NYU Law Magazine

Grumpy Court

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

University of Virginia Law Professor Michael Livermore ’06 and two Dartmouth College computer scientists will publish an article in the 2016 Washington University Law Review asserting that over time Supreme Court opinions have become longer, more layperson-friendly, and increasingly grumpy.

Using computer analysis of negative and positive language in Supreme Court opinions from 1791 to 2008, the authors gave 107 justices a “friendliness score” and determined that five current justices are among the 10 most cross: Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

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One for All: The Hauser 20th Anniversary

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

The celebration of the Hauser Global Law School Program’s two decades featured two high-profile keynote speakers and a reunion of global faculty, fellows, and students. At the New York Historical Society, Koen Lenaerts, vice president of the Court of Justice of the European Union, spoke about the EU as a rights-based legal order.

Lenaerts emphasized that “the raison d’être of the EU is inherently linked to the protection of individual rights.” He drew parallels between the legal orders on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the 2014 judgment of his court in Digital Rights Ireland, which invalidated the EU data retention directive, with the US District Court for the District of Columbia’s ruling in Klayman v. Obama, which criticized the bulk collection of phone and Internet metadata by the NSA as “almost Orwellian” and incompatible with the Fourth Amendment.

In Vanderbilt Hall, Mohamed ElBaradei LLM ’71, JSD ’74, LLD ’04, Nobel Peace Prize winner, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a former vice president of Egypt, gave a passionate speech decrying the “blinkered mindset” hampering international affairs.

ElBaradei reflected on the current complexities of global relations. The United Nations and other international organizations have failed to avert conflict and violence, ElBaradei said, and he did not mince words in calling the world to account. “The global response remains shamefully erratic and subjective, predominantly depending on geopolitical interests,” he said. “In Congo, Rwanda, Darfur, and recently Syria, despite colossal death tolls, the international community did little more than wring its hands.” He contrasted these examples with the swift reactions to events in Afghanistan and Libya.

ElBaradei’s prescription included understanding the consequences of ignoring suffering and launching wars, appreciating the connection between inequality and insecurity, prioritizing nuclear disarmament, reforming dysfunctional international organizations, and shifting paradigms from international rivalry to cooperation.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “it really depends who is dying and where. Is it not telling that we always know exactly how many Westerners have lost their lives in any of these conflicts, but no one bothers to keep more than the vaguest tally of local victims? Are we shocked, then, when we see growing anger, distrust, and extremism?”

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Related Link

“What Price, Peace?”
Law School Magazine, 2006

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The Ambassadors

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

For 29 diplomats from 17 nations, an NYU Law classroom offered a chance to learn about the internal law of the United Nations. José Alvarez, Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law, addressed a range of complex issues in Law and Practice of the UN, the inaugural course of the Institute for Executive Education (IEE).

The IEE, launched this past January, offers non-degree programs for professionals. The UN course was customized and developed with the United Arab Emirates for young diplomats of all nations.

Although the students were advanced professionals, not all had legal training. The course therefore provided a compressed, high-level version of the kinds of discussions that might occur in Alvarez’s three-credit course International Organizations. “My goal is not to solve the problem, just to frame it for you,” Alvarez told the class.

“Sometimes diplomats lack legal knowledge, and sometimes lawyers lack diplomacy skills,” says Damira Zhanatova, from the Kazakhstan Mission to the UN, “so the synergy in the course of law, diplomacy, business, and political issues together is really useful.”

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New Frontiers

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

The Center on Law and Security selected Joshua Fattal ’18 (pictured above, far left) and Kevin Kirby ’17 (center) as scholars for ASPIRE (A Scholarship for Service Partnership for Interdisciplinary Research and Education), a program funded by the National Science Foundation and run in conjunction with NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering with the goal of training cybersecurity specialists. ASPIRE provides a full-tuition scholarship, a stipend, and a wide range of interdisciplinary academic opportunities with students and faculty from other NYU schools. Fattal, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Columbia University, will examine the implications of cybersecurity for balance between privacy and national security. Kirby has an interest in national security law, renewable energy, and computer programming. He previously served five years as an army engineer and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. The two join Brian Eschels ’16 (far right), who was named an inaugural ASPIRE scholar last year.

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Country Miles and Decades

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

In Around the World in 50 Years, Albert Podell ’76 writes a charming, engaging, and sometimes harrowing chronicle of:

The journey began in 1965 when Podell and his friend Harold Stephens set out to circumnavigate the globe by car, which they achieved and wrote about in their book, Who Needs a Road?

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Area of Agreement

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

With a foreword by Bill Clinton and acknowledgments of the Koch Brothers and the Heritage Foundation, Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice explores bipartisan opposition to mass incarceration. Brennan Center for Justice President Michael Waldman ’87 and Justice Program Director Inimai Chettiar asked elected officials, advocates, and presidential candidates such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Kamala Harris, Martin O’Malley, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Bryan Stevenson, and Scott Walker to contribute essays proposing solutions to over-incarceration. “In this time of increased political polarization,” former president Clinton wrote in the foreword, “there is one area where we have a genuine chance at bipartisan cooperation: the over-imprisonment of people who did not commit serious crimes.”

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A Worthy Dozen

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

Selected by 24 judges from nearly 300 nominations of lawyers ages 40 years and younger, 12 NYU Law alumni were named among New York Law Journal’s 50 Rising Stars of 2015:

Daniel Bitton LLM ’04
Partner
Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider

Lauren Burke ’09
Executive Director
Atlas: DIY

Ross Hirsch ’00
Partner
Herrick, Feinstein

Nilda Isidro ’07
Partner
Goodwin Procter

Chi-Yu Liang LLM ’09
Partner
Withers Bergman

David Livshiz ’05, LLM ’06
Senior Associate
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

Joseph Loy ’04
Partner
Kirkland & Ellis

Renato Matos LLM ’14
Partner
Capell Barnett Matalon & Schoenfeld

Sateesh Nori ’01
Attorney-in-Charge of the Queens Neighborhood Office
Legal Aid Society

Kevin Orsini ’03
Partner
Cravath, Swaine & Moore

Farrah Pepper ’01
Executive Counsel for Discovery
General Electric

Benjamin Rajotte LLM ’07
Assistant Professor of Law
Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center

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No Trial by Jury

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:54 +0000

A new undertaking at the Law School will focus on a venerable yet disappearing feature of the American legal system: the civil jury trial. Why are so few civil cases resolved by juries? What are the consequences? Are there reforms that might stop or slow the jury trial’s demise? The just-launched Civil Jury Project (CJP) will tackle these questions.

The founder of Susman Godfrey, Stephen Susman, has provided funding for the project. He serves as CJP’s executive director and, as an adjunct professor, is also teaching the fall course How to Try a Jury Case Intelligently. Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, and Catherine Sharkey, Crystal Eastman Professor of Law, serve as the project’s faculty directors.

“This is a critical moment in American history for the jury,” says Susman. “The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right of trial by jury in common-law civil cases. The aim of this project is to gather and assess empirical data on the downtrending, and to examine the theoretical and practical critiques of jury trials and ways to improve them.”

While only recently formed, CJP has already enlisted as advisers a roster of distinguished judges, academics, and jury consultants, including federal and state court judges who have agreed to use their courtrooms as “laboratories” for the implementation of certain reforms in appropriate cases. Says Sharkey: “NYU’s Civil Jury Project, having brought together all relevant players—judges, lawyers, academics, and jury consultants—is uniquely poised to pursue a methodologically sound, policy-driven research agenda that will produce powerful data about the function, and future, of the civil jury.”

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A-Paper Confessions

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:27 +0000

Professor David Richards’s spring seminar Free Speech, Ethical Transformation, and Social Change: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation explored the role free speech played in resistance, such as Gandhi’s in India and the US feminist and antiwar movements in the 1960s and ’70s. For his final law school project, David Billingsley ’15 recorded an album, Confessions, with his band Mary’s Roommate that explored themes in the course. Giving him an A, Richards praised Billingsley for his candor: “[Confessions] reflected beautifully his own personal struggles with the issues of the seminar, in particular, overcoming the patriarchal voices in his psyche.”

Billingsley found turning his ideas into songs made the topic more accessible: “Music allows people to react to the message more directly and sincerely through feeling.”

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Congressional Testimonies

Gina Rodriguez — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 20:10:26 +0000

“I’ve tried today to emphasize that regulations are an important and valuable force in our society, and are the reason that the air we breathe and the water we drink is clean, our food and medicine is safe, our workplaces are secure, our markets operate as advertised, and our values are embodied in our public and our private institutions.”

—Professor of Practice Sally Katzen
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
“Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System”
February 25, 2015

“The Clean Power Plan is not, as its opponents argue, an unprecedented approach that risks economic calamity; instead, it is just another example of the Environmental Protection Agency doing its job to ensure that polluters account for the cost of their pollution in a manner that will result in substantial net economic benefits to the public.”

—Lawrence King Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus Richard Revesz
House Energy and Commerce Committee
“EPA’s Proposed 111(d) Rule for Existing Power Plants: Legal and Cost Issues”
March 17, 2015

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