ALI Taps Four Columbia Law School Professors to Report, Advise on Key Areas of Law

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 New York, March 11, 2015—Four Columbia Law School professors have been appointed by the American Law Institute (ALI) to lead or assist on important new research in key areas of the law.  

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Professor Elizabeth S. Scott

Elizabeth S. Scott, the Harold R. Medina Professor of Law, will serve as project reporter for a new restatement project, Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law. She will have five associate reporters working with her.

The project will be comprehensive in nature, examining: the scope of parental authority, including decisions on health care, education, discipline, and religion; rights and responsibilities of unmarried fathers; duty to rescue and protect children from harm; and state intervention. It will also take on the issues of children in public schools; children in the justice system, including age boundaries on jurisdiction, interrogation, the attorney-client relationship, and mental-health screening, evaluation, and treatment; and children as legal persons, covering tort liability, free-speech rights, regulation of labor, children’s authority to make medical decisions, control over sexuality, and emancipation.
 
Scott, co-author of the award-winning book Rethinking Juvenile Justice, is also part of The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, which was created in 2007 to study the effects of modern neuroscience on criminal law and to make neuroscience more accessible and beneficial to the courts.

Columbia Law School Professor Suzanne B. Goldberg will serve as associate reporter on a different ALI investigation, the Project on Sexual and Gender-Based Misconduct on Campus: Procedural Frameworks and Analysis.

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Professor Suzanne B. Goldberg

The project will examine, among other things, reporting procedures; confidentiality; relationships with police and local criminal justice; interim measures and support for complainants; investigation and adjudication; the role of lawyers; the creation and maintenance of records; sanctions or remedies; and appeals. The project will also examine informal resolutions, as well as the nature of hearings.

Goldberg, the Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law, is a leading expert on civil rights, sexuality, and gender law, and social change. She is co-director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and director of the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic. Recently, she was appointed by Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger ’71 to serve as the Executive Vice President for University Life. Since July, she has been serving as Bollinger’s Special Advisor on Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.

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Professor Jane C. Ginsburg
Photo: Ignacio Evangelista

Columbia Law School Professor Jane C. Ginsburg will serve as an adviser to another new project recently launched by ALI, the Restatement of the Law, Copyright.

The restatement will focus on the generally applicable parts of copyright law, including the subject matter of copyright; the scope of the exclusive rights granted by copyright; copyright "formalities"; the rules governing ownership and transfer of copyrights; the duration of copyright; the standard for copyright infringement; rules regarding the circumvention of copyright protection systems; defenses to copyright infringement, including the first sale limitation and fair use; and remedies, including actual and statutory damages, attorneys' fees, preliminary and permanent injunctive relief; and criminal penalties.
 
Ginsburg is the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law and a Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts faculty member. 
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Professor Thomas W. Merrill

Columbia Law School Professor Thomas W. Merrill has been named an associate reporter on ALI’s Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property. Merrill, the Charles Evan Hughes Professor of Law, writes extensively on property and administrative law issues including eminent domain and environmental law. 

 The American Law Institute is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. The ALI drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes restatements of the law, model statutes, and principles of law that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.

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