Jose Alvarez, Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law and Diplomacy and director of the Center for Global Legal Problems, lectured on "The Promise and Perils of International Organizations" at the Central European University (Budapest), the OAS Course on International Law (Rio de Janeiro), the University of Wisconsin Law School, Thomas Jefferson School of Law (San Diego), George Washington School of Law, and the Old Vic Theater in London, the latter at the invitation of the London School of Economics. He also has given lectures on "The Emerging Foreign Direct Investment Regime" to CLS alumni groups in Budapest and Washington, D.C., as well as to lawyers, public servants, and elected state officials. Prof. Alvarez participated in a meeting in September of the Advisory Committee on Public International Law (which advises the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State). He recorded four lectures on human rights "Fundamentals of Law" to be used in undergraduate courses at universities in Latin America and was a panelist at a conference titled the "Abuse of Human Rights" in Budapest. He delivered a paper on the effects of the NAFTA's Chapter 11 on Mexico at the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation in Bonn, Germany, and was the keynoter for a conference on "Torture and the War on Terror" at Case Western Reserve School of Law.
Barbara Black, the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History, delivered a talk on "Constitutionalism and the United States Constitution" at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History. She is serving another term as a guarantor of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University.
Richard Briffault, the Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation, presented "The Relationship Between Adequacy and Equity" at conference on "Adequacy Lawsuits: Their Growing Impact on American Education" at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in October. In November, he presented "Buckley Reconsidered: Campaign Spending Limits and the Constitution" at the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In December, Prof. Briffault spoke to the Erie County Charter Revision Commission about county charter revision and served as moderator at a conference on "Consent and its Discontents: Policy Issues in Consent Decrees, Policy Research Institute for the Region" held at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
John C. Coffee, Jr., the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance, delivered the 2005 Anton Phillips Lecture at the University of Tilburg in The Netherlands in September. Also that month, he participated in the initial conference in Toronto of Canada's Task Force on Modernizing Securities Regulation, on which he serves as the only non-Canadian and academic member. Later in September, he was the principal academic lecturer at the ABA National Institute on Class Actions, held in Chicago and in San Francisco in October. He spoke on International Dimensions of Corporate Governance at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, at a conference honoring his co-author, Joel Seligman, president of the University of Rochester. In October, Prof. Coffee was the keynote speaker at the Brookings-Nomura conference called "Gatekeepers" in Washington, D.C., participated as a panelist at an ALI-European Corporate Governance Institute conference on Sarbanes-Oxley's impact on corporate governance at the New York Federal Reserve, and spoke on legal ethics at the UCLA second annual Mergers and Acquisitions Institute in New York. In November, he co-chaired and spoke at a joint UCLA/Columbia conference on Shareholder Power at the Law School. Prof. Coffee is serving as the Order of the Coif's Visiting Lecturer for 2005, and he spoke in that capacity at McGeorge Law School in Sacramento, Calif., on "Gatekeeper Failure and Reform." Finally, in December, he chaired the ALI-ABA's annual Institute on Corporate Governance at Fordham Law School. Finally, Lawdragon, a web site and publication guide to 500 of the nation's leading lawyers, included Prof. Coffee (www.lawdragon.com).
Lori Damrosch, co-editor of the American Journal of International Law wrote the lead essay for the centennial volume of the publication. The article, "The 'American' and the 'International,'" reflected on the journal as a vehicle for the transmission of ideas about international law between the United States and the rest of the world.
Elizabeth F. Emens presented a paper entitled "The Sympathetic Discriminator: Mental Illness and the ADA" at the 29th International Congress on Law and Mental Health in Paris in July. In September, Prof. Emens spoke to the Law School's Law and Culture Colloquium on "Aggravating Youth: Roper v. Simmons and Age Discrimination."
Jeffrey Fagan, professor of law and public health, testified in July before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary of the Massachusetts Legislature on recent scientific evidence on the deterrent effects of the death penalty. Later in July, he presented a paper titled Crime and the Transformation of Public Space at the International Sociological Association meeting in Paris. In August, he was appointed Vice-Chair of the Committee on Law and Justice of the (U.S.) National Academy of Science. Also in August, he was awarded a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship to critically analyze new evidence on the deterrent effects of the death penalty in the U.S. In September, he presented a paper titled Policing and Legitimacy at the annual meeting of the European Society of Criminology in Krakow, Poland. In November, his research titled Neighborhood Effects on Legal Socialization of Children and Adolescents was presented in Toronto at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology. At the same conference, he also presented a paper, together with Tracey Meares, titled Attention Felons: Normative, Socialization and Deterrent Effects of Legal Mobilization on Gun Violence. His research continues on social and legal strategies to suppress illegal gun markets, and on the effects of incarceration on voter participation.
Merritt B. Fox, the Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law and co-director of the Center for Law and Economic Studies, has given a number of academic presentations. In February, he presented, "A Comment on Gomes, Gorton & Madureira: SEC Regulation FD, Information and the Cost of Capital," at the First Annual NYU/Penn Conference on Law and Finance. In April he delivered "Demystifying Causation in Fraud-on-the-Market Actions" at the Law and Business Program for Bankruptcy Judges, sponsored by the Federal Judicial Center and Columbia Law School, and organized by Columbia Law Professor Edward Morrison. In September he presented a paper entitled "After Dura: Causation in Fraud-on-the-Market Actions" both at the University of Iowa Law School's Corporate Governance Symposium and at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Later in the month, as a member of the International Advisory Council of the York University Schulich School of Management Russian Corporate Governance Project, Professor Fox presented a paper, "A Comment on Russian Corporate Governance Today," at the group's annual meeting in Paris. At the end of September he gave a talk at the Transatlantic Financial Services Regulatory Dialogue conference at St. John's College of Cambridge University, entitled "Cross Listing Made Easy: Why Differences in National Disclosure Regimes Usually Don't Matter."
Katherine Franke gave paper titled "The Politics of Same Sex Marriage Politics" at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and to the Columbia Law Faculty. She discussed her new book, Subjects of Freed-dom, at the law schools at the University of Oregon and the University of North Carolina. She gave a lecture titled "Engendering Legal Education" at the University of Mississippi and was commentator on a symposium on the Road to Securing Human Rights in Southeast Asia, organized by the Gruber Foundation. Finally, Prof. Franke provided introductory remarks to a dialogue between David Gergen and Richard Franke at the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Philip Genty was given the inaugural Public Interest Professor of the Year award from the Clinical Legal Education Association. The award, selected by students, is given to a faculty member or administrator who has most supported and inspired the public interest law student community.
Jane C. Ginsburg, the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law and co-director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, gave a lecture in October titled "Liability for Facilitating Copyright Infringement: Anticipating the Après-Grokster" at the University of Utrecht and at the Facultés Universitaires St. Louis, Brussels, as well as in November at the LUISS university law school in Rome and at the University of Milan. With Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss '81, she presented to the ALI Council a draft of the project for which they are co-reporters: Intellectual Property: Principles Governing Jurisdiction, Choice of Law, and Judgments in Transnational Disputes. In December, Prof. Ginsburg was a visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she taught an intensive course on International and Comparative Copyright Law.
Harvey J. Goldschmid '65 returned to the Law School last summer after spending three years as a commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Rochester University President Joel Seligman, who has written the definitive history of the SEC (The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the SEC and Modern Corporate Finance), said that Prof. Goldschmid was the SEC's most important commissioner who did not also serve as chairman. "His strong preference was to work quietly and behind the scenes to craft the most appropriate consensus policies possible at the SEC," said Mr. Seligman. "His term as commissioner will be remembered for these quiet victories on a myriad of issues in the aftermath of Sarbanes-Oxley." Additionally, Prof. Goldschmid participated in the Forum for EU-U.S. Legal-Economic Affairs in Rome from September 14-17 and addressed "SEC Success to Date in Fixing Corporate Governance Failures and Serious Threats Now Facing the Commission." In October, he participated in corporate governance conferences at the Washington University School of Law and Yale Law School, and he spoke about the active shareholder and director elections. Prof. Goldschmid gave a keynote address to the Corporate Directors Institute of the National Association of Corporate Directors in Washington, D.C. In November, he delivered a keynote addresses at PLI's Annual Institute on Securities Regulation in New York and at the NASD's Fall Securities Conference in San Francisco. He also provided a keynote for the AICPA/Securities Industry Association, Conference on the Securities Industry. Prof. Goldschmid also rejoined the boards of the American Association for the International Commission of Jurists and Transparency International - USA. He became a member of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Corporate Governance and Commissioners' Council of the SEC Historical Society.
Jeffrey Gordon, the Alfred W. Bressler Professor of Law and co-director of the Center for Law and Economic Studies, was a presenter at law school conferences at Washington University in St. Louis (on executive compensation), Yale University (on a majority, not plurality, voting for directors), Georgetown University (on independent directors), University of Maryland (on directors' fiduciary duties nearing insolvency) and Columbia University (on the objectives of the corporation). He circulated a new working paper, "The Rise of Independent Directors, 1950-2005: Toward a New Corporate Governance Paradigm."
Kent Greenawalt '63 presented a paper at a conference on Natural Law and Natural Right in Contemporary Jurisprudence at Princeton University in September. In October, he delivered a Baum Memorial Lecture on "Conscientious Refusals of Medical Treatment" at the University of Illinois School of Law and later that month, discussed attitudes toward science at a conference on "Secular Europe, Religious America" at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Prof. Greenawalt also participated in a November panel on law and religion at the American Academy of Religion.
Benjamin L. Liebman, director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies, participated in July in a training program on media law for judges from western China in Xi'an, cosponsored by Northwest University of Law and Politics and Internews, and delivered "An Empirical Account of Defamation Litigation in China" at the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and at the China University of Law and Politics Publishing House. He was also appointed guest professor at the institute, among the first foreign scholars for that honor. In October, he participated in a panel discussion on "International Norms and Post-WTO China" as part of an International Law Association conference in New York. In November, Prof. Liebman delivered a lecture on China's recent legal reforms to the Asian Affairs Committee of the New York City Bar Association and participated in a conference on Chinese legal education at Washington University in St. Louis. Also in November, he delivered the C.V. Starr Lecture at New York Law School, titled "Legitimacy through Law in China."
Carol Liebman spoke at the National Conference of State Legislators and the Association on Conflict Resolution about disclosure of medial errors. With Professor Barbara Schatz, she also attended and spoke at the third annual Colloquium on Clinical Legal Education in China.
Clarisa Long, the Shaye Professor of Intellectual Property Law, was a panelist at the Federal Circuit Bar Association's conference called "Perspectives on Patent Law and Innovation" held at the Law School in October. In November, she gave a presentation on intellectual property rights for a conference on commercializing innovation at Washington University in St. Louis.
Louis Lowenstein, Simon H. Rifkind Professor Emeritus of Fianace and Law, gave the featured speech at a N.Y. Society of Security Analysts dinner honoring Irving Kahn, an original disciple of Ben Graham, on his 100th birthday. The title of his remarks was "Graham-and-Doddsvile Revisited."
Gillian Metzger '95 presented a paper, Congress, Interstate Relations, and Article IV, to faculty workshops at the University of Virginia Law School and at Columbia.
Curtis J. Milhaupt '89, Fuyo Professor and director of the Center for Japanese Legal Studies, taught Corporations in the Columbia-University of Amsterdam program. Also this summer, he taught Mergers & Acquisitions in the University of Tokyo's Summer Program, Global Trends in Business Law. He organized and moderated a major conference in Tokyo titled "Gatekeepers and Corporate Governance." Prof. Milhaupt presented "In the Shadow of Delaware? The Rise of Hostile Takeovers in Japan" at the University of Michigan Law and Economics Seminar in September and before the Asian Affairs Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in November. In October, he participated in a bilateral symposium on the U.S.-Japan financial system in Gotemba, Japan. Also that month, he was a featured speaker on corporate governance and foreign investment at an OECD-APEC conference on in Pusan, Korea.
Joseph Raz was awarded the Hector Fix-Zamudio International Prize for Legal Research at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in August and, the following month, delivered the John Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. He also participated in conferences at Oxford University and Sienna University and gave two seminar lectures at the University of Sofia. He is organizing two small workshops on animals and ethics and on the nature of value, at Columbia, and a conference on his work work at Regensburg, Germany.
Alex Raskolnikov, co-chair of the Transactional Studies Program, presented "Crime and Punishment in Taxation: Deceit, Deterrence, and the Self-Adjusting Penalty" at the Transactional Studies Roundtable at Columbia Law School, the Harvard Law School Seminar on Current Research in Taxation, the Annual Meeting of the National Tax Association, and the Tax Club.
Carol Sanger presented "Infant Safe Haven Laws: Legislating in the Culture of Life" at the University of Colorado Law School, Boulder, Colo., in November and "A Case for Civil Marriage" two days earlier at a symposium titled Should Civil Marriage Be Abolished? at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. In October, Prof. Sanger presented "Infant Safe Haven Laws: Legislating in the Culture of Life" at the Minnesota Public Law Workshop in Minneapolis. In June, she served as chair and commentator for a panel on Children, Rights and Justice during Law & Society Annual Meeting in Las Vegas and as Plenary Lunch Speaker for the AALS Mid-Year Meeting on Contracts in Montreal, where she presented "Form and Substance: On Allan Farnsworth." At the Law, Culture and Humanities Conference in Austin, Tex., in March, she presented "Moral Motherhood, Moral Panic, and Infant Safe Haven Legislation."
Barbara Schatz was a plenary speaker at the third Chinese Clinical Legal Education Conference in Wuhan in July. The conference brought together officials from the Chinese Justice and Education Ministries, professors from universities throughout China, and clinical educators from the United States, South Africa, India, and Poland.
Catherine Sharkey was invited to serve as an adviser to the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Liability for Economic Loss. Over the summer, she participated in a panel, Seeking Redress in U.S. Courts, at the Global Justice Forum 2005 conference, convened in London by Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein. Prof. Sharkey presented an empirical paper, "Crossing the Punitive-Compensatory Divide," at the summer annual meetings of the American Law & Economics Association and Law & Society Association, and this fall as part of the Florida State University Faculty Enrichment Speaker Series and Northwestern Law & Economics Colloquium. She presented a theoretical version of the piece at the USC faculty workshop in November. That same month, she also presented "Caps and the Construction of Damages in Medical Malpractice Cases" at a Remedies Discussion Forum at the University of Louisville.
Jane Spinak was asked to serve on the New York City Administration for Children's Services (ACS) Commissioner's Advisory Board. She volunteered this summer to train senior lawyers at ACS on techniques of supervising lawyers in public service practice. Over the summer, she traveled to Poland to finalize plans with the law faculty of the University of Lodz for their new child advocacy program and to provide two days of training on clinical methodology and supervision. During the visit, she met with Poland's Ombudsman for Children to discuss Polish and U.S. child advocacy practices. In September, she participated in the 2005 First Star Congressional Roundtable on Children in Washington, D.C., titled "From Policy to Practice: The National Need for Professional Legal Representation for Foster Children." The goal was to discuss child advocacy issues with members of Congress and their staffs. She also appeared on the Montel Williams Show in September to discuss foster care policy and practice in the United States.
Peter L. Strauss, Betts Professor of Law, was in Brussels for a workshop on rulemaking in the European Union. He spoke on the same topic at the Law School and to the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practic as part of a workshop and public forum in connection with Prof. George Bermann's project on administrative law in the European Union. Prof. Strauss also gave a presentation to the Federalist Society on the topic: "Must all statutes always be interpreted always to mean what they might have meant the day they were enacted?" In connection with the Seminar on Legal Education he long offered at Columbia, Prof. Strauss has been alert for developments that might have significance for Columbia's future curriculum. The interest took him to McGill University's Faculty of Law as a senior Fulbright specialist this fall to study the innovative curriculum being developed there; Columbia graduates Blaine Baker '79 LL.M., Shauna Van Praagh '00 JSD, and E. Adelle Blackett, Associate '98 LL.M. are among those who have played leading roles in its creation.
Susan Sturm, the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility, received a Ford Foundation grant as part of the Reaffirming Action project to study cutting edge practices to diversify university faculties. She presented a talk on "Legitimacy and Future of Drug Courts and Problem Solving Courts" at a symposium on "Compelling Issues for Urban Courts in Philadelphia" in September. She spoke at a conference in San Francisco in October called "Promoting Diversity — Tough Questions and Proposed Solutions."
John Fabian Witt delivered a number of lectures and papers this fall. Among them were:
"James Wilson and the Role of Lawyers in American Constitutionalism at the NYU Gotlieb Colloquium
"Civil Liberties and Internationalism: The First Generation" at a symposium on the work of Nadine Strossen at t he University of Tulsa
"The King and the Dean: Melvin Belli, Roscoe Pound, and the Common Law Nation" on the development of the American plaintiffs' bar at the Stanford Legal Theory Workshop on September 22 and at the Columbia Faculty Workshop
"Elias Hill's Exodus: Exit and Voice in Reconstruction Constitutionalism" at the Ohio Legal History Seminar at the Ohio State University and at the University of Virginia School of Law
"Civil Liberties and the First World War" in the Annenberg Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Pennsylvania "Elias Hill's Exodus"
Prof. Witt chaired a panel at the American Society for Legal History titled "Law and Regulation in the Progressive Era" and was appointed chair of the program committee for the 2006 conference of the American Society for Legal History. Along with 56 faculty member, he filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of FAIR v. Rumsfeld, which was argued in December.
"The Dark Side of the UN's War on Terrorism" in The Dark Side of Rights
"Torturing the Law" in Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law
Prof. Vivian Berger '73
"Streamlining Injustice" on the pending bill to reform habeas corpus appeared in her regular column in the National Law Journal (August 8, 2005)
"Whose Equal Access?" on Rumsfeld v. FAIR in the National Law Journal (November 7, 2005)
"Mediation: An Alternative Means of Processing Attorney Disciplinary Complaints" in 16 Professional Discipline 21 (2005)
"Summary Judgment Benchmarks for Settling Employment Discrimination Lawsuits" (with Michael O. Finkelstein and Kenneth Cheung) in the Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal
Prof. Richard Briffault
State and Local Government Law, Sixth Edition, with Laurie Reynolds (West Group, 2005)
"Campaign Finance" in The Limits of Market Organization (R. Nelson, ed., Russell Sage Foundation, 2005)
"The Local School District in American Law" in Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics (W. Howell, ed., Brookings Inst. Press, 2005)
"The 527 Problem . . . and the Buckley Problem" in 74 Geo. Washington L. Rev. 949 (2005)
"The Return of Spending Limits: Campaign Finance After Landell v. Sorrell" in 32 Fordham Urb. L. J. 399 (2005)
"Clingman v. Beaver and the First Amendment Right of a Minor Political Party to Open Its Primary to Major Party Voters" in 4 Elec. L.J. 51 (2005)
"An Historic Moment for Separation of Powers" in New York Law Journal, Sept. 12, 2005
Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan
"The Decline of the Juvenile Death Penalty: Scientific Evidence of Evolving Norms" in 95 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 427 (2005)
"Legal Socialization of Children and Adolescents" (with Tom R. Tyler) in Social Justice Research (December 2005)
"Neighborhood, Crime and Incarceration" (with Valerie West and Jan Holland) in Columbia Human Rights Law Review 71(2005)
"Two Patterns of Age Progression in Adolescent Crime" (with Franklin Zimring) in American Juvenile Justice (F. Zimring, ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Prof. Merritt Fox
"Demystifying Causation in Fraud-on-the-Market Actions" in 60 The Business Lawyer 507
Prof. Jane Ginsburg
"The Author's Name as a Trademark: A Perverse Perspective on the Right of "Paternity"? in the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal
"Legal Protection of Technological Measures Protecting Works of Authorship: International Obligations and the US Experience" in the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts
"Authors and Publishers: Adversaries or Collaborators in Copyright Law" (with Prof. Robert A. Gorman) in An Unhurried View of Copyright (The book, a classic in copyright literature, is being republished with accompanying articles from former students and admirers in honor of Prof. Benjamin Kaplan '31.)
Prof. Kent Greenawalt '63
"A Pluralist Approach to Interpretation: Wills and Contracts" in a symposium on Legal Interpretation in 42 San Diego Law Review 533 (2005)
"Child Custody, Religious Practices, and Conscience" in a symposium on Conscience and the Free Exercise of Religion in 76 University of Colorado Law Review 965 (2005)
Prof. Curtis Milhaupt '89
"In the Shadow of Delaware? The Rise of Hostile Takeovers in Japan" in the November 2005 Columbia Law Review
Prof. Alex Raskolnikov
"Contextual Analysis of Tax Ownership" in the Boston University Law Review
Prof. Catherine Sharkey
"Caps and the Construction of Damages in Medical Malpractice Cases" in Medical Malpractice and the U.S. Health Care System: New Century, Different Issues (Cambridge University Press: Rogan Kersh & William Sage, eds., 2005)
Prof. Susan Sturm
"New Governance and the Architecture of Learning, Mobilization, and Accountability: Lessons from Gender Equity Regimes" in New Governance (Cambridge University Press)
"Gender Equity As Institutional Transformation: The Pivotal Role of 'Systems Integrators'" in Learning from Advance (University of Michigan Press)
"Law's Role in Addressing Complex Discrimination" in Handbook of Research on Employment Discrimination: Rights and Realities (Springer Press)
Prof. John Witt
"The Long History of State Constitutions and American Tort Law" in the Rutgers Law Journal
Law Stories, a series by Foundation Press that explores the history, policy, and human interests underlying the "canonic" cases in various fields, well represented by Columbia faculty and alumni, either as editors and/or contributors.
Intellectual Property Stories is edited by Professors Jane Ginsburg and Rochelle Dreyfuss '81 (NYU Law School), while contributors include Professors Diane Zimmerman '76, Jessica Litman'83, Robert Merges '95 J.S.D., Graeme Austin '00J.S.D., and Graeme Dinwoodie '00 J.S.D.
Administrative Law Stories, edited by Professor Peter Strauss, with contributions by Professors Strauss, Thomas Merrill,and Gillian Metzger '95
Constitutional Law Stories, edited by Professor Michael Dorf with a contribution by Professor Vince Blasi
No Litmus Test: Law versus Politics in the Twenty-First Century Michael Dorf (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)
The recent battles over the U.S. Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito make clear that the law is under assault from both the political right and left. And as Professor Dorf shows in No Litmus Test, due to hit the book stores in March, these fights are nothing new.
Conservatives denounce what they see as liberal judicial activism in decisions involving abortion, gay rights, and the separation of church and state. They seek judges who will "apply" rather than "make" the law. Meanwhile, liberals decry the apparent hypocrisy of a Supreme Court that invokes states' rights to invalidate civil rights laws while overriding states' rights in order to put a Republican in the White House. Backed by academics who have been arguing against the possibility of objectivity for roughly a century, many critics on the left have essentially given up: Law, they contend, is simply politics in disguise.
By analyzing the most pressing controversies of our day, Prof. Dorf defends the possibility of principled legal decision making against the attacks of both the right and the left. From Bush v. Gore to the war in Iraq, No Litmus Test demonstrates that even when the law provides no clear-cut right answers, it offers tools for distinguishing good arguments from bad ones.
Administrative Law Stories Peter Strauss, ed., (Foundation Press, 2006)
Essay after essay in this fascinating book explores the statutory and historical setting of the cases discussed, rather than mere doctrine, examining in detail lawyers' judgments and tactics. Many use recently revealed papers of Supreme Court Justices to discuss often surprising elements of the decision by the Court. Students can learn a good deal about the handling of these disputes at the administrative level, before they ever get to court -- a perspective essential to understanding the field, but hard to pick up from the reported cases. Attention is paid to the ways in which many of these decisions affected future developments, with primary focus on context and on understanding the ways in which administrative disputes develop, and the roles that lawyers play in developing them.
The eleven contributions in the book include essays by Professors Thomas Merrill (Chevron v. NRDC) and Gillian Metzger '95 (Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Co. v. NRDC) as well as Prof. Strauss (Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe).
Gender and Rights Carol Sanger and Deborah L. Rhode, eds. (Ashgate, 2005)
In this long-awaited volume, Professors Carol Sanger and Deborah Rhode (Stanford Law School) have assembled 25 essays by leading international scholars and advocates on the relationship between rights and gender inequality. The contributions are organized into six categories: rights, sources of harm and well-being, work, family, violence, and political participation. They focus on the theoretical justifications for rights, as well as the contextual complexities of enactment, implementation, and enforcement. The book pays particular attention to the relationship between cultural practices and legal rights. Included in this book are essays by Catharine A. MacKinnon, Mary Lyndon Shanley, William N. Eskridge, Leti Volpp '93 and an introduction by Prof. Sanger, "Asserting Rights in the 21st Century."
Legal Methods: Understanding and Using Cases and Statutes Peter Strauss (Foundation Press, 2005)
How should students begin their legal education? Professor Strauss's innovative materials build on a Columbia Law School commitment reaches back to Professor Karl Llewellyn's The Bramble Bush, which posited that legal education should start with the materials lawyers use, as well as those of the institutions with whom they deal. Prof. Strauss focuses on the skills beginning law students need for using cases, statutes, and secondary materials in their education. He does so by following the development across time of American legal doctrines about product liability and workplace injury, case law and statutory, and of the judicial and legislative institutions that created those doctrines. Along the way, students encounter not only the appellate opinions typical of law school teaching materials, but lawyers' arguments and briefs, legislative history materials, and secondary literature that includes excerpts bearing on continuing controversies over statutory interpretation.
Intellectual Property Stories Jane Ginsburg and Rochelle Dreyfuss '81, eds. (Foundation Press, 2005)
Foundation Press turned to IP experts Professors Ginsburg and Dreyfuss (NYU Law School) to edit this volume, another in a series of seminal law cases in various areas of law. Both also contribute essays. The book is well represented by Columbians, including Professors Diane Zimmerman '76, Jessica Litman'83, Robert Merges '95 J.S.D., Graeme Austin '00 J.S.D., and Graeme Dinwoodie '00 J.S.D.
Legislation: Understanding and Using Statutes Peter Strauss (Foundation Press, 2006)
This book's focus makes statutes, and the processes that produce them, the primary consideration. Traditional teaching materials tend to make statutes and the circumstances of their creation secondary; students encounter the legislative process and legislative materials chiefly, sometimes exclusively, through the eyes of judges. In contrast, two of the three principal chapters of this book are organized around the enactment of two particular statutes -- one late 19th century, the second late 20th century. These chapters expose students to primary documents reflecting the quite different processes by which these two statutes were enacted, and invite them to reach conclusions about their meaning, in advance of any exposure to judicial interpretations -- just as lawyers would typically be required to do in practice. The latter of these two chapters also includes extensive selections from the secondary literature to help put the current debates between textualists and purposivists in sharp focus.
The intervening chapter deals in a more conventional way with the development and use of the purpose/intent-oriented methods of interpretation that characterized mid-Twentieth Century judicial practice. This chapter, in which judicial decisions predominate, often sets a statutory problem as a prologue to the case -- highlighting the statutory issue and inviting the student to do her own interpretive analysis before encountering the judges' opinion.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade: A Commentary Petros C. Mavroidis (Oxford University Press, 2005)
While the WTO has developed ground rules for international commerce and provided technical assistance for developing nations, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) remains a central document, with many of its provisions referred to in the various agreements of the 148-member global organization.
In his volume, Commentaries on the GATT/WTO Agreements, Prof. Mavrodis, who served from 1992-96 at the GATT legal service, examines relevant case law that allows him to both elaborate on and to diminish ambiguities inherent in the primary law. His commentary is divided into four parts: tackling the core disciplines, rules, exceptions, and remaining provisions of the GATT, including an analysis of the degree of sovereignty that nations lose in joining the WTO and the gains that are ensured from resulting cooperation. For international trade law scholars and legal historians, the texts of the 1947 and 1994 GATT agreements have been included as appendices.
State Constitutions for the Twenty-first Century, Volume 2 Drafting State Constitutions, Revisions, and Amendments Frank P. Grad '49 and Robert F. Williams (SUNY Press, 2006)
Constitutional reform requires not only good ideas but also the ability to translate those ideas into language that will effectuate the drafters' aims. This book—the second of three volumes on state constitutions—is the essential guide for those involved in constitutional reform. It identifies the recurrent problems that reformers face in drafting or amending state constitutions and explores how those problems might be addressed. It also explains why drafting state constitutions is a distinctive enterprise, different from the drafting of other legal documents.
