Probing potential abuses in the insurance industry for then-New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Winters, a summer intern, came across the smoking gun: an email from an employee of insurance broker Marsh & McLennan providing evidence of bid-rigging. That eventually led Spitzer to file a civil complaint against Marsh in October 2004, and to clean up the insurance industry. It also gave Winters a jumpstart on another career: writing.

That winter break he started work on a book, tentatively titled The Spitzer Effect, which would examine the AG’s impact on the mutual-fund and insurance industries. Winters, whose interest is market regulation, assisted in Spitzer’s earlier investigation into the mutual-fund business. In February 2005, he received an initial book offer that was too low to pay his credit card debt. Financially strapped—he juggled academic jobs and house-sat while working for Spitzer—Winters believed in his book enough to aggressively court a top literary agent, and, by September, he had signed a handsome two-book deal (the second book deals with the impact of excessive executive compensation) with Knopf. Winters took off that fall semester to research the book (due out by January 2008), but was never far from campus. His bylines continued to appear in the Law School’s student newspaper, the Commentator.

In September, he and his girlfriend, Katie Roberson-Young ’06, plan to move to Miami, where he’ll take a year to finish his books before looking for work as an assistant district attorney. Although Winters’s long-term career plans are to investigate and prosecute white-collar crime as a D.A., he will keep his pencils sharp—just in case: “Writing is as fulfilling [as law] and allows me to enter and exit the legal profession.”

In college she had visions of being a public defender, but after interning at a child welfare agency in Harlem, James realized that her clients needed counseling more than reduced sentences. Putting law school on hold, she earned an M.S.W. at NYU.

Later feeling burned out by social work, James went into admissions and recruiting, first at Fordham and then at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and noticed a pattern: Candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds—regardless of ambition— often didn’t have the requisite qualifications. Rejecting one such student, she recalls: “I was heartbroken because I knew he could be a great practitioner.” She, too, could have missed opportunities if not for the rigorous British schooling that placed her in accelerated classes. The comparison made James realize that her original plan, law school, would better equip her to offset these imbalances in our society.

James began at NYU thinking that “the next Brown v. Board of Education is coming, and I want to be a part of it.” She’s active in the Black Allied Law Students Association and the Coalition for Legal Recruiting, which promotes faculty diversity.

Next she’ll work in Manhattan as an associate at Clifford, Chance, a firm she chose for its securities litigation work, and volunteer as an admissions officer at TruePotential, the LSAT prep course for low-income students started at the Law School: “I might not use all of the nonprofit skills that I have right away, but I’ll be prepared for the day when I move on to do other things…whatever I decide to do.”

We’ll add more pegs to the hat rack.

But determination, not luck, drove Gauntlett’s future successes. Turning to academics, he finished two years of school in one. He entered the University of Western Australia initially to study medicine, but switched to law because “law is more dependent on intellect than physicality,” he says. Traveling with his prize-winning moot court team gave him the confidence to undertake arduous trips abroad. Graduating in 2002 with dual bachelor’s—law and commerce—he went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, then on to NYU for his LL.M. in trade regulation.

He lives alone, cooks for himself and pushes his nonmotorized wheelchair. He’s assigned a notetaker, and friends help him navigate the streets in a pinch, although he was homebound after snowstorms: “It’s too bad your mates don’t have a spare bulldozer on them to help you out in the snow.”

Gauntlett is helping write a brochure for NYU law students with disabilities. “It’s one of those evolving things where people with disabilities stand on the shoulders of others,” he says. “The next person will have it easier.” He will return to Oxford to finish his doctorate in competition law, with an eye toward practicing law back in his native Australia.

Breyer’s practical perspective on democracy—that government is connected to the citizens it serves, and that people have a responsibility to work together to affect their communities—was repeatedly invoked by the five legal luminaries who spoke in tribute as the 2007 Annual Survey was dedicated to him.

Echoing Feder’s enthusiasm for Breyer’s writing, Judge Robert Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit noted how Breyer’s opinions, plainspoken and free from footnotes, are tools of democracy, enabling anyone to read and understand his judicial decisions.

But aside from Breyer’s contribution to the law from the highest court, several speakers focused on his earlier work. “You may think that the greatest job that Justice Breyer ever assumed…was as associate justice of the Supreme Court,” said Kenneth Feinberg ’70, former special master of the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. “You are incorrect.” He argued that Breyer’s talent for getting political opponents to compromise when he served as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1974–75 was his finest contribution to the democratic process. A prime example was how Senators Edward Kennedy and Strom Thurmond compromised on judicial appointments. “‘You can have Mississippi if we can have Massachusetts.’ ‘You can have a district judge in California if we can have one in Alabama.’ It worked,” said Feinberg, whose own credentials as a mediator are superlative. “Today, when you meet senators who were around back then… they say, ‘Remember those days when the Senate was more bipartisan?’” Kate Adams, Breyer’s former clerk from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit who is now vice president and special counsel of Honeywell Specialty Materials, later added, “Perhaps through his constitutional pragmatism, judging each case one at a time through the lens of active liberty, Justice Breyer can do the same for our Court and our Constitution.”

Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford Law School, who knows Breyer from their days as Harvard Law professors, and Richard Stewart, John Edward Sexton Professor of Law, who worked with Breyer on the casebook Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy: Problems, Text and Cases, remarked that Breyer’s contributions in the public service have been successful because he nails down what really matters. Sullivan described how Breyer approached his work with the judiciary committee with the goal of determining “what they should do that day for the country.” And Stewart recalled Breyer’s 14 years in the First Circuit where he most notably influenced sentencing guidelines, an issue that remains among the most important to the judicial system today. “[Breyer’s] initiatives have not won universal applause,” Stewart remarked, “but these innovations, warts and all, have stood the test of time.”

The same thoughtfulness Breyer demonstrates when serving the people in a legal capacity permeates his nonlegal endeavors. As chief judge of the First Circuit, he recognized that lawyers were constantly getting stuck in malfunctioning elevators in the old Boston courthouse, causing them to miss appearances. Breyer became actively involved in redesigning the new John Joseph Moakley Courthouse, which opened in 1999, from poring over blueprints to getting cost estimates from bricklayers. “He rolled up his sleeves to renovate that courthouse,” recalled Adams. And the building on the Charles River even reflects Breyer’s practical outlook. Ever mindful of the people, Sullivan said, “He built such a courthouse with great success, with great public spaces where the people would have the best views of Boston Harbor.”

Over the years, meditation has quietly slipped out of the ashram and into the mainstream. Under Chen’s initiative, this stress-relieving routine is the newest kind of practice studied at the Law School.

The summer before she matriculated, Chen walked into an East Village yoga school to take part in her first serious meditation session, motivated by a desire to understand herself a bit better. “I had meditated before—that’s not the correct way to put it—I had sat before,” she said. She emerged with a desire to practice daily, and the impulse to start the Open Meditation student group, or OM, which she runs with Sara Johnson ’09 and Patrick Garlinger ’09. Through meditation, says Chen, “we acquire a self-awareness to choose longer-term paths and actions that allow us to be of more service to the world.”

Chen and her fellow students are not alone. Lawyers in the United States and Europe have begun embracing meditation in response to alarming increases in depression, alcoholism and suicide rates in the profession. The American Bar Association regularly organizes meditative retreats for students, lawyers and judges, and mandatory CLE credits can be earned by taking part in meditation classes.

“The essence of the lawyer’s life is thought and consequences, and is almost entirely cerebral,” says Matthew Warner ’09, a weekly practitioner whose first experience with meditation was in one of Chen’s classes. “Meditation allows a break from the problems and conflict, allowing one to acquire perspective and remember why he or she came to the law.”

Like many other female law students, MacCormack was troubled by the lack of gender equality that continues to pervade the legal profession. Women may account for more than half of all earned J.D.s, but they still only hold 17 percent of partnership positions at law firms, and a quarter of tenured law professorships. Conversations about “work-family balance” and questions about what to wear to interviews (Do I have to wear a skirt? Should I remove my wedding ring?) are common fodder on discussion forums catering to women in the law and in private conversations. Many women who had never before considered “women’s issues” find themselves wondering what impact their gender could have on their legal career.

Instead of grappling with these issues silently or settling for commiseration with friends, MacCormack took action. She joined Law Women, an NYU School of Law student organization, and in her first few months as a member of the group received a letter from a Stanford law student proposing the creation of an online community for women in the law. At a conference on Stanford’s campus in March of 2006, the Law Women members further crystalized the idea and worked out the details of a Web site intended to, as MacCormack put it, allow “women in the law to be able to have all the conversations we have amongst ourselves on a much bigger stage.”

A year later, MacCormack is editor-inchief of Ms. JD (www.ms-jd.org), an online forum for women in all areas of the law. The tagline of the Web site, which officially launched in March 2007 at Yale’s Legally Female conference, is “Changing the face of the legal profession.” Indeed, the women of Ms. JD are revolutionizing traditional ways of networking, sharing experiences and promoting issues that concern women. The site is mostly in blog format, with law students, professors and practitioners writing op-ed–style posts that are open for comment. There is also a forum where readers can have conversations, as well as a calendar of relevant legal events.

The topics on Ms. JD are as diverse as the women posting. They range from sexual harassment to balancing motherhood with fulltime enrollment in law school to options for part-time legal work to inspiring stories of women who have made breakthroughs in the legal world. Perhaps most important, Ms. JD connects women at all levels of the law and from all across the country, offering resources, communication and a sense of solidarity.

“It’s sort of like sharing notes,” said MacCormack, who is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Legislative and Public Policy. She could have added that based on the tenor of Ms. JD’s content, it’s clear that the legal establishment will be put to the test.

Brand went to work: tracking down Smartmatic executives in Venezuela, pulling documents written in Spanish (he’s bilingual) buried in the bureaucracy of Venezuela’s commercial registries, and spending hours in the squat 1970s-era building that houses the National Electoral Council (CNE), sweettalking secretaries to gain access and cultivating sources. “There wasn’t one Deep Throat,” he says, as his sources included a number of businessmen, Venezuelan government officials and a former operative of Venezuela’s intelligence agency who would fly from Caracas to deliver information to Brand at a Coral Gables restaurant.

In May 2004 Brand broke his front-page story. Smartmatic, which operated mainly out of Caracas, not Florida, appeared to have had the inside track in obtaining the government contract. Smartmatic had partnered with Bizta, a tiny company founded by the same Venezuelan executives, which in the months prior to receiving the major contract had secretly sold 28 percent of its stock to the Chávez government. A pro- Chávez Science Ministry official sat on Bizta’s board of directors. Further, “Neither Smartmatic nor Bizta had ever performed an election,” says Brand.

After Brand revealed Venezuela’s investment in Bizta, the government divested its shares in the company. Chávez survived the August 2004 recall referendum amid accusations of election fraud by the opposition, and the story fell out of the U.S. news. Meanwhile Brand married a Cardozo law student, Samantha, moved to New York, and entered NYU.

Then in March 2005, flush with cash from its Venezuelan contracts, Smartmatic bought California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, a major U.S. e-voting manufacturer. “I was stunned to hear that a company with a controversial history and financial links to the Venezuelan government would be playing such a high-profile role in counting millions of U.S. votes without anybody looking into it first,” says Brand. In March 2006, he wrote an op-ed piece in the Miami Herald questioning whether Smartmatic’s purchase of Sequoia merited investigation: “Congress spent two weeks overreacting to news that Dubai Ports World would operate several American ports, but a better target for their hysteria would be the acquisition by Smartmatic International of Californiabased Sequoia Voting Systems, whose machines serve millions of U.S. voters.”

In May 2006, Brand met with State Department officials interested in a briefing on Smartmatic. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney wrote a letter to then-Treasury Secretary John Snow, attaching Brand’s articles as exhibits. Shortly thereafter, the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), the FBI and the IRS reportedly opened investigations into Smartmatic. By December 2006, Smartmatic had announced it would sell Sequoia Voting Systems in response to the investigations, but denied improper links to the Chávez government. “Obviously Smartmatic was unable to convince federal investigators that its ownership of Sequoia posed no risk to the security of our elections,” says Brand. “The pending sale is an important step in building the confidence of Americans in the electoral process.”

Brand’s firsthand exploration into a matter vital to our democracy has enriched the discussion in many classes. “Having a journalistic, deep investigation into the facts brought into the law classroom is illuminating,” says Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law. Pildes is an expert in voter rights law who taught Brand in his course, Law and Democracy, which addresses some of the very issues Brand has reported on. “The skills he uses, the investigative mind-set—really digging and uncovering facts, figuring how to get access to information—can serve someone well in his role as lawyer.”

Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, an expert on the electoral process, and Brand’s independent research adviser, says: “Until the Florida election, we tended to think that the machinery of the elections was relatively technical and unimportant. Richard figured out that there was the possibility of using the new technology of computerized voting as a means to assure a preexisting set of results…and that the government of Hugo Chávez was neck-deep in moving into this brave new world.”

As a young reporter, “senators, ambassadors and mayors take your calls, and now they don’t anymore,” Brand says, describing the “byline withdrawal” he has experienced moving from journalism to the relative anonymity of law school, and on to join Cravath, Swaine & Moore in their corporate department. “But,” he says, “if ever there was a law school with more things going on in election law, it’s NYU.”

In the end, a distinguished bench, consisting of Judge Allyson Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Judge Kenneth Karas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, sided with the plaintiffs, declaring petitioners’ cocounsels Chirag Badlani ’08 and Julie Mandelsohn ’07 the winning team. The Best Oralist Award, however, went to respondent Anthony DeCinque ’08 (Alan Lawn ’08 was his cocounsel), making the honors appropriately bipartisan.

A Winning Season

The team of Brian Crow ’07, Shaneeda Jaffer ’07 and Kartik Venguswamy ’07 reached the quarterfinals of the 57th Annual National Moot Court Competition. In the earlier New York regional round, Venguswamy garnered the Best Oralist honor.

Michael Robotti ’08 and Lee Turner-Dodge ’08 took first place at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s Evan A. Evans Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition on March 25. Daniel Samann ’07 coached.

Jonathan Davis ’08 and Jonathan Herczeg ’08 took top honors at the third national UCLA Sexual Orientation Competition on February 24. Sam Castic ’07 coached.

NYU’s Moot Court Board hosted for the second year in a row the Immigration Law Competition. Heather Keegan ’07 and Vilas Dhar ’07 ran the competition, while Julia Fuma ’07 and Andrew Hodgetts ’07 created the problem. Teams from 10 schools argued before Kermit Lipez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Stanley Marcus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and Juan Osuna, acting chairman, Board of Immigration Appeals.

Vilas Dhar ’07, Rachael McCracken ’07, James Medek ’07 and William Newman ’07 earned first, second, honorary men-tion and third place oratory honors, respectively, at the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition, Atlantic Regional, on March 19.

“I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done anything to address the issues our country was facing after Hurricane Katrina,” said Franke, who as an undergraduate ran Vanderbilt University’s alternative spring break. With 400 students traveling to multiple countries annually, it is Vanderbilt’s largest student-run organization. Franke contacted fellow members of Law Students for Human Rights (LSHR), who in turn directed her to the Student Hurricane Network (SHN), a national organization formed by law students to address the aftermath of Katrina.

With SHN’s assistance, Franke spearheaded a trip to the area in March 2006 during the Law School’s spring break. Thirty students—eight were sent to Gulfport, Mississippi, and the rest to New Orleans— worked with a total of nine local organizations, pitching in on such pressing matters as the repair and demolition of storm-damaged homes, the preparation of written testimony for the New Orleans City Council on urgent local issues and the monitoring of eviction proceedings in Mississippi.

The trips were so successful that Franke contacted Assistant Dean Deborah Ellis ’82, the head of the Public Interest Law Center (PILC), to see how she could make it an annual project. The two worked together to launch a permanent Alternative Spring Break (ASB) program and to petition the Law School for funding. The arrangement they struck makes LSHR responsible for the planning and logistics, while PILC provides funding for travel and accommodations.

In March 2007, the first official ASB sent 34 students to three different sites. One group returned to New Orleans to aid government agencies and community and humanitarian organizations; a second group ventured to Miami to advocate for immigrant rights; and a third group worked with legal service organizations on behalf of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised in the Bronx, the poorest urban county in the United States.

Franke entered the picture at the right time. The Law School in general, and Dean Richard Revesz in particular, was interested in supporting such a program, Ellis said, but “nobody had quite the momentum and organizational know-how to do it until Mimi came along.”

Isaac Cheng ’08 volunteered in New Orleans in 2006 and again this year, helping with community organizing and political action on behalf of immigrant workers and of residents displaced from housing projects. “They don’t have complicated theories about what happened,” he said. “They just have a really straightforward response, which is, ‘Come back and rebuild.’”

Some student participants who stayed closer to home were reminded of the tremendous need, everywhere, for legal assistance. Jessica Chicco ’07 devoted the week to Legal Aid’s Juvenile Rights Division in the Bronx. She spent much of her time combing the archived files of two different cases for specific information involving a mental retardation diagnosis and evidence of sexual abuse. “We did substantive work,” said Chicco. “I was kind of skeptical about getting anything done in five workdays, but we really did. And I learned a lot. It’s a complete immersion.”

Many students, said Franke, were surprised at how important their work was: “I put that as an incredibly good sign, one, that the organizations were actually utilizing the students but, two, showing that they really are in need of student help.”

Franke feels the ASB can make a dent in such overwhelming need. “Even outside of some natural disaster,” said Franke, “it’s extremely important for those of us who are going to hopefully assume positions of leadership and power in our country to understand…the legal struggles that many people are facing every day: a poor family in New Orleans trying to deal with insurance claims, or a legal resident challenging his detention or immigrant status, or somebody in the Bronx in need of civil legal services.”