Columbia Law Introduces Six New J-Term Courses for 2024

Edward R. Morrison, Charles Evans Gerber Professor of Law, designed Consumer Bankruptcy Law and Public Interest Lawyering as a seminar for students to explore how fundamental social problems—homelessness, poverty, racism, gaps in social safety nets—create issues of economic justice that can be addressed through consumer bankruptcy law and other laws governing credit markets. Guest speakers will include public interest lawyers discussing the effects of bankruptcy on divorce, domestic violence, and homelessness. Students will write memos and make presentations about the capacities of bankruptcy law as a form of economic justice

When public and private corporations engage in misconduct, there are mechanisms for internal correction (such as reporting malfeasance to the corporation’s audit committee) and means for external reporting (such as employing the law applicable to whistleblowers). In the seminar Corporations in Crisis: An Introduction to the Worlds of “White Collar Crime” and “Corporate Governance,” students delve into issues of legal ethics and criminal law in contemporary practice. They will consider cases resembling the scandals at FTX and Enron under the guidance of John C. Coffee Jr., Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law; Lecturer in Law Rebecca Simmons ’91, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell; and Visiting Professor of Law Charles Whitehead ’86. 

This class on comparative competition law is taught by two partners at Cleary Gottlieb who are experts on transnational antitrust: Nicholas Levy, a leading EU and U.K. practitioner, and D. Bruce Hoffman, a former director of the Bureau of Competition at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Global Merger Control covers history, law, and policy topics including: the role of politics and industrial policy, the rationale for different jurisdictional thresholds, the function of evidence and economics, and the architecture of administrative and judicial systems of merger control.

When the Supreme Court decided that there is no constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there were seismic repercussions for health justice in the United States. In the seminar Healthcare Law & Justice After Dobbs, adjunct faculty Delphine O’Rourke ’01—a former partner at Goodwin and now president and CEO of WellGlobal Health—leads discussions about how Dobbs affects not only women’s health care but also pharmaceutical regulation, reproductive rights litigation, and the interaction of federal and state abortion and health care law. She encourages students to debate sensitive topics from an array of perspectives and uses interactive simulations to illustrate key concepts.

Formerly the principal lawyer on climate change negotiations for the U.S. Department of State for more than 25 years and currently deputy to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, Sue Biniaz ’83 offers students firsthand knowledge and perspective in the course Negotiating International Agreements: The Case of Climate Change. Through a climate lens, the course provides an expert introduction to crosscutting features of international agreements, the process of international negotiations, the development of national positions, advocacy of national positions internationally, and the many ways in which differences among negotiating countries are resolved.

The way defense lawyers, investigators, prosecutors, and experts on both sides of criminal legal cases do their work is affected by technological innovations such as mobile digital forensics, location tracking, and facial recognition. In Outdated Laws & New Technologies in Criminal Legal Practice, Jerome Greco, supervising attorney at The Legal Aid Society’s digital forensics unit, introduces students to cutting-edge technologies and the issues they raise, including systemic and individualized racial and gender bias, and reasonable expectations of privacy under the Fourth Amendment.