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To advance the proposal, Lippman created the Task Force to Expand Access to Civil Legal Services in New York and appointed Helaine Barnett ’64, former president of Legal Services Corporation, as chairwoman. The 28-person task force also includes Steven Banks ’81 and Michael Rothenberg ’91. Lippman attended the first of a series of hearings across the state, in Rochester in June, to assess the unmet needs. “For the poor, you can’t tell me that adequate civil legal help isn’t every bit as important as their health care and their education,” Lippman said at that hearing. “As lawyers, as judges…our constitutional mission is to provide equal justice under the law. If we’re not going to do it, who is?”

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Now an associate at Stinson Morrison Hecker in Jefferson City, Missouri, Root continues to pursue pro bono the Eighth Amendment’s application to lengthy delays that death-row inmates experience. “I still believe that the claim draws on a lot of values that are cherished in our constitutional system,” Root says, “but so far, very few courts have been willing to grant relief on that basis.”

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Harvard University granted NYU University Professor Thomas Nagel an honorary doctorate of laws in May. Provost Steven Hyman called Nagel “one of the most influential philosophers of modern times.”

Nagel (left) also holds an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Oxford and has received many prestigious honors for his work, including the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, the $885,000 Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy, the $1.5 million Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Last year Nagel’s colleague Ronald Dworkin, Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law, received an honorary doctorate of laws from Harvard.

David Garland (right), Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law, accepted an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels in December for his “achievements in the field of law, criminology, and sociology” and “scientific research on an interdisciplinary basis aimed at integrating the fields of criminology, law, sociology, and philosophy.”

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During the last year, Professor of Law Jerome Cohen has kept up pressure on China, writing many op-eds about Gao Zhisheng, a leading human rights lawyer known as the “conscience of China” who was stripped of his law license and convicted of “inciting subversion of state power” in 2006.

Gao disappeared in 2009, reappeared briefly after protests from rights groups, and disappeared again in April 2010. “It appears that the government fears Mr. Gao, even under house arrest, more than it fears the international community’s condemnation of his renewed ‘disappearance,’” wrote Cohen and Beth Schwanke, legislative counsel for Freedom Now, in the Wall Street Journal in May.

For Times Wang ’11, one of Cohen’s students, the situation is personal. His father, Wang Bingzhang, has been a political prisoner since 2003. On the eve of Barack Obama’s first visit to China, in November 2009, the younger Wang wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, urging U.S. action against China for human-rights abuses. Adding that his father was a nominee for the Nobel Prize that Obama had just been awarded, he wrote, “It is especially appropriate that Obama should confront human-rights issues on this trip; within Chinese prisons sit numerous Peace Prize nominees.”

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“What Price, Peace?” The Law School magazine’s 2006 profile of Mohamed Elbaradei.

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Each week in the seminar, co-taught by Richard Pildes, students examined an appeal in that term’s Supreme Court docket and watched attorneys litigating the actual cases participate in mock arguments. One of the cases was Pottawattamie County v. McGhee, in which Clement challenged absolute prosecutorial immunity for instances in which prosecutors allegedly procure false testimony during a criminal investigation that is later introduced at trial. The case was settled before the Supreme Court made a decision.

Albert Levi ’11 says that while the classroom exercises were highly instructive, seeing his professor argue Pottawattamie last November was the best possible lesson in how to navigate an oral argument. He recalls how Clement repeatedly sidestepped the question of where to draw the line between the investigative stage, during which Clement maintained that prosecutors should be held liable for fabricating evidence, and the prosecutorial stage, in which immunity would still hold. Clement held his answer until the end, for maximum impact. “There was a trap, he avoided it, then he managed to counterpunch at the end,” Levi says. “That, to me, is the definition of great.”

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An EJI team including a dozen NYU School of Law alumni reviewed hundreds of court documents and interviewed more than 100 African Americans who had been excluded from juries in eight Southern states. They found that prosecutors have used their peremptory strikes to exclude jurors for “low intelligence,” seeming “arrogant,” and walking a certain way. “The underrepresentation and exclusion of people of color from juries has seriously undermined the credibility and reliability of the criminal justice system, and there is an urgent need to end this practice,” said EJI Executive Director and NYU Professor of Clinical Law Bryan Stevenson in the report’s summary.

A June 4 New York Times editorial said the EJI report illuminated “the grim truth” of a prediction Justice Thurgood Marshall made in Batson that prosecutors would simply invent race neutral reasons to comply with the law. CNN, NPR, and the American Prospect also covered the EJI study.

Stevenson saw his views on another issue prevail in May when the Supreme Court prohibited sentences of life without parole for juveniles in non-homicide cases. The decision in Graham v. Florida also resolved the companion case, Sullivan v. Florida, which Stevenson argued.

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Batchelder has been an adviser to policymakers, public agencies, and nonprofits particularly on matters at the intersection of tax and social policy. Her recent scholarship has focused on efficiency in the design of tax incentives—she has a forthcoming book, $750 Billion Misspent? Getting More from Tax Incentives, co-authored with Austin Nichols and Eric Toder—and estate tax reform, on which she testified before the Senate Finance Committee in 2008. Batchelder is also an affiliated professor at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and an affiliated scholar at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She was a tax associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, D.C., and New York before joining NYU Law’s faculty in 2005, where she was a co-director of the Furman Academic Scholars Program.

Batchelder’s colleagues applaud the appointment. “She’s good at understanding theory; she has empirical skills; and a primary interest in her work is real-world ideas,” says Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation. “She’s interested in figuring out feasible policies that could actually be enacted and affect the political process.”

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