Proceedings and Relevant Parties – NYU Law Magazine

Together Again

Gina Rodriguez — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 17:03:55 +0000

Amidst gorgeous New York City spring weather, 12 classes from 1955 to 2010 gathered at NYU School of Law last May for Reunion 2015. The weekend events included academic programming, dining, dancing, and outdoor activities. At dinners held for the reunion classes, four alumni were honored for their exceptional work at the Law School and in their careers.

View the full section of reunion photos on the NYU Law Alumni website.

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In Appreciation

Gina Rodriguez — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 07:00:54 +0000

Joshua Espinosa ’15, William Randolph Hearst Foundation Scholar within the AnBryce Program, spoke for so many of his fellow scholars when he expressed his gratitude to the donors who made his NYU Law career a success. His achievements, Espinosa said, “were really three generations in the making” and began in Cuba, where his grandfather was born.

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Hooding Album, Class of 2015

Gina Rodriguez — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 05:00:35 +0000

In an annual convocation photo session, proud alumni relatives and donors face the camera to celebrate with the legacy graduates and scholars of the Class of 2015.

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Reflections

Gina Rodriguez — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 04:30:07 +0000

Members of the Class of 2015 share where they are going and what they are proud to have done.

Learn what other students and recent graduates say about their experiences at NYU Law by exploring The View from Washington Square.

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“I Encourage Your Discomfort”

Gina Rodriguez — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 03:45:01 +0000

The Law School was well represented at New York University’s 183rd Commencement on May 20. The occasion marked the final graduation ceremony for both Martin Lipton ’55, the outgoing chair of the University’s board of trustees, and NYU President John Sexton, a dean emeritus of NYU Law, as well as the conferring of an honorary doctorate of laws on Sherrilyn Ifill ’87, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who addressed the enthusiastic crowd at Yankee Stadium. Reading from the University’s citation, Life Trustee Ellen Schall ’72, former dean of NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, called Ifill “a leading voice in the national dialogue on equality and civil rights.” Sexton praised his former student as a “mentor to future generations of civil rights activists and lawyers. You reflect the core values of our university as the national conversation on race and the law takes on added urgency.”

Ifill, speaking to the entire University a year after addressing NYU Law’s Class of 2014 at Convocation, invoked the many challenging racial incidents of the past year—such as the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island; and Baltimore, as well as the ambush killing of two police officers in Brooklyn—and recalled a phrase by Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

“These in fact are the times that try men’s and women’s souls,” said Ifill. “The past nine months have challenged the very soul of our nation, such that we cannot pretend, even as we are here filled with the excitement of this day, that there are not deep challenges awaiting us.” Ifill mentioned some of the challenges: finding a job; anti-LGBT discrimination; being stopped on the street or in a car for one’s appearance alone; worrying about parents with little or no savings; the cost of college for one’s children; and increasingly stringent voter ID laws.

Lingering a moment on the issue of a prison population that has reached “unsustainable and shameful proportions,” Ifill said, “You know that incarcerating two million people is a sign of American failure, not American success.”

There was nothing less, she said, than a “crisis of confidence in the rule of law and in our justice system,” and it required action. “I encourage your discomfort, that you must contribute, that you must make your voice heard. That is the essence of good citizenship, that bone-deep sense of obligation that you must work to improve our democracy, and to improve it especially for those who are most marginalized and most in need.”

At the end of her speech, Ifill shifted from the societal to the personal, revealing that she had been one of the passengers on the Amtrak train that had derailed in Philadelphia only eight days before.

Finding herself walking along the tracks in a daze away from the wreckage, Ifill turned to the “favorites” listed in her cell phone: her sister, husband, daughters, best friends. All of them rushed to her aid.

“I wish to not only call upon you to use this extraordinary education to exercise the highest form of citizenship, to fight for justice and peace and equality in our democracy, to be excellent,” she said, “but I also call upon you to just as passionately nurture, tend, and cherish your favorites, the ones who, when calamity happens, will find you and surround you with their love and lead you out of the fog.”

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Related Links

“NYU’s 183rd Commencement Exercises”
NYU website, 5/20/15

“Sherrilyn Ifill ’87 addressed students and guests at the NYU Law Convocation”
NYU Law website, 5/22/14

“Partner for Life”
NYU Law Magazine, 2013

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Fall Ball

Gina Rodriguez — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 03:44:52 +0000

On October 30, on the eve of Halloween, the Law School invited students and other community members to celebrate with a night of music, fortune tellers, and costumes.

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Police Report

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:48:34 +0000

New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, facing public outcry in the wake of citizens’ deaths at the hands of local police, gave his own perspective in November as part of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law’s series on urban crime. He conceded that fear of police is an issue, particularly in minority communities: “In a city that has been made so much safer, how do we get back trust—if we ever had it?” Bratton also described changes in police practices such as curtailing the use of “stop-and-frisk” and reforming officer training. Bratton, who had served previously as commissioner in the mid-1990s, expressed confidence that the NYPD would improve relations with the community and keep crime rates low: “I wouldn’t have come back into this position if I was not an optimist.”

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Border Disputes

Gina Rodriguez — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 18:56:46 +0000

At the 2014 Herbert Rubin and Justice Rose Luttan Rubin International Law Symposium last November, Jorge Bustamante, former UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, lamented the disjunction between the immigration dilemma, which by definition concerns two or more nations, and what he sees as Congress’s too-narrow thinking about it: “A unilateral decision is not going to be able to solve the problems associated with a bilateral phenomenon, not only because of the empirical evidence about the internationality of the phenomenon of immigration, but also the territoriality of the law.”

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The Size of Justice

Gina Rodriguez — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 20:06:29 +0000

In the 21st annual Brennan Lecture on State Courts and Social Justice, Chief Justice Chase Rogers of the Connecticut Supreme Court named technological advances, a growing economic gap, and increasing self-representation as factors pointing to the need for change in the civil justice system. “We need to find a way to distinguish the straightforward case that comes into civil court from those that require more judicial involvement,” said Rogers.

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The Prices Were Right

Gina Rodriguez — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 17:27:56 +0000

The 21st annual Public Service Auction, which raised more than $50,000 for students doing public interest summer work, featured not only an appearance by NYU Law’s a cappella group Substantial Performance but also game show-inspired competitions between students and faculty. Continuing the game theme, a poker night with professors Cynthia Estlund, Samuel Issacharoff, and Jeremy Waldron was auctioned off for $1,275.

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