“Building Good Government,” by Larry Reibstein, traces how NYU School of Law became the first leading law school to successfully require a 1L course that analyzes statutes and their implementation by administrative agencies. That our course has thrived for the last seven years, while it has foundered elsewhere, is a testament to my outstanding colleagues, who engage with policies and politics in their own practice and scholarship, and use those experiences to bring the subject to life in the classroom. The conversation extends beyond the classroom, too, as this year the Law School welcomed key regulatory thinkers from the Clinton and first Bush administrations, and held several spirited debates about financial, healthcare, and auto-industry reform.

Just as the administration of U.S. affairs has become more complicated, governance in the world has taken on a whole new dimension. Last year the Law School was honored to host some of the world’s leading scholars of global governance for year-long fellowships at the new Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice, directed by University Professor Joseph Weiler. For our roundtable discussion “The Shape of Global Governance,” the magazine invited the Straus fellows to join Joseph and other key faculty members for a thoughtful conversation about how to structure behavior among nations in the 21st century.

Democratic government, of course, is ultimately by and for the people. I am impressed by our alumni, some of whom have accepted leadership posts in which they must make difficult, often unpopular decisions while our nation grapples with the fallout from the global financial crisis. Don’t miss our cover story, “The Man Following the Money,” in which Duff McDonald profiles Neil Barofsky ’95, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Neil’s track record prosecuting international drug smugglers and fraudulent mortgage brokers as a U.S. assistant district attorney for the Southern District of New York now looks like a blueprint for excelling in his unprecedented role of investigating and auditing the $700 billion bank bailout. With his forthrightness, he reminds me of another alumnus who has taken a series of challenging jobs. In “A Chat with Kenneth Feinberg ’70,” the then-special master for TARP executive compensation reveals how he manages unique assignments compensating victims of 9/11, Agent Orange, and other disasters. Not three months after our interview, Ken became President Obama’s choice to oversee the BP victims’ fund.

Even in the midst of the financial downturn, here at NYU Law we are still investing prudently but optimistically in the future. In October we will officially open Wilf Hall, a state-of-the-art new academic building on MacDougal Street named after the family of our trustee donors, cousins Leonard Wilf (LL.M. ’77) and Mark Wilf ’87. And this fall we welcome six fantastic new professors. They join a stellar group of full-time faculty recruited during my deanship who are whimsically depicted in “Café Society.”

The news and ideas that fill every page of this magazine are a credit to you, our alumni, who have supported our institution as it has transformed itself into a world-class law school. I was thrilled at the March Weinfeld Gala to announce the final tally for our seven-and-a-half year capital campaign. We raised a total of $415,064,515. The annual average raised during our campaign was more than that of any other law school campaign. What a wonderful way to celebrate our 175th anniversary. Here’s to another 175 great years!

Richard Revesz

Visiting each fall since 2005 to teach a variety of courses, and joining the faculty full-time this year, Epstein is an unwavering, conservative scholar whose deeply reasoned and blunt views on regulation clash with those of most other faculty members, thereby enriching the discourse. “Granted, he’s a foe of the administrative state, but he’s the most important thinker in opposition to the regulatory state we have in the country,” says Professor Rachel Barkow.

Epstein will teach a course in Spring 2011 (along with Bruce Kuhlik, general counsel of Merck) on one of the bulwarks of the regulatory state: the Food and Drug Administration. Describing the course, Epstein lays out a conventional-seeming syllabus—examining how products are approved, clinical trials, recalls—until he adds, “What’s right and wrong about the FDA.” There’s no doubt which side Epstein takes. But just in case, Epstein offers: “I’d blow them up.” He then methodically dissects the agency and its failings, which he says range from “permit-itis”—too many permits required—to “ossified” scientists and bureaucrats who have neither the capacity nor expertise to regulate drug-making. Of the FDA’s propensity to deny or drag out drug approvals, he says, gesticulating, “It’s like carnage as far as I’m concerned.”

Epstein’s best-known work came in 1985 with Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain. His insistence that government must respect and compensate private property rights is a springboard to his view of regulation.

The professor’s underlying principle is that any regulation must leave all affected people better off than with no rule. More specifically, Epstein says regulations ought to come in later rather than sooner. So if you’re planning on putting up a manufacturing plant next to a house, you should not force the builder to go through an exhaustive permission process first. Under his preferred regime, “I can’t stop you from putting in a foundation,” he says. “But once pollution comes in, I can shut you down.” The beauty of this, he says, is that the builder of the plant understands that threat—and won’t want to construct here in the first place. “What on earth is there to commend the current system?” he asks, sounding exasperated. Although Epstein takes issue with just about everything emanating from the Obama administration, at least the president’s policies are giving Epstein plenty of material to work with — and future courses to teach.

A sampling of Richard Epstein’s positions on current regulatory issues:

Health-care overhaul: “It’s going to craterize the system,” he says. “There’s nothing in this bill that controls costs.”

Financial regulation: “I have no confidence this federal government will come up with a system of regulation that will do the job,” he says. Rather, Epstein would like to see a decent bankruptcy system to handle the large cases.

Consumer protection agency: “It will end up hurting the very people whom they purport to help,” he says, referring to credit card and other loan restrictions.

Global warming: Insisting that too many uncertainties surround the theory to commit billions of dollars to decrease carbon levels, he would instead focus on reducing methane.

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Senior Circuit Judge Harry Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and his senior counsel at the court, Linda Elliott, teach Federal Courts and the Appellate Process and the Art of Appellate Decisionmaking. In those classes, students question when courts can review governmental action and when they are obliged to defer to government actors. To drive the lessons home, the students go into mock courtrooms, where, after they have been briefed on real cases that are before the D.C. Circuit, they present oral arguments to their classmates and teachers. Students then divide into panels of judges, deliberating and writing opinions. “It is very, very intense,” says Edwards, who has taught at NYU Law since 1989. “It is one thing to offer an intellectual critique of our system. It is quite another thing to have to comb through an actual case record to complete a brief, present an oral argument, or write an opinion.”

Robert Katzmann was teaching law at Georgetown University, specializing in such topics as regulation and administrative law, when President Bill Clinton appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1999. Since 2001 he has also been teaching Administrative Process, a seminar in which he guides students in dissecting the various factors that affect an agency in reaching a decision, whether it’s the Federal Trade Commission or the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The administrative process is a many splendored thing,” says Katzmann, an adjunct professor, “and can be approached through many lenses.” He teaches students to look at the internal and external forces — the professional staffers and lawyers on the inside, for example, and the president, Congress, and the courts on the outside. Students roleplay as judges and critique opinions that Katzmann himself wrote, so he is able to replay the interaction between the courts and agencies.

C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, admits his bias when it comes to the importance of administrative law. He was trained as an administrative and antitrust lawyer from the beginning, and served as chair of the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice section of the American Bar Association in the mid-1990s. He was also counsel to the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, chaired by then–Vice President Bush. “You cannot understand economic activity in the U.S. if you are a lawyer without understanding how congressional legislation is translated into the rules that apply to virtually every business entity in the country,” Gray asserts. Its importance, he adds, can be seen in the D.C. Circuit, which mostly hears administrative law cases. “It’s no accident,” Gray says, “that the principal feeder [of justices] to the Supreme Court is the D.C. Circuit.”

Gray taught at NYU Law for the first time in Spring 2010. His course, Energy, Environment, and Security: Law and Policy, pivoted on the idea that regulations primarily determine national and international energy policy. “It is a very tangled web of administrative rules and can only be understood in the context of very, very dense rulemaking,” he says. This spring, Sally Katzen, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Clinton, will teach a seminar whose title echoes Gray’s statement: How Washington Really Works.

For five years, Distinguished Research Scholar and Senior Lecturer Michael Levine has taught a course called Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation that attempts to tie together regulatory theory with real-world problems. That intersection mirrors his career. As a student at Yale Law School, Levine wrote a note advocating airline deregulation, making him an early proponent of that concept. In the late 1970s, he was recruited to be chief of staff to Alfred Kahn, chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board. From there he worked for airlines including Continental and Northwest, and became president and CEO of New York Air. He has also taught at Yale Law School. “Basically what I’m trying to do is give students the benefit of having seen the process from the government, business, and academic sides,” Levine says. Academics, he says, tend to “compare imperfect markets with perfect visions of how things could work.” People in the arena, he adds, tend to see markets as more or less as good as they are going to be. Levine tells students they’ll confront both imperfect regulation and markets, requiring them to figure out how best to navigate through them. Last fall, in light of the economic meltdown, Levine revised his course to address financial services regulation—a perfect example of imperfects.

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Professor Samuel Issacharoff is not one to rest on his laurels. Just when he’s made a name for himself in a particular field, he moves on. Two years ago he was inducted into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his expertise in employment law and his empirical work in behavioral law and economics. But “neither of those would come to the top of any list right now,” says the Renaissance man, whose interests currently lean toward complex litigation and procedure and constitutional law. “I tend to move across a lot of different fields. There’s tremendous excitement while you’re on the upward slope of the learning curve. Then you make the decision whether to stay with what you’ve become good at, or do something different.”

Apparently Issacharoff, who was lured from Columbia Law School to join the faculty this summer as the Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, has made that decision, going for the latter option several times over.

“He’s a lawyer hyphen scholar. He’s able to bridge the gap between high theory and a lawyer’s sense of how judges are thinking about issues. His practice informs his scholarship, and his scholarship informs his practice,” says coauthor Stanford Law professor Pamela S. Karlan.

On the lawyer side of the hyphen, Issacharoff started in the mid-1980s as acting director of the Voting Rights Project for the D.C.-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, litigating politically charged matters like racist gerrymandering. “These were great professional moments that gave me tremendous satisfaction. You felt you were on the right side of history,” he says. In 1992, as a junior faculty member at the University of Texas School of Law, he did a turn as an affirmative action lawyer, helping represent the school in the high-profile Hopwood reverse-discrimination case. (The University won at trial but lost on appeal.)

His earliest scholarly writings were on procedural law and employment law. In the late 1990s he started writing about the political issues he’d dealt with as a young lawyer, culminating in the seminal book The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (with Law School Professor Richard Pildes and Pamela S. Karlan, 1998). He and his coauthors made the TV talk show circuit during the controversial 2000 presidential election, and by 2001 published When Elections Go Bad: The Law of Democracy and The Presidential Election of 2000.

“Sam is one of the refreshingly large personalities in the legal academic world—and not just because he is 6’5,” says Pildes. “While most academics aspire to shape a field, Sam’s scholarship has re-defined several fields: voting rights, complex litigation, civil procedure and employment law. He is not afraid to take strong, controversial positions, but his work is as respected among courts—which cite it regularly—as it is among academics.”

Issacharoff, 50, was born in Buenos Aires, to dad, Amnon, 77, a psychoanalyst, and mom, Dorah, 72, who taught college comparative literature. When he was five years old and spoke only Spanish, the family, which includes two younger siblings, moved to the U.S., eventually settling in Manhattan. In 1968, at the height of the student protests, he entered the competitive Bronx Science High School. “It was a time when schoolwork seemed very difficult to justify as a consuming event,” he recalls. “There were times when attention was focused on the wonderful chemistry courses, and times when we focused on the police arresting students in the building.”

A lingering effect of that period was to redirect his interests from math and science toward history and social sciences. “I was very much taken by the ideas of the day,” he explains. He graduated from SUNY Binghamton in 1975, having majored in history, spent a year studying at the Université Paris, then entered CUNY’s Graduate Center to study labor history.

When he started at Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1983, he became immediately enthralled not only with the aspect of legal argumentation, but with the intellectual discipline of law itself. “I was tremendously taken by the craft side of law, fascinated by legal procedure, drawn to ways of conceptualizing a problem and strategizing a solution,” says Issacharoff.

After stints at the Lawyers’ Committee for International Human Rights, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a D.C. labor law firm, he joined the University of Texas School of Law, where he became the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law. He left in 1999 to become a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, where he was eventually named the Harold R. Medina Professor in Procedural Jurisprudence. “I’ve had three chairs. That shows some instability,” he jokes.

Not so, however, when it comes to personal relationships.

He met Cynthia Estlund, his wife of nearly 20 years, in his first semester Constitutional Law class, taught by Robert Bork. She sat in front of him, and after a few months of fits and starts and a few hard-fought squash games, they became a steady pair. “He’d been out of school for several years and was beyond a lot of the law school neuroses,” recalls Estlund, a professor at Columbia University School of Law, who will be visiting NYU in the spring. “He was world-wise, iconoclastic and confident.” They married in 1986 and have two children, Jessica, 18, and Lucas, 16.

Issacharoff has published nearly 100 articles, essays and reports. And in addition to his two earlier books, he has just published Civil Procedure (Foundation Press) and Party Funding and Campaign Financing: An International Perspective (Hart Press).

What’s the secret to his productivity? “He is someone who can do three things at one time. He’ll get on the exercise machine with a manuscript in front of him and a basketball game on the television. And then while he’s cooling down, he’ll sit down at the computer for 10 minutes and write a paragraph,” says Estlund.

Most recently, Issacharoff has become interested in mass tort litigation where “everybody knows there has to be a resolution, but nobody knows quite how,” he says (e.g., cases involving faulty breast implants or DES exposure). He’s recently been appointed to produce a report and commentary for The American Law Institute for the Project on Aggregate Litigation.

His current interests also include the law of democratic participation—i.e., creating democracies in Bosnia and Iraq. This past summer he gave a talk on national security at Oxford University. He’s toying with the idea of writing a book on constitutionalism and fractured societies. “This work is newer,” says Stanford Law School professor and vice dean, Mark Kelman, “but it’s incredibly interesting and likely to be important over the next decade as we think about democracy-building as a foreign policy issue. He’s one of the outstanding scholars of his generation.”

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Like any historian worth his salt, Daniel Hulsebosch is adept at uncovering the past—even his own. Hulsebosch, a legal historian specializing in both early American legal and constitutional history and the legal history of the British Empire, traces his love for the field back to fifth grade. With notebook and Polaroid in hand, he reported on the history of the colonial era houses in his Westchester neighborhood. “The physicality of history struck me,” he says. “I was fascinated by its layered quality, the way an old house was actually made up of a series of additions, each built by a different generation,” Hulsebosch says with characteristic eloquence. “Later I came to see intellectual history in much the same way: ideas are structures built over time, each part added by a new generation.”

Hulsebosch, 39, who joins the faculty in September, has a reputation among his colleagues as a kind of Rumpelstiltskin who can turn the driest material into gold. “Legal history doesn’t produce good stories naturally,” says Eben Moglen, Hulsebosch’s professor at Columbia Law School. “He has the ability to find stories that reflect larger social truths and to tell them in a way that makes for good reading. He’s an inventive writer of history with an eye for the vignette.”

Brought up with four siblings, Hulsebosch had “to develop verbal skills pretty early on, or else get lost in the shuffle,” he says. He became a serious student at Colgate University in sleepy Hamilton, New York. “The best attraction in town was the library. There wasn’t much else to do but read, so I started spending much of my time buried in books.” He majored in history, minored in literature, and, as the editorial editor of the school newspaper, developed his writing style. During his junior year, he studied abroad in London, which cemented his love for history. He spent a good deal of his time at the Public Record Office researching the relationships between American and British officials, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the eve of the Second World War. “It was thrilling to reach through the archives and read letters written by Churchill, and more importantly, by the civil servants who worked with him,” he says. “I became fascinated in the second tier of leadership, the names we don’t remember but who informed and advised key leaders.”

He carried that fascination into his first book: Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). In it, he reinterprets the role that familiar characters like Alexander Hamilton played in shaping the Constitution, while also restoring forgotten characters, like loyalists Sir William Johnson and William Smith Jr., to their deserved places of prominence.

In his current project, tentatively titled Writs to Rights: The Transformation of Professional and Popular Conceptions of the Common Law, 1790-1850, Hulsebosch asks why the early U.S. didn’t develop a civil service in the way that European nations did. “My short answer is the legal profession became the unofficial civil service and helped generate the administrative glue made elsewhere by government officials.” He’ll look at the lawyers who transformed British common law into the American system of laws we know today.

“Dan’s important, in part, because he represents a new wave of scholarship in early American history that we call Atlantic History,” says Stanley Katz, professor of public and international affairs at Princeton. “Dan has done a brilliant job of putting a legal perspective on this movement,” he says.

After earning his J.D. in 1991, Hulsebosch went on to Harvard University, getting his Ph.D. in History of American Civilization in 1999. He was a 1998-1999 Samuel I. Golieb fellow at the NYU School of Law and also received a 1996-1997 Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard. In 1999 he started teaching at Saint Louis University School of Law, where he became a tenured associate professor in 2004. He won an American Society for Legal History’s Surrency Prize for the best article published in the Law and History Review in 2003.

Hulsebosch is ambivalent about the relevance of historical work to modern lawmaking. On the one hand, “I usually find that the past I’m uncovering is more different from the present than it is the same, though that itself is an important lesson,” he says. But legal historians can offer decision makers guidance. For example, he helped draft an amicus brief (led by Law School colleague Professor Michael Wishnie) to the Supreme Court that looked at whether the founding fathers would have interpreted the writ of habeas corpus to have extended to the military base at Guantánamo Bay.

Hulsebosch spends his free time exploring New York in much the same way he did in fifth grade, strolling down the city’s streets and noticing how houses from one period sit side by side with those from others. Always the historian, he likes to tease his colleagues who live in the West Village by telling them: “In the colonial period, their apartment building would have been under the Hudson River.”

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His sister may have soloed with the Boston Pops Orchestra, but Stephen Choi, who joins the faculty this fall from the University of California at Berkeley Law School, hopes to achieve fame through a different route: securities regulations.

Growing up in the Boston suburbs, Choi, 38, would never have guessed that law would be in the cards for him. His grandfather and two uncles were doctors, and his dad, Noah, was a professor at Harvard Medical School. An older brother would become a hospital administrator. His mother, Jae Eun, was a music teacher and his two sisters were musical prodigies. “I have a dead ear,” says Choi, whose mother’s attempts to get him to play the violin and clarinet failed. “I was the black sheep of the family.”

He had shown some promise in science, though, and entered Harvard as a biochemistry major. Then one Friday night after 36 hours in the lab, he recalls, he was performing a laborious experiment in which he had to carefully transfer DNA into a thin vial. “I’m not very coordinated, so instead of it going into the vial it went onto the floor. I decided, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’”

Luckily, at about that time a non-science course captured his imagination—Justice. “That got me thinking about fairness, consequences and administrative” issues of law-themes he still deals with today.

Choi went on to Harvard Law School, graduating first in his class in 1994. He spent the next year as an associate at McKinsey & Company before becoming a visiting professor and then an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, where he carved out his specialty in securities regulation. While teaching, he completed a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1997. He moved with tenure to Berkeley in 1998 where he was appointed the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law, before being lured to the New York University School of Law.

Choi is a prolific writer with at least 32 published works under his belt, including theory papers on securities regulations; securities class action empirical studies; and a series of papers on the judiciary. His research focuses on how to protect investors in an increasingly complex securities market. “A delicate balance exists here. There’s no doubt that a strong system of securities regulations gives investors confidence. But regulators can often make mistakes and face large pressures to be seen as ‘doing something,’ particularly in the wake of a large scandal such as Enron. Too much regulation can be just as much a problem as too little.” Recently Choi cowrote “Behavioral Economics and the SEC” in the Stanford Law Review, which examines how behavioral quirks may lead the SEC to overregulate. Another cowritten article, “How to Fix Wall Street: A Voucher Financing Proposal for Securities Intermediaries,” published in the Yale Law Journal, explores conflict of interest problems among Wall Street analysts and the possibility of market-based solutions to these problems. And his recent 700-page casebook, Securities Regulation: Cases and Analysis (Foundation Press), the first to include a hypothetical case study that examines a Martha Stewart–like, insider trading–related scenario, is his biggest undertaking to date.

“Steve has a knack for picking important issues in investor protection and performing a very detailed, empirical analysis that is helpful in setting regulatory policy,” says Robert Daines, Pritzker Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School (and former Law School professor). “His pieces on the effect of recent securities regulation reform, such as in corporate elections, the issuance of securities and regulating investor lawsuits against corporations, are unmatched.”

Choi and his wife, Un Kyung, and their three children have already settled into New York City. The kids adore the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, and Choi loves his newfound proximity to Wall Street, the hub of the securities industry. “I couldn’t imagine being at a better place,” he says of the Law School and the city. “But at baseball games,” he admits, “I still root for the Red Sox.”

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In the four years that Oren Bar-Gill has been in the U.S., he has published 11 papers, has five more on the way and has presented at the prestigious American Law and Economics Association conference. The Israeli, who joined the New York University School of Law last January, is the envy of his colleagues. “He’s uniquely brilliant. His I.Q. is in the sky,” says Omri Ben-Shahar, Bar-Gill’s former professor who will visit the Law School from the University of Michigan in the fall. Bar-Gill, however, keeps such effusive praise in perspective.

“I do believe that my work is important,” says Bar-Gill, 30. “Still, when I look at friends who are neuroscientists, or people who study epidemics, this is a humbling experience for me.”

A self-professed nerd who placed third in a regional geometry competition in ninth grade, Bar-Gill combines his love for numbers with his interest in justice to carve out his specialty, law and economics. “He comes up with ideas that nobody has thought of before,” Ben-Shahar says. “Every paper he writes has a surprising, counterintuitive idea.” For example, in “The Value of Giving Away Secrets” (written with Gideon Parchomovsky), Bar-Gill argues that, contrary to accepted wisdom, inventors prefer narrow protection and disclosure over broad intellectual-property protection. In other papers he argues against nullifying contracts that impose seemingly heinous credit terms on the low-income consumer. “If I’m selling furniture in an inner-city community and I’m not allowed to insert these credit terms into the contract, I might simply decide not to sell there at all.”

In his 2004 paper “Seduction by Plastic,” Bar-Gill explored the policy debate over legal intervention in the credit card market. He’s currently expanding that research into a book, Market Failure and Behavioral Economics, to be published by Harvard University Press in 2007, about the interplay between consumer psychology and market forces in consumer markets, such as those for cell phones, magazines and health clubs. “He does in several hours things it takes many professors half a year to finish. He’s the most efficient person on earth,” says Michal Barzuza of the University of Virginia School of Law.

Bar-Gill has always been a quick study. Raised with his equally brilliant siblings (his brother is a physicist, his sister a mathematician and dancer) in the suburbs of Haifa by his father, Aharon, 59, a professor of aerospace engineering, and mother, Nechama, 56, a schoolteacher, Bar-Gill skipped a grade in grammar school. “I have no idea why. I guess I was bored.” Playing basketball and tennis spared him from being branded a complete geek, however.

After Bar-Gill graduated high school in Haifa in 1992, with a major in computers and electronics, he was accepted into the Academic Reserves Program, which allows students to defer their mandatory army service until after they’ve finished their studies. He was set to enter the Technion in Haifa, where he would be groomed for an engineering post in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), but switched gears: “I had this great aspiration to become a judge, a naive desire to make a difference.”

Early in law school at Tel Aviv University, however, he reassessed. “I realized that most of what judges do is fact-finding rather than analytical legal reasoning. While this is very important, it was not the intellectual exercise I wanted,” he says. He pursued a joint degree in law and economics, earning a J.D. equivalent, magna cum laude, from Tel Aviv University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in economics in 2002. In the meantime, he enlisted in the legal department of the IDF in 1997, where he worked under the chief military prosecutor doing appellate litigation. “I saw a lot of action on paper,” he jokes. Thinking outside the box once again, he says: “A lot of criminal litigators see prosecutorial power as a bad thing. The lesson I learned is that if you really want to help defendants, you should become a prosecutor, because you have the power to make sure defendants get a fair trial. You can decide how to frame the charges and which sentences to request.”

Bar-Gill met his wife, Sigal, 29, a shiatsu therapist, during the summer just after he finished high school. They married in 1997 and in 2000, moved to Boston, where Bar-Gill obtained an S.J.D. at Harvard in 2005. He and Sigal currently live in New York with their two-year-old daughter, Noam. “Often someone who is busy promoting his career has to forge ahead at the expense of other people,” Ben-Shahar says. “But Oren is very much a family person and a great friend. He’s truly a mensch.”

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Halbertal, a global visiting professor of law and Gruss Visiting Professor of Law since 2003, joins the faculty as the tenured Gruss Professor of Law this fall. He will continue his practice of spending the spring semester in Israel, where he is a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University. At NYU, he teaches Jewish Law and Legal Theory and the Ethics of Obligation in Jewish Law. Though he doesn’t have a J.D., he has become, through his careful readings of others’ work and long philosophical discussions, “indispensable to so many of us on the faculty,” says Amy Adler, who specializes in art law. Indeed, the news that Halbertal secured a permanent position on the faculty prompted an outpouring of unusually gushy praise, with colleagues calling him “beloved,” “a dear man,” and “joyful and soulful.”

Halbertal’s extraordinary dedication and generosity may be the result of lessons learned from his father. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he grew up trilingual. His father, Meir, spoke Yiddish, his mother, Henya, was fluent in Hebrew, and both also spoke Spanish. A Jew born in Poland, Meir survived the Holocaust by fleeing to Russia. While much of his family perished, he spent time in a Siberian gulag and an orphanage, and escaped pogroms by joining distant relatives in Uruguay. There he met and married Henya, an elementary school teacher. They had two sons, Moshe and Dov, and moved to Jerusalem when Moshe was eight years old. Halbertal remembers his father, the educational director of a high school who died in his early 70s in 2001, as an optimistic person who taught him the power of gratitude and giving. “When I asked him how he came from there without being broken,” says Halbertal, “he said, ‘Whenever I was in distress, I saw someone in far more distress and gave help to him.’” Both parents also instilled a deep respect for education. “My father’s formative years were all about survival,” Halbertal says. “He wanted his children to have the gift of what he missed, the gift to study and grow, so in some ways, we were the children who fulfilled whatever he hadn’t had.”

Halbertal received a strong, Talmudic education in yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish rabbinical seminary, and then attended Hebrew University, where he earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in Jewish thought and philosophy. His work began to focus on the intersection of Jewish law and philosophy when he noticed a “constructive tension,” namely the question, “What is the role of value in adjudicating between possibilities?” For example, Halbertal notes that a saying such as “an eye for an eye” can be read in two plausible ways: the semantic, where one would actually demand an actual eye in retribution, and the moral, where one would accept monetary compensation and consider the eye a metaphor. Through such analysis, “you see the role that values play in the interpretive process,” says Halbertal.

One of Halbertal’s most notable works is the 1997 book People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority (Harvard University Press), in which he applied his deep knowledge of religious thought to modern questions. “Part of Halbertal’s gift is that he manages to reveal how much the struggles within Jewish thought resonate with ongoing struggles in law, literature and politics today,” says Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law. Pildes cites current debates over the role of the Constitution in American law and culture, the proper methods of constitutional interpretation or the legitimate space for dissent from rulings of the Supreme Court as subject to illumination through Halbertal’s exposure of the centuries-long turmoil over surprisingly similar issues within the traditions of Jewish religious thought.

In 2001, Halbertal was appointed by a committee established by the Israeli Joint Chiefs of Staff to contribute to the drafting of the ethics code for the Israeli Army. Given the importance to Israel of its military, creating any restrictions on military might was a delicate operation. However, the ultimate product, says Yishai Beer, professor of law at Hebrew University, “was a masterpiece.”

More recently, Halbertal was the guest at the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy—known for convening some of the most incisive, even ruthless, intellectuals and philosophers for a thorough dissection of papers-in-process. Halbertal’s paper, “Self-Transcendence, Violence and the Political Order,” examines the suicide bomber and the terrorist who doesn’t try to escape punishment because he wants to prove that the aim was worth risking his life. Halbertal claims that this kind of sacrificial transcendence is morally misguided. Legitimate moral demands may, in some cases, require sacrifice, but sacrifice can never legitimize action that would not otherwise be legitimate. Thomas Nagel, who leads the colloquium along with Ronald Dworkin, says Halbertal’s argument boils down to, “If violent action is right, it’s right without sacrifice. If it’s wrong, sacrifice won’t make it right” and described the paper as a “lucid and original discussion of self-transcendence and its pathologies.”

Living and teaching across an ocean and a continent can take its toll. But true to form, Halbertal, who is divorced and the father of three daughters, focuses on the positive. Living in two nations, he says, is “a gift” that confers the ability to be comfortable among different people and in different situations, and he is especially grateful to share that with his children. “We have a sense of the world not being a small place, which is a good thing,” Halbertal says. “There is empowerment in exploring and seeing and contributing.”

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Tax law gets a bad rap. “You go to a dinner party and say you’re a tax lawyer and instantly people say, ‘Oh that’s nice,’ and turn to someone else,” says Lily Batchelder. She, too, once held the notion that studying tax law was about filling out forms and memorizing rules. “It wasn’t until I opened my first tax book and saw exactly what it was as an area of study—thinking about how tax burdens and benefits should be distributed across different taxpayers and how people might game the system—that I was totally in love.”

Few people are as passionate about tax law as Batchelder, 33, who traded in a tax practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in September 2004 to join the faculty at the Law School. “She’s this breathtakingly enthusiastic person,” says Fred Goldberg, a former IRS commissioner and her mentor at Skadden. Students will get their first taste of Batchelder’s energy this fall when she’ll teach Federal Income Tax and Tax and Social Policy. “If you’re interested in eradicating poverty and inequality,” explains Batchelder, who is a lifelong advocate for the economically disadvantaged, “then you need to know how to deal with the tax system. Social policy is increasingly done through the tax code.”

Batchelder’s concern for social justice started early. Raised with her three brothers in Brookline, Massachusetts, she followed her parents’ lead. Batchelder’s father, Sandy, 73, was a lawyer with a strong pro bono practice. Her mother, Molly, 68, a folk art painter, taught her that “For those to whom much is given, much will be expected,” Batchelder says. So as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Batchelder joined a number of activist groups, including a pro-choice alliance, a solidarity network for Central America and an anti-apartheid group. As the director of the Stanford Homelessness Action Coalition, she moved the group’s meetings off campus so that neighborhood residents and homeless people alike could participate. “Some people were on sports teams; I was in activist groups. It was what I loved and what I thought was important,” she says.

Batchelder graduated in 1994 with an A.B. in political science, a 4.0 GPA and the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for her thesis analyzing the implications of East Palo Alto’s incorporation. After college she worked as a client advocate at a small social service agency in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where she occasionally broke up violent fights in the soup kitchen. She went on to become the director of community affairs for state senator Marty Markowitz, now the Brooklyn borough president.

She enjoyed community work, but “I wanted to address some of the problems I saw and to deal with the policy issues that were creating them,” she says. A master’s in public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government did the trick. After graduating in June 1999, she entered Yale Law School, where she founded the Pro Bono Network, was editor of the Law Journal and was the director of a human rights project.

Lured by Goldberg to Skadden, Arps in 2002, Batchelder proved adept at practicing law. “I’ve seen how she manages a conversation with a bunch of grumpy lawyers. And I’ve seen how she has insight on issues where conversation stops,” Goldberg says.

Professor Daniel Shaviro says, “She’s the first entry-level tax person the school has hired in 20 years. Even though she wasn’t fully on the job market, we heard about her and went after her.” Her work currently focuses on tax and transfer policies affecting low- and middle-income families. In particular, she is researching arguments that behavioral tax incentives are often best structured as refundable tax credits. She is also exploring the continuing relevance of traditional arguments for tax incentives to encourage individual savings.

Batchelder spends her free time watching bad action movies and having dinner with friends. Teaching will be a new experience, but one she’s looking forward to: “I love trying to convince people to love tax. Tax usually is not seen as an exciting subject, but it’s one of my goals to convince people it is.”

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Rachel Barkow, who has been an associate at the Washington, D.C., firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans since 1998, will join NYU Law’s faculty this Fall. At her law firm, she focused on telecommunications and administrative law issues in proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, state regulatory agencies, and federal and state courts. She took a leave from the firm during 2001 to serve as the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Georgetown University Law Center. Her main academic interests are administrative and criminal law, and she is especially interested in how the lessons of administrative law can be applied to the administration of criminal justice.

Barkow’s most recent publication is “More Supreme than Court: The Fall of the Political Question Doctrine and the Rise of Judicial Supremacy,” which appeared in the Columbia Law Review (2002). She is currently working on an article that examines the relationship of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to the Jury Guarantee. Professor Barkow is also beginning a book that traces the development of separation of powers doctrine at the Supreme Court and the relationship of that doctrine to theories of individual rights and court competency.

When asked why she chose to come to NYU Law, Barkow remarked, “What attracted me to NYU Law, in addition to the fantastic faculty and student body, is the school’s dynamism and energy. There are so many speakers and workshops and events, with so many different and engaging perspectives being aired. And it’s wonderful to see such a high level of interest from both the students and the faculty. The enthusiasm is contagious, and I’m thrilled that I will be a part of it.”

After graduating from Northwestern University (B.A. 1993), Barkow attended Harvard Law School (J.D. 1996), where she won the Sears Prize, which is awarded annually to two students with the top overall grade averages in the first-year class. Barkow served as a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.

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