“America runs on capitalism and democracy in an often conflicting arrangement. The success of that arrangement requires the work of dedicated and honorable Americans who will aggressively protect what we have in this country. And when you look at the world today, even considering America’s problems, we still have a great deal to protect. Protecting what we have means giving back while we are striving to get ahead.”

Alec Baldwin
Actor and Activist
Recipient, Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts

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Speaking on behalf of the 2010 class, which included 30 students from 19 countries, were Andrew Rudisill Vinton of the U.S. and Tiwari Soni Amarnath Pushpa of India. Both students reminisced about the unique experience of this dual-degree, one-year program. “[Singapore] is a place where many roads meet and then again diverge. Likewise, our paths have converged,” said Vinton. “We have come from different countries, backgrounds, and experiences, met here for a common purpose, and will again go our separate ways.”

The program awards an LL.M. in Law and the Global Economy from NYU Law and an LL.M. from the National University of Singapore, and has now graduated more than 100 students in its three-year history. Professor Tan Eng Chye, deputy president and provost of NUS, highlighted the international links that have been forged by both the universities and the students. “You are now uniquely equipped to work and research anywhere in the world, with the reputation of both NYU and NUS behind you,” said Chye. “You are also part of a transformation in the way in which we think about law and the possibilities for collaboration across countries. As a matter of fact, you will be the transformation.”

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While working as an art gallery tour guide at Yale University, where she majored in art history, she noticed that most of the visiting students were well-to-do children from private schools. So she reached out to the New Haven Public Schools to bring students from across the city to the gallery, and she developed an after-school art curriculum with the city’s public schools.

One of Bhatia’s post-graduation jobs, as a graphic designer at the Foundation for Child Development in New York, pushed her further toward young people and the law. As she started doing more program work and less design, she was stirred by the foundation, which funds research, policy, and advocacy work related to early childhood education. “The people who I thought were doing the most useful and exciting projects were lawyers,” Bhatia says.

Fittingly, her arrival at NYU Law coincided with the birth of a new student group, the Suspension Representation Project (SRP), whose members represent public school students in suspension hearings. The NYC Department of Education’s record in this area isn’t pretty: Long-term suspensions almost doubled between 2000 and 2008 (from 8,567 to 16,214); those facing suspension are disproportionately low-income students with disabilities.

Three years spent working with SRP helped Bhatia shape her current AFC fellowship. “Avni came to us unusually prepared,” says Kim Sweet, executive director of AFC. Now Bhatia is moving from representing suspended students to working on policy advocacy, outreach, and training, and she’s relishing the opportunity to follow children beyond the hearings and have an impact on their lives. “It’s so rare for me to meet a student, especially a young student, who does not want to go back to school,” says Bhatia. “All kids want to do great things, and we have to facilitate that.”

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Expecting to find a well-beaten path for combining law and social enterprise when she arrived at NYU School of Law, Raz instead received blank stares whenever she mentioned “law” and “social entrepreneurship” together. Some asked why she wasn’t getting an MBA or public policy degree. Sensing an unfilled niche, Raz, who was also a Root-Tilden-Kern Jacobson Public Service Scholar, began talking to other students. “A large number felt they were in between the traditional firm world and the traditional public interest world,” she says, “and they wanted to be able to do both.”

So in 2008 she co-founded the Law and Social Entrepreneurship Association (LSEA). Now 350 members strong, the organization ref lects Raz’s interest in bridging disciplines. A recent symposium on social-enterprise solutions for rebuilding Haiti marked one of the first times that the School of Law, the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and the Stern School of Business had collaborated on an event. A lecture series, Inside the Social Entrepreneurs Studio, brings innovators to campus on a regular basis. “People are looking to NYU Law as one of the future leaders of law and social enterprise,” Raz says.

As an NYU Reynolds Graduate Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship, Raz researched hybrid entrepreneurial models that straddle the for-profit and non-profit worlds to solve pressing social problems in innovative ways. (On the side, she’s helped friends engaged in projects as varied as fighting corruption and crime in Mexico and creating a hip-hop education center.) Post-J.D., she’s now at the Law School on another fellowship, working on a corporate governance project with Professor Helen Scott.

“The LSEA tapped into a clear, strong river of interest among law students,” says Scott, co-director of the Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business, who has worked closely with Raz in developing a social entrepreneurship curriculum. “I think we are going to be the first major law school to have a real curricular focus for people interested in social enterprise from the law school side. Keren has been instrumental in moving that forward. She’s a visionary, but she combines that with a real down-to-earth sense of how you get it done.”

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As a law clerk in the U.S. Department of Justice Torts Branch during his 1L summer in 2008, Babener quickly impressed the attorneys there with his relentless curiosity and meticulous research. “He never gives a cursory response,” says Gail Johnson, senior trial counsel at the DOJ. “When he hands you the final product, it’s exhaustive.” That summer, Babener first discovered the topic that would direct his academic life for the next two years: structured settlements, in which a defendant agrees to resolve a personal-injury tort claim with periodic payments over time rather than with a lump sum.

While researching structured settlements for his seminar paper in Tax and Social Policy back at school the following fall, Babener kept coming across references to the same piece of conventional wisdom—that personal-injury claimants receiving lump sum settlements dissipated their awards within five years 90 percent of the time. This information was being used to support tax subsidies for structured settlements. Despite a thorough search, Babener found only anecdotal evidence and no empirical confirmation of the notion. “A government incentive as important as the structured settlement tax exclusion deserves to be grounded in statistically valid data,” he says.

This assertion led Babener to an 80-page, single-spaced first draft of his seminar paper, which detailed the history of structured settlements and delved into such fine points as qualified settlement funds that allow the settlement of lawsuits before an agreement is reached on how the amounts will be allocated among the claimants. His professor, Lily Batchelder, suggested he break the draft into two distinct pieces. Babener followed her advice, and both were accepted for publication. The Fall 2009 NYU Journal of Law & Business included his note, “Justifying the Structured Settlement Tax Subsidy: The Use of Lump Sum Settlement Monies,” and the NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy published “Structured Settlements and Single-Claimant qualified Settlement Funds: Regulating in Accordance with Structured Settlement History” as an article in Winter 2010.

Babener’s diligent research had led him to contact and share drafts with practitioners and academics, and the interest was returned. First, organizers of the 2009 annual conference of the Society of Settlement Planners in Washington, D.C., invited him to attend. Then he presented his research findings and participated in a panel discussion at the 2009 National Association of Settlement Purchasers annual conference in Las Vegas. Patrick Hindert, co-author of the legal reference book Structured Settlements and Periodic Payment Judgments and editor of the blog Beyond Structured Settlements, posted an extensive two-part article analyzing Babener’s work, then enlisted Babener as a contributing author. At the 2010 Settlement Planners conference Babener gave a presentation and participated in a panel discussion. The feather in his cap: In February 2010, his research was cited in a U.S. Department of the Treasury hearing on the part of the tax code underpinning structured settlements. “Being in contact with those in the industry has allowed me to write from a position of knowledge that would not have otherwise been possible,” Babener says.

A 2010-11 Tax Policy Fellow, Babener is pursuing a master of laws in the Graduate Tax Program. He plans to return to his hometown of Portland, Oregon in 2011, joining top Pacific Northwest firm Lane Powell, where he was a 2009 summer associate. He’ll no doubt hit the ground running. “Jeremy has made a large name for himself in a very short time due to the integrity of his work,” says Batchelder. “He’s a real self-starter and is completely interested in getting things right and improving policy.”

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Jarrett made a distinction between success and its glittery trappings on one hand, and fulfillment and a sense of purpose on the other. She steered her audience toward the latter, describing her early career at a Chicago law firm to illustrate the difference. “I came in early, and I stayed late. I did everything I thought I should do with my hard-earned law degree,” she recounted. “And within six years, I had also married, given birth to my darling daughter, and divorced.” Then, Jarrett said, she reached a turning point: “One day, while I was sitting in my lovely office on the 79th floor of the Sears Tower, looking out my window at an extraordinary view of Lake Michigan, I began to cry.” Realizing that she had been pursuing what she thought she should do, “not what gave me fulfillment or purpose,” Jarrett struck out in a different direction that would take her into government, notably as deputy chief of staff to Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and business, as president and CEO of the Habitat Company, a private residential property manager in Chicago. “You must care deeply about what you do, or you will not have the endurance to sustain your effort or achieve your goals—and you will certainly not be able to lead by instilling passion in others,” she said. Jarrett also told the newly minted grads that while her career veered from the practice of law, having a law degree gave her “the confidence to know that…I had a safety net.”

The buoyant ceremonies were tempered by the terrible loss of two members of the graduating class who were honored during the ceremonies. Lucas Johnson died on April 30 after a valiant battle with cancer; Mattei Radu passed away on May 7 due to complications from asthma and a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Their classmates dedicated the Class of 2010 Graduation Gift to them. Totaling more than $100,000, it was presented by Sabrina Ursaner ’10 and Aleksandra Krawcewicz (LL.M. ’10). In addition, Johnson, who had completed five semesters, was declared an honorary member of the Class of 2010. Luc Radu accepted an LL.M. degree on his brother’s behalf.

Before the graduates filed out, Dean Richard Revesz encouraged them to maintain their connections and rely on one another as they join a global community of 40,000 NYU School of Law alumni: “Know that the door is always open back at Washington Square.”

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Even before college, Romero was interested in immigrant rights and community building. At the University of California, Berkeley, Romero found a language for his passion to correct injustice. He also encountered the cause that would come to define much of his life: holding multinational corporations accountable for human rights abuses of their workers and others.

Initially becoming involved with SINALTRAINAL, Colombia’s largest food and beverage industry union, because of U.S. military intervention in Colombia, Romero soon joined a campaign against Coca-Cola, helping organize campus boycotts across the United States to pressure the company to address allegations of abuse of union organizers in Coca-Cola facilities in Colombia. (In a statement on its website, Coca-Cola defended its reputation and said that, “for as long as we have been in Colombia, the Company and the independent franchise bottling partners have made efforts to protect the Coca-Cola workforces.”)

“Camilo is strikingly passionate about social justice as well as having a vigorous understanding of the social world,” says Professor Samuel Lucas, who taught Romero at Berkeley. “Those two things provide an unbeatable combination when seasoned by his obvious insight, intellectual capabilities, and empathy for disadvantaged groups and individuals.”

The Coca-Cola work brought Romero to New York, where in 2005 he helped win a ban of Coca-Cola products at NYU. He was in the city, too, in February 2009, when the University allowed Coke back on campus. The next day, Romero received an acceptance letter and full scholarship from NYU Law. It was a crisis-of-conscience moment.

“Despite feeling conflicted,” he recalls, “it also was motivating to think I could use the opportunity to help attain my goals.” His decision to pursue a J.D. had stemmed largely from litigation against Coca-Cola—he’d seen that activism alone was insufficient. Romero chose NYU for its public service emphasis: “Law school is a tool of access, so no matter what cause you’re fighting for, a degree from a school as elite as NYU is leverage.”

Now an organizer and member of the legal team for SINALTRAINAL, Romero attained more leverage this spring with his Soros Fellowship, which provides tuition assistance to immigrants or children of immigrants. More important, Romero says, the accolade validates his work of the past seven years: “This award is not for me, but for those who will come after me.”

Romero actively seeks mentors, even those he hasn’t been taught by, such as Professor of Clinical Law Anthony Thompson, an expert in utilizing advocacy to shape public policy. “There are two things about Camilo that are very unique in first-year law students,” says Thompson. “One, he comes into the study of law with an acute appreciation for the role of organizing and activism, in addition to litigation, as ways to better the plight of the less fortunate. Two, he’s had some experiences outside the country, and he comes with a very broad perspective of what it means to be involved in social justice and human rights issues.”

Romero values leadership development, and wants to ensure a path for others. “There’s a victory in this struggle,” says Romero of his activism. “By the time we die the world will still suffer from inequalities, but if we can make it better, then we’ve done our part.”

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One of the keys to the Forum’s success was stipulating that it would be the only event that could be programmed during the Wednesday lunchtime slot. “People are often fragmented into their individual groups,” says Friedman, who organized the series and often moderated the sessions. “The idea was that students might enjoy having one activity that they all could attend.” Indeed, he’s heard the buzz in the halls from students discussing forums even the next day.

To earn this high level of interest and enthusiasm from the student body, Friedman, aided by assistant Sara Lewin, invited students to contribute conceptual ideas. The result is a mix, over 22 sessions, of both evergreen topics—the best approach to acing exams or choosing note topics, for example—and subjects “ripped from the headlines,” à la an episode of Law & Order. “If something’s happening in the world, it’s great to be able to organize a Forum on it,” Friedman says. Most forums pair outside experts with Law School faculty—a good way, he adds, to showcase faculty scholarship. “Some people like to see high-profile individuals,” he says. “I certainly learned that if you ask people, they do come.”

Indeed, one of the most anticipated forums of the academic year was the first one, a debate on health-care reform between Judy Feder of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, whose ideas on financing reform have been noted by President Obama, and Richard Epstein, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, a noted libertarian. Their sparring produced memorable lines such as Feder’s, “It’s time to stop scaring people into thinking that they’re going to be worse off with health reform,” and Epstein’s, “What you’re watching here is a grotesque concatenation of every bad left-wing liberal policy in the last 40 years, and the time has come to stop it.”

A forecast of the Supreme Court’s most recent term featured probing insight from guests such as Paul Clement, former U.S. solicitor general and Law School adjunct faculty member; Professor Rachel Barkow; and Jeffrey Toobin, author of the bestseller The Nine. “I don’t say out of criticism that the Court is a deeply ideological body,” Toobin said. “I don’t think there is any other way to decide these cases except ideologically. I just wish they’d be honest about it.”

His words would resonate months later, when a major player discussed Citizens United, one of the cases eagerly anticipated by that Supreme Court panel. Legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who successfully argued in support of Citizens United for the rights of corporations and unions to speak publicly about politics and elections, said, “The fact that four members of the Supreme Court were prepared to sign on to the notion that this speech was not protected by the First Amendment is…very troubling indeed.”

The impressive roster of speakers continued throughout the year. Wall Street’s foe, former New York governor and attorney general Eliot Spitzer, was surprisingly measured on the question of how financial institutions should be regulated in the aftermath of the crisis: “This isn’t about good people and bad people. This is about ideology gone awry, government failure, private sector failure…. Angry populism is not any better a guide to policy than libertarianism masquerading as capitalism.”

For a behind-the-scenes peek at agency regulation in the current administration, longtime Washington insiders C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and Sally Katzen, administrator of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Clinton administration, joined regulatory policy expert Dean Richard Revesz. Vividly describing the stark contrast between the George W. Bush and Obama views of regulation and policymaking, Katzen spoke of long-suffering employees weeping and embracing members of Obama’s agency review team during the transition.

The Gray and Katzen session had particular appeal for Daniel Nudelman ’12, who had recently covered the topic in his Administrative and Regulatory State class. “We had just studied two executive orders,” he says, “and then we got to see the two people that wrote them. It was pretty awesome.”

Helena Haywoode ’12, concurs: “One thing that the Forum does is allow students to explore current legal topics that there isn’t time to cover in class,” she says, “and it simultaneously exposes us to the leading thinkers in those topics—leading actors, even. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”

That kind of student enthusiasm has gratified Friedman. “It became apparent immediately that there was a real student interest in this sort of thing,” he says. “We wanted a place where students could participate, to feel a part of it. The goal has always been both to educate and to provoke.”

But not to provoke too much, he adds. “Disagreement’s fun, but we often learn the most when people from different viewpoints manage to agree,” says Friedman. “One really nice thing about the Forum is that it’s an extremely civil conversation. Whatever my or anyone else’s hopes were, we far exceeded them.”

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