Aaron Bloom ’11, Colleen Duffy ’11, Monica Iyer ’10, Aaron Jacobs-Smith ’11, and Laura Moy ’11 spent seven months analyzing the interplay of commodity traders, food processors, global retailers, and fast-food companies to investigate the role played by transnational corporations in the global food supply chain. The research, supervised by Lama Fakih ’08, a fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and Professor Smita Narula, CHRGJ faculty director and legal adviser to De Schutter’s U.N. mandate, indicated that a shrinking number of large traders control a growing proportion of the supply chain; their demand for cheap, uniform food products pressures poor, small-scale farmers who lack the clout to contest low compensation. As a result, farmers must reduce the wages of their laborers, adversely affecting workers’ right to food. The first sentence of the paper puts it starkly: “It is both ironic and tragic that 80 percent of the world’s hungry are food producers.”

The two-day June meeting was the first of several planned this year that will culminate in a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Participants representing agribusiness, farmers, agricultural workers, and NGOs as well as academic experts received a synopsis of the students’ paper as one of three documents that formed the basis for discussion. “I really hope that what we created was a foundation for a good conversation there,” Iyer, the project leader, said, “and that people who were coming to the conference learned from it and were able to build from that toward actually finding solutions.”

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“We see our sustainability efforts and conversations as part of an important culture change at the Law School,” says Angela Gius ’10, who, along with Joy Sun ’10 and Maron Greenleaf ’10, were invited to join the NYU Law Sustainability Committee supervised by Lillian Zalta, assistant dean for operations and administrative services.

“We’re hoping to make a ‘green’ lifestyle the norm on campus by ensuring that green habits are easy and accessible, that our facilities—and how we use them—become increasingly energy efficient and waste-free, and that sustainability is a priority in our decisions as individuals and as an institution,” says Gius.

The Law School has already undertaken several significant steps, such as composting waste, improving recycling, reducing energy use, replacing plastics in dining halls, and producing “Green Guides” to educate students, faculty, and staff. Facilities Manager Ken Higgins says the Law School buildings have also been upgraded, switching to lowflow toilets and ditching halogen light bulbs in favor of compact fluorescents.

Ideas flow from all parts of the Law School, says Zalta, who appreciates the passion of the student committee members. “They push the agenda,” she says. “They are extremely committed—you don’t have to ask them for buy in. They’re in.”

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The intent is to provide free legal scholarship in a readable, accessible format, said Matthew Lawrence ’09, former managing editor of the NYU Law Review, whose efforts were integral to the Web site’s launch. The Legal Workshop presents short, plain-English articles written by an author whose related, full-length work of scholarship appears in one of the participating law reviews. In June, for instance, Senior Circuit Judge Harry Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a visiting professor at NYU School of Law, published an engaging editorial about judicial politics that uses personal experience to illustrate the ideas in a Duke Law Review article that he co-authored with Michael Livermore ’06, “Pitfalls of Empirical Studies That Attempt to Understand the Factors Affecting Appellate Decisionmaking.”

A not-for-profit joint venture, the Legal Workshop is operated by current and former student editors. The idea came about at a 2006 meeting of editors in chief of top law reviews who shared how they were struggling to make their individual Web sites viable. Erin Delaney ’07 embraced the idea of a collaboration, and the editors of the NYU Law Review took the lead in cutting through the legal red tape to form a multistate consortium of private and public entities. “It was a simple vision,” said Lawrence, “but it took a lot of hard work to make it happen.”

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Bellamy has crisscrossed the private and public sectors throughout her career, having worked as a corporate lawyer for Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a managing director at Bear Stearns, a principal at Morgan Stanley, a New York state senator, president of the New York City Council, and director of the U.S. Peace Corps.

French Secretary of State Alain Joyandet presented the medal “to pay tribute to [Bellamy’s] commitment to the cause of children all over the world.” He praised Bellamy for her “intense and tireless contribution…at the head of UNICEF to fight discrimination against children and advocate for the recognition of their rights.”

Bellamy is president and CEO of World Learning, a Vermont-based nonprofit organization that seeks to help Americans become more effective global citizens through study abroad, graduate education, and community projects.

“Being at the head of UNICEF was an honor and a privilege. I can think of no work that is more vital to humanity than ensuring that children everywhere survive their early years and grow up with health, dignity, and peace.”

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Launched through a partnership of the Law School, Harvard Law School, and the Advantage Testing Foundation, the Training and Recruitment Initiative for Admission to Leading Law Schools (TRIALS) is a five-week summer residential program for socioeconomically disadvantaged students that offers rigorous preparation for the LSAT, lectures by legal luminaries, and opportunities to meet with and observe lawyers in the field. Harvard hosted the inaugural year of TRIALS this past summer, and NYU Law will host the program in 2010. “This is part of a comprehensive diversity effort,” said Dean Richard Revesz. “In a difficult economic environment, we are not scaling back our programs but are expanding our commitment through a targeted approach that does the most with each dollar.”

As part of this effort, the Law School has also joined forces with Legal Outreach, a college prep organization that uses the law as a tool to inspire and prepare urban youth to succeed in high school, college, and beyond. Legal Outreach’s four-year program begins the summer before a student’s ninth-grade year with an intensive criminal justice course, which was held at NYU this summer; almost every day an alumnus engaged students in discussions on compelling legal issues.

The Law School has also expanded its AnBryce Scholarship Program, founded in 1998 by Anthony Welters ’77, chairman of the NYU School of Law board of trustees, and his wife, Beatrice, to provide full scholarships and other support to outstanding students who are the first in their families to pursue a graduate degree. The program, which began with one student per year, is now fully funded and has 30 students—10 per class—annually. “When I was in school, I never considered the need to work a hardship,” Welters recently told Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine. “But there were lots of opportunities I missed in law school because of the need to work. My wife and I facilitated these scholarships so that others could take advantage of the full school experience.”

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In 1983 the Legal Aid Society filed the primary lawsuit in the matter, McCain v. Koch, to obtain better shelter for families. Subsequent lawsuits concerned questions of shelter eligibility and services for the homeless. By 2008, more than 40 court orders were in play. In an attempt to end the quarter-century legal conflict, the city made reforming the shelter system a top priority.

The settlement between the Legal Aid Society and New York City explicitly guarantees the right to shelter and formalizes qualifying standards for shelter, assisting individuals with obtaining necessary documents and helping them find somewhere to go in the event that shelter is denied.

In a September 2008 news conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg at City Hall, Banks said the hard-won development made this “a historic day for homeless children and their families,” adding, “An enforceable right to shelter for homeless children and their families is now permanent, no matter what administration is in office, no matter who is mayor.”

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Feinberg, the Obama administration’s new “pay czar” overseeing executive compensation for companies receiving federal aid, was the special master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund established by Congress 10 days after the attacks as an administrative alternative to litigation. The vast majority—98 percent—of eligible victims and families submitted claims to the fund, and by June 2004 Feinberg had supervised payouts of more than $7 billion to 5,560 claimants.

The 95 remaining victims and families filed suits against the airlines, security companies, and others in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. That court, in turn, appointed Birnbaum, a specialist in mass torts and a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, as mediator. From February 2006 to March 2009, she settled all but three wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits for a total of $500 million.

In her concluding report to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Birnbaum wrote that many families had not had a chance to “tell the story of their loss.” So, she arranged for the families to address airline representatives in face-to-face sessions that were “heartwrenching and emotionally draining.” In Hellerstein’s order accepting the report, he praised Birnbaum’s “extraordinary work”: “She absorbed their losses and their pain with empathy…. She gained plaintiffs’ confidence. Without her assistance, most of these cases, in my opinion, would not have settled.”

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Read an interview with Kenneth Feinberg ’70.

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Stevenson is one of two awardees who will each receive $250,000 during a ceremony this fall. The EJI represents indigent defendants, death row inmates, and juveniles who it believes have been denied fair and just treatment in the legal system. This term, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide the case of EJI client Joe Sullivan, who was convicted of rape at the age of 13 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In December, Stevenson filed a petition in Sullivan v. Florida asking the Court to determine whether Sullivan’s sentence violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

“In securing access to justice for those most in need of protection from discrimination—including, at times, discrimination within the legal system itself—Bryan Stevenson … assist[s] oppressed minorities in developing the voice and arguments they need to demand equal justice under law,” said U.S. District Judge Bernice Donald of the Western District of Tennessee, who was a member of the prize committee. “[His] work is a model for human rights advocacy and presents a compelling case for the necessity of focusing on and developing public interest law in legal education and practice.”

Stevenson’s share of the prize money will be contributed to EJI’s budget.

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Not all proponents applauded the bold move. Jennifer Pizer ’88, marriage project director for Lambda Legal, told the Times the federal suit was “risky and premature” and that a Supreme Court loss could set the cause back decades. But Olson, a Dwight D. Opperman Institute of Judicial Administration board member, countered, “We studied this very, very carefully,” adding that it was hard to tell clients, “Why don’t you…wait another five years?”

Meanwhile, antidiscrimination law expert Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, weighed in on the sanctioning of same-sex marriage rights in multiple states—including Iowa and Vermont in the span of four days last April—in the Times, on NPR, and in other media outlets. In a podcast for the NYU Law Web site, Yoshino interpreted the Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous decision: “A 7-0 decision says that there really isn’t an argument we can credit on the other side, and this manifests a movement away from thinking about the same-sex marriage issue as being up for debate and toward the idea that to be against same-sex marriage is like being against interracial marriage.” (Listen to the full interview at law.nyu.edu/news/yoshino_podcast_marriage.)

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On the surface, the case was a simple one. A small Texas utility district with an elected board wanted the opportunity to “bail out” of its obligations under Section 5, which requires that certain local jurisdictions with a history of voting rights discrimination seek Justice Department preapproval before changing their voting procedures. Since the district does not register voters, it was deemed ineligible to bail out, and so brought suit to win that right or, alternatively, to overturn Section 5 entirely. The latter possibility made Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder the most highly anticipated opinion of the last term.

The tone of the oral argument on April 29 led most observers to believe the Supreme Court might declare Section 5 unconstitutional. Adegbile faced skeptical questioning from several justices; one of the most prominently raised questions was whether the mix of covered jurisdictions was now outdated. Many legal analysts predicted a 5-4 decision.

The Court surprised both sides on June 22 when it ruled 8-1 to address the case narrowly, leaving Section 5 intact. The Court gave non–voter-registering entities the right to seek bailout relief, but also implied that Section 5’s constitutional status might be under threat.

Professor Richard Pildes, whose congressional testimony on Section 5’s 2006 reauthorization was quoted in the opinion, said, “Congress had thrown down a gauntlet to the Court by not updating the Act in 2006, and the Court responded in its own more gentle way by essentially throwing the gauntlet back down to Congress and saying the Act is in serious constitutional jeopardy.”

Agreeing with Pildes, Professor Samuel Issacharoff, whose law review article on Section 5 was cited in the ruling, said, “If we look at where the problems have taken place in recent elections, Ohio and Florida come to the fore, and neither one is a covered jurisdiction under Section 5.” Adegbile, on the other hand, considers the continued relevance of Section 5 a legislative matter rather than a judicial one: “Where you have a statute that has withstood the test of time and has been a transformative piece of legislation…that system should not lightly be set aside.”

Acknowledging that no system is flawless, Adegbile said, “Section 5 has never been a perfect metric of all of the places where discrimination is happening, but it’s been a very effective one at getting at some of the most entrenched discrimination.” He added, “In my work I travel near and far to hear from those folks about whether or not they need Section 5…. Their experience has been such that they understand that the struggle for equality is not done yet.”

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