his mentor and “philosophical godmother,” Professor Gwen Taylor of the University of Otago in New Zealand. She had written to H.L.A. Hart for advice on whom Waldron should study with at Oxford. Hart wasn’t taking new students but suggested Dworkin, and the relationship began. “He was very glamorous, quite intimidating intellectually, but a good person to work with,” Waldron recalls. Dworkin would, typically, shred Waldron’s papers—courteously, of course—and Waldron says he now owes a great debt to Dworkin for his rigorous workings-over. Dworkin, in turn, remembers Waldron then as “engaging, informal, funny, very fast and quick.”

From 1980 to 1982, Waldron was a fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford. Anxious to get on a tenure track, he decided to quit Oxford and go to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He stayed there until 1987, when he left for the Boalt Hall School of Law. Nearly 10 years later, he and his companion, Carol Sanger, then a law professor at Santa Clara Law School, were recruited separately by Columbia Law School. “I didn’t like New York so much, so I succumbed to an offer from Princeton and Carol accepted Columbia.” But he wasn’t happy at Princeton, and after just one year he moved to Columbia. He stayed for “a glorious nine years”—just last year he was named University Professor.

Waldron has several projects in the works, including collecting historical writings on the rule of law. That will be the topic for a course he will teach in the spring. This fall, he’ll help conduct the demanding Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy with Nagel and Dworkin.

One thing Waldron will be doing less of this year is administrative work. He ran a center on law and philosophy at Columbia and chaired the University Senate Committee on Libraries and IT there. He says that he won’t miss the grinding committee work and that he’s happy that he will be able to partake of the classical music, opera and travel that he loves. But also, he says, his new schedule will give him more time to focus—“on the core activity of teaching and writing.

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Introducing Margaret Satterthwaite https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/margaret-satterthwaite/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:49:04 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=1011 Margaret Satterthwaite '99To watch Margaret Satterthwaite field emails in her office, dressed conservatively in a crisp white button-down shirt and navy pantsuit—funky blue/brown plastic glasses not withstanding—one would never suspect that she once was a rebellious teen punker. Then again, nothing about this assistant professor of clinical law, who also holds a master’s degree in literature and once combed the streets of Haiti investigating human rights abuses, is predictable.

“An unconventional career path? Is it?” Satterthwaite ’99 asks about herself. “I certainly didn’t want to be a lawyer initially,” she concedes. “I wanted to be an activist.”

These days, as a faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), Satterthwaite, 37, is a little bit of both. “She is among a handful of scholars in the United States who have managed to combine very thorough and nuanced scholarship with timely and pathbreaking analyses of the most pressing issues confronting practitioners in this area,” says Professor Philip Alston, who heads up the CHRGJ.

In the three years since returning to her alma mater to teach, she has generated several important human rights reports and articles. In 2004, Satterthwaite and CHRGJ researchers, in conjunction with a committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, released a hefty legal report called “Torture by Proxy: International and Domestic Law Applicable to ‘Extraordinary Renditions.’” The report concluded that “extraordinary rendition”—sending suspected terrorists to countries where they risk being tortured under interrogation—is not authorized by any publicly available statute, regulation or executive finding and violates international law binding on the U.S. Satterthwaite is expanding that research into a scholarly piece, “Extraordinary Rendition: Testing the Limits of Human Rights Law,” which is expected to be published this winter in the George Washington University Law Review. In “Fate and Whereabouts Unknown: Detainees in the ‘War on Terror’” (CHRGJ Dec. 2005), Satterthwaite looked at a related issue: the enforced disappearances of terrorist suspects—detainees who are held in secret locations by the U.S.—many of whom were allegedly involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Satterthwaite was raised in Maryland and Virginia by her divorced mom, Sara, 63, who worked in a series of “pink-collar jobs,” such as dental hygienist. As a teenager, she says, “I was politically aware and felt like high school was this world of trying to look good and going to proms.” She fell into a group of activists and jumped at the opportunity to enter the New School’s Eugene Lang College a year early. She took to New York City, and soon became involved in Amnesty International (AI).

Satterthwaite earned her B.A. in 1990, majoring in literature and gender studies, then headed to California, where she worked as an editorial assistant in a publishing company before entering a Ph.D. program in literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her intention was to become a college professor, but she left after earning her M.A. to follow her activist passion: “I realized that the thing that really excited me was human rights work.” Moving to Washington, D.C., in 1994, she directed AI’s campaign on gay and lesbian rights before joining a human rights organization called Street Law. She also had the opportunity to travel to Haiti, where she was an investigator for the Haitian National Truth and Justice Commission; she learned Kreyol and investigated the human rights abuses that occurred during president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s exile from 1991 to 1994. The work she did in Haiti, with a team led by an impressive, Haitian lawyer, made her realize the importance of a law degree.

She was accepted into NYU on a Root-Tilden-Kern scholarship, and did two summer internships—one representing Haitian asylum-seekers and the other working for a human rights organization in Port-au-Prince. After law school, Satterthwaite completed two clerkships—one with Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit, and a second at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Between clerkships she was a Furman Fellow at Human Rights First. In 2002, she worked for the U.N. Development Fund for Women, becoming interested in the plight of women migrant workers—a focus that has been the subject of her current and previous scholarship, including “Crossing Borders, Claiming Rights: Using Human Rights Law to Empower Women Migrant Workers” (Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal 2005).

She returned to teach at the Law School in the fall of 2003, and in January 2006 became a faculty director at the CHRGJ and an assistant professor of clinical law. She also settled down, marrying her partner, Alison Nathan, a visiting assistant professor at Fordham Law School, last spring. “I thought I’d have a couple more years working in human rights,” she says of the latest turn in her career path, “but this was my dream job. It allows me to combine advocacy with scholarship and teaching.”

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Introducing Smita Narula https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/smita-narula/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:26:05 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=1002 Smita NarulaYou won’t find Coca-Cola in Professor Smita Narula’s refrigerator—Narula, 33, a faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), won’t buy it because the bottling process in her native India usurps the natural water supply. Nor will you see a diamond engagement ring on her finger—her husband, Richard Green, 36, “had to find something that doesn’t involve child labor abuses (like the production of diamonds), armed conflict or other human rights violations,” she says, with self-deprecating humor.

Narula simply stands by her beliefs, wherever they lead her. Though her family is considered upper caste—“It goes against me to even identify which caste; I don’t believe in them,” she says—Narula has made the cause of discrimination against the so-called lowest caste, the Dalits, her own. India officially abolished the practice of untouchability in its 1950 constitution, but the Dalits are still segregated from the upper castes, still live in extreme poverty and are forbidden to intermarry, hold property or even drink from the same well as those of higher castes. In 1999, Narula spent months in India for Human Rights Watch (HRW) interviewing Dalits about their plight. The result: her award-winning book, Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s Untouchables. For her work, as well as her role in bringing together human rights activists in India to form the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of India awarded her the Human Rights Award for Outstanding Research and Writing.

Because of Narula’s exposé and the work of the campaign, the Dalits were put on the agenda at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, held in South Africa, says Sam Zarifi, research director of the Asia Division at HRW. “What sets her apart,” he says, “is that she combines the passion of an activist with the dispassionate analysis of a top academic lawyer.”

Take the case of the estimated 2,000 Muslims massacred in a bloody three-day slaughter in the state of Gujarat, India, in 2002. Government officials portrayed the incident as a spontaneous riot that occurred in retaliation for an earlier attack on Hindus that was blamed on Muslims. Narula traveled to India for HRW to interview hundreds of survivors and police. Her report, “We Have No Orders to Save You,” concluded that the Indian government actually engineered the killings, having Muslims cut and set on fire with kerosene lamps. Her report made waves in the international community. In 2005, the United States barred Narendra Modi, the Gujarat chief minister, from visiting.

Narula was born in Delhi to Sudershan, now 65, the director of medical services for the United Nations, and Hans, now 70, who worked for UNICEF and is retired. Subject to their parents’ frequent transfers, Narula and her brother spent their earliest years in Delhi, Jakarta and Kabul. When Narula was nine, the family moved to New York City, where she attended the U.N. International School. She earned a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree at Brown University in international relations and international development, graduating magna cum laude at the age of 20. She went on to get her law degree at Harvard, where she was the editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and became interested in caste discrimination. After law school, she joined HRW. “I feel my relative privilege very strongly,” she said. “Any measure of privilege brings with it responsibility.”

Narula came to NYU in 2003 to become the executive director of CHRGJ and to coteach the International Human Rights Clinic. This year, she was made an assistant professor of clinical law and a faculty director of the CHRGJ. Professor Philip Alston, the chair and faculty director of the CHRGJ, says of Narula: “There are few people who are as well connected and able to put students in contact with that network.”

In 2005, Narula and her clinic students published “The Missing Piece of the Puzzle,” examining the role that caste discrimination plays in the current conflict in Nepal. Many of the recommendations in the report have been raised in parliamentary meetings of the European Union and been incorporated into the mandate of the U.N. in Nepal. Along with Jayne Huckerby, CHRGJ’s research director, Narula and her students are now concentrating on a report critiquing the use of racial profiling and lethal force in the shoot-to-kill policies that various governments have enacted or authorized in the wake of 9/11.

Narula’s scholarship similarly takes on timely social issues. In a recent article in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Narula asks whether corporations and international financial institutions can be held accountable for violations of the right to food and other social and economic rights under international law.

Such focus and intensity is typical of Narula, says her husband of three months; they were married at the U.N. Chapel last June. “She approaches her students, her writing, her activism all the same way,” he says. “Fully engaged.”

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Introducing Florencia Marotta-Wurgler https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/florencia-marotta-wurgler/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:21:36 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=1000 Florencia Marotta-WurglerProfessor Florencia Marotta-Wurgler ’01 was online buying a used copy of a biography of Russian intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome, when an idea for a research paper struck her. “I said, ‘Wait a second. I just gave my credit card to a stranger who lives in Sweden. How do I know that I’m going to get the book?’ What if the seller disappears in the middle of the night? Do buyers protect themselves?” recalls Marotta-Wurgler, who will teach Contracts and e-commerce beginning this fall. “And what about those econtracts that the buyer is required to click on, but rarely reads?”

Marotta-Wurgler, 32, set out to determine whether online sellers who don’t disclose their contracts before the transaction offer worse terms than those who do. She collected and read over 515 software license agreements for products sold online. About half of the contracts in her sample were made available to the buyer on the seller’s Web site. The other half went against the basic principles of contract law, in that the buyer was not able to read the terms until after he or she purchased the product. The result of her examination, described in her yet unpublished paper “Are ‘Pay Now, Terms Later’ Contracts Worse for Buyers? Evidence From Software License Agreements,” stunned her colleagues. The hidden or “pay now, terms later” contracts offered relatively more buyer-friendly terms than those that consumers were forced to accept in advance. “While many professors have written about electronic contract formation at a theoretical level and speculated about its consequences, she’s really the first person who’s tried to discover what’s actually going on in this area,” says Law School Vice Dean Clayton Gillette.

In a companion paper, “Competition and the Quality of Standard Contracts: An Empirical Analysis of Software Agreements,” Marotta-Wurgler, an e-contracts expert who paradoxically wrote in longhand until law school, looked at whether online sellers with a dominant market share take advantage of their position by imposing worse terms on the buyer. There, too, she found that monopolists did not offer unusually harsh terms, though they did charge more. She is currently working on a paper tentatively titled “Is There an ‘Informed Minority’ of Standard Form Contract Shoppers? Evidence from Online Shopping Behavior” to examine buyer behavior online.

Born Maria Florencia Isabel Marotta, she and her two younger brothers were raised in Buenos Aires by parents who, she says, couldn’t be more different from one another. Her mom, Silvana, 56, is an artist; her dad, Horacio, 58, is an engineer who spurred her intellectual curiosity. “When I was seven, he’d come home at night and read me the theory of relativity.”

When it came time for Marotta-Wurgler to go to university, she didn’t feel comfortable with the European system, in which students declare their career path from the get-go. “I was interested in a lot of things,” she says, with a slight Argentinian accent, so she pursued a liberal arts education in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1996 with a major in economics. Marotta-Wurgler traces her fascination with economics back to her Argentinian upbringing, during which the peso was constantly devalued against the dollar. “One day the price of the bus went up so high that I couldn’t afford the ticket in the afternoon and had to walk home,” she recalls with a laugh.

Eager to learn how to conduct original empirical economic research, she became a research analyst in 1996 at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an economics think tank in Cambridge, Massachussetts. For two years, she worked on projects on medical costs and aging. “I liked doing economic analysis,” she says, “but thought there’s this other angle that I want to explore that is more typically done by legal analysts.” That’s when she moved to New York to attend NYU. She excelled at the Law School, quickly finding her niche in contracts law. After graduation, Marotta-Wurgler became an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell. She left after a year and a half to teach. “Some people love the adrenaline rush of meeting clients and doing deals. I’m more reflective. That’s the way I’m wired.”

In June 2003, she got a Fordham fellowship to teach Corporations at Fordham Law School and help run the Center for Corporate, Securities and Financial Law. Marotta-Wurgler left Fordham in June 2004, when her alma mater offered her the Leonard Wagner Fellowship in Law and Business.

Things fell into place in her personal life that year, too, when she met Jeffrey Wurgler. In an odd twist, he had worked in the office next to hers during her years at the National Bureau of Economic Research, but they had never crossed paths. She and Jeffrey, 33, who teaches behavioral finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, married in 2004 and are raising Lucy, their Norfolk terrier puppy.

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Introducing Roderick M. Hills Jr. https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/roderick-m-hills-jr/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:17:32 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=994 Roderick M. Hills Jr.Rick Hills, 42, may very well be the only professor who has had to find a home for his farm animals (goats, a sheep, a pony, chickens and his horse, Reflector) before taking a job at the Law School. Should New Yorkers find that odd, the quick-witted Hills, an expert in federalism and constitutional law, quips: “Thank God we here in Michigan are not governed by a bunch of blue-state New Yorkers who don’t understand the importance of livestock.” Seizing an opportunity to teach by example, he adds: “That’s what I mean by federalism. The cultural divergence between different regions makes it disastrous to attempt to impose a single system of legislation on the nation.”

Hills, who taught for 12 years at the University of Michigan Law School, joins NYU in September to teach Land Use Regulation and The Administrative and Regulatory State. The son of prominent D.C. Republicans—his father, Roderick M. Hills Sr., was the former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (1975-77) and counsel to President Gerald Ford; his mother, Carla Hills, was secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Ford administration and U.S. Trade Representative under George H.W. Bush’s administration—Hills eschewed politics, making a name for himself in constitutional law. His research focuses on the costs and benefits of decentralizing public power. “His learning and practical knowledge range across every level of government, from local governments to state governments to the national government,” says Richard Pildes, the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law. “I know of no one else who contributes on the great constitutional issues of our time and who also attends local zoning hearings, just out of intellectual curiosity and a desire to understand the practical workings of government.”

Hills’s recent work hints at his range. In his forthcoming essay, “Compared to What? Tiebout and the Comparative Merits of Congress and the States in Constitutional Federalism,” he tackles the issue of government subsidies for industry. In another upcoming book chapter called “Sex, Drugs, God and Federalism,” Hills examines the outcome of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to determine the role that federalism played in defusing conflicts over religion and culture. Professor Don Herzog of the University of Michigan Law School hails the piece as Hills’s “best work yet,” predicting that “this will be a gigantic piece of scholarship.”

The second of four children, Hills spent his earliest years in Los Angeles before moving to Washington, D.C., when he was 10. As a teen, Hills played with the Peabody Youth Chamber Orchestra. “I was a super cello nerd in high school,” says Hills, who began his undergraduate studies at Yale University majoring in music. He eventually switched to history, with an emphasis on British intellectual history and German idealist philosophy, earning his B.A. in 1987. After graduation, he enrolled in the Committee on Social Thought, an interdisciplinary program in the humanities at the University of Chicago. He’d intended to go for his Ph.D., but quit to follow his then-fiancée, Maria Montoya, to Yale. While she studied history, he entered Yale Law School, reluctantly at first. “I had no interest in being a lawyer at the time,” he says. There were too many lawyers already in his family. His parents had founded the California law firm of Munger, Tolles & Hills in 1962, and two of his three sisters were lawyers. But, “once I got to law school, I loved it.” After earning his J.D. in 1991, he clerked in Dallas, Texas, for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. After the clerkship, Montoya landed a job teaching history at the University of Colorado, and Hills followed his wife again—teaching at the law school and practicing at the Law Office of Jean Dubofsky, where the lawyers worked primarily on appellate briefs. There he second-chaired, and won, the famous gay civil rights litigation Romer v. Evans. He went on to teach at Michigan in 1994, where Montoya also became a professor. “It was a challenge for both of us to be working towards tenure while raising our two daughters,” Hills says. “But it helped that our work overlapped so much: Maria’s book was on 19th century struggles for land in the American West, so she was writing on local political corruption and property law—two of my favorite topics. We read each other’s drafts and learned from each other’s research.”

“Having spent 12 years in a medium-size college town,” says Hills, “we’re ready to live in, and expose our daughters to, the new environment of a major city.” He is no doubt also looking forward to having a new city and state government to examine through the lens of federalism. Montoya, 42, will teach history at NYU. Their children, Emma, 14, and Sarah, 12, presumably will have fewer chores since they will no longer have to feed and care for Reflector and the gang.

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Introducing Cynthia Estlund https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/cynthia-estlund/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:14:19 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=972 As a visiting professor last spring, Cynthia Estlund did something that her colleagues have only fantasized about: She banned laptops in the classroom. “She came in as a complete outsider and tried something new that was likely to completely bug the students. And they went with it,” says Deborah Malamud, AnBryce Professor of Law.

Challenging the status quo is typical for Estlund, who will join NYU as a professor this fall. In her scholarship “she raises serious questions as to whether the current labor law system will continue to work in this country,” says Malamud. And her creative thinking has earned her the respect of her peers. “Professor Estlund has done important work exploring the limits of labor law doctrine and integrating First Amendment theory into the law and politics of the workplace,” says Professor Samuel Estreicher, the director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law.

Since entering law school, Estlund’s professional and intellectual interests have centered on labor and employment law. “I liked the idea of representing people who had their own goals and some power to pursue them, but who needed legal help,” she says. But recent decades have not been kind to unions or to labor law. In her last traditional labor law piece, “The Ossification of American Labor Law” (Columbia Law Review 2002), Estlund discusses the multiple barriers to renewing and reforming the labor laws. “It’s a bit of a eulogy,” she says of the paper. “It’s about the many ways in which law reform could happen and does happen in other legal regimes, but doesn’t happen in labor law.” In 2003, she published the book Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (Oxford University Press). In it, she argues that the workplace has become the most important site of cooperation, sociability and communication among people of diverse backgrounds. She also hopes to expand her recent article “Rebuilding the Law of the Workplace in an Era of Self-Regulation” (Columbia Law Review 2005) into a book.

Estlund, 49, was born in a small town in Wisconsin. Her late father, Bruce, sang in big bands, then became a newspaper man until the financial pressures of raising three children nudged him into public relations. Her mother, Ann, 71, was a freelance writer. Estlund attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. During college she held jobs in the school’s cafeteria, as a research assistant in an insurance company, as a restaurant hostess and even as an apple-picker. Upon graduating in 1978 with a summa cum laude degree in government, she landed a fellowship to study government programs for working parents in Sweden. She lived for two years in an urban commune, became fluent in Swedish, worked in the antinuclear-power movement and studied sociology. “I was impressed by the role that organized labor had played in building a humane society in Sweden and across much of Europe,” she says.

Returning to the United States, she entered Yale Law School, where she met her husband, Samuel Issacharoff, now 52, a constitutional law expert at NYU. Earning her J.D. in 1983, she clerked for Judge Patricia M. Wald of the D.C. Circuit. While clerking, “we realized that we’d become altogether too boring,” Estlund says. So she and Issacharoff took off for a six-month stint in Argentina, becoming involved in the newly democratic government’s efforts to prosecute the military for human rights abuses. Still not ready to get completely back “on-track” they joined small law firms in Philadelphia before moving to Washington, D.C., where Estlund worked at the high-powered union-side labor law firm Bredhoff & Kaiser.

Balancing competing urges to stay with the pack or go her own way is one of the things that Estlund does best, according to her husband. She also can maintain “a clear-eyed view of the law as a system of governance, power and order,” while not losing sight of what’s right and wrong, he says.

In 1989, they jointly made the leap into academia, landing at the University of Texas School of Law. There Estlund taught property and labor and employment law and became an associate dean for academic affairs. In 1998, Estlund and Issacharoff took offers to visit and then stay at Columbia Law School. Estlund taught and served as vice dean for research.

The move to NYU offers her an academic environment that she calls “a better fit,” and a fresh start as she and Issacharoff face their first year as empty-nesters. Their children, Jessica, 19, and Lucas, 18, will both be at college. Says Estlund: “We’ve been fortunate to find a ‘track’ that allows us to follow our own intellectual fancy, to lay our own tracks, you might say.”

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Annual Survey Honors Dworkin https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/annual-survey-honors-dworkin/ Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:34:00 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=2872 Some were friends and colleagues; others were intellectual adversaries of one of the most noteworthy and frequently cited legal philosophers of the past century. All came together to honor Ronald Dworkin when the 63rd volume of the Annual Survey of American Law was dedicated to him on April 17. With this award for his exceptional role in the study and practice of law in the United States, Dworkin, the Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law, joins the ranks of honorees such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (2005), Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (2004), Attorney General Janet Reno (1998) and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1983).

During the dedication ceremony, hosted by Annual Survey editor-in-chief Malachi Boyuls ’06, Dworkin’s colleagues—University Professor Thomas Nagel; Judge Posner; Professor Lawrence Sager, who has since become dean of the University of Texas School of Law; Professor Thomas Scanlon of Harvard University; Lord Hoffmann of the House of Lords; Robert B. Silvers, coeditor of the New York Review of Books; and then-Columbia, now-NYU University Professor Jeremy Waldron—reminisced about “Ronnie’s” long and illustrious career. The portrait that emerged was of a man as intellectually relentless as he is charming. “He is a person single-handedly swimming against the tide to keep up and raise the standards of our collective political life,” commented Scanlon.

Jeremy Waldron, Thomas Nagel, and Richard PosnerOne of the ways Dworkin, who is also the Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College in London, has challenged the intellectual community is by creating the ground-breaking Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy, which he has run since 1987 with Nagel. Sager described it as a rare, sometimes masochistic opportunity for scholarly assistance. He recalled one academic who, after a take-no-prisoners analysis, responded to the colloquium’s attentions by turning his back and crouching in a fetal position. “Ronald has a dogged insistence to get to the bottom of things,” Nagel said. “His is a ruthlessness of ideas.”

There has been pain, but also gain. “I believe that everything that I have written bears the improving mark of those rigorous sessions, and if there is an ounce of egalitarian good sense in my book on property and my subsequent writings, it is Ronald Dworkin’s responsibility,” says Dworkin’s former student Waldron, a frequent colloquium visitor, who will coteach the series this year, his first as an NYU professor.

For his part, Nagel confessed that he learned something new about Dworkin when he read the Law School cover story about his old friend last fall. After his federal appeals court clerkship with Judge Learned Hand, Dworkin opted to work for Sullivan & Cromwell rather than clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Nagel imagined an alternate reality, in which Dworkin had pursued a different path. “I’d like to thank Sullivan & Cromwell,” said Nagel, getting a big laugh, “for enriching our philosophical lives and for giving me the friend and colleague with whom it has been such a joy to work.”

Hoffmann was equally appreciative of Dworkin’s contributions. He described how Law’s Empire (Harvard University Press, 1986), Dworkin’s masterwork on the judgment of particularly difficult cases, “offered the best explanation for what I was trying to do.” Dworkin’s latest book, Justice in Robes, breaks new ground and deals with the balance between judges’ personal morality and their legal reasoning.

Silvers, Dworkin’s longtime editor at the New York Review of Books, needed only to list some of the most impressive of Dworkin’s 57 articles—“The Jurisprudence of Nixon,” “Women and Pornography” and “The Threat to Patriotism”—from the past 38 years to show how the works provide a “skeletal history of the times.”

The audience chuckled when Posner, whose relationship with Dworkin has been characterized by what he called “antagonism and antipathy,” said, “To be an invited skunk at a garden party is an unusual experience; one that argues generosity on Professor Dworkin’s part, or perhaps a spirit of mischief on the part of the editors.”

“The editors have shown great wisdom in choosing Dworkin,” noted Dean Richard Revesz. “I was so pleased when they asked, ‘Do you think this would be okay?’ I thought, this is more than just okay, this is great!”

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It’s All Academic https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/its-all-academic/ Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:32:23 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=2861 Terry Maroney '98Getting an entry-level teaching job at an accredited law school isn’t an easy task—only about 110 of the more than 1,000 applicants each year succeed. But the Law School is beating the odds.

According to the recent Entry Level Hiring Report by Professor Lawrence Solum of University of Illinois College of Law, 12 job-seekers with NYU J.D.s found teaching spots in 2006—representing the fourth highest placement number among all law schools. An additional nine candidates with NYU graduate law degrees, fellowships or acting assistant professorships were hired as well. New hires found positions at schools such as Cardozo School of Law (Margaret Lemos ’01), NYU School of Law (Florencia Marotta-Wurgler ’01), USC Law School (Shmuel Leshem (LL. M. ’02, J.S.D. ’05)) and Vanderbilt University Law School (Terry Maroney ’98, above).

The credit goes to the two-year-old Academic Careers Program (ACP) run by Crystal Olsen Glynn and Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law Barry Friedman, who also directs the Furman Academic Program. Glynn and Friedman help candidates organize their scholarship, CVs and credentials for the annual American Association of Law Schools (AALS) hiring conference in Washington, D.C. The ACP also runs a “job camp” each fall to demystify the hiring process. Maroney, who defended her paper, examining the effects of mood disorders and brain damage on an individual’s competence to stand trial, before Professors Oren Bar-Gill, Rachel Barkow and David Garland at the last job camp, says: “I received important commentary from faculty and other candidates and my paper eventually got to the level it needed to be. Doing the moot job talk prepared me to think on my feet while at the AALS hiring conference.”

“You can’t enter the market without years of preparation to make yourself a viable candidate,” says Sam Buell ’92, a former special attorney for the Department of Justice’s Enron Task Force, who contacted the ACP after deciding to pursue a career in teaching. “I’d liken the legal market for teaching to the NFL draft, or qualifying for the PGA Tour.” With the help of the ACP training, Buell made the cut. This fall, he will teach Securities Regulation and Criminal Law at Washington University School of Law.

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Cassese Named a Judge, Noble Reelected https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/cassese-named-a-judge-noble-reelected/ Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:31:58 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=2863 Sabino Cassese and Ronald Noble, both law professors from the NYU community, recently won major appointments in organizations abroad.

Sabino CasseseCassese, a Global Visiting Professor of Law, joined the Constitutional Court of Italy on November 9, 2005, five days after his appointment by then-President Carlo Ciampi. A professor of administrative law at the University of Rome-La Sapienza and the former director of its Institute of Public Law, Cassese also served as Italy’s minister for public administration. He is a prolific scholar, specializing in administrative law history, the European Union’s administrative structure and the role of independent administrative authorities.

Ronald NobleLast September, Ronald Noble, an NYU School of Law professor on leave, was appointed to a second five-year term as Interpol’s secretary general. The vote, by the Interpol General Assembly, was unanimous. “I know Ronald Noble to be a tireless worker, a leader and a visionary who is deeply committed to the goals of Interpol,” said Jackie Selebi, the organization’s president. Noble has served as both assistant secretary and undersecretary for enforcement for the U.S. Treasury, deputy assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice and president of Interpol’s Financial Action Task Force.

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Remembering Chester Mirsky https://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/2006/remembering-chester-mirsky/ Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:30:17 +0000 http://blogs.law.nyu.edu/magazine/?p=2865 Chet and I met in September 1982 when I came to NYU from Cornell on a “look see” visit. We became friends almost immediately and shared our professional and personal lives for the next 20-plus years.

Chet was brilliant and charismatic. He overflowed with ideas. Politically, he was a “lefty,” but more iconoclast than ideologue. He liked being controversial and even relished conflict. However, he was warm and likable, even lovable. He was constantly in motion, usually talking with his hands, often excoriating some recent outrage, hypocrisy or irony.

When I signed on to NYU, agreeing to revitalize the criminal justice research center, the dean and several colleagues encouraged me to nominate a visiting criminologist to help launch our program. That’s how Mike McConville came to NYU and changed Chet’s life. Mike immediately recruited Chet to collaborate on a study of indigent criminal defense services in New York City. Their book-length empirical study, Criminal Defense of the Poor in New York City (1986), was highly critical of the NYC Legal Aid Society, one of the liberal establishment’s most sacred cows. The LAS leadership, board members and friends, even members of the Law School faculty railed against Chet and Mike—and sometimes me by association. The denunciations and criticisms energized Chet and Mike. They flourished in the controversy, meeting every criticism with more evidence. Their study is now regarded as a classic in the field.

Chet was an inspiring teacher with superb oral advocacy skills; he was fast, agile and articulate. With students, he was friendly, even avuncular. He organized the criminal procedure course around role-playing exercises. There was electricity in the air as students argued motions and presented evidence. We had many wonderful students including Malcolm Spector ’94 (a noted sociologist before attending law school), who later became one of Chet’s closest friends and a great source of support during Chet’s battle with cancer.

Chet helped me launch and sustain the monthly Fortunoff (now Hoffinger) Criminal Justice Colloquium. He attended every session, even though it meant he wouldn’t get home until after midnight. Sometimes he stayed the night at our home. I loved critiquing the colloquium with him over a late-night brandy.

Chet leaves an indelible imprint on the Law School. With Harry Subin, he was cofounder of the Law School’s first clinic. From that seed, the NYU clinics grew into the top clinical law program in the country. He also leaves behind some first-rate scholarship, including two books with Mike McConville, a federal criminal procedure book with Harry Subin and Mega-Mall on the Hudson with David Porter. Most important, Chet leaves his passion for justice and his strategies for criminal defense in the hearts and on the minds of hundreds of New York University School of Law graduates who will carry forth his ideals and pass them on to their students and protégés.

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