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Investment bankers and lawyers do a lot of work together, but they don’t really mix, do they?

Exactly. Many fresh young MBAs have never worked with a lawyer before. There’s no reason we should be keeping law and business students apart during their education. We should be getting them to learn how to work with one another before they start their jobs. That’s what we try to do in the Jacobson program.

Or, failing that, there’s still a benefit from doing so mid-career. Is that the point of the Institute for Executive Education?

Many business schools have non-degree executive education. But no law school has really attacked that market in a systematic way. With the navigation of regulation and legal frameworks becoming more and more a part of a senior manager’s job, we said to ourselves, “Why couldn’t a law school, using its knowledge and its very special set of skills, create executive education for those people?”

Is there an argument to be made that a smart law school graduate with a taste and feel for deal-making would make a better banker than most MBAs?

Over the last few years, the smart professional service firms have figured out how to better recruit at law schools. Not surprisingly, McKinsey figured it out first, then Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. There’s nothing wrong with working at a law firm, but these students are equipped to do anything in the world, having gone through the rigorous education we provide them. For example, both the general counsel of McKinsey and the chief of staff to Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman are NYU Law graduates.

Should business schools bear any responsibility for the financial crisis? Or law schools? Have we been teaching our students the wrong things?

In the 1980s and 1990s, the academic side of business seemed to have completely bought into the shareholder-centric model of the corporation espoused by many academics. We began teaching people that only value creation mattered. It all comes down to how you feel about the purpose of the corporation. Is it only to make money for shareholders? What about professional responsibilities? Then we ended up with Enron and WorldCom, and we realized that we were teaching people to be profit-seekers at the cost of everything else.

In a recent paper you co-authored about the causes of the financial crisis, you suggested a compelling reform: Shine a brighter light on complex financial structures by requiring greater disclosure, including discussions from management as to why they were used. Isn’t that heresy from a banker, to suggest reducing complexity?

When somebody tells me about a new financial product or structure and justifies it by saying that it aids liquidity and price discovery in the market, I say run the other way. Because if there’s nothing to justify it other than someone being able to scrape a few extra pennies off of a transaction in the name of liquidity, it doesn’t provide enough value to justify the added complexity. Without wading too far into what is a controversial debate, I’d suggest that there is questionable value added to the markets as a result of high-frequency trading.

Can you provide an example of a deal where lawyers and bankers worked together creatively to accomplish something?

Back in the ’80s, when I was at Salomon Brothers, we were representing General Motors as they were trying to acquire Ross Perot’s EDS. During the negotiations Perot and Roger Smith, GM’s CEO, came to us and said, “Ross wants to have some kind of public market security that will reflect the value of EDS.” At first, we said it would be impossible, because Roger wanted all of EDS. But then the bankers and lawyers got together and ended up inventing what came to be known as the tracking stock. The concept got invented to solve a particular business problem, with the intimate cooperation of lawyers and bankers, because the deal wasn’t going to happen without it.

This Q&A was edited and condensed.

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The EQ movement hit its stride after psychologist Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Over time, an emphasis on honing skills to better understand, empathize, and negotiate with other people permeated the workplace. Research now supports the career-affirming power of EQ: meta studies such as one in the peer-reviewed Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2011 have found a significant positive correlation between EQ and job performance.

The increased awareness of EQ as a predictor of success did not escape NYU Law’s board of trustees, which formed a strategy committee to address how to shape legal education in the 21st century. An October 2012 report from the committee, headed by Cravath, Swaine & Moore chairman Evan Chesler ’75, called for training in leadership and collaboration, skills captured by EQ.

“EQ sets leaders apart from the rest,” says board chairman Anthony Welters ’77, the just-retired executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group. “Smart people are not too difficult to find. But people with a combination of IQ plus EQ are rare and valuable.”

Seeing an opportunity to help prepare its students to become leaders, NYU Law recently rolled out an EQ training program to the entire student population. Part of a broader leadership development initiative at the Law School that includes a speakers series, seminars, and a peer leadership program, the series of EQ workshops is led by Vice Dean Jeannie Forrest, who has a PhD in applied psychology.

In the workshop’s introductory segment, Forrest lists three “buckets” necessary to be a good lawyer: knowing your stuff, getting stuff done, and exhibiting emotional intelligence. While many professionals shine in the first two areas, the third can sometimes be a challenge, she explains. In the argot of the workshops, EQ is comprised of four distinct elements: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

But boiling it down to its essence, Forrest tells students, EQ is really about interpersonal acuity. “The one with the high EQ?” she asks. “That’s the well-rounded problem-solver who can lead with confidence.” And, she adds, all other things being equal, that person excels.

Justin Sommerkamp ’15, who was part of the pilot EQ program last spring, used his EQ training to gauge how he was doing as a summer associate at a top law firm. “Every office conversation involves nonverbal communication that can be absolutely vital to performing well,” he says. “Reading the body language and nonverbal communications of the attorneys allowed me to adjust my behavior and work without needing a constant performance review conversation.” Sommerkamp says that when his work drafts were being reviewed, he paid attention to the assigning attorney’s adjustments in posture and changing facial expressions, as well as his level of focus. Sommerkamp returned to the firm this summer for a second year.

Danielle Arbogast ’15 also participated in the workshops, where she learned how to initiate interactions more effectively.

“The beauty and the strength of the strategies explored in these workshops is that they are easy to practice, yet have a tremendous impact,” she says. Simply making a habit of greeting people by name in large-scale social situations, for example, has helped Arbogast generate a more immediate connection with new people and overcome her tendency to withdraw in group interactions.

On the job, says Arbogast, the lessons have been equally beneficial. “I’ve worked in two public defense offices since I began law school,” she says, “and I simply cannot overstate the importance of being able to accurately read and effectively respond to emotions—both the client’s and my own. When a client’s liberty—and often employment, housing, custody of their children, or immigration status—is at stake, emotions are often running high. Learning to recognize and respond to those emotions allows you to use them to improve communication and potentially reach a better outcome for your client.”

Forrest points out that there are 40 million Google hits for “define leadership,” but little agreement on the definition of leadership. With a deeper knowledge of how to foster successful working relationships, however, NYU Law students have the tools to define leadership for themselves.

“The Law School isn’t just interested in creating great lawyers,” says Forrest. “We’re creating lawyers who are going to be leaders in their lives. Every single one of our students has leadership potential.” The EQ workshops are a way to unlock that potential, she adds. “If they are aware of who they are and what they’re bringing to the table and how they interact with other people, then they will be leaders.”

—Senior Writer Atticus Gannaway is the author of a young adult novel.

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With the assistance of Beth Heifetz ’83, a partner in the Washington, DC, office of Jones Day, Gillette approached Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager for Detroit, in the spring of 2013 with a proposal for a project to consider which forms of municipal governance best ensure fiscal stability. The ensuing assignment sought answers to two questions: Given what other distressed cities had done, which short-term governance structures might be appropriate after the emergency period ends? And what long-term structures could ensure fiscal health?

Gillette was the ideal candidate to spearhead the undertaking. Long a leading expert on local government law and financially distressed municipalities, he has authored books on municipal governance and municipal debt finance, and he has written about relations between localities and their neighbors and the privatization of municipal services. In his 2011 book Local Redistribution and Local Democracy: Interest Groups and the Courts, Gillette examined ways in which local governments engage in substantial redistribution to both the wealthy and the poor, through tax incentives for development and “living wage” ordinances, for example. The book also discussed the role of the courts in reviewing local redistributive programs.

Gillette invited seven students to work with him on the extracurricular project: Daniel Barron ’14, Hampton Foushée ’14, Zachary Kolodin ’14, David Leapheart ’14, Joshua Lobert ’15, Andrew Walker ’15, and Amy Wolfe ’15. “This was an incredibly diligent and creative group,” Gillette says. “The time they spent on this project was the equivalent of an additional course in their schedule. They had to learn areas of the law to which they had no previous exposure and think outside the box about how to reform municipal institutions that had failed to provide basic local goods and services.”

Meeting once a week or more for about three months, the Detroit team operated as a “mini law firm,” in Gillette’s words, with the Office of the Emergency Manager as its sole client. Supervised by Gillette, students deliberated big questions as a group, divvied up research for specific issues, and collaborated on drafting memos. The focus of their inquiries ranged widely. One evening they would investigate the benefits of a “strong mayor” system, while the next they would discuss the appropriate role of a financial control board. In the process, they considered municipal debt, tax structure, relations with the state, relations with suburban areas, labor, and internal governance structure.

The Detroit project, says Gillette, offered “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for law students to be involved in institutional design and to have the experience of seeing how a municipality both works and could work.”

“We were doing a lot more than just law,” says Wolfe. “We were problem solving. Here’s a city. This is the condition it’s in. Now how do we make it better? Professor Gillette was asking open-ended questions that I didn’t have answers to, and it made me rise to the occasion. I was given the opportunity to learn and give my opinion.”

The interdisciplinary nature of the assignment gave students the opportunity to think more broadly than they would have if they were simply reading casebooks and statutes for a class. Members of the group interviewed officials and business leaders from Detroit and other jurisdictions that had confronted financial distress. They then discussed their findings and recommendations. Wolfe recalls at one point making a big chart of all the positions in the city government to try to untangle the powers of appointment and removal.

“It was incredibly refreshing to see the ideas we’d vocalized as students actually make it to the finish line, and it’s encouraging to know you can do anything with this degree,” says Leapheart, who grew up in Michigan with grandfathers who were United Automobile Workers members.

“We think we had substantial input into the conversations that are continuing about post-bankruptcy Detroit,” concludes Gillette. “But regardless of what happens with our proposals, this was a remarkable opportunity and a great learning experience for the students.”

Following the success of the Detroit project, Gillette has created an interdisciplinary seminar, Law and Economics of Municipal Governance, that he will co-teach in Spring 2015 with adjunct professor Robert Inman, an expert in urban fiscal policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

—Michelle Tsai is the public affairs officer for NYU Law.

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Long before the boom of new regulation began, NYU Law assembled a uniquely deep bench of scholars and practitioners of compliance and enforcement who are unleashing new work of their own that will influence the next generation of lawyers: new courses, new publications, new scholarly forums, and new research opportunities. First and foremost, they are preparing students for careers in an area that is both booming in terms of jobs and coming into its own as a distinct and rigorous legal specialty. “Over the last 10 years, compliance has become a profession within the legal profession,” says Bruce Yannett ’85, a white-collar litigator at Debevoise & Plimpton. “It is now a career path.”

A LOGICAL REACTION

Several laws enacted or significantly amended in the wake of the big corporate scandals of the early 2000s (Enron, Tyco, etc.) and the credit market collapse of 2008 have put corporate conduct squarely on the radar of federal prosecutors. A possible violation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA)—to name two—can mean an expensive investigation followed by litigation, big settlements, and fines, or even jail time for managers. It used to be that most corporate criminal actions involved small, privately held companies and produced average fines of around $50,000.

Now, however, US attorneys are making headline-grabbing cases against large public companies. The amounts involved can be enormous.

Since 2011, Wal-Mart, for instance, has been under investigation by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible violations of the FCPA. The company says it has been cooperating with both US and Mexican investigators looking into allegations that it paid off officials south of the border. Earlier this year, Wal-Mart announced that it was anticipating spending up to $240 million in its fiscal year 2015 on the investigations. Similarly, cosmetics retailer Avon has spent more than $300 million since 2008 on investigations by US authorities into charges that it bribed Chinese officials.

Meanwhile, recent settlements in corporate criminal and civil enforcement actions have been even greater. Last November, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson paid $2.2 billion to resolve criminal and civil liability actions by the US government for marketing several prescription drugs for uses not approved by the FDA. And in August, news outlets reported that Bank of America agreed to the largest-ever civil settlement between a corporation and the US government: more than $16 billion to resolve allegations that the bank’s Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch units knowingly sold faulty mortgage-backed securities.

Corporate enforcement matters like these involve not only big money but also a high degree of complexity. Typically, multiple state, federal, and private parties are involved, and dealing with all of them can require large legal teams well versed in different varieties of criminal and regulatory law. The trend toward ever larger and more complex cases shows no sign of abating. That means more work—and more jobs—for lawyers.

[SIDEBAR: The New Legal Trinity]

CORPORATE LAW IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST

NYU Law is a particularly intense center of activity for compliance law and enforcement and related areas. At the heart of this activity are Jennifer Arlen ’86, Norma Z. Paige Professor of Law, and Geoffrey Miller, Stuyvesant P. Comfort Professor of Law. The two have joined forces before. Several years ago, with scholars from the Cornell and University of Texas law schools, they founded the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, which aimed to give legal theory a more scientific basis through data and analysis. Now they have teamed up as faculty codirectors of the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement, launched in spring 2014.

The program has a few purposes. The first is to provide intensive training to students who are planning to make careers in compliance or enforcement. The second is to promote research and policy reform. In April, for instance, the program co-sponsored with the American Law Institute an invitation-only conference called “Deterring Corporate Crime: Effective Principles for Corporate Enforcement.” It attracted star enforcement officials, defense lawyers, and academics, such as Preet Bharara, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Benjamin Lawsky, New York State’s superintendent of financial services, who both gave keynote speeches; former SEC director of enforcement Robert Khuzami; and white-collar investigator Jules Kroll.

Arlen, who is frequently quoted by the press on corporate crime, has published extensively on the subject. A particular focus of her work is the question of how criminal responsibility should be allocated between the corporation and the individuals who committed the crime. Arlen argues that corporate officers who break the law do so ultimately for their own benefit, not the corporation’s. She teaches a four-credit Business Crime course and a seminar entitled Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing.

Her intense intellectual passion for corporate criminal enforcement policy comes from a belief that compliance is the place where the sometimes conflicting demands of business and the public meet head-on and where the law attempts to reconcile them. “This is corporate law in the public interest, and that’s what I love about it,” she says. “It can have social utility whether you are prosecuting crimes or defending a corporation.” She is also happy to point out that “none of my students are having trouble finding jobs.”

Miller looks at compliance from a slightly different perspective: the management of corporate risk. Miller teaches Compliance and Risk Management for Attorneys and another course called Professional Responsibility and the Regulation of Lawyers. He is also the author of the casebook The Law of Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (2014), the first explicitly linking the three subjects.

Miller says corporate compliance officers used to be kept far away from important decision-making. Now most report to corporate boards and are charged with making sure corporations are aware of and in compliance with a huge body of changing laws—laws that now have real teeth.

He sees compliance as an important risk-management function that should figure into almost any significant corporate decision. Would, for example, the benefits of a merger outweigh the costs of absorbing the target company’s potential compliance problems? Key information for making that call has to come from a senior compliance officer who has the respect of other top executives. Says Miller: “You need to be able to sit at the table and have your voice heard.”

The Law School faculty members with expertise in compliance and corporate enforcement range from Beller Family Professor of Business Law Kevin Davis, who teaches a course on the FCPA and money laundering, to Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy Rachel Barkow, who joined the US Sentencing Commission last summer and is faculty director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law. In 2011, NYU Press published the center’s Prosecutors in the Boardroom: Using Criminal Law to Regulate Corporate Conduct, a collection of papers by scholars who attended the center’s first major annual conference, “Regulation by Prosecutors.”

Harry First, Charles L. Denison Professor of Law and a former chief of the New York State attorney general’s Antitrust Bureau, wrote one of the first business crime casebooks, Business Crime: Cases and Materials, originally published in 1990. Marcel Kahan, George T. Lowy Professor of Law, and Stephen Choi, Murray and Kathleen Bring Professor of Law as well as director of the Pollack Center for Law and Business, are among the most prominent scholars in corporate law and, especially, securities fraud. Indeed, they are the two most recognized scholars in the 20-year history of the annual Corporate Practice Commentator list of the Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles. William Allen, Nusbaum Professor of Law and Business, joined the faculty in 1997 from the Delaware Court of Chancery, where he had been judge or chief judge for a dozen years. That court has primary jurisdiction for matters of corporate law and governance for the many large US companies incorporated in Delaware. In 1996, Allen wrote a decision (In re Caremark International Inc. Derivative Litigation) that virtually created the modern compliance industry, holding that boards of directors could be found liable for the misdeeds of employees if the corporation did not have in place a “reasonable system” for monitoring compliance.

Terms like “reasonable” are open to interpretation, of course. And training lawyers to make those calls is a particular goal of Helen Scott, professor of law and co-director of NYU Law’s Mitchell Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business, and Karen Brenner, executive director of law and business initiatives at NYU and an affiliated professor of law. They teach Law and Business of Corporate Governance to mixed classrooms of NYU Law and Stern students who learn together how to navigate both the legal and business sides of corporate governance. “What we’re really trying to do is have students cultivate judgment,” says Brenner. “It’s about their ability to make judgments where the law doesn’t prescribe a simple answer, or a simple answer is not sufficient to do what we perhaps think is right or best in the circumstance.”

NOT JUST ANOTHER LEGAL JOB

NYU Law grads in senior compliance jobs emphasize how much more the chief compliance officer is involved now in running the business day to day than in past decades. “This kind of job is attractive for people who want a blend of legal and operational,” says Lauren Steinfeld ’92, senior adviser for privacy and compliance at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tim Lindon ’80, for instance, is chief compliance officer and vice president for brand integrity at tobacco maker Philip Morris International (PMI). Based in Geneva, he manages a staff of 40 and reports to the audit committee of the company’s board.

Lindon says his job requires him to be a combination of legal counselor, risk manager, and organizational psychologist. The latter part, he says, comes from working constantly to stay on top of every aspect of his company’s business and to find what he calls its “stress points”—areas or situations in which individuals are most likely to succumb to temptation or poor judgment. (In general, he says, those tend to be jobs far away from corporate headquarters or those that have been occupied by one person for a long time.)

One recent responsibility was vetting companies PMI had targeted for acquisition in Indonesia and the Philippines. Business practices, laws, and customs are much different in those countries than in the United States. Lindon had to make sure that nothing the target companies had done in their previous usual course of business could turn out to be a violation of, for instance, the FCPA. That meant learning the target companies from the ground up—not only their operations but also their history and culture, which was not entirely what he had expected when moving from PMI’s general counsel office to being its chief compliance officer. “I thought this was another legal job, and that’s what surprised me,” he says.

At a January Milbank Tweed forum on compliance, “Suddenly Sexy: How Compliance Went from Ho-Hum to Hot,” panelists such as Goldman Sachs’s Buddy Donohue and Pamela Root ’80, managing director of Citigroup Global Markets, echoed that sentiment, emphasizing that compliance practitioners need to know not only the law but also the day-to-day operations of their business. The role is more hands-on than that of the traditional general counsel, stressed Root. Effective compliance officers need to know what employees are doing before it becomes a regulatory problem and to help them get back in line as necessary. That means a lot of face time with and understanding of a business’s people, not just its org chart.

Above all, the compliance officers seemed to say, this requires not just a different kind of practical training, but a difference in attitude as well. “Don’t go into compliance if you don’t want to get your hands dirty,” said Root. “You’ve got to be in the trenches.”

—Peter Carbonara is a NYC-area freelance writer whose work has appeared in Fortune, Businessweek, and The American Lawyer.

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In the Court’s opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer quoted from an amicus brief authored by Alfred B. Engelberg Professor of Law Katherine Strandburg warning against such patents. If “claims to exclusive rights over the body’s natural responses to illness and medical treatment are permitted to stand,” the brief argued, “the result will be a vast thicket of exclusive rights over the use of criti­cal scientific data that must remain widely available if physicians are to provide sound medical care.”

As technology infiltrates nearly every aspect of our lives, intel­lectual property issues are growing in importance. They are also becoming more pervasive. During their most recent term, the justices took several major patent cases—including one involving software—as well as a much-watched copyright dispute involv­ing retransmission of television broadcasts. In the not-too-distant future, jokes John M. Desmarais Professor of Intellectual Property Law Barton Beebe, the age-old Property course will largely revolve around the ownership of things like inventions and expressions rather than land and goods.

With an eye to the 21st-century economy, NYU Law has added five of the country’s most active and sought-after IP academics to its faculty during the past five years. Beebe and Strandburg joined in 2009, followed by Jeanne Fromer in 2012 and Christopher Sprigman and Jason Schultz in 2013. They all join Rochelle Dreyfuss, who has been a faculty member and IP stalwart since 1983.

“NYU Law has assembled an amazing group in IP in just a few years,” says Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law School IP professor and a founding partner of the complex civil litigation firm Durie Tangri in San Francisco. “It is arguably one of the best.”

While the six IP professors focus on different (though often overlapping) areas, one question they all explore is what best drives innovation—the primary reason for having laws that cre­ate intellectual property rights. Along with other full-time faculty members and adjunct professors, they offer nearly 30 intellectual property courses a year, including core and advanced courses in patents, copyright, and trademarks. The professors’ scholarship has had a major impact on the subject matter, including Dreyfuss’s analyses on changing patent law; Strandburg’s studies of cultural behavior to understand innovation; and Beebe’s groundbreak­ing paper examining trademark law as the new sumptuary code.

The other professors have also made early marks in the field, including Fromer’s examination of the proper audience for IP infringement and Sprigman’s book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (2012), which suggests that copying in creative areas, such as fashion, promotes rather than harms innovation. Schultz, who founded NYU Law’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic, is known for having developed a top-notch clinic at Berkeley and for generating innovative strategies for updating law and policy to serve citizens in the digital revolution.

An expert in copyright protections and their expansion, Diane Zimmerman, an award-winning former reporter for Newsweek and the New York Daily News, is now Samuel Tilden Professor of Law Emerita and continues to make significant contributions to the intellectual life of the group.

Because IP law so often overlaps with greater issues of culture and business, it also draws in faculty with non-IP specializations, such as Emily Kempin Professor of Law Amy Adler, who teaches art law and has weighed in on moral rights. Practi­tioners also teach various electives in particularly IP-heavy fields, including biotechnology, fashion, and entertainment. And, with the constant crossover between competition law and IP, including whether patent settlements that delay the release of generic drugs are illegally anti-competitive, antitrust professors Harry First, former chief of the Antitrust Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office, and Eleanor Fox ’61, an expert in global antitrust issues, also play a role in the curriculum.

All this activity adds up to what Sprigman describes as an “invigorating” academic environment where endless sparks generate ideas and an unparalleled group of colleagues helps develop them.

[SIDEBAR: A Founding Father of IP]

PATENTS

Patents protect original inventions on everything from car parts to prescription drug formulas to plastic bracelets on the arms of elementary-schoolers. Patents must be applied for and approved, and the owner of a patent has the exclusive right to use his or her invention. That means if a company wants to sell a product that would use another’s patented property, it must either pay the owner for a license or risk being sued.

Many patent law practitioners and experts, including Dreyfuss and Strandburg, have technical or scientific backgrounds in areas such as physics or engineering. So while patent litigation might have gone mainstream, courts continue to struggle with the theoretical question of which inven­tions are and aren’t eligible for patent protection—and should and shouldn’t be. Both professors’ work delves into the issue of patentability, using empirical research to develop theories on the broad question of what levels of protection will lead to the most innovation.

When Dreyfuss, Pauline Newman Professor of Law, first joined NYU Law, she had planned to focus on civil procedure. But when longtime NYU professor and renowned copyright expert Alan Latman became ill, she was asked to teach a patent law course as well. Latman helped Dreyfuss get up to speed and even to develop her first research paper on patents. Over the course of her more-than-30-year career in academia, Dreyfuss has produced a vast array of scholarship that has made her sought-after by governments from Russia to China seeking to improve their own patent systems.

Dreyfuss also has a reputation for practical scholarship on domestic patent law issues. “Her work is very appreciated not only by intellectual property scholars but also by judges, which is unfortunately rare in the legal academy,” says Jane Ginsburg, a Columbia Law School IP professor and a frequent collaborator with Dreyfuss. Ginsburg also cited Dreyfuss’s deep knowledge of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

About the time she began focusing on IP, Dreyfuss says, patent law “happened to get hot” following the 1982 founding of the Federal Circuit, unique among the appeals courts in that it has sole jurisdiction over most patent appeals and was created to allow the development of unified patent law.

When the Federal Circuit celebrated its five-year anniversary, Dreyfuss was asked to write a paper evaluating the court on its then-short history. She has repeated that analysis on several anniversaries since and jokingly advises her students to be careful what they write about, lest they be doing it for 30 years.

These days, Dreyfuss, who has a master’s degree in chemistry and worked as a research chemist at the company that is now Novartis before becoming a lawyer, is particularly interested in patent law as it relates to life sciences and pharmaceuticals.

Cases in that arena, addressing questions such as whether human genes can be patented and whether drug patent owners can strike deals with generic drugmakers to maintain market exclusivity, have been subjects of focus at the nation’s highest court. “The Supreme Court has weighed in pretty heavily on this question of whether patents impede rather than promote the progress of science,” says Dreyfuss. “They’ve been looking for ways to make sure the fundamental principles of science stay in the public domain and to allow patenting only of applications.”

Dreyfuss has continually advocated for a patent system that allows progress in scientific research without taking away developers’ incentives to innovate. She served on an advisory committee for the secretary of health and human services on genetics, health, and society, which issued a report on how gene patents and licensing practices affect patients’ access to genetic testing. Dreyfuss argues that enterprises that offer gene-based testing should receive protections from patent infringement claims and that those conducting research on genes should be granted exemptions from infringement. Such exemptions remain a hot topic in the patent world.

Strandburg, who has a PhD in physics, seeks answers to the more theoretical questions of IP law in an effort to understand how the patent system could best work to promote scientific and technological progress. In recent years, she has conducted research studies of what she calls “knowledge commons,” broadly defined as any group that collaboratively shares knowledge or information with the purpose of creating and innovating. Strandburg and her fellow researchers, including standout student Can Cui ’12, now an associate in the Hong Kong office of Morrison & Foerster, have looked at groups ranging from news gatherers to surgeons to roller derby teams. Strandburg’s book Governing Knowledge Com­mons (2014), co-authored with Brett Frischmann of Cardozo Law School and Michael Madison of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, examines how each of those groups innovate and whether they do so without seeking or being able to seek formal patent protection.

For instance, in an evaluation of doctors who, under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health, are researching rare diseases that affect children, Strandburg and her collaborators discovered that the researchers worked together and shared data with apparently little concern about which of them could patent what. Pat­ents may be of increasing concern later, Strandburg says, as the research teams interact with pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments based on their research.

In other research, Strandburg addresses how much patent protection is necessary to spur innovation. Though Strandburg says more research is necessary to reach any final conclu­sions, empirical research she and others have done leads her to believe that the question of what is patentable should depend not only on the details of the particular invention but also on whether there is a community that will innovate regardless of whether patents are available. In other words, where patent pro­tection is unnecessary to spur innovation, perhaps the law should take that into account and consider limiting the availability of patent protection for those areas.

COPYRIGHT

Unlike a patent, which must be applied for, anyone who writes an original song or creates a new painting is eligible for copyright protection. Whether a photograph that incorporates part of anoth­er’s painting is “transformative” enough not to violate the earlier work’s copyright, or whether a website’s use of a news organiza­tion’s reporting or imagery is “fair use” are common questions being hammered out in court.

Addressing themes similar to those explored by Dreyfuss and Strandburg, Fromer and Sprigman have identified the broader pressing issue in copyright cases as whether the assumptions on which IP law is built—that protection is required to promote creativity and innovation—are actually true.

Landmark Supreme Court decisions—such as the 1994 rul­ing in favor of rap group 2 Live Crew over its use of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” lyrics—and new litigation—like the 2013 Second Circuit decision for the artist Richard Prince concerning fair use, or the battle between Robin Thicke and Marvin Gaye’s estate over Thicke’s 2013 summer hit “Blurred Lines”—make it easy to grab copyright students’ attention, Fromer says.

Fromer splits her time fairly evenly between copyright and patents. She is attracted to the fact that the two systems—both designed to protect inventors and promote innovation—look so different.

Fromer compared the two in a paper published this year and co-authored with Stanford’s Lemley. The professors examined copyright and patent case law, noting that, in some copyright cases, the audience used to determine infringement is a mix of the so-called ordinary observer and experts in the relevant field.

In patent cases, on the other hand, whether a person’s patent has been infringed is often judged only from the perspective of experts.

Copyright and patent protection exist, Fromer says, to provide incentives for people to create valuable things, and the general idea is that people will cease creating if they can’t recover their investments of time or money. Therefore, if the copy doesn’t harm the creator in the marketplace, she says, “there’s no reason to care because it shouldn’t be diminishing their incentive to create.”

For that reason, patent lawyers, judges, and scholars can learn from copyright cases that ask both whether a consumer would have substituted the copy for the original and what is original about the work the party is looking to protect, Fromer says.

Fromer is also working on a research project with Sprigman that seeks to evaluate what drives creativity and, in turn, what sort of formal intellectual property protection is necessary to develop incentives for continued creativity.

Such empirical work is important, says Sprigman, “because for too long, a lot of intellectual property protection has been a faith-based enterprise. That is really changing. There is a real turn in the scholarship toward trying to understand at a pretty basic level how the mechanism does or doesn’t work.”

Sprigman and Fromer’s project, done in partnership with Christopher Buccafusco of the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law and Zachary Burns, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, involves asking volunteers to complete tasks that require creativity. One group is told that anyone who completes the task will be eligible for a $1,000 drawing but that those who do it best will receive more tickets. Another group is told that only those who are best at the tasks will get tickets. The pur­pose of the study, which they plan to complete in 2014, is to gauge whether participants are encouraged to be more creative when they’re eligible for a reward no matter what, or if they’re more creative if they have to meet some sort of threshold of creativity to be eligible. The results will suggest whether requiring a threshold level of achieve­ment to receive copyright protection—as is required to receive a patent—would lead to increased creativity.

Another arm of Sprigman’s work involves analyzing cre­ative areas, such as food, fashion, and open-source software, in which, for whatever reason, there is very little or no intellectual property protection. Some of that work was captured in The Knockoff Economy (2012), co-authored with University of California, Los Angeles law pro­fessor Kal Raustiala.

“The value of looking at low-IP industries is you learn something about how they get along in the absence or the partial absence of IP, and how they innovate. There are many ways to innovate and to capture the gains of innovation without relying necessarily on formal law,” Sprigman says. He points to stand-up comedy as an example. Comedians don’t rely on formal law, he says, but they’ve developed a system of community norms against joke steal­ing that they enforce against one another. (For more on Sprigman, see his faculty profile.)

Like all of their IP faculty colleagues, both Sprigman and Fromer are also closely watching cases in which innovation, and how it pushes against intellectual property law, are playing out in court. One recent high-profile example is the so-called Google Books case, in which the Authors Guild sued the search giant over its plans to scan thousands of books and make them searchable for free online.

In a landmark decision, Second Circuit Judge Denny Chin, who heard the case at the district court level, ruled in November 2013 that Google’s project was fair use because it was transformative and contributed to the public good. The decision is currently on appeal.

Chin’s decision and a few other recent holdings “really shape the fair use analysis in favor of the defendants” and expand what “transformative” can mean in the analysis, Sprigman says. Whereas fair use is most commonly thought to be transforming the nature of the work, such as 2 Live Crew turning “Pretty Woman” into hip-hop, in the Google Books case the transformation was of the way the works would be used, in this case for research. The works themselves stayed the same.

Sprigman and Fromer’s colleague Jason Schultz was also closely watching the Google Books case. As it turned out, the judge was keeping an eye on Schultz’s thoughts on the subject of fair use. In his opinion, Chin repeatedly cited an amicus brief authored by Schultz and others on behalf of humanities and law scholars. The brief touted the positive impact the Google project would have on research including “data mining,” which involves searching large amounts of data to detect patterns.

“The significance of this case extends far beyond” Google’s book project, the Schultz amicus brief said. Allowing books to be searched on a mass scale has endless potential for research progress to benefit society, it continued, “and none of the works in question are being read by humans as they would be if sitting on the shelves of a library or bookstore.” Thus, the brief argued and Chin agreed, the project doesn’t infringe the authors’ rights or violate the ideals of copyright protection.

Schultz’s scholarship also addresses copyright’s “first sale” doctrine, which says that when someone purchases a copyrighted work, such as a book at a bookstore, it is then his to loan or sell as he pleases. How that doctrine works in the digital realm, where consumers download books or songs, is unsettled. “If we don’t find a way for consumers to maintain a personal property interest in digital media, it will leave the copyright system out of balance,” Schultz says, because purchasers will have less incentive to buy copyrighted works and instead might download them illegally.

In a forthcoming paper with Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s Aaron Perzanowski, Schultz argues that any new law drafted on the topic should simply say that whether the copyrighted work is in digital or analog form, the consumer owns it and has the right to resell it. “If you drafted a law that says those things, you’d win in the digital age,” he says.

As a professor of clinical law, Schultz works with students on what he calls the “big policy issues.” Students in his Spring 2014 clinic submitted two amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. In the high-profile patent case Alice v. CLS Bank, the students argued that abstract patents are particularly problematic in the software realm because they encourage frivolous litigation and prompt businesses to create large pat­ent portfolios for the sole purpose of defending against such suits. The students also filed a brief in ABC v. Aereo on behalf of smaller broadcasters in support of streaming Internet television service Aereo. The startup charges users a small monthly fee to watch local pro­gramming on their computers or mobile devices—the same local programming that could be watched for free on a TV with rabbit ears, Aereo argued. The US Supreme Court sided with ABC and other major broad­casters in June, however, ruling that Aereo infringed on their copyrights.

The main focus of students’ projects, Schultz says, will be to advocate protection of the public interest. Spring 2014 students advised the New York Public Library system on how to best make available to other libraries and institutions the soft­ware it is developing to make library works more digitally acces­sible. Some students also were placed at the ACLU under the supervision of ACLU attorneys Catherine Crump and Ben Wizner ’00, director of the ACLU’s Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology. The students evaluated and made recommendations to criminal defense lawyers on how to defend against law enforce­ment’s use of individuals’ cell phone location data, and drafted model pleadings to be used by these lawyers in requesting such cell-related information from the government.

“There is no end to the kinds of projects that students can work on that really make a contribution” to IP law, Schultz says of his clinic.

Amanda Levendowski ’14, a clinic student who will join Cooley this fall as an associate, said she found working in the not-for-profit environment invaluable. Schultz was instructive, she said, on how she can integrate that type of service into her work at the law firm.

TRADEMARK

The third prong of intellectual property, trademark, involves the various tools, including logos, words, symbols, and colors, that companies use to identify their products. Trademark law allows companies to seek damages from those who try to sell knockoff products or trade on their brands by confusing consumers into thinking they’re buying a product that was made by another, usually inferior, company.

Despite its undisputed relevance in the business world, trade­mark law has historically received less academic attention than patents and copyright law. That hole in intellectual property scholarship led Barton Beebe to develop his expertise in trademark law.

“When I really started reading [about trademark law], I thought it was the lens through which you can see the rest of the universe. Everything was there—economy, culture, politics, expression,” says Beebe, who has a PhD in English, including work in cultural studies. And yet, he says, it seemed that it was under-theorized and understudied.

Beebe’s research—and his interpretations of trademark’s broad reach—allows NYU to be one of the few law schools that offer an advanced course in trademark law, though that’s some­thing Beebe expects will change soon. “It’s becoming obvious that [trademark law] is so wrapped up with the state of the 21st-century economy,” he says, especially as branding becomes more important in global commercial centers like New York, Tokyo, Paris, and, increasingly, Silicon Valley.

Adjunct Professor David Bernstein, a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, teaches the advanced class with Beebe. Bernstein is a renowned trademark lawyer who defended luxury company Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) against allegations it violated a mark owned by high-priced shoemaker Christian Louboutin. In a landmark 2012 decision, the Second Circuit allowed Louboutin to keep its trademark on red soles but said YSL could continue to sell its all-red shoes.

Bernstein has known Beebe since the latter’s law school days, when Beebe was a “star” summer associate at Debevoise, Bernstein says. Today, Beebe is more widely known as a standout for his groundbreaking 2010 Harvard Law Review paper “Intellectual Property Law and the Sumptuary Code,” which compared trade­marks to laws that restrain luxury and extravagance for the pur­pose of enforcing social hierarchies.

“I’m obsessed with how trademark law facilitates status distinctions in society—not necessarily hierarchical distinctions in terms of status distinctions, but also how trademark law helps facilitate horizontal distinctions in a mass culture. It’s as if in a mass capitalist democracy, if we didn’t have trademark law, we’d have to invent it,” he says.

People buy signs, which include branded clothing and products, Beebe continues, to distinguish themselves from oth­ers. “If you don’t have religious or ethnic identity, if you live in a massive, multicultural, globalized city…people rely more on trademarks and brands. And trademark law is the regulation of that distinction.”

Trademark law protects the world’s most recognizable brands—such as Coca-Cola or Nike—from “dilution” of their marks by allowing them to sue those whose products might reflect badly on their brands, even if no consumer would think the major brand-owner actually made the product. “What’s interesting about anti-dilution protection, and IP law in general, is that trademark law is increasingly designed to protect the strong more than the weak,” Beebe says.

One wonders to what extent IP law is following the increas­ingly large divide between soci­ety’s rich and poor, he says. “Anti-dilution law is a really obvious expression of the 1 per­cent,” Beebe adds, since only the most famous trademarks qualify for such protection.

MOVING FORWARD

Beebe’s analysis of trademark law’s representation in greater society goes part and parcel with his fellow faculty members’ continued evaluation of how IP laws should mold and change to best contribute to society. They are all eager to use available case law and their own empirical research to contribute to that conversation.

Spring 2014 represented the first time all six professors were on campus together, and it brought not only expanded course offerings but also new life to the school’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.

The center is unique at NYU Law in that all full-time IP profes­sors serve as faculty co-directors. The center pursues a mission to foster interdisciplinary work in the area of innovation and law, and to bring in top-notch IP practitioners and experts to interact with faculty and students.

To that end, the center held an array of events that attracted a wide spectrum of audiences, including “Taking on the Take- Down Notice: Copyright, Youth and Educators in Harmony,” which featured a panel of media-savvy New York high school, college, and graduate students, and “Drones and Aerial Robotics,” which drew together aerial photographers, former military personnel, privacy wonks, and robotics enthusiasts.

In celebration of the Engelberg Center’s 20th anniversary this year, the IP faculty took part in substantive panels on IP topics with NYU Law trustees and guests such as US Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

The center is launching an Empirical Innovation Law & Pol­icy Research Initiative this fall that will focus on the data-driven study of the interplay between law, policy, and innovation. It will kick off in October with a two-day conference on Empirical Schol­arship in Intellectual Property: New Evidence Relevant to Policy.

In September, the center will host the 2nd Thematic Conference on Knowledge Commons Governing Pooled Knowledge Resources. Organized by Strandburg, the event aims to take stock of the lat­est developments in the interdisciplinary study of knowledge commons, and will seek to better understand how knowledge commons work, where they come from, what contributes to their durability and effectiveness, and what undermines them. The conference will pay special attention to knowledge commons in the fields of medicine and the environment.

What stands out about these faculty is how invested and excited each is in the others’ works. It is a cohesive group that also benefits from a diverse set of interests. That allows the center to approach analysis of innovation law and policy from many angles.

Each of his new colleagues, Sprigman says, “has done more than one thing in their career that has changed the way people think” about an IP question. They are the people who have driven him throughout his legal career, he says, “and now I’m hanging out with them.”

—Erin Geiger Smith is a freelance journalist in New York City. A former legal reporter at Reuters, she has written for the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Beast, among other outlets.

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Before law school began, however, Buskey attended RTK orientation, which included overnight camping and hikes. His uncertainty evaporated. “The programmatic support at NYU—in the Root Program and in the Public Interest Law Center—really surprised me,” says Buskey, now an attorney for the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. And that first impression stayed true throughout his three years. “There was always someone willing to discuss issues and problems,” he says, “someone who would help you think through what kind of lawyer you wanted to be.”

Angelica Jongco ’05, a senior staff attorney at Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization in San Francisco, still remembers the nurturing she received “grabbing falafel with my mentor, Kathleen Guneratne, my first day. She answered all my questions and made me feel completely at home.” Guneratne ’04, now an Alameda County (California) public defender, remains a friend and mentor.

The RTK Program has a rich history. Since 1954 it has produced leaders in all aspects of law and even business, including two of the founders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Martin Lipton ’55 and Herbert Wachtell ’54; the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herbert Kelleher ’56; and the former general counsel of AIG, Florence Davis ’79, who is now president of the Starr Foundation.

RTK alumni also hold influential public service positions throughout the country (see illustration on the next page). The program has, over time, spurred the growth of the public service community at NYU Law. In fact, the founding of the Public Interest Law Center (PILC) in 1992 would begin to make Root’s programming accessible to the entire school population, including making available to all students funding for public interest summer internships and entrance to the Monday night Public Interest Speaker Series.

“The public interest community at NYU is large enough that there is space to assemble your own family,” says Kendal Nystedt ’14. “I’ve built my own family through relationships formed during two years in the Immigrant Rights Clinic, while on the Review of Law & Social Change, and as a member of the Coalition on Law & Representation’s leadership collective.” Nystedt received funding available to any NYU Law student to organize an Alternative Winter Break trip to Arizona, where seven students worked on immigration enforcement issues at the southern border.

This sharing of the wealth, as it were, is to everyone’s advantage, according to Chief Judge Theodore McKee of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He has served on the RTK Selection Committee annually since 2004 and has become one of the program’s biggest cheerleaders. “NYU understands the importance of gathering a critical mass of public interest law students,” McKee says. “That critical mass transforms qualitatively the experience of public interest law students.” RTK Scholars are “not an isolated bunch,” he adds. “They’re an extraordinary group of scholars integrated into a vibrant and vital community of public interest-minded folk.”

[SIDEBAR: Tending the Roots]

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A teenage girl, clenching her lawyer’s business card between her teeth, stood with her hands shackled behind her back.

The scene set off Freedman’s highly attuned sense of injustice. Who handcuffs children? It was degrading, inhumane, and unconstitutional—and occurring in front of her eyes. Still, as always, Freedman turned indignation into strategy.

After the hearing, Freedman launched an investigation. She asked the girl’s attorney about the handcuffs; surveyed her staff of some 65 other lawyers and social workers; and called the head of another Manhattan nonprofit, the Center for Family Representation (CFR), to ask whether their clients, many of them teen parents, were being routinely manacled.

A bigger picture came into focus. Court officers who escorted teens charged with minor offenses from criminal to family court kept them in handcuffs during child welfare hearings. Everyone in the courthouse had become inured to the sight of children standing in manacles throughout their proceedings, Freedman learned.

Under the law, every litigant is entitled to be free of restraints unless they present a danger of violence to themselves or others. In Manhattan—and in no other family court in New York City—that presumption had been flipped on its head. The Lawyers For Children client had faced a marijuana charge, hardly a violent offense.

Freedman sent a demand letter to the New York Office of Court Administration, the administrative arm of the state court system, which also happens to be the source of most of her agency’s funding.

The office agreed that handcuffing children had to stop. Freedman’s lawyers began to demand that their nonviolent clients be free of restraints. Still, nearly a year later, the practice continued.

“It’s like pushing against Jell-O,” says Freedman, seated in her big-windowed, award-filled corner office that looks out onto the Tombs, as the Manhattan Detention Complex is known. “No one will say that this should be happening. They say, ‘You’re absolutely right!’ And then nothing changes.”

Nothing changes, that is, until Freedman grabs hold.

MICRO AND MACRO

There, in microcosm, is Freedman’s modus operandi. First comes her empathic connection to a child, which often triggers her intuitive sense about a social injustice on a large scale. She investigates and finds allies, then outlines a list of demands. These are her first steps before taking legal action (if necessary) toward reform. Most effectively, perhaps, Freedman persists—without bombast or bullying—until she gets what she wants.

In this way, Freedman has wielded her New York University law degree as a sword for the public good: to improve, vastly, the lives of mostly poor children in foster care in New York City. If, at 60, she is as deceptively mild-mannered as Clark Kent, she is also as apparently mighty as his alter ego. Like the superhero, she is a merger of opposite traits: low-key and take-charge; steady and passionate; creative and rational; self-effacing and wickedly smart.

“There’s something so centered and focused and powerful within her,” says Vaughn Williams, an LFC board member. “And it’s an interesting dichotomy, because in a polite way she’s very tough. She’s motherly and sensitive to the kids that she’s representing, but then she’s also demanding and businesslike as a lawyer. And she has taken such a solid, consistent path, year after year, in an upward trajectory.”

The result is a New York City foster care system that is “way way better,” according to Martin Guggenheim ’71, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law and a mentor of Freedman’s. “It’s a mindboggling success story.”

In addition to representing some 50,000 children in court over three decades, LFC has filed scores of class action lawsuits and appeals, almost always winning. It has shone a light on many subsets of aggrieved foster children, from those who witness domestic violence to older teens aging out of foster care to immigrants, sexual abuse survivors, and, most recently, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

And, from her start in 1984 with a team of two and a donated office, Freedman has built a nonprofit firm with a $7 million annual budget—almost $2 million raised privately—in a warren of offices on three floors. She exemplifies “how a lawyer wanting to do something different and entrepreneurial and outside the mainstream of big law can build an institution,” says Williams, former partner and now of counsel at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

The surprising power of that institution derives, in part, from its ability to succeed at its micro and macro missions: helping children personally while formulating public policy. Freedman’s work rests on the proposition that every child deserves a voice. Toward that end, every client at LFC is assigned a lawyer as well as a social worker, so that a trained professional examines every facet of a child’s life. Relationships form and deepen. By the time the court hearing arrives, children are presented as fully dimensional people, not as cardboard cutouts of foster kids.

“Her lawyers stand out,” says former Family Court Judge Jody Adams, now special adviser to the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services for Children and Families in Shelter. “They’re really smart, they know the law, and they know their clients. And her social workers are equally brilliant. They often brought older children into the court who then expressed themselves to me. I came to see their clients as individuals.”

LFC’s young clients, in turn, serve as experts on foster care. They are eyewitnesses to a system that has left them in violent homes, removed them from loving families, and often attempted to discard them as they entered adulthood—alone, jobless, and homeless.

Freedman’s gift is to listen to their voices and discern trends in everyday accounts. Then she goes to work at the very top of the child welfare food chain, meeting with commissioners she has known for decades, enlisting the aid of family and state court judges who respect her work, tapping New York’s prestigious law firms to lend their name—and letterhead—to particular fights.

ESCAPE FROM RIKERS

If a single client comes to mind for Freedman, it is Darren Martin. A brilliant student, Martin began to slip academically in 1996, when he was 15. He would threaten his classmates, and ravenously eat two free school lunches a day. Soon, his school’s dean learned that Martin’s mother had abandoned him for her boyfriends. He had been living alone in their Harlem apartment with no money and no food for three weeks.

The city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, offered Martin some unappealing choices, including living in a group home—“That’s like dumping you in jail,” Martin says—or moving in with his sister in Baltimore. “The City of New York was just thinking of the quickest and easiest solution to get me off of their rolls. They clearly wanted to ship me away.”

A caring teacher called LFC, and Martin met with his new social worker and lawyer. “I felt understood,” says Martin, who told his team that his top priority was his education. “For how angry I was, I needed someone to redistribute and articulate those feelings into something else.”

Martin was placed in “kinship foster care” with an aunt and uncle, allowing him to complete high school. But two days after graduation, his foster parents handed him a plane ticket to Wisconsin; he was to enroll that fall at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Until then, he had nowhere to live. “They’re kicking me out of the house and I have nowhere to go,” Martin told his LFC attorney.

It may as well have been the lament of every young adult who aged out of foster care in New York City, especially those placed in care voluntarily by parents who don’t want them. Young adults like Martin were cast adrift without an anchor to face adulthoods as bleak as those in a modern-day Dickens novel—of homelessness, prostitution, drugs, prison, or early pregnancy. One New York City study found that youths formerly in care comprised roughly one-quarter of the city’s homeless shelter population.

For Freedman, Martin’s case crystallized the aging-out crisis. With Legal Aid as co-counsel, she began negotiating with New York City to stop discharging foster youths into homelessness. The result, in 2011, was a sweeping court-ordered class-action settlement mandating that all foster children be released to stable housing and provided connections to jobs, further education, and at least one caring adult when they age out of the system.

In addition, Freedman led the creation of a special court, within New York City Family Court, whose sole job is to work with and track closely the well-being of foster children from age 18 until 21.

“These kids were in very bad shape,” says Douglas Hoffman ’81, supervising judge of New York County Family Court. “Karen suggested a radical change. She proposed a court that could be a model nationally. We’re still tweaking it, but it’s really a turnaround from A to Z.”

As for Martin, LFC negotiated with New York City to pay for summer housing and Martin boarded the plane to Madison, where he enrolled in a pre-college program until the fall. He graduated, then earned a master’s degree, married, and became a father. Today, at 33, Martin serves as the student services coordinator in the financial aid office of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“If I had been fending for myself,” says Martin, “I probably would’ve been that angry black teenager who ended up at Rikers.”

DO-GOOD DNA

Freedman, an NYU School of Law trustee, is well aware of the distance between her usually penniless clients and her own privileged origins in New York City.

Freedman’s energetic mother, Doris, was a crusader for art and artists. She presided over the Municipal Art Society, a private organization dedicated to landmarks preservation and New York City’s building landscape, and founded the Public Art Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to mounting contemporary art in the city’s public spaces. A plaque and named plaza at the southeast corner of Central Park honor her legacy. Freedman’s father, Alan, a businessman, founded the WNYC Foundation to increase private funding for public radio.

In Karen’s early teens, her family moved into the Century building on Central Park West. It was designed and built by Freedman’s maternal grandfather, Irwin Chanin, a New York City architect responsible for many of New York’s jazziest Art Deco buildings, as well as half a dozen Broadway theaters. The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union memorializes his work.

In 1969, not long after that move, the New York Times published a feature showcasing the work and home of Doris, who had become New York City’s first director of cultural affairs. The story, “Even Buying Art Is a Democratic Process in Freedman Home,” peered into the Freedmans’ life, suggesting facets of wealth and influence that, Freedman says, told only part of her family’s story.

Alan had grown up modestly in Brooklyn and Cleveland. He joined the Air Force, and afterward went to work rather than college to support his young family. He began selling advertising for a small New Jersey company that made desk accessories and marine instruments, working his way up steadily to become president. All along the way, Doris and Alan Freedman insisted on raising their family on their own earnings.

Freedman modeled her parents’ dedication to work. In 1970, she took a job as a counselor at Camp Ramapo for Children, in Rhinebeck, New York, for kids with emotional and social disabilities. The experience would deeply affect her and influence the course of her life.

“Most of the campers were inner-city kids,” says Freedman, who is petite and speaks in a thoughtful cadence, without “ums” or “uhs.”

The camp philosophy then was to hire counselors close in age to the campers. Freedman, at 16, had the charge of a cabin of 15-year-olds, a practice she now thinks of as “insane” and legally suspect. Yet it opened her eyes.

“It was transformative,” she says. “I loved working with kids. I felt energized by them. They were difficult, complicated, tough kids, but that’s what I knew I wanted to do. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know in what form, but I knew that going forward in my life I wanted to work with children.”

The very idea of making a difference had been cultivated during Freedman’s formative years at the progressive Ethical Culture Fieldston School, with its emphasis on social justice. The school’s charge is not to teach students to adapt to the existing social order, but rather “to change their environment to greater conformity with moral ideals.” Three generations of Freedmans are graduates.

She found similar values at Wesleyan University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and where she met her husband, Roger Weisberg, a documentary filmmaker, whose work on social justice issues often dovetails with Freedman’s. In a highly competitive field of boosters, Weisberg says he is his wife’s greatest. He fell, in part, for her “selflessness and compassion.” He admires how she has given voice to children. He respects Freedman’s agility as both adversary and ally. “She can collaborate with the very people she’s dragging to court to force a reform,” he says.

After college, Freedman went to work in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where she came to appreciate the power of the law. She decided on law school. “I felt that law school would allow me the greatest opportunity to advocate on behalf of individual children and make positive systemic change,” says Freedman. “That was the trajectory that I wanted to follow.”

That clarity of thought and purpose led her to become a Root- Tilden Scholar. In 1977, Freedman was one of about 20 NYU Law students selected for the program, which encourages careers in public service and public interest law. At the scholars’ first meetand- greet, Freedman befriended Elaine Fink ’80.

“I was taken with her,” says Fink, who is the managing attorney for children’s advocacy at the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio. “The way she talked about her work touched me and intrigued me. We both knew we weren’t competing for the best law firm job out there. We had lofty, improve-the-world goals.”

At NYU, Professor Guggenheim’s seminar on Children and the Law began to shape Freedman’s thinking. In his scholarship, Guggenheim has examined the unwitting harm that can occur when lawyers represent children. Under the banner of children’s rights, he argues, lawyers for children often create antagonisms with parents, resulting in more broken families and more children harmed in foster care.

Freedman considers Guggenheim her most influential mentor and, at times, her most formidable ideological adversary.

“The notion of an attorney acting in the ‘best interests of the child’ can be used to cause great harm and detriment to children,” Freedman says. “That is why at Lawyers For Children the voice of the child is paramount. There is a social worker and a lawyer assigned to advocate for every child, and in those circumstances where a child is developmentally incapable of comprehending and participating in the court proceedings, it is the skilled social worker who will use substituted judgment to help the attorney formulate the legal strategy on that case.”

But before graduating from law school, Freedman faced a series of devastating family losses. In 1979, her mother underwent routine surgery. In recovery, she stopped breathing and lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered. Two years later she died, at 53. Doris’s passing was followed little more than a year later by Alan’s death from a heart attack. He was 58.

Eulogizing Alan for a New York Times obituary, Mayor Edward Koch ’48 said the Freedmans had performed “magnificent service” to the people of New York, leaving behind “monuments of spirit” to the city. They also left behind both inspiration and challenges for their three daughters just as they were entering adulthood.

“We had a very, very close family,” says Freedman, “and there was this unwritten thought, amongst all three of us, that the way to honor our parents would be to carry on a legacy of giving that we saw them emulate for us.”

All three sisters have done so amply. Susan Freedman is the current president of the Public Art Fund. Nina Freedman is part of the Global Philanthropy and Employee Engagement team at Bloomberg. Karen Freedman assumed the role of matriarch, keeping the family glued together through years of loss and grief.

“Probably the hardest thing in having something like that happen to you when you’re relatively young—and I was in my early 20s and my youngest sister was just turning 20—is to try and ensure that you don’t go on living the rest of your life in the crash position, fearful and immobilized,” says Freedman. She wills herself instead “to face challenges and take risks and allow my own children to have the confidence, independence, and courage necessary to make a difference in the world.”

Her three children are on their own paths toward public service in art, medicine, and law. Allison Weisberg founded an interactive alternative art space in SoHo, Recess, where artists work while the public may observe and interact. Daniel Weisberg is in an internal medicine residency at Harvard, with a specialty in public health. Liza Weisberg may hew most closely to her mother’s line of work; she completed a two-year trial preparation assistant position at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and has just begun her first year at Harvard Law School. “In the best possible way, she’s given me totally unreasonable expectations about what’s possible as a mother and a professional and a lawyer,” says Weisberg.

But a family joke reveals the extent of her mother’s caution. Departing Cuba at the end of a family vacation during which Allison stayed behind for a college exchange program, the family was battered by a heavy rainstorm. Freedman fretted about leaving Allison.

What could possibly harm her, a family member wondered aloud.

“I don’t know,” said Freedman. “She could get washed into a drainpipe?”

The drainpipe became code for Freedman’s awareness of her overprotective instincts, as in a text she might write to one of her children: “Are you home yet or are you in a drainpipe?

Then again, her protectiveness—of New York City’s foster care children—has been a life force.

THE MOST VULNERABLE

The colorful waiting area on the eighth floor of 110 Lafayette Street features a fanciful mural of an airplane flying through clouds, with the plane’s cockpit windows opening to the real receptionist’s window. A boy and a dog in a rowboat float alongside the plane, and a Lawyers For Children banner flaps in the wind.

The inviting décor underscores the youth-friendly, one-on-one services of the organization—perhaps the Clark Kent side of the operation—while in the offices beyond, Freedman and her staff use legal muscle to challenge wrongdoing on a large scale.

Recently, Freedman turned her attention to the crisis among LGBTQ youth, one of the most preyed-upon subsets of children in foster care. Lawsuits and academic reports chronicle the overrepresentation of LGBTQ youth in care—usually black and Latino—and how they suffer every imaginable abuse almost from the moment they come out to family: homophobic bullying, broken bones, sexual assault.

LFC has long had a project to support individual clients, but in early 2012, Freedman perceived an opportunity to make change on a larger scale. A client served as catalyst. He reported abuse and neglect at his group home, Green Chimneys Gramercy Residence, a nondescript brownstone in the East Village touted as a cutting-edge program for LGBTQ youth. “He was telling us of inappropriate sexual advances being made by staff members to the young people living there,” Freedman says. “He told us there was no viable programming, children were routinely locked out of the residence and left on the streets, food was scarce, and staff were clearly without adequate training—bullying, humiliating, and even abusing the young teens in their care.”

She contacted an old friend, Ronald Richter, who, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had been appointed commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services. Richter was the city’s first openly gay child welfare commissioner, and, coming from a long career as a family court judge, was well acquainted with the miserable plight of LGBTQ youth in foster care. Freedman invited Richter, who is married and has a daughter, to LFC’s offices, where he heard stories from several of Lawyers For Children’s LGBTQ clients. “They felt incredibly validated, having that kind of access,” Freedman says.

Richter, in turn, was moved. “When you’re running a child welfare agency, everything is very, very important,” says Richter, who has since returned, under the new city administration, to his judgeship at Queens Family Court. “And there are only certain things that you can act upon with the force of a city agency. Karen made sure that this issue was acted upon with force.

Commissioner Richter himself made a series of unannounced visits to the Gramercy residence, and while he worked with the agency to remedy deficiencies with both the facilities and the services, he finally ended the contract. “We agreed to disagree about their ability to provide programming,” says Richter, “so there was a parting of ways.”

(Green Chimneys declined to comment on the Gramercy closing.)

Freedman pushed on. She enlisted LFC board member Williams, of counsel at Skadden. They co-signed a demand letter to Richter, outlining specific protections for LGBTQ youth. Williams’s presence in a series of meetings signaled Freedman’s intent to sue if change was not imminent.

Despite her longstanding friendship with Richter, she pressed him, demanding that the city vastly increase the number of safe placements for LGBTQ youth, and that it train and advocate up and down the chain of child welfare services.

“There’s no winning Karen over,” Richter says. “She’s never going to decide to favor something because she likes you, or you want her to. She’s true to herself and her core beliefs. Which, of course, can be very annoying. She has a ton of integrity.”

TURNING UP THE HEAT

Freedman’s agenda is never-ending. She has engaged professionals on her firm’s board to teach public speaking and self-presentation to a cadre of rotating “ambassadors” from among her 18- to 21-year-old clients. They will advocate on behalf of LFC, spread word of its programs to others, and learn how to best advocate for themselves in the process. And she is determined to take the most cutting-edge research on brain science and apply it to New York City’s child welfare system.

“We have a system that’s about 30 years behind in terms of good practice,” says Freedman. Many agencies still use confrontational, behavior-modification methods on youths who carry traumas akin to those brought home by war veterans. And when agencies seek arrest warrants for AWOL youths, the result often triggers a negative spiral, she says. “It’s really an abuse of the entire police system,” Freedman adds.

Then there is the matter of the handcuffs. Freedman’s second demand letter elicited silence from the same state court office that awards LFC $5 million annually. Self-preservation might dictate backing down; Freedman, however, stepped up pressure. She tapped the prominent law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, which sent yet one more letter. “It’s a way of strong-arming them,” Freedman says mildly. “It will get their attention.”

This summer, the wheels started turning. In a letter, the state court agreed to adopt new rules to remove handcuffs in family court “in a timely manner.” That may not end the practice. But if history serves, Freedman will win this contest. On matters of justice for children, she always does.

As sure as time goes on, the cuffs will come off.

—Candy J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a journalist and author living in Montclair, New Jersey.

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