Faculty in the News

Salon—December 16, 2018
Christian nationalists are trying to seize power — but progressives have a plan to fight back
Along with Clarkson, who is a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, presenters included Alison Gill, legal and policy director at American Atheists and Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at Columbia Law School. … Platt began with a point that belongs front and center, since everything in Project Blitz rests on its denial. “I wanted to step back and start out by reminding everyone that religious liberty is a progressive value,” she said.

Lawfare—December 17, 2018
Can the President be Indicted? A Response to Laurence Tribe
By Philip Bobbitt
Laurence Tribe has proposed a novel argument to assert that a sitting president can be indicted. Because I feel so strongly otherwise, and because I have such regard for Professor Tribe, I want to reply to his claims.

CNN—December 17, 2018
Vanuatu threatens to sue biggest carbon energy producers
"There's just a tremendous urgency to take action now, so environmental groups, citizens, states and cities are taking to the courts to try and force action," says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.


CNN Business—December 17, 2018
Big Tech is way too big (Video and story)
Amazon, Google and Facebook tower over their tech competitors. But have they grown too big? Antitrust expert Tim Wu thinks so. The Columbia University law professor doesn't see much of a difference between Big Tech and Standard Oil, one of the industrial giants of the early 20th century.
[Note: Amid the release of Prof. Tim Wu's new book The Curse of Bigness—combined with related news concerning companies like Facebook, AT&T, and Time Warner—he was cited and quoted extensively during this period in publications including Columbia Journalism Review, Just Security, Le Monde, Medium, NBC News, Politico, Publishers Weekly, Techonomy, The New York Times, The Ringer, The Verge and The Washington Post.]

The Register-Guard—December 17, 2018
Pushing climate change in courts
Climate change litigation took off in the mid-2000s in response to “the refusal of the George W. Bush administration” to tackle issues surrounding global warming, according to Michael Gerrard, a Columbia Law School professor who founded the center in 2009.
 

Lawfare—December 17, 2018
Does Trump’s Involvement in the Cohen Payments Constitute an Impeachable Offense? Part II
Somewhat along these lines, the constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt, author of the recently-published supplement to Charles Black’s “Impeachment: A Handbook,” concludes that, standing alone, the campaign finance violations simply lack the "enormity" required for an impeachable offense.


CNN—December 18, 2018
These celebrity dance creators think 'Fortnite' should pay them for their moves. The courts may disagree.
Indeed, while copyright infringement lawsuits in music or video are fairly common, they are rare for choreography, said Jane Ginsburg, a professor of artistic property law at Columbia Law School. "Courts haven't said a lot because courts haven't had a lot of cases," she said.
[Note: This article appeared in numerous publications nationwide.]

Accountancy Age—December 18, 2018
Is letting investors choose auditors the key to reform?
As timing goes for outlining his ideas for empowering investors as a way to improve the audit process, John Coffee could not have hoped for better. … In a two-day conference looking at financial scandals past and present, the Professor of Law at Columbia University was able to bring an international perspective. “There have been auditing failures all over the world this year, but the rhetoric in the UK is unique,” he said.

CNSNews.com—December 18, 2018
Commentary: How Trump Could Crush Hostile Incoming NY AG’s Police State Investigation
Trump’s team should make a constitutional challenge against the Attorney General’s arbitrary power to search. For this Trump should hire Professor Philip Hamburger, whose scholarship on the constitutional problems with the administrative state is not only unmatched, but positions him as among the best lawyers who grasp the true danger of the judgeless searches James will employ.

HuffPost—December 19, 2018
Federal Plan To Reduce Childhood Lead Exposure Falls Short, Experts Say
“It’s a significant step backward in progress to end lead poisoning for children in the United States,” said attorney and health justice scholar Emily Benfer, a visiting associate clinical professor of law at Columbia University Law School who directs the health justice advocacy clinic.

The Gothamist—December 19, 2018
How NY's Outdated Rape Shield Law Works To Harvey Weinstein's Advantage
“Raising the cry of ‘raped by the courts,’” activists and their allies agitated for rape law reform, retired Columbia University law school Nash Professor of Law Emerita Vivian Berger wrote in a seminal 1975 study, Man’s Trial, Woman’s Tribulation: Rape Cases in the Courtroom.
 

The Conversation—December 19, 2018
Your deeply held beliefs may just be wrong – 5 essential reads
Columbia Law School scholar Richard Briffault writes that “the volume of campaign spending is not the main problem with our campaign finance system. The real challenge for our democracy is where so much of this money comes from.”
[Note: This article appeared in numerous publications nationwide.]

Bloomberg—December 20, 2018
My 15 Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2018
Philip Hamburger: “Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech.”
Hamburger asks a great question: Why exactly do we limit the political speech of charitable organizations? Answers it, too. The rule wasn’t handed to us on stone tablets; it’s always been politics, all the way down.
[Note: This article appeared in numerous major publications nationwide.]

Techdirt—December 20, 2018
NY's Record $176 Million Settlement With Charter For Crap Broadband Highlights Cable's Growing Monopoly
At one point, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge tried to insist the NY AG suit was all just part of a secret, vile "cabal" on the part of Netflix and Google simply because the AG hired Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu as an advisor (narrator: it wasn't)

BizNews.com—December 20, 2018
How to clean up dirty Big Four: ‘Let investors choose auditors’
The only way to solve the crisis of confidence in Big Four auditors is to empower investors to choose firms. That's according to John Coffee, Professor of Law at Columbia University, who was speaking at an ICAEW conference looking at financial scandals past and present.

ABA Journal—December 21, 2018
2018's most important legal tech stories
In the states, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu Tweeted that the recent revelations should bring more attention to Facebook’s antitrust and anti-competitive behavior.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—December 21, 2018
19 self-help books to help you live your best life in 2019
“Life Admin” by Elizabeth Emens (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26): Most books about organization focus on rooms; this one focuses on the mind.

ThinkProgress—December 21, 2018
Young people are poised to take the U.S. government to court over climate change
According to the plaintiffs and Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, a final decision won’t come until late 2020 or early 2021.

Smithsonian.com—December 24, 2018
The True Story of the Case Ruth Bader Ginsburg Argues in ‘On the Basis of Sex’
“It can be difficult in 2018 to imagine that so many laws distinguished between men and women or that so many laws restricted the rights of women, but that is where we were,” says Suzanne Goldberg, a professor at Columbia Law School.

Psychology Today—December 24, 2018
Making Holiday Thank-Yous Less Work or More Fun — or Both
By Elizabeth Emens
Do you dread a holiday hangover — not from sugar or alcohol, but from the good fortune of receiving gifts? If you struggle with whether and how to say thank you for gifts, you are not alone.

Quartz—December 26, 2018
1.7 million people have signed a petition in favor of suing France over climate-change inaction
According to Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, “more than 900 climate-related lawsuits were filed in the US since 1986, nearly a third of them since 2016.”


The American Conservative—December 26, 2018
The Agony Of Fortnite Addiction
In The Benedict Option, I quote William James, the founder of psychology, saying that who we are depends on what we pay attention to. I got that insight from Columbia University’s Tim Wu, whose book The Attention Merchants is a history of advertising as an epic contest to win the attention of consumers.

Livemint—December 26, 2018
The image as the iconoclast
Soundararajan and Aruna believe their black feminist sisters such as Burke and Kimberle Crenshaw trailblazed the conversation about the intersectionality between gender and historically marginalized groups—be it blacks in the West or Dalits in India.

The New York Times—December 27, 2018
Bringing to Life the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Only Her Family Knows
The future justice was a stickler when her daughter was growing up, though. A skilled editor, “she made me rewrite every English paper multiple times,” Jane Ginsburg recalled. … A Harvard Law graduate, Jane Ginsburg is now a professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University.

NBC News—December 27, 2018
19 bold predictions for science and technology in 2019
Tim Wu, a lawyer at Columbia University, has argued in his recent book, "The Curse of Bigness," that to break the grip of giant corporations on American democracy, the government needs to break them up. I don't expect that there will be a bipartisan agreement on that.

The Atlantic—December 27, 2018
Affirmative Action Shouldn’t Be About Diversity
Luke Harris, a Vassar professor, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia University and UCLA—both critical-race-theory pioneers—have noted that what got lost in the University of Michigan fight was that students were also awarded 10 points for attending elite high schools, eight points for taking a certain number of AP courses, and four points for being legacies.

Vox—December 27, 2018
The 9 thinkers who made sense of 2018’s chaos
3) Kimberlé Crenshaw on the battle over “identity politics” and “intersectionality”
… But actually understanding intersectionality requires going back to the work of the woman who coined the term: Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor with dual appointments at Columbia and UCLA.

Financial Post—December 27, 2018
Why everyone loses when real estate innovation is stifled
When a resource is owned by many, the rights-holders often prevent others from developing the resource, causing its value to deplete. Michael Heller, a professor of real estate law at Columbia University, has dubbed such a situation “the tragedy of the anticommons.”

Yahoo Finance—December 28, 2018
2 toxic storylines for Facebook won't go away in 2019
In early December, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu estimated the odds of some sort of enforcement action at 80%. Two weeks later, after The New York Times reported on Facebook’s sloppy oversight of leaky data-sharing partnerships, he amended that estimate in an e-mail: “Now 95%.”
 

AskMen—December 28, 2018
Best Motivational Reads of 2018
Since the end of the year presents the perfect opportunity to reflect, recharge, and get motivated with a good book, we tapped our favorite bibliophiles to get the inside scoop on their favorite motivational reads of 2018. … “10% Happier” — Dan Harris | Elizabeth Emens, Author of “Life Admin,” Law Professor at Columbia Law School | … His book is an answer to a question my own book journey has led me to ask myself and others: ‘What are you going to do with your Admin Savings Time?’ Dan Harris's book says meditation is one good answer.”

The Washington Free Beacon—December 29, 2018
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Speech
As 2018 gutters out, sputtering down to its dim end, it might be worth looking back at one of the few genuinely new lights of the past year—the Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger's underappreciated Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech.

Bar & Bench—December 29, 2018
Meet Meher Dev, recipient of the 2018 Baker McKenzie Scholarship
Meher Dev received the Baker McKenzie scholarship for 2018. A graduate of Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), Meher went on to work with Senior Advocate Indira Jaising, and is currently a Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School, New York.

The Wall Street Journal—December 30, 2018
The Stickiness of ‘Life Admin’
By Elizabeth Emens
Life admin is sticky. It tends to stay where it lands. Whoever made the first call to the exterminator often keeps on doing that task.

Hindustan Times—December 30, 2018
Dr Manmohan Singh: An unusual life in unusual times
Listening to them speak, it struck me that Dr Singh’s economic philosophy synthesises the work of his two great contemporaries, Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen. Like Bhagwati, he strongly advocates a freer play of market forces and a greater integration with the global economy; like Sen, he strongly emphasises the importance of social equity with access to health and education for all.


The New York Times—December 31, 2018
Consejos para vivir mejor en 2019 (Spanish)
The columnist Tim Wu said it best in our pages: if we stop doing something that we like only because we feel we should do it with excellence, what we lose is ourselves.

Buzzfeed News—December 31, 2018
As Usual, Women Were Absolutely Killing It In 2018
2018 has been a year of women putting themselves first and at the forefront of every major conversation as much as possible. Here are some of the (many) women who had a great year: … Menaka Guruswamy, who was one of the lawyers who successfully fought for the takedown of Section 377.
[Note: Menaka Guruswamy, BR Ambedkar Research Scholar and Lecturer at Columbia Law was a prime architect of a successful multi-year advocacy campaign to overturn a law in India that criminalized “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.”]

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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.