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Tan described the day’s ceremony as a “special yet bittersweet one,” marking both the end of an era and a chance for NYU and NUS to find new ways to work together.

Founded in 2007, NYU@NUS graduated 237 men and women during its first six years. This year, to toast the program’s accomplishments, all alumni were welcomed back. They flew in from all corners of the globe, with the largest turnout from the very first cohort, the Class of 2008.

Student speaker Eduardo Rosenberg Paiz LLM ’14 of Guatemala expressed how day-to-day life in Singapore had inspired him. The low crime rate contrasted sharply with that of his home country; it gave him peace-of-mind to attend class knowing his wife was safe. “The fact that this dream became a reality in less than a lifetime,” he said, “will feed my every instinct to leave whatever I encounter in a better way than how I found it.”

Mona Boughaba LLM ’14 of Switzerland, the other student speaker, was grateful for the close ties shared by the 2014 class—the “legacy year, as we liked to call ourselves.” While the previous months had included an array of challenges, ranging from routine stressors like demanding classes to disasters like the typhoon in the Philippines, the high points stood out. Among them, she said with a laugh: “After so many years, the surprise organized for Professor Alan Tan’s birthday was finally a real surprise for him!”

During the celebratory dinner, Alan Tan, director of NYU@NUS, and Simon Chesterman, founding director of NYU@NUS and now dean of the NUS Faculty of Law, cut a custom-made cake: two three-tier confections joined by a bridge adorned with both schools’ logos. It represented the partnership that had made those seven academic years so sweet.

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Wood is “the Learned Hand of our generation,” said Chase, referring to the Second Circuit’s chief judge from the 1920s to the early ’60s, whose brilliance and eloquence often propelled his name onto the Supreme Court shortlist. Appointed to the Seventh Circuit in 1995 by Bill Clinton, Wood was twice considered for the nation’s highest court by Barack Obama, an idea Chase heartily endorsed.

“Judge Wood is known for tactfully dealing with others in sometimes prickly circumstances,” said Dean Trevor Morrison, “not through grandstanding or combativeness, but by sheer intellectual force.”

That force, said Yael Tzipori ’14, editor-in-chief of the Annual Survey, shows law students that “it is possible to resolutely and articulately hold your position, even when you’re in the minority.”

Wood’s dissents often prevail in the end, notably in the 2008 matter of Bloch v. Frischolz, in which a Jewish family had affixed a mezuzah to their doorpost—only to have it repeatedly removed by a condominium association per building rules.

A three-member panel of the Seventh Circuit, including Wood, declined to hear Bloch. Wood’s dissent, based on the right to free expression, prompted the court to rehear the case en banc. Both her panel colleagues—Judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook—eventually reversed themselves, joining the full court’s unanimous decision.

Eleanor Fox ’61, Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Trade Regulation at NYU Law, is a 30-year friend of Wood and a fellow practitioner in antitrust law and international procedure. She said of Wood’s decisions: “They read like stories about people, which of course is what they are.”

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From left: Daryl Kleiman ’15, Diane Abrams, Melissa Quartner ’15, Robert Abrams ’63

In 1969, Diane Abrams taught the very first Women and the Law course at NYU Law. It may have been the first course of its kind at any law school in the nation. She returned 45 years later to lead a discussion at Law Women’s 2014 Summit, “Transforming the Academy: Developing Early Strategies for Women’s Success in the Law.” In her luncheon speech, Abrams celebrated progress by remembering incidents from the 1970s that would seem surprising today, such as judges saying “gentlemen” when calling a group of mixed-gender counsel to the bench. But she also acknowledged there was more progress to be made, noting the summit included an interactive session with Rachel Godsil of Seton Hall University School of Law on how to recognize and overcome implicit bias and stereo­type threat.

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Raisler began by asking Staley what he thought were the primary causes of the financial crisis, prompting a refreshing admission: “Before I answer that, let me say that the financial community has a lot to atone for given the financial crisis and the damage it left in its wake.” Staley then offered three specific and detailed causes that have rarely topped more popular lists of culprits: a handful of collective mistakes by bankers, academics, regulators, and investors, including widespread agreement that any securities rated AAA were effectively risk-free and the idea that any country in the newly formed Eurozone posed the same credit risk as any other; regulatory oversight’s failure to keep up with the evolution of financial markets; and Wall Street’s conduct, particularly stemming from perverted incentives and compensation structures.

Staley went on to defend modern financial techniques and the size of financial players such as JPMorgan Chase. “Cars today don’t pollute nearly as much and their fuel efficiency is vastly superior, but we no longer have any idea how they work. That’s the price of complexity…. JPMorgan Chase is not large just because it wants to be. It is large because its clients want it to be large.”

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Moderator Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Profes­sor of Constitutional Law, laid out two broad sets of issues: “the constant embarrassment we seem to have with respect to our voting systems in elections” and the consequences of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which effectively defanged the section of the Voting Rights Act requiring municipalities with a history of electoral discrimination to obtain federal preclearance for any changes to voting laws or procedures.

Robert Bauer, distinguished scholar in residence and senior lecturer at NYU Law as well as co-chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Admin­istration, explained that identifying current electoral problems is more straightforward than solving them. Bauer, who is also general counsel to the Democratic National Committee and former White House counsel, said that the obvious problem of long lines—a notorious emblem of the 2012 election that prompted Barack Obama to say in his victory speech, “We’ve got to fix that”—could stem from multiple causes, including polling place misman­agement, long and complicated ballots, and dys­functional machinery, showing how unexpectedly complex reform can be.

Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, described a con­flicted bipartisan environment that is much more complicated than the Democratic Jim Crow South had been, and suggested that the courts were work­ing to construct a new constitutional doctrine pro­tecting voting integrity and the electoral process against insiders’ manipulation.

Adjunct Professor Myrna Pérez, deputy direc­tor of the Democracy Program at NYU Law’s Bren­nan Center for Justice, described legislative trends regarding voting rights in states around the country. While 2012 was a banner year for attempts to restrict the franchise, she said, 2013 had seen far fewer such bills introduced. “We need to continue the effort to make restricting the right to vote toxic,” she said, adding that the effective dismantling of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act translated into more resources being expended on litigation.

Speaking directly to that sea change in litigation was Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. Rather than cutting off potentially discrim­inatory voting laws before their implementation, he said, victims of such laws can now mount chal­lenges only after the fact. Ho predicted worse prob­lems in more places now that the burden of proof is on plaintiffs. “We have an uphill battle ahead of us, but at least it’s exciting,” he said wryly.

In a spirited speech, Julie Fernandes, a senior policy analyst at the Open Society Foundations, also pondered the end of preclearance. “Post hoc remedies don’t work very well in our world,” she said. “In the world of elections, once an election happens, it’s over. No one cares.”

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Sarah Burns

Professor Sarah Burns, faculty director of the Carr Center, is a longtime civil rights scholar and practitioner. She also teaches the new Reproductive Justice Clinic, whose students work with the cen­ter. “Reproductive justice requires a willingness to address the social, economic, and political conditions that make it impossible for so many people to attain reproductive health and exercise individual reproductive rights,” says Burns. “The direct assault on fundamental rights most often occurs at the intersections of race, socioeconomic status, and gender. As a result, we will have close engagement with the diverse communities directly affected as we strengthen and ultimately go beyond prevailing strategies to build a body of law that ensures reproductive justice for all.”

Beth Nash

Both center and clinic have already collaborated with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Proj­ect, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and National Advocates for Pregnant Women to help shape pol­icy on projects relating to reproductive health care policy, medical ethics, family law, and criminal law and procedure in a frame of federal and state constitutional law.

In April, the Carr Center’s first annual conference featured discussion of topics such as women’s rights regarding health care, women of color and reproductive justice, and the relation of reproductive rights to constitutional personhood. “I’m thrilled that the Carr Center will allow a group of faculty, students, and fellows to give intense focus to this develop­ing area of the law,” says Dean Trevor Morrison, “and I look forward to following their work.”

Keynote Address

In her keynote address at the Carr Center’s inaugural conference, University Professor Carol Gilligan, a member of the center’s advisory board, examined the longstanding absence of many women’s voices in the reproductive justice debate:

I am suggesting that the inattention to ‘woman’ in her rich diversity and the dismissal of her experiences as inconsequential to reproductive rights law are not simply an oversight or an instance of misogyny. They are vital to maintaining a view of the world that denies interdependence. Because women live intimately with men, whether as mothers or sisters or daughters or lovers, women’s silence is also essential to preserving an image of manhood that hides vulnerability. The pregnancy dilemma was revealing precisely because it illuminated interde­pendence and vulnerability—and this, I suspect, is what we don’t want to talk about.

I don’t think it’s possible to achieve reproductive justice or to hear the voices of women without changing the terms of the public conversation. I am not a legal scholar, but to bring the humanity and humane experiences that women centrally represent in our struggles over reproduction and its regulation into the law means creating a framework in which concerns about responsibility and relationships and a recognition of what caring entails can be heard as germane to reproductive rights and freedom.

Gender is at the heart of our battles over reproductive rights, and it is my impression that gender remains a difficult subject for us to talk about. More difficult now, perhaps, given that the advances of the past half-century have brought the contradictions between patriarchy and democracy out into the open. I suspect that when we fight over regulating reproduction, this is what we are really fighting about.

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The example of US efforts on behalf of Chen Guangcheng, the blind, self-taught Chinese civil rights lawyer who sparked international attention—and tension—when he escaped from house arrest and sought refuge within the US embassy in Beijing in April 2012, offers “broader lessons for human rights advocacy and what it illustrates about smart power in action,” said Koh.

The important takeaways, Koh said, involve the role of precedent in previous human rights incidents in China, lawyering in negotiations, and human rights strategies.

“It’s an example of smart power, engagement,” he said. “We engage with the Chinese government. Translation—adapting law to a modern reality and then leveraging it as a tool of smart power. That seems to be a broad approach that works, and I think it should be how this case is remembered.”

Koh will be a distinguished scholar in residence at NYU Law during the 2014-15 academic year.

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Ifill, the keynote and final speaker, urged every lawyer to find a way to be a civil rights lawyer no matter their chosen career path.

She noted that 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, and the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. “What that means for us sitting here today, in all of our diversity, in all of our cosmopolitan sophistication, what that means is that this country as you and I have been privileged to know it is less than 60 years old,” Ifill said.

America is still “relatively new at this thing called equality,” she added, saying there is immense ground to cover in terms of improving civil rights, from securing voting rights to addressing mass incarceration to closing the ever-increasing income gap. Therefore, Ifill told the graduating class, “I cannot release you from your obligation to engage in the work of perfecting this democracy.”

“You are called to be a civil rights lawyer because civil rights work is the work of democracy maintenance. It is not work to be done only by black lawyers or women lawyers or gay lawyers or even those of us who have committed ourselves to this practice full-time,” she said. “It is every lawyer’s obligation to engage in the hard, but necessary, work of democracy maintenance.”

For the women graduating, Ifill also had a particular message: “Women, I shouldn’t have to address special remarks to you, but I feel compelled to do so…. I advise against listening to advice on how to ‘do’ womanhood, whether that advice is to ‘lean in,’ ‘thrive,’ ‘be confident,’ or any number of other imperatives directed toward women. Just do you. You’re a woman. You’re going to be criticized no matter what course you take.”

Ifill returned to her original theme in her closing: “My hope for all of you today is that you will become my partners, my colleagues in civil rights work. That you will infuse your practice, in whatever field it might be, with the ethics of equality and of opportunity. That you will join that overflowing roster of NYU Law graduates who are recognized for their innovation, commitment, and leadership in making this great, but flawed, democracy better.”

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In the opening panel, Hays alumni considered “Which Recent Case Lost in the Supreme Court Can Civil Libertarians Best Live With (and May Even Have Been Right)?” The panelists included David Rudovsky ’67, founding partner of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg; Madeline deLone ’94, executive director of the Innocence Project; Rachel Meeropol ’02, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Rachel Goodman ’10, staff attorney at the ACLU Racial Justice Program. In posing the initial question, Norman Dorsen, Frederick I. and Grace A. Stokes Professor of Law and co-director of the Hays Program, had asked these former fellows to work hard—to reframe cases that might otherwise simply be dismissed as “bad decisions” by a conservative Court.

Before discussing his case, Rudovsky shared a poignant story. Having graduated in 1967, he could recall a time when this panel’s question would not have been so relevant. “Civil libertarians were winning not all cases, but many. We were about to launch our legal careers, my fellow Hays Fellows and others, thinking the future looks bright.” But soon after his graduation, the Court ruled that burning a draft card was not protected by the First Amendment. Rudovsky added with rueful humor, “And so now we have 45 years since then of bad law.”

And yet, he said, he and his colleagues still move forward. In Rumsfeld v. FAIR (2006), law schools that objected to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy unsuccessfully argued for a First Amendment right to bar military recruiters from their campuses. Although the other side prevailed, that loss yielded discussion and protest. “[The students] were much more energized by that process—the protest process—than arguments in court,” Rudovsky said. The reaction informed a larger conversation about LGBT rights, culminating in the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2010. This case, he concluded, affirmed “the power of reengineering our thoughts, reconsidering, and using some other methods to reach the same result.”

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