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.”

The society presented the medal at its centennial meeting, after Meron delivered an address that concluded that tribunals “have helped to instill the idea that justice, not retribution or impunity, should be the response to horrific crimes.” W. Michael Reisman, the Myres S. McDougal Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and chairman of the ASIL honors committee, lauded Meron “for his contributions as a teacher over many decades, as a creative scholar, especially in the field of humanitarian law, for his scholarship in the humanities, for his work for the U.S. government as counselor to the Department of State, for his leadership of the Former Yugoslav Tribunal over which he presided and for his contribution to the American Society of International Law, as editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law.” Meron, he said, would have qualified for the award for any one of these accomplishments.

“The visiting judges were interested in the ways American courts function, how they relate to the executive branch and how they deal with administrative problems,” said Russell D. Niles Professor of Law Oscar Chase, codirector of the institute.

When asked if American judges should have final say in trials, the Chinese judges had varying opinions. Some, like Ouyang Zhenyuan, a senior judge of the Fourth Civil and Commercial Tribunal of the High People’s Court, felt that jury trials protected judges when sentences were handed down. Yu Chunsheng, president of the Xinjiang Wulumuqi Shayibake District Court, disagreed: “It’s hard to be an American judge. You have far more experience and yet you have to abide by a jury’s verdict.”

The judges also had the opportunity to meet with the Honorable Doris Ling-Cohan ’79 and hear about her administrative initiatives to benefit the largely Asian community in Lower Manhattan. One program that impressed the judges was the free book available at the court, cowritten in English and Mandarin by Ling-Cohan, which explains New York State court procedures.

Current events also made for lively discussion. “On the last day of the program, we discussed the Hamdan case in which the Supreme Court held that the president’s powers over the Guantánamo detainees were limited by the Geneva Conventions and Congressional action,” said Chase. “I found that the Chinese judges were as divided about the outcome as the justices of the Supreme Court.”

Designed to attract students from all over the world, not just Asia, the program will combine the rigorous academic education for which NYU is known with a program that embraces what NYU President John Sexton calls the idea of “global connectedness and promise.”

“For NYU School of Law this is a natural step,” said Dean Richard Revesz. “Over a decade ago, we recognized that important changes in the way law was being practiced required changes in the way it was taught. This led to the creation of our highly successful Hauser Global Law School Program. Our partnership with NUS takes that insight to the next level.”

Students will earn a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree in law and the global economy from NYU, with optional concentrations in either U.S. and Asian business and trade law, or justice and human rights. An expanded curriculum will allow them also to earn an LL.M. from NUS. Courses will be taught by NYU law faculty in residence at NUS as well as by NYU global faculty and members of the NUS faculty.

In addition to their classes, students will have the opportunity to complete internships with Singapore law firms, corporations, government entities or NGOs in the region. They may also follow courses in Shanghai through a joint program of NUS and East China University of Politics and Law.

“We expect the new program to attract two broad categories of applicants,” said Chair and Faculty Director of NYU’s Hauser Global Law School Program Professor Joseph Weiler. “The first is Asian students who hope to acquire proficiency in American law and benefit from the distinct methodology and style of American legal education, while also developing a comparative understanding of Asian law. The second is students from the rest of the world who recognize the importance of Asia and want to combine the rigor of an American law degree whilst simultaneously acquiring proficiency in Asian law and institutions.”

“This relationship brings together the top international law faculty in the United States and Asia’s Global Law School,” said Chesterman. “It’s tremendously exciting, not only for the students, but also for the two faculties.” NUS Faculty of Law Dean Tan Cheng Han agreed, saying, “We welcome the NYU School of Law to Singapore.”

The June Harvard Law Review featured an exception to those rules, a collaboration between Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law Richard Pildes and Professor Daryl Levinson of Harvard Law School called “Separation of Parties, Not Powers.” It took aim at the conventional understanding of what is said to be the unique genius of the constitution: the checks and balances that are built into the separation of powers. Ambition checking ambition, in James Madison’s phrase, is said to be the very basis of the success of American democracy.

“The truth,” Levinson and Pildes wrote in the timely, fresh and immensely readable article, “is closer to the opposite.”

In an interview, Pildes explained that the article’s goal was to cause readers to reexamine the things they thought they knew. “The starting point,” he said, “is getting people to think more seriously about ideas, like ‘separation of powers,’ that are repeated so often they become taken-for-granted mythologies, without asking any more whether these institutions actually operate in the way these stories lead us to unreflectively believe.”

What the framers failed to envision, say Levinson and Pildes in their article, is how party politics can swamp the constitutional structure. When the same party controls both political branches, it is fantasy to think that Congress’s institutional self-interest will be enough to act as a meaningful check on the president. A single party has controlled government more often than not since 1832.

“Against this background,” the article says, “it is odd to hear courts and constitutional scholars celebrating government ‘accountability’ as a particular virtue, or even potential virtue, of the Madisonian design.”

Though the article was not formally published until June, it caught the attention of the legal academy in draft form. “It’s a very good and important paper,” said Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “It has a real insight that, certainly in the legal literature, is novel and fresh.”

He added that its thesis may in places be overstated, noting in particular that Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has tried to protect Congressional power, though without notable success.

It is a mistake, the article says, to look to the courts for significant oversight of executive power when the political branches are controlled by a single party, as judges generally find presidential actions constitutional when they can be said to have been undertaken with Congressional authorization or, at least, silent acquiescence. Thus, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force was, the Supreme Court ruled in 2004, sufficient to justify military detentions. The administration relies on that same authorization in connection with its controversial surveillance program.

“Only during divided government,” the authors write, “do courts have the independence to act as a meaningful check on national majorities. In short, strongly independent judicial review may be possible only when least necessary.”

The article helps explain why Democrats are so eager to win back the House or Senate: Only an opposition party with subpoena power and similar oversight tools can truly act as a check on another branch. Indeed, among the reforms proposed in the article to compensate during periods of unified government is providing the minority party with such tools.

“Rather than blaming individual members of Congress for not playing their ‘assigned’ role of providing checks and balances and exhorting them to be more ‘responsible,’” Pildes said, “we need to look at the legal and institutional context in which they act and focus on changing that in ways that enable more meaningful checks and balances to be exercised in actual practice.”

When the Sudanese civil war ended last year, Miller (pictured at left), who had been working with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) to create a rule of law program in Southern Sudan, saw an opportunity to help them in their post-peace agreement constitutions. That’s when he started RoLI. “There was a desperate need for the people of Sudan to get legal consultation that they could trust,” says Miller, the executive director. With Miller in Sudan, and Steinitz plus a 50-lawyer team from Latham & Watkins working pro bono in Manhattan, RoLI helped hammer out constitutional frameworks at the national, subnational and state levels.

Pressman had also been working in the region setting up rule of law programs for the U.N. He had listened to Darfuri victims’ stories about their villages being pillaged and women being raped. “So many times I told these people that I would make their words heard,” says Pressman, who grew up hearing his own family’s stories of the Holocaust. Pressman had just returned to the United States and was organizing a speaking tour to talk about the plight of the Sudanese people when he got a call from Nick Clooney, a columnist at the Cincinnati Post. Clooney and his movie star son George had been unable to get into the region; they wanted to report firsthand on the three-year-old conflict at the Save Darfur rally on April 30 in Washington, D.C. By chance, the elder Clooney was chatting with a cousin, who told him about her nephew, a lawyer from NYU. “David is quite an accomplished young man,” Clooney later wrote. “More than that, he is a person who gets things done. When others said ‘no,’ he said, ‘If you really want to do this, I think I can find a way.’”

The unlikely trio and a cameraman soon set off for Nairobi, Kenya. From there, they hopped a single-engine Cessna to Southern Sudan, where they spent the night in stifling hot huts crawling with tarantulas, then took another plane and also a Jeep across dirt roads to the Oure Cassoni Refugee Camp at the Chad-Darfur border to interview the refugees on camera.

When they returned home, the Clooneys spoke at the rally and appeared on CNN, Oprah and Today, to name a few media outlets. “We were able to use George’s celebrity to propel these horrific stories into virtually every media market and hopefully into the American conscience,” says Pressman. A long, arduous trip to fulfill his promise, but one that may lead to much-needed aid for the suffering Sudanese.

Nagel, who coteaches the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy with Professor Ronald Dworkin, has been a professor of philosophy at NYU since 1980. In 1986, he also became a professor of law, and, in 2002, University Professor. Nagel is the author of dozens of articles and 10 books, including one of his latest, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, with Professor of Law and Philosophy Liam Murphy. “The Mellon award to Tom Nagel signals what everyone in the field already knows: that he is one of the Anglophone world’s few most eminent and influential philosophers,” said Dworkin. “He has no formal legal training, but he has become an intuitively skillful and imaginative lawyer and he has brought new sophistication to the study of legal philosophy and, indeed, of constitutional and international law. The Law School is extremely lucky to have him, not just to teach moral and political philosophy, but to carry forward the integration of law and the humanities. The Mellon funds will further enhance his power to do that.”

Stevenson, who lists among his honors a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the American Bar Association Wisdom Award for Public Service, the American Civil Liberties Union National Medal of Liberty and the American College of Trial Lawyers Award for Courageous Advocacy, teaches courses on racial justice and capital punishment as well as leading the headline- making Capital Defenders Clinic in Alabama. In January 2005, clinic client James Borden became the first Alabama death-row prisoner to have his sentence converted to life imprisonment due to mental retardation. “The clinic is the perfect nexus of legal training and education while helping defendants who are literally dying for representation,” says Stevenson, who believes that “each of us is more than the worst thing we have done.”

Stevenson is also the executive director of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, which works on behalf of indigent defendants and prisoners, many on death row. The EJI has succeeded in obtaining relief in the form of new trials, reduced sentences or exoneration for more than 70 death-row prisoners in the past 15 years.

It was Stevenson’s tireless advocacy that caught the attention of the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award committee, said Allen McFarlane, assistant vice president for student diversity programs and services at NYU. He said that Stevenson “embod[ied] the work of Dr. King…. We want to recognize individuals in our own community, in our own backyard, who are doing great things related to social justice and diversity in our world today.”

Stevenson was also one of three professors to receive the annual NYU Distinguished Teaching Award in May. The medal and $5,000 grant recognize faculty who have contributed significantly to the intellectual life of the university. Said Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs E. Frances White: “The committee was especially impressed by Bryan’s ability to inspire students to dedicate their lives to helping those marginalized in the criminal justice system.”