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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“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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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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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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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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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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The NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, a student publication “devoted to the development and analysis of classical liberal thought,” held its first Friedrich A. von Hayek Lecture in Law last September, featuring the energetic and engaging Professor Richard Epstein as its inaugural speaker.

Epstein, who is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, kicked off his brief in-residence stay at NYU with his lecture “Intuition, Custom and Protocol: What Are the Sound Sources of Human Knowledge?” During his talk, he examined how Hayek might have understood human nature, our traditions and the choices we make, and then applied Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order—defined as unplanned cooperation among members of a society—to legal frameworks.

Intuition, as Epstein defined it, relies on a set of three basic societal norms: condemnation of acts of aggression, reciprocity in social transactions and revulsion of acts of deviance. These norms suppress violent crime, set the terms for contracts and prohibit taboo acts. Unlike Hayek, who believed that an individual’s moral compass guides a society toward order, Epstein asserts that people will inevitably find exceptions and ways to circumvent these norms (killing in self-defense, for example) and so the creation of laws to sort things out is always necessary.

To define custom, Epstein cited the development of language. No centralized government agency forms a language; rather, it is a collective product agreed upon and utilized by individuals gradually over time. However, in order to resolve extremely critical issues facing a society (the depletion of natural resources, unfair compensation for land), custom may need to be forsaken, allowing a forced evolution to take place in the form of legislation—something somewhat contradictory to Hayek’s laissezfaire philosophy of spontaneous order.

Epstein compared his final topic, protocol (which he defined as “a rigorous program that you follow, come hell or high water”), to intuition by highlighting how, in modern day cases of risk assessment and liability, stringent steps need to be taken and regulations must be observed in order to keep society safe. Epstein explored Hayek’s theory’s restrictions by suggesting that protocol based on data, and instituted by one central organization, will serve society better than multiple individuals deciding things for themselves.

Boiling down Hayek’s model to an image, Epstein remarked that Hayek’s legal system would “have sharp boundary lines, and then once those boundary lines are clear, let individuals figure out what to do.” He recounted that Hayek argued a dispute with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1944, during which New Deal Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter countered Hayek and said that the government should draw those boundary lines, and, as with a highway, also control the traffic’s flow. “Hayek said that the reason why highways work is that we set the rules and you figure out where to go,” Epstein said, adding, “We have had an empirical test: Highways do just fine—the FCC doesn’t do so good!”

In July, however, Congress voted to renew the measure, called Section 5, which was enacted at the height of the civil rights movement in 1965—several months after three voting rights activists were killed in Mississippi and after state and local police in the South attacked 600 civil rights protesters on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Last renewed in 1982, Section 5 requires some areas of the country—mostly Southern states—to obtain approval (called preclearance) from the Justice Department before any changes to election practices or procedures can go into effect.

Given the vast changes in U.S. society in the 41 years since the law was enacted, Section 5 doesn’t necessarily make sense in its current form, Issacharoff told the panel on May 9. He urged legislators to ease some of the procedural requirements currently faced by jurisdictions covered by the provision. He also warned that as the political parties vie for voters, Section 5 can be misused by officials basing decisions on party politics. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the emergence of real bipartisan competition in covered jurisdictions has brought with it concerns of preclearance objections motivated by political gain, particularly in the highly contested area of redistricting.”

A week later, Pildes raised some of the same points, and also criticized a proposal to revise the Section 5 language to repudiate the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Georgia v. Ashcroft. In that case, the Supreme Court said that a redistricting in Georgia should have been allowed, even though the Justice Department declined to approve the change.

“Here were black and white legislators, willing to make their seats more dependent upon interracial voting coalitions. Yet the Act would have imposed on them more racially homogenous constituencies,” he testified. “And here were black legislators, not demanding safer sinecures for themselves, as officeholders typically do, but taking risks, cutting deals and exercising political agency to forge a winning coalition. Yet the Act would have denied these political actors the autonomy to make the hard choices at issue, even with partisan control of state government at stake.”

Issacharoff’s appearance was his second before the committee this year. In January, he testified on a somewhat related matter during the confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito. In 1985, the nominee had written on a job application that he disagreed with Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s about reapportionment, and the idea that states had to structure government to implement the “one-person, one-vote” principle.

“That such doubts about the reapportionment cases should reappear on a job application in the 1980s is at least a curiosity,” Issacharoff testified. While he didn’t recommend rejecting Alito, he urged the Senate to be sure that Supreme Court justices are committed to protecting the right to vote. “Before confirming any nominee to the Supreme Court,” he testified, “the Senate of the United States should be able to conclude with confidence that, regardless how a nominee may vote on any given case, there is no doubt that he or she will assume the responsibility of protecting the integrity of our democratic processes.”

“How much do you hate pie, Dean Revesz?” Carter asked.

“Lots!” replied Revesz, as the bids kept rolling in.

Too bad for the dean, because he and Sexton were about to square off against Jay Neveloff ’74 and Beverly Farrell ’01 in an impromptu pie fight that brought in $1,050 to benefit the Law School’s summer programs in public interest.

The auction’s proceeds help fund students to work at public interest organizations both in the United States and abroad. Last year, reports Deb Ellis, assistant dean for the Public Interest Law Center, NYU funded more than 300 students working in 31 countries.

In the end more than $139,000 was raised, making this year’s auction the most successful in the history of the event. Alumni helped plan this auction—a first—and their participation was a big reason for the record-breaking outcome. The 22-person alumni auction committee, chaired by Neveloff and his wife, Arlene, worked with students to solicit donated items from members of the community for both the silent and live auctions. As a result of their efforts, the auction itself was awarded the President’s Service Award for Volunteerism and Community Service, which recognizes outstanding efforts to support charitable causes at the university, and in the greater community of New York City.

The alumni effort was also reflected in the greater variety and sophistication of the prizes. During the silent auction, held in Greenberg Lounge, guests bid on weekend getaways to Colorado’s Beaver Creek resort, vintage Bordeaux and dinners at top restaurants such as Babbo and Lever House.

The stakes were raised in Tishman when guest auctioneers Jason Washington ’07 and Professors Cynthia Estlund and Samuel Issacharoff brought bidders to their feet, pitting students against alumni for extravagant prizes.

A night of tournament poker with World Series of Poker record-setter Wendeen Eolis went for $2,500, while a diamond necklace from M. Fabrikant & Sons was snatched up for $6,000. The night’s largest bid, commanding an impressive $6,700, fetched a pair of Super Bowl tickets and VIP passes to a Friday night pre-game party in Miami.

“The Public Service Auction represents student and alumni support for our commitment to public interest legal practice,” says Ellis.

“It was gratifying to see the superb job the student committee did, and the overwhelming support of the faculty and alumni,” Neveloff said, adding, “besides, where else can you see President Sexton and Dean Revesz getting pies thrown in their faces?”

Dean, whose new book, Conservatives Without Conscience, was published in July 2006, and whose bona fides on the topic of executive overreaching are impeccable, said, “After Watergate, I thought the imperial presidency had made its way into the history books.” His experiences as counsel for the besmirched Nixon administration provided a sobering backdrop for the day’s discussions. “Today,” he said, “the lesson of Watergate is, ‘Don’t get caught, and if you do, tough it out and say you’ve got the power.’” He talked about the bad old days in the Nixon White House—recalling being ordered to arrange a punitive tax audit for the Scanlon Monthly, which had accused then-Vice President Spiro Agnew of attempting to repeal the Bill of Rights and to cancel the 1972 elections. He also cited Jack Caulfield’s quashed plot to firebomb the Brookings Institution in retaliation for its criticism of the Vietnam War. While these abuses of power were extreme, he then described Executive Order 13233, which annulled a 1978 law that turns presidential records over to the public 12 years after an executive’s departure. President Bush signed the order within his first year of office—just weeks after 9/11. The level of secrecy of this administration, Dean warned, has “reached a startling stage.”

The rest of the day was devoted to mostly polite but sometimes heated conversations moderated by the faculty codirectors of the center, Professors Noah Feldman, David Golove, Stephen Holmes and Richard Pildes. The framers of the constitution had not predicted political parties, said Pildes, and the idea of checks and balances presumes Congress’s desire to fully participate in governing as well as oversight. Sidney Blumenthal, former adviser to President Clinton, agreed that partisan abuse is “political in character, fundamentally.” But Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Viet Dinh, a former U.S. assistant attorney general for legal policy from 2001 to 2003, disagreed. “Congress is inadequate to deal with security and dispatch in matters of national security,” said Dinh. Laws passed by Congress “encourage the President to claim and exercise inherent powers,” insisted Posner, particularly in light of new threats to the U.S.

Former Nebraska senator, and now president of the New School, Bob Kerrey offered harsher criticism of Congress. The War Powers Resolution, Kerrey said, did not provide carte blanche to any president to challenge an abstract terrorist threat. Congress was explicitly to blame, concurred Michael Vatis, a lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C., for allowing the executive branch to waylay civil liberties by authorizing clandestine wiretaps on U.S. citizens and indefinitely detaining enemy combatants. If the president is allowed to take power, Vatis said, then he’ll take it. Patrick Philbin, former associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, countered that the war on terror “is a very different war, but a war nonetheless” and the President must be allowed to act.

Donna Newman, the New York City criminal defense attorney assigned in 2002 to represent Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen deemed an enemy combatant, said that she was dumbfounded by the disregard for due process where her client was concerned. The President has constructed an “atmosphere of fear” as a basis for grabbing power. “It’s a fear of liberty, not terrorism,” she said, “to somehow say that freedom is what makes us vulnerable.”