Faculty in the News

The Federalist Society—June 29, 2018
The Deregulatory Landscape (Video)
Does the growth of the administrative state threaten our civil liberties? Professor Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School argues that structural change to the administrative agencies is necessary in order to ensure civil liberties for all.

The New York Times—July 1, 2018
Bulwark Against an Abortion Ban? Medical Advances
Carol Sanger, who teaches reproductive rights at Columbia Law School, predicts that the Supreme Court won’t overrule Roe v. Wade anytime soon. Developing a case that would be a direct assault takes years, she said. “You don’t say, ‘Kennedy’s out, Roe’s overturned,’” Ms. Sanger said.

Vox—July 2, 2018
10 legal experts on the future of Roe v. Wade after Kennedy
“I expect that Justice Kennedy’s departure likely will impact the status of Roe and Casey, though I don’t expect the Court to overturn Roe immediately.” — Gillian Metzger, professor, Columbia Law School
“His retirement is likely to impact the existing constitutional right of women to choose abortion in cases of unwanted pregnancies not so much because it will bring about the immediate reversal of Roe v. Wade but, because it makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will give the states more room to decide what regulatory constraints on abortion are valid.” — Carol Sanger, professor, Columbia Law School

New York Law Journal—July 2, 2018
Upcoming SCOTUS Case Could Complicate NY Effort to Close Double Jeopardy ‘Loophole’
These challenges will ultimately mean worries about the potential impact of Gamble on any move by New York to close its double jeopardy loophole are likely to be unfounded, according to Columbia Law School professor and former Manhattan federal prosecutor Daniel Richman.

Governing—July 3, 2018
Rhode Island Becomes First State to Sue Fuel Companies for Climate Change's Damage
The Rhode Island lawsuit is a first because no other state has sued fossil-fuel companies for climate-change impacts, said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Politifact—July 3, 2018
Democrats’ playbook for stopping Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick
In a 2014 debate at Columbia University, law school professor Thomas Merrill argued that term limits would undermine the court’s legitimacy, because justices would be tied to the politics of the president that appointed them, rather than to the Constitution.

Financial Times—July 3, 2018
Justice Kennedy's retirement puts US abortion activists on alert
No matter whom he chooses to nominate, there is no guarantee the Supreme Court would immediately move to overturn Roe, says Carol Sanger, a professor at Columbia Law School and author of About Abortion. “It would not wholly surprise me if some of the conservative judges found that they were bound by some of the determinations on stare decisis,” she says.

Wired—July 3, 2018
SCOTUS and Congress Leave the Right to Privacy Up for Grabs
“The chief justice decided to vote for his result, assigned himself the opinion, wrote the opinion narrowly and leaves everything to everybody else,” says Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center.

The New York Times—July 5, 2018
Reversing Roe v. Wade Won’t Help Republicans
By Carol Sanger
“Overturning Roe? Watch what you wish for, Republicans.”

Popular Science—July 5, 2018
Scott Pruitt just resigned as EPA administrator
“Pruitt has been sloppy in following the required administrative procedures,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, told The Verge. “Wheeler may be better at fixing that.”

The New York Times—July 5, 2018
Polish Crisis Deepens as Judges Condemn Their Own Court
“It is quite extraordinary to see members of a court so outraged by the behavior of their leadership to issue such a letter,” said Sarah H. Cleveland, a professor at Columbia Law School and a member of the Venice Commission, which is responsible for monitoring rule of law issues for the Council of Europe, a human rights body.

International Bar Association—July 6, 2018
Latin America: Glimmers of progress amidst fears of backsliding on reproductive rights
Professor Suzanne Goldberg from the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School says Justice Kennedy’s retirement may sound the death knell for reproductive rights in the US. ‘Justice Kennedy stood as a bulwark against the efforts by some states to dramatically cut back on abortion rights,’ she says.

The News–Gazette—July 8, 2018
Supreme Court vacancy: Prepare for a game-changer, experts say
Columbia law Professor Suzanne Goldberg says: "There is a group of states that has tried relentlessly, for many years, to cut back on women's access to safe abortion.
Columbia law Dean Gillian Lester says: "There are definitely some hazards, with the Republicans holding a bare 51-vote majority in the Senate — including an ailing John McCain. Even with no filibuster, the White House can't lose a single Republican on a party-line vote, which makes things interesting.

Market Watch—July 9, 2018
Opinion: Overturning Roe v. Wade could hurt job growth in many U.S. states
Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke predicts that, “If women can’t control their…bodies — and [if] it’s a crime to do so, we’ll…see a drop in women in the wage labor market, in politics, as heads of corporations.”

Modern Healthcare—July 9, 2018
Providers could rejoin Roe v. Wade debate as Trump picks a new Supreme Court justice
One reason, noted Columbia law professor and abortion scholar Carol Sanger, is the medical community, which has largely left the rancorous topic of abortion to abortion providers. “For the states that say, ‘I want this to be illegal,’ we are back in the day of having doctors having to decide whether to perform legal abortions,” Sanger said.

WDET—July 10, 2018
What’s the Future of the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade? (Audio)
Henderson also speaks with Columbia Law School Dwight Professor of Law Jamal Greene, who clerked for then-Justice John Paul Stevens. He says the court leans conservative, and replacing Kennedy with Kavanaugh won’t cause any major shifts in the makeup of the court.

Business Insurance—July 10, 2018
Litigation against fossil fuel companies over climate change to continue despite setback
Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said in an email that “Judge Alsup’s decision is not binding in any other court hearing in any of these cases.”

Inside Climate News—July 11, 2018
What Brett Kavanaugh on Supreme Court Could Mean for Climate Regulations
“Judge Kavanaugh isn't anti-environmental, but he tends to be anti-agency,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “He's often struck down regulation that he didn't think Congress had authorized explicitly enough.”

Lawfare—July 11, 2018
NATO and War Powers: Remembering the ‘Great Debate’ of the 1950s
By Matthew Waxman
“It is well known that Cold War alliances and a massive standing arsenal contributed to expansive assertions of presidential power to engage in military hostilities. Those powers continue to be debated, especially in the Trump era.”

New York Law Journal—July 11, 2018
Review of Developments Under State Environmental Quality Review Act
In their column on Environmental Law, Michael B. Gerrard and Edward McTiernan review the decisions issued by New York courts in 2017 under SEQRA.

Popular Science—July 12, 2018
The dusky gopher frog will be the next Supreme Court's first environmental test
Kennedy’s enviro-friendly reputation largely stems from two 5-4 cases in which his swing vote was crucial, notes Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

NPR—July 12, 2018
How A Conservative-Leaning Supreme Court Could Chip Away At Abortion Rights (Audio)
NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Columbia Law School Professor Gillian Metzger about how a conservative-leaning Supreme Court could chip away at abortion rights, short of overturning Roe v. Wade.

The New York Times—July 13, 2018
Wilbur Ross Says He Will Sell Stock After Watchdog Warns of Potential for Criminal Violation
“It is a serious matter, particularly when you’re dealing with someone like the secretary of Commerce, who has his finger on so many decisions that affect businesses and financial investments,” said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School.

The New York Times—July 14, 2018
Feeling That Old Urge to Merge, but in a Vertical Way
Vertical mergers tend to get less of a stink eye from regulators, though experts like Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, have argued that vertical mergers should get as much scrutiny, if not more, since the combined companies can have enormous power over consumers and markets.

Gothamist—July 16, 2018
NYPD Plan To Hold Disciplinary Hearing In Four Year Old Eric Garner Case Derided As 'Political Theater'
“There’s no real urgency for NYPD to act other than that it’s the anniversary and there’s a lot of pissed off people still in the city,” Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University who specializes in police accountability and criminal law, told Gothamist. “Why are they giving an ultimatum now? It doesn’t make any sense, except for political reasons.”

Fast Company—July 16, 2018
Everyone should be reading “The Attention Merchants” this summer
The Attention Merchants is not a how-to guide that will give you tips and tricks to control the vast reach that websites like Facebook and Google have in your life. Instead, [Tim] Wu tries to fully explicate the pros and cons of the attention economy, with complete historical context.

Politico—July 16, 2018
Trump-Putin summit mystery: What about Snowden?
Matthew Waxman, director of the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School and a former senior George W. Bush administration official, said he doesn’t expect Snowden to come up at Monday’s summit. But it’s impossible to be sure, he added — especially given the Trumpian spectacle Snowden’s return would involve. “Trump is unpredictable, and he seems sometimes to care more about the showmanship of deals than their substance,” he said.

USA Today—July 17, 2018
Experts fear Trump meeting with Putin will embolden Russian interference in midterms
Matthew Waxman, a professor and expert in national security law at Columbia Law School, blamed both President Barack Obama and Trump for not taking steps to deter Russian cyberattacks, which included an extensive information campaign on social media, as well as efforts to access and publicize private Democratic emails.

Law.com—July 18, 2018
Insider Trading Law After 'Martoma'—What Is the Status of Gossip?
By John C. Coffee Jr.
“The new decision in United States v. Martoma has a less sweeping and more defensible rationale, but still deviates from the law in other Circuits. In addition, it has some nuances that future cases are certain to explore.”

E&E News—July 18, 2018
Trump wants Supreme Court to halt kids' suit
Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, compared the administration's application to its successful 2016 attempt at halting the Obama-era Clean Power Plan while a case was pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Christian Science Monitor—July 18, 2018
Overturning Roe might be simple; the politics that follow won't be
“That’s a shabby use of law to say, ‘Well you can also get an illegal pill,’ ” says Carol Sanger, a professor at Columbia Law School in New York.

Forbes—July 18, 2018
Will the Supreme Court's Amex Decision Shield Dominant Tech Platforms From Antitrust Scrutiny?
In a New York Times op-ed titled “The Supreme Court Devastates Antitrust Law,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu wrote that the Court “is rejecting that tradition of compromise [between pure laissez-faire capitalism and state control of the economy] and taking us down a path that leads in dangerous directions.”

E&E News—July 19, 2018
How the oil industry learned to love Massachusetts v. EPA
“If the Massachusetts case were overturned, then that defense would be gone,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “American Electric Power v. Connecticut said that in view of Massachusetts, there’s no remaining role for federal common law nuisance cases on climate change, that that is exclusively EPA’s job.”

Grist—July 19, 2018
Think the climate change lawsuit is dead? It’s just beginning.
“It’s easy to see this decision as momentum,” said Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. But “no other court is bound by this decision. It’s as simple as that.”

WRVO—July 19, 2018
Eminent domain court battle looms over Utica hospital project
But Columbia Law School professor Thomas Merrill, a property law scholar, says that's not true. “There’s no requirement that the person that’s going to get the property after the condemnation is completed has to be public,” Merrill said. “New York does not draw that line at all. In fact, there’s some language in the statute that encourages the use of private enterprise in these projects.”

Bloomberg—July 19, 2018
U.S. Antitrust Authorities Unlikely to Follow EU Lead on Google
“The EU has traditionally been more comfortable intervening because of the lesser trust in Europe in markets’ ability to self-correct,” said Anu Bradford, who teaches antitrust law at Columbia University. Europeans also tend to have greater faith in government’s ability to fix situations through intervention whereas the U.S. fears stifling market innovation, she added.

Observer—July 20, 2018
Putin’s Ploy to Interrogate Americans Was a Bad-Faith Trick That Almost Worked
Philip Bobbitt, a former State Department and NSC legal officer who now teaches national security law at Columbia University, told Observer that at the worst, a Q&A session with the 12 indictees could be a ploy to get American officials—likely from the DOJ or legal counsel from the U.S. Embassy to Moscow—to tip their hand and reveal information about the status of the Mueller investigation.

The Jakarta Post—July 21, 2018
5 books Yuval Noah Harari wants you to read
Anyone who lives on the internet knows that attention is scarce these days, with the endless stream of content and information. But [Tim] Wu argues that this does not come out of nowhere, but is rather a product of “more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention”.

Broadway World—July 23, 2018
Shakespeare's Globe Announces Programme For 'Shakespeare And Race' Festival
The Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture is to be given by Professor Kim F. Hall, a pre-show talk for Emilia with Morgan-Lloyd Malcolm, a panel discussion of actors who have played Othello, and an international symposium featuring Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and UCLA, who coined the term ‘intersectionality’.

The Washington Post—July 23, 2018
Trump administration officials dismissed benefits of national monuments
“It’s almost constitutively vague as to what is deliberative and exempted,” said David Pozen, a professor at Columbia Law School, referring to FOIA Exemption 5. “It was meant to ensure open and frank deliberation before a decision is taken.”

Balkinization—July 23, 2018
The Rulification of Penalty Kicks—and a Reform Proposal
By David Pozen
“The introduction of VAR thus exposed a gap between the law on the books and the law in action. And the effect was to rulify the adjudication of penalty kicks.”

The New York Times—July 24, 2018
How E.U.’s Google Fine Explains High Cellphone Costs in the U.S.
It would be both wrong and dangerous to just blame the Europeans. Wrong, because there is reliable evidence that the European Commission does not target American companies: It is just as tough with all firms, including domestic ones.
[Note: In referencing “reliable evidence,” this piece links to (but doesn’t cite) Anu Bradford’s law review article on E.U. merger control.]

Scientific American—July 26, 2018
Plan to Weaken Car Emissions Rules Could Reopen Key Climate Case
A carmaker might argue that EPA lacks authority to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles, said Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “They would be making the argument to the D.C. Circuit that the Massachusetts decision was wrong,” he said. “That’s their effort to reopen the case.”

NBC—July 26, 2018
If Roe v. Wade dies, what will unite the Republican Party? (Video)
Killing Roe might end up being bad news for Republicans, says Carol Sanger, Columbia Law professor and author of “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in the Twenty-First Century.”

Voice of America—July 26, 2018
Trump Administration’s Promotion of Religious Liberty Criticized at Home
The Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York and Columbia Law School’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project said the president’s executive order “will have the effect of favoring majoritarian faiths at the expense of religious minorities.”

CNBC—July 26, 2018
Facebook insiders sold more stock than usual in the second quarter
John Coffee, professor of law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School, said not all sales pursuant to Rule 10b5-1 are lawful, “although the exceptions are modest.” He underlined Zuckerberg's estimated $80 billion net worth.

The Independent—July 27, 2018
Will Congress actually impeach the deputy attorney general?
“This strikes me as a sad stunt.  Whatever one thinks of Rosenstein’s conduct as deputy attorney general, it is implausible that he has committed ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ within the meaning of the Constitution,” said David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia Law School.

The Wall Street Journal—July 27, 2018
New York Regulator Revokes Its Approval of Charter, Time Warner Cable Merger
“The age of do-nothing state oversight is over,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University professor and longtime critic of big telecommunications companies.

The Nation—July 30, 2018
The UN Eyes a World With Less US
With the four-year term of the current representative, Columbia Law School professor Sarah Cleveland, set to expire at the end of the year, the Trump administration nominated conservative lawyer Pierre-Richard Prosper, who served as President George W. Bush’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes, to take her place.

Al Jazeera—July 30, 2018
Will Guyana's oil boom benefit the people? (Video)
So what can Guyana do to avoid becoming another poor, yet resource-rich nation? On this episode of The Stream, we speak with Lisa Sachs, Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

The New York Times—July 30, 2018
Trump Administration Mulls a Unilateral Tax Cut for the Rich
Michael Graetz, a tax law professor at Columbia University who worked in the Treasury Department’s tax policy office when the department determined that taxing capital gains could not be changed by regulation, said he still thought that the decision to change the law should fall to Congress.

Arkansas Times—July 30, 2018
Jeff Sessions' Arkansas trip includes a Little Rock stop
The federal government’s approach poses a grave threat to LGBT elders who need care, as highlighted in Dignity Denied: Religious Exemptions and LGBT Elder Services, a recent report by SAGE, the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), and Columbia Law School’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project.

The Los Angeles Times—July 30, 2018
CBS' board announces investigation into Chief Executive Leslie Moonves' alleged misconduct
Columbia Law School professor John C. Coffee said CBS’ board might have muddied the outcome of the investigation because it did not ask Moonves to go on leave. If the investigation ultimately fails to substantiate the issues raised in the New Yorker story, critics probably will speculate that the conclusion was predetermined, he said.

National Law Journal—July 30, 2018
The Nominee: A Peek Into Kavanaugh's Rulings and Feedback From the Industry
Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene looked on the bright side. “Brett Kavanaugh would have been an entirely orthodox, predictable court pick by anyone in the Republican presidential field. Given this president and a pliant Congress, this could have been WAY worse,” he wrote in a July 9 tweet.

Sightline Institute—July 31, 2018
Trump Appointees Might Undercut HFC Ban but West Coast Leadership Fighting Back
Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University,  remarked that “California’s adoption of its own HFCs standards may well inspire other states to do the same, especially since there are readily available substitutes.”

Bloomberg—July 31, 2018
Forget Collusion. Conspiracy’s the Watchword in Mueller’s Filings
The statute has been a basic part of prosecutors’ tool kits for decades, said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Columbia Law School. “It captures conspiracies to violate all sorts of federal laws, and allows the government to go after property or information it is entitled to,” he said.

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This report shares mentions of Law School faculty cited in print, broadcast, and online news outlets. It is not intended to be inclusive of every media mention.