Faculty in the News

Columbia Law School Clip Report, November 16–30, 2018

BBC World News—November 16, 2018
Fake News Hits World Stock Markets (Video)
But fake news—or at least misinformation—has also affected companies and stock markets. … Eric Talley from the Columbia Law School told me just how vulnerable business are to fake news.


Wall Street Journal—November 16, 2018
Forget the Playoff, College Football’s Burning Question Is About Taxes
Michael Graetz, a tax scholar at Columbia University and Georgia fan, said, “It will be hard for the IRS to ignore donations that improve a giver’s seat—but it’s not out of the question, especially if the priority points have little value.”


U.S. News & World Report—November 16, 2018
PG&E Faces Historic Financial Liability From California Wildfire
"This is going to become a progressively more serious problem because there will always be sparks," says Michael Gerrard, professor at Columbia Law School and director of the school's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. "As the forests and the wooded areas become ever more flammable – and as more and more population moves into the woodlands – we'll see more damages.


Financial Times—November 16, 2018
German and US banks drawn into Danske money laundering probe
“The DoJ will be interested in whether the correspondent banks complied with anti-money laundering protocols; if $10bn was moving through a small branch in a matter of weeks in Estonia, which is next to Russia, why did that not raise red flags?” said John C. Coffee, a professor of law at Columbia Law School in New York.


Bloomberg Law | Big Law Business—November 16, 2018
Columbia Law Invests $4.5 Million in Public Interest Careers
Columbia Law School may be known for preparing its graduates for jobs at Big Law firms, but it’s also taking steps to make it easier financially for students to pursue public interest and public service legal careers. … Dean Gillian Lester announced the initiative, calling it “core to our mission and, perhaps today more than ever, critical for the health and vitality of our nation’s most important institutions.”


Recode—November 16, 2018
Recode Daily: Facebook battles renewed criticism from Washington, D.C.
In this excerpt from Tim Wu’s new book, “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” the author says that after the fast and chaotic late-90s and early 2000s, people assumed that bigness —the economics of scale — no longer really mattered in the new economy, and that there could be no such thing as a lasting monopoly on the internet. Basically, U.S. antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over, giving the major tech players a pass for a decade and counting — even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers.
[Note: Amid the release of Prof. Tim Wu's new book, The Curse of Bigness—combined with related news concerning companies like Amazon, Apple, and Facebook—he was quoted and cited extensively during this period in publications including The American Conservative, Axios Future, Barron’s, Bloomberg (Opinion), Bloomberg (Podcast), CBC News, CNBC, Dissent Magazine, El Sol de México, Folha de S.Paulo, Global Competition Review, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Ringer, and USA Today.]



WhoWhatWhy—November 16, 2018
AS CALIFORNIA BURNS, TRUMP ADMINISTRATION BATTLES CLIMATE LAWSUIT
“This case has always faced the difficult prospect of eventual review by the Supreme Court. But there is no question that Justice Kavanaugh is less likely to rule in favor of plaintiffs than Justice Kennedy,” said Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.


PanAm Post—November 16, 2018
“Por ahora, cancelar la extradición de Arias es improcedente”: Duque (Spanish)
For its part, the firm Victor Mosquera Marín, who represents the former minister before international tribunals, said that 18 independent experts from the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations with a speech by Sarah Cleveland, unanimously ruled in favor of Arias since the process started on August 11, 2014.


The New Yorker—November 17, 2018
The New York Hustle of Amazon’s Second Headquarters
“A key concept for understanding how Amazon operates is leverage,” Lina Khan, an academic fellow at Columbia Law School who has written extensively about Amazon, told me. “By running the search as a nationwide competition and receiving proposals from hundreds of cities, Amazon now has a database of information that gives it a further competitive advantage over rivals, as it’ll use this research to inform future expansion, and Amazon extracted the best deal through exercising its bargaining power over cities. The end outcome was to further enhance its dominance.”
[Note: Lina Khan is an academic fellow at the Law School.]


Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien—November 17, 2018
NEARLY ONE MILLION FELONS GIVEN THE RIGHT TO VOTE. IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF A MOVEMENT? (Video) [Hearst Television]
Florida took a historic step this week as voters agreed to restore voting rights to nearly one million ex-felons, overturning some of the harshest restrictions in the country. … Overwhelming, these laws disenfranchise people of color. Soledad O’Brien sits down with Marlon Peterson, a convict turned activist, and Columbia law professor Bernard Harcourt to discuss whether this is the beginning of a national movement.


Essence—November 17, 2018
White Woman Claims Black Women Fueled ‘Anti-White Woman Rhetoric’ Is The Result Of Intersectionality
“Intersectionality,” the pioneering framework to understanding and reckoning with intersecting oppressions, was created by Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw, director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and co-founder of the African American Policy Forum, over two decades ago.


Reason Magazine—November 17, 2018
National Injunctions: Historians Enter the Lists
A major new brief on national injunctions was filed two days ago in the Seventh Circuit sanctuary city case. … The authors are an all-star cast of legal historians and historians of the early Republic from Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia: Amalia Kessler, Bob Gordon, Bernie Meyler, Gregory Ablavsky, Stanley Katz, Hendrik Hartog, and Kellen Funk.


Financial Times—November 18, 2018
Hybrid courses attract new applicants to law school
Last month, Columbia Law School announced a hybrid course on its New York campus. It will run over 12 weeks during the summer break, with an additional requirement to complete three online courses, each lasting four weeks. The Columbia hybrid option uses the same professors as the full-time course, according to Julia Miller, assistant dean for executive education and non-degree programmes at Columbia Law School. “We wanted to make sure that this was of the highest quality,” Ms Miller says. “This is a commitment from the top down.”


Financial Times—November 18, 2018
Danske Bank whistleblower talking to US enforcement agencies
“The Russian element makes this a high enforcement priority for the US,” said John Coffee, a professor of law at Columbia Law School in New York. “If a whistleblower was rebuffed internally when he came forward with credible information, that would definitely be of interest to DoJ.”
 

The Guardian—November 19, 2018
We've settled on a shallow conception of democracy. And that's dangerous
By Tim Wu
But there’s another, nearly lost, democratic tradition, in which the goals of a democracy and a worthy civilization are irreducibly linked to the healthy development of its citizens along social, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. In this older conception, a great democracy is one that serves as a cauldron for the building of good character and the pursuit of a worthwhile life – one that includes but also goes beyond mere material security.


WNET-TV | The Open Mind—November 19, 2018
Disequilibrium on the Supreme Court (Video and transcript)
The future of American law and morality, the jurisprudence that will define America is our topic today. The High Court is reaching a potential crossroads, return to an aspirational consensus or deepen a polarizing divide. Can the court veer from a partisan legitimacy crisis to neutral constitutional arbiter? I’m delighted to welcome Columbia law professor and inaugural Knight Institute Fellow David Pozen to consider this question, the bruising nomination battle confirming Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and if and how the Court can salvage democracy.


The Atlantic—November 19, 2018
Trump’s Voter-Fraud Lies Are a Betrayal of His Oath
It could qualify as well under the formulation of the constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt, who recently updated the handbook Black wrote on impeachment and who defines the impeachable offense as “a crime against perpetuation of the order and ethos of the State.”


Recode Decode—November 19, 2018
Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? It’s complicated. (Audio and transcript)
Kara Swisher: Today in the red chair is Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. It’s a group at Columbia University that defends the freedoms of speech and press in the digital age. …
Jameel Jaffer: We published a paper by Tim Wu, that was the first one that we published, called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” And he was thinking about new threats to the First Amendment. Like, instead of censorship, flooding in information space.
[Note: Jameel Jaffer is a lecturer at the Law School.]


Daily Maverick—November 19, 2018
Our Burning Planet: The Long Suicide revisited (Audio and story)
Present trends suggest that not many of them will know what lies behind why “their farm has been dried to a crisp or (their) home has been inundated with water and (they’re) fleeing for (their) lives,” as Michael Doyle, an international relations scholar at Columbia University, puts it.
[Note: The Daily Maverick is a South African daily online newspaper]


Philosophy For Our Times—November 20, 2018
E122 | Who We Are | Diane Abbott, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Kemi Badenoch, Richard Reeves (Audio)
To debate these questions of identity and injustice, Rana Mitter is joined by pioneer of intersectional theory Kimberlé Crenshaw, Vice Chair of the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch, social mobility expert Richard Reeves, and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott.


Gothamist—November 20, 2018
Video Allegedly Shows Staten Island Cop Planting Joint In Teen's Car
Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio's announcement that police would no longer arrest New Yorkers for smoking pot in public, glaring loopholes in the policy have essentially "shifted the evidentiary threshold to incentivize cops" to make bad arrests, said Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University specializing in police accountability and criminal law.


The Guardian—November 21, 2018
Triathlons, ultramarathons and ambitious baking: why is modern leisure so competitive?
In a recent essay, In Praise of Mediocrity, the author Tim Wu shared his hunch that we are now afraid of being bad at things: “We are intimidated by the expectation ... that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time.


Bloomberg—November 23, 2018
Dazzled by Ghosn's Star, Investors Ignored Lessons of History
“Lots of companies have been tyrannized by an overly powerful CEO,” said John Coffee, director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. “Think back to WorldCom and Enron: you have a dominant CEO who ignored everyone else and dismissed the board.”
[Note: This article appeared in numerous publications nationwide.]


NPR—November 23, 2018
Comey Vows To Resist Subpoena From House Republicans For Closed-Door Testimony
"While the authority for Congressional subpoenas is broad, it does not cover the right to misuse closed hearings as a political stunt to promote political as opposed to legislative agendas," Comey's lawyer, Daniel Richman, said in a statement a day after the subpoenas were issued on Wednesday.


The Economist—November 24, 2018
The person who is doing most to undermine the Reserve Bank of India
Sometime in the 1990s Jagdish Bhagwati, one of India’s most distinguished economists, encountered Swaminathan Gurumurthy, a financial commentator associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), a Hindu-nationalist organisation. … Mr Bhagwati came to a caustic conclusion. If rss ideologues like Mr Gurumurthy were economists, then Mr Bhagwati was a “Bharatnatyam dancer”, he said (referring to a traditional dance from Tamil Nadu performed by women).


KCBS Radio—November 24, 2018
Federal Government Report On Climate Change Says Consequences Of Global Warming Are Already Here (Audio)
The federal government released a comprehensive report Friday detailing several major ways that climate change is impacting the US right now - and how severe the damage is going to get. KCBS Radio anchors Melissa Culross and Jon Bristow spoke to Michael Gerrard, a professor at Columbia University and the Director of the Law School's Center for Climate Change Law about the ramifications of the report.


BBC World Service | The Compass—November 25, 2018
The Great Unravelling: Trade and Trump, Episode 4 of 5 (Audio)
(14:16) Petros Mavroidis teaches the law of the WTO at Columbia Law School in New York, and he’s skeptical that the U.S. is motivated by a sincere desire to improve the WTO.


The Intercept—November 25, 2018
THE COUNTERINSURGENCY PARADIGM: HOW U.S. POLITICS HAVE BECOME PARAMILITARIZED
And steadily, all of the counterinsurgency tactics of these foreign wars have crept back home, Bernard Harcourt argues in a recent book. Called “The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens” and it makes the argument that through NSA spying; Trump’s constant, daily distractions; and paramilitarized police forces or private security companies, the same counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare used against post-9/11 enemies has now come to U.S. soil as the effective governing strategy.


SCOTUSblog—November 26, 2018
Argument preview: Court once again to examine anti-fraud rules of securities law
By Ronald Mann
Next Monday’s argument in Lorenzo v. SEC involves a proceeding sanctioning petitioner Francis Lorenzo under a different set of closely related provisions, which impose liability for using fraudulent schemes in connection with the sale of securities.


Reuters—November 26, 2018
Does Delaware law preclude mandatory arbitration of federal securities claims?
In the new paper, the securities law professors – including, among other luminaries, John Coffee of Columbia, Lucian Bebchuk and John Coates of Harvard, Ann Lipton of Tulane, James Cox of Duke and Donald Langevoort of Georgetown—contend that federal securities claims are outside the scope of corporate charters and bylaws governed by Delaware law.


Buzzfeed News—November 26, 2018
Trump Said “I Don’t Believe It” About His Government’s Climate Change Report Finding And Scientists Are Dismayed
"Every U.S. and international scientific body agrees that humans are causing dangerous climate change," Michael Gerrard, a professor at Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told BuzzFeed News in an email. "None of this matters to President Trump. He is impervious to facts."


Vox—November 26, 2018
Trump White House issues climate change report undermining its own policy
“The report affirms what we’ve all known: The costs of climate change under a business as usual scenario are phenomenal,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
 

Yale Law Journal | YLJ Podcast—November 26, 2018
YLJ Podcast (128:1): Professor David Pozen on Transparency’s Ideological Drift
On our first episode of Volume 128, co-hosts Cody Poplin and Sasha Dudding interview Professor David Pozen about his recently published Article, Transparency’s Ideological Drift, 128 Yale L.J. 100 (2018).


National Jurist—November 26, 2018
Columbia Law: Forget Big Law, think Big Heart
Columbia Law School has a great overall rep, but its real claim to fame is that it sends the most grads to Big Law than any law school in the nation. … And now Columbia is stepping up its game. “Columbia Law School has a strong tradition of educating and mentoring graduates who will go on to serve the community, and these enhancements now position us as the premier destination for law students eager to pursue public interest and government careers,” said Dean Gillian Lester, in a news release.


BoingBoing—November 26, 2018
Arrogant overreach: Ajit Pai's plan to totally destroy net neutrality may doom him in court
As Tim Wu -- the competition and internet legal scholar who coined the term "Network Neutrality" -- writes in the New York Times, "A mere change in F.C.C. ideology isn’t enough."


The Atlantic—November 27, 2018
The Tax-Code Shift That’s Changing Liberal Activism
By David Pozen
But resistance groups have also been transforming American politics behind the curtains, through the choices they are making about their place within the tax code. This seemingly dry legal development could turn out to be one of the movement’s most significant legacies, as it presages a new model of liberal activism for the age of Trump and beyond.


Financial Times—November 27, 2018
Letters to the editor | Buenos Aires summit is a good place to start fighting back against destructive unilateralism
By Karl Sauvant, Axel Berger, and Uri Dadush, among others
Ten years after the G20 proved its effectiveness in dealing with the global financial crisis, it needs to step up its efforts to overcome a political crisis, fuelled by destructive unilateralism, that threatens international governance on trade, investment and tax. Against this background, as members of the T20 Task Force on Trade, Investment and Tax Cooperation, we propose that the G20 take initiatives in three key areas.
[Note: Prof. Sauvant is a lecturer at the Law School and resident senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI).]


SCOTUSblog—November 27, 2018
Argument analysis: Justices dubious about ramifications of broad Indian reservation in Oklahoma
By Ronald Mann
If the argument tells us anything about the likely outcome of the case, it suggests that several of the justices will balk at the stark implications of moving so much territory – about half of the state of Oklahoma – into reservation status.
[Note: Prof. Mann also wrote a preview of Carpenter v. Murphy for SCOTUSblog.]


SCOTUSblog—November 27, 2018
Argument preview: Of patents, prior art and secret sales
By Ronald Mann
The question before the court is whether the invention was “on sale” (and thus barred from patenting) if the inventor made a private sale that did not make the invention “available to the public” until after the patent filing.


Reuters—November 27, 2018
New York top court: Jury trials needed when deportation a risk
Mark Zeno, a Columbia Law School lecturer representing Suazo, welcomed the decision. “You can’t separate penalties imposed by the federal government from those the state imposes when viewing a conviction’s consequences,” Zeno said.
[Note: Zeno is a lecturer at the Law School who co-leads the Criminal Appeals externship. This article appeared in numerous publications nationwide.]


CBC News—November 28, 2018
'This isn't what we were promised': Amid GM closures, Trump's economic policies are coming home to roost
Michael Graetz, a former U.S. Treasury official and tax law expert, agrees the tariffs should blare a "caution sign about trade wars." But he isn't so quick to criticize the president's tax-reform policies, believing it's still too early to tell whether the lower tax rate will ultimately produce more jobs in the U.S. — even though he says "there's no question" most of the savings have gone into stock buybacks.


WIRED—November 28, 2018
THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE IS NOW, AND IT’S HAPPENING TO YOU
“This is a powerful piece of artillery for any legislator who is interested in advocating for action,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.


Forbes—November 28, 2018
Elon Musk Said Tesla Was 'Single-Digit Weeks' From Death -- Where Are The Disclosures?
“You don’t have an obligation to disclose material developments on a day-by-day basis,” says John Coffee, director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. “Silence is not actionable unless there’s a duty to disclose.”


Nashville Tennessean—November 28, 2018
Why Tennessee took more than 30 years to set executions for death row inmates
The latest wave of executions illustrate a dominant trend with death sentences in Tennessee and nationwide. … A report on the death penalty from Columbia University's law school that reviewed death sentences imposed from 1973-1995 found that errors often are rampant in capital cases. "Serious, reversible error permeates the existing death penalty system," the report found. "It plays a cruel hoax on taxpayers, the judicial system, innocent defendants and families of murder victims."


The Emory Wheel—November 28, 2018
Wheel Debates: Are Genetic Modification’s Risks Justified?
In the words of Columbia University Professor of Economics, Law, and International Relations Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, “fear of an improbable Frankenstein is leading to the certain prospect of the Grim Reaper.”


The New York Review of Books—November 29, 2018
How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right
By Bernard Harcourt
Speaking openly to the new right, Trump is rallying and emboldening a counterrevolutionary politics. If the American people do not act soon, we risk being caught in a downward authoritarian spiral or violent civil strife.


The Times of India—November 29, 2018
How to game elections: Social media provide a costless platform for political parties to spread disinformation
By Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary
In India next year another very important test of democracy’s power to resist the bad effects of misinformation distributed through targeted political communication will occur; current assembly elections may be a trial run. Early indications are very worrisome.


The Washington Post—November 29, 2018
Why there’s reason to question Trump’s answers to Mueller — and what that means legally
Jennifer Rodgers, a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, broke it down for us over email. "The written answers to Mueller would be legally just like an oral statement, so subject to a false statements charge under 18 USC 1001,” she wrote. To make such a charge, “you need to prove the statement was knowingly false when it was made,” meaning that Trump’s claim that he didn’t know about the meeting to the best of his knowledge “muddies it a bit but not too much."


Nonprofit Quarterly—November 29, 2018
If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em? –The Rise of the 501c4 on the Left
But as David Pozen, a Columbia law professor, explains in the Atlantic, the 501c4 is increasingly used by both left and right.


MARFA Public Radio | West Texas Talk—November 29, 2018
Kimberlé Crenshaw Returns To Marfa (Audio)
On this episode of West Texas Talk, Elise Pepple sits down with critical race theorist Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw. They unpack a term Crenshaw coined in 1989 as a framework for understanding how different forms of discrimination overlap to affect marginalized people — intersectionality. Crenshaw is a law professor at UCLA and Columbia Law school, where she directs the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.


DRUGSTORE CULTURE—November 29, 2018
Welcome to a world ruled by networks
More recently, Philip Bobbitt has charted the emergence of what he calls the ‘market state’ – and, in his classic study, Terror and Consent (2008), plotted their ‘unique vulnerabilities’ and the ‘connectivity that allows a cascading series of vulnerabilities to be exploited.’


SFGate—November 30, 2018
New San Jose billboard calls egg-eaters bad feminists, ruffles feathers
The phrase "intersectional feminism" was first used by scholar and civil rights activist Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to call for a more comprehensive feminist movement that took into greater account the experiences of women of color.


Daily Kos—November 30, 2018
The Trump effect: Swastikas now spreading across college campuses
Bernard Harcourt (also a professor at Columbia), writing for the New York Review of Books, believes Americans have underestimated the degree to which Trump has fanned the flames of white nationalism—and its constant partner, anti-Semitism—in this country, through his speeches and actions that constantly seek to place blame and malign specific groups of Americans—typically Jews, Muslims, leftists and anyone who is not white.
 

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This report, which gets posted online as well, 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. Faculty members who are featured in the media are encouraged to send their clips to [email protected] for possible inclusion in our Clip Report. Faculty members seeking assistance in placing an op-ed, promoting scholarship, facilitating interviews, event coverage, or media training, may email us at [email protected] or call us at 212-854-2650.