The chief justice invoked the value of interacting with students from a multiplicity of countries. “You must be aware that there are still great differences in societies in the East and the West, how they are politically organized, how their peoples behave, what their cultural values are, what their religious beliefs are,” said Chan. “Some of these differences may not be bridgeable, however hard those who want to convert the world to their own values may try. My hope is that [you] will bring that experience to bear when you are in a position to become ambassadors of your home countries in dealing with the rest of the world.”

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Kenji Yoshino, Chief Just ice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, introduced the justice to the enthusiastic crowd as �a self-described and proud Nuyorican� and �an early and awesome achiever.� Sotomayor, however, said in her address, �Nothing in my childhood hinted to me that I would be in a position someday to stand on this field and speak to such a large crowd.�

Continuing in this personal vein, Sotomayor reflected on the simultaneous feelings she was experiencing�humility, excitement, challenge, gratitude, and engagement�and drew parallels between her own life and the lives of those graduating. She also spoke of her deep affection for New York City. �Having been a part of the fabric of this city, you will always carry its energy inside you,� she said. �And the city will challenge you to do big things, to accomplish as much as you can, to work at bettering the world in every way you know how.�

Sotomayor urged graduates to embrace challenge and the attendant fear: �Being a little frightened, as I have been taking every step in my life, including becoming a Supreme Court justice, is natural and unavoidable. But being hopeful and remaining open to the joy of a new experience can counterbalance that anxiety and help you meet each new challenge.�

Her ultimate message was of service to others: �Neither your life nor the world you live in just happens. You control the quality of your lives and your communities. It is only in giving to others that you can find meaning and satisfaction in what you do.�

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Class Gift committee co-chairs Gerardo Gomez Galvis ’12, Elana Wilf ’12 (both pictured above), and Catherine Karayan (LL.M. ’12) presented a $125,000 check to Board of Trustees Chair Anthony Welters ’77. They recruited a record 36 new alumni to become Weinfeld Fellows. As junior members of NYU Law’s most prestigious giving society, Weinfeld Fellows are alumni who have graduated in the past decade and contribute $1,000 or more to the Law School annually.

“It’s a testament to the class and to the school that so many people wanted to join,” said Wilf. “It is a lot of money, especially given the economy, but it really shows our support of NYU.”

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The first therapy dog program at NYU School of Law came about through the efforts of Scot Goins ’12 and Lance Polivy ’13, the outgoing and incoming presidents of the Student Bar Association. “I’ve desperately missed having a dog since I moved to New York City, and during stressful times I sometimes travel to local pet stores or dog parks,” says Goins. He imagined that other students who had left their pets at home might feel the same way.

Inspired by learning of a therapy dog that visited the Yale Law campus during the fall, Goins and Polivy worked closely with the administration to organize four therapy dog sessions during exam period through the Good Dog Foundation. “As soon as we began publicizing it, there was just this tremendous response from students,” Polivy says.

Michael Stromquist ’14, who misses his family’s three dogs in Tampa, can attest to the puppy effect. Although he was harried and preoccupied by exams, he made a detour to stop and play with the therapy dogs for 15 minutes. Says Stromquist: “It made my day about a million times better.”

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Representing the federal government, Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, bristled. “I just don’t accept the fact that we haven’t done anything,” he said, pointing to myriad recent insider trading convictions and Ponzi scheme busts. As for the big banks, Breuer expressed sympathy with the idea that Wall Street has not been held accountable but said that bringing criminal cases was challenging, as the government must prove every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. “Viscerally, I understand people want to see Wall Street executives being ushered out in handcuffs,” he said. “While I understand the desire, that’s not enough.”

Wall Street crusader Eliot Spitzer, former New York governor, gave a glimpse of the ferocity that got him elected by continuing the pressure on Breuer. “There was significant deception and fraud that should be prosecuted,” he said. “Corporations are not held accountable. Wall Street persuaded us that they could regulate themselves. Self-regulation is complete hokum.”

Barofsky mentioned the new financial fraud task force announced in President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address. He questioned whether the new initiative would amount to anything.

Predictably, Breuer defended it as worthwhile and dropped respected names such as current New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Just as predictably, Spitzer, former New York AG, dismissed it. The wild card was Mary Jo White, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and now a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton. She criticized the task force, but because it would make Wall Street firms, now her clients, targets: “It gets back to my frenzy concern. You don’t want that kind of pressure in the system. You don’t want the search for scalps to be the metric for success. Politics doesn’t belong in this space at all.”

Breuer’s exasperated response: “On the one hand, we haven’t done enough; on the other, task forces are too aggressive.” There were no winners here.

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Last spring, Kerr won a 2012 Trudeau Foundation Scholarship, the most prestigious doctoral award in Canada, which will fund $60,000 per year for three years of scholarship. In her doctoral research, Kerr is rethinking current approaches to incarceration and justice, focusing on how much control courts and legislatures actually exert over post-conviction punishment. “What I ask is, How does the legal system imagine the prison; what does the judge consigning an individual to prison expect in terms of the actual administration of the sanction? And what legal concepts and techniques work to control the actual quality of the sanction?” Kerr says.

The field of sentencing and punishment theory asks when punishment is justified, but the actual nature and features of imprisonment remain largely unexamined. “In those exchanges, few theorists debate what kinds or modes of imprisonment are legitimate,” she says. “They use a notion of ‘hard treatment’ as a placeholder concept; they tend not to unpack and define. But if you want to ask if something is legitimate, you need to know what that something is or ever could be. To ask about the legitimacy of imprisonment, we must ask about the capacity and limitations of actual prison systems.”

Kerr’s doctoral research proposal grew out of her experience as a staff lawyer at Prisoners’ Legal Services in Vancouver, where she pursued human rights litigation on behalf of prisoners such as transgender inmates with medical needs, aboriginal people who wanted to practice their spirituality, and mentally ill inmates whose illness-driven behavior led to frequent disciplinary sanctions. After graduating from the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, Kerr clerked at the British Columbia Court of Appeal before practicing as a litigation associate at the firm Fasken Martineau. In addition to her other activities, Kerr is working with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association on constitutional litigation related to the use of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons and with Pivot Legal Society to decriminalize sex work; a case on the latter issue is currently pending before the Supreme Court of Canada. She is also a doctoral fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

While earning her LL.M. at NYU Law, Kerr worked as a research assistant to David Garland, Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law, on Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, his prize-winning book. “Lisa Kerr is an outstanding young academic whose talents, experience, and research project make her perfectly suited to be a Trudeau Scholar,” says Garland, who is also Kerr’s doctoral supervisor. “The subject of her dissertation—the legal regulation of life inside prisons—is now an urgent problem, given the growth in prison populations and the deteriorating conditions of confinement in a post-rehabilitative era. Lisa is on her way to producing a dissertation of the first importance that will bridge the gap between the academic and the practitioner worlds and open up the possibility of serious reform in this important area.”

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In 2011, IRC students Wonjun Lee ’12, Julie Mao ’11, Saerom Park ’12, Nikki Reisch ’12, Martha Saunders ’12, and Nancy Steffan ’11 asked the Justice Department to turn over a group of e-mails that discussed the government’s purported policy and practice of returning deportees. This spring Park and Saunders faced off against U.S. attorneys representing the Department of Homeland Security, withstanding rapid-fire questioning by Judge Jed Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The students prevailed; the judge ordered the Justice Department to disclose the bulk of the e-mails.

In April, the consequences of this ruling played out in the upper echelons of federal government. The Office of the Solicitor General said it would “clarify and correct” a 2009 statement to the Supreme Court in which it erroneously implied that the government already had procedures in place to ensure the return of deportees who win their immigration appeals. And the Justice Department announced it would implement new procedures to ensure that such deportees can return to the U.S.

The developments were a reminder of the importance of this type of work, something the judge pointed out on the bench. “It was really interesting to hear Judge Rakoff talking about how our case had made a difference in ways that he himself found surprising,” says Morawetz.

Reisch, who presented arguments with Lee in front of Judge Rakoff in May to request the release of additional documents related to deportation procedures, says the collaboration among the students working on the case this year—Lee, Saunders, Park, and Reisch—was critical to the success of their FOIA request. Supervised by Morawetz, they worked together over several months to fine-tune every aspect of their arguments, challenge one another with different lines of questions, and edit practically every line of their written briefs.

That’s how Reisch was able to deliver a strong rebuttal in Judge Rakoff’s courtroom this May. “Wonjun and I had both mooted each other, so we were prepared,” she says. The graduate, who is clerking for Judge Marsha Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this year, says she discovered her passion for oral advocacy through working on cases with the IRC. On another case, Reisch had the opportunity to argue at the Third Circuit—an experience she calls both exciting and intimidating.

“If you’re on the side of justice,” says Reisch, “there are ways to make that come through in the stories you tell and the way you go about your litigation.” In other words: Fight with passion.

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The case, prepared by Moot Court Board members Jerilyn Laskie ’13 and Nicole Geoglis ’13, centered on the child pornography conviction of one Ezra Fitts and presented two issues for the moot Supreme Court to review. Zachary Briers ’12 and David Hodges ’12 squared off on the first, involving the sufficiency of probable cause for the search that led to Fitts’s arrest. Thomas Bennett ’12 and Paul Brachman ’13 debated the second: whether a court could properly order Fitts, who was convicted solely of possession of child pornography, to pay restitution to the victim depicted in those materials.

As is common in the actual Supreme Court, each of those arguing received tough questions from the justices. At one point, Sotomayor asked Briers whether he rejected the Eighth Circuit’s position on an issue relating to search warrants, and Sutton then pressed Briers on the matter. “Do you concede the Eighth Circuit’s wrong?” Sutton asked. “No skin off your nose,” Sutton joked after Briers offered a hesitant yes. “I had to think about who is on which circuit here,” Briers responded, causing the room to erupt in laughter.

Sotomayor posed a thorny issue to Brachman on restitution: “Why should this one defendant who happens to get caught pay the price for the person who made the film and every other person who the victim is suffering about? Why should this one individual bear the brunt of the entire cost?”

“Because it’s so difficult to determine with exactitude how each possessor causes harm to victims like John Doe,” said Brachman, “it makes a great deal of sense both as a matter of law and as a matter of policy to impose the burden for remedying the harm on the individuals who caused the harm rather than on the victims.” Later, he added, “The petitioner’s argument boils down to this: It’s okay to rub salt in a wound because I didn’t inflict the first cut, and because so many people have rubbed salt in the wound we can’t tell which grain of salt caused the injury. That interpretation is perverse and contrary to the purposes for which the statute was enacted.”

The justices named Brachman (right) as Best Oralist. “We pick one person,” said Sotomayor, “but there really shouldn’t be any losers because each of you has done an extraordinary job.”

Lohier was likewise impressed: “I think it’s fair to say that, based on what I saw this evening, you’d do exceptionally well before the Second Circuit. I think that the most important thing, besides candor—never forget candor in your responses—is to listen to the question and to answer the question. All four of you were able to do that in a very professional way.” Lohier is currently (and Sotomayor was formerly) an adjunct faculty member at NYU Law.

“Why do I bother doing a moot court, adding another case to my docket?” Sotomayor asked as the event drew to a close. “I do it because after I engage in an exercise like this by students, I’m inspired. I’m inspired because I know that those who are following in the job I love so much—lawyering—are being trained so well that you give me hope, both about the profession and about the future of the profession and my job.”

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