Faculty in the News

Columbia Law School Clip Report, January 1–15, 2019

Art in America—Jan. 1
Your Face Tomorrow
Perhaps most disturbingly, Dragonfly Eyes reveals how the growing reach of the surveillance state is normalized and supplemented by countless individual acts of voluntary disclosure—a state of affairs that the legal scholar Bernard Harcourt has called the “expository society.”
 

The Washington Post—Jan. 2
Happy Hour Roundup
Jedediah Purdy offers a must-read thread making the case for cautious optimism about where our politics and democracy are headed in the near future
 

The Washington Post—Jan. 3
Trump’s reign of corruption will now face real opposition. Here are three things to watch.
First, as Jedediah Purdy points out, progressives and Democrats appear to be undergoing a fundamental shift in attitudes toward democracy itself.


Yahoo News—Jan. 3
Can a sitting president be indicted?
In a similar interpretation for the Lawfare blog, legal scholar Philip Bobbitt writes, “When the president pardons himself, he assumes a power that is incompatible with, rather than a supplement to, the application of the federal criminal law.”
 

Yahoo Finance—Jan. 3
A simple, yet radical solution to solve Facebook's problems
Lina Khan, an academic fellow at Columbia Law School and a senior fellow at the Open Markets Institute (OMI), an anti-monopoly think tank based in Washington D.C., notes that most of the major concerns about Facebook including privacy and national security are “heightened because of Facebook’s market power” and scale. … Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, author of a new book, “The Curse of Bigness,” that essentially calls for a break up of Facebook, tells me that Instagram and WhatsApp “could position themselves as the anti-Facebook.”
[Note: Amid the release of Prof. Tim Wu's new book The Curse of Bigness—combined with related news concerning companies like Amazon and Facebook—he was cited and quoted extensively during this period in publications including Boing Boing, Bookforum, the Columbia Daily Tribune, Columbia Journalism Review, Medium, NBC News, The New York Times, ProMarket, Reuters, and Washington Monthly.]
 

Law360—Jan. 3
Current SEC Shutdown May Set New Record
Columbia Law School professor John Coffee Jr. said the impact on planned IPOs could be one of the most significant effects of the SEC going dark.


InsideClimate News—Jan. 4
A Surge of Climate Lawsuits Targets Human Rights, Damage from Fossil Fuels
And while the plaintiffs haven't secured any substantial victories in U.S. courts, they may be scoring a different victory by drawing attention to the inaction of Congress and the Executive Branch, said Michael Gerrard, faculty director at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.


LLM Guide—Jan. 4
Online and Hybrid LL.M. Programs: The Best of Both Worlds
Columbia Law School, for instance, has just launched a new hybrid Executive LL.M. in Global Business Law that kicks off in March. … Julie Sculli, director of the new Columbia program, says the idea is to give time-pressed lawyers greater flexibility.


New Internationalist—Jan. 4
Five climate struggles to watch in 2019
According to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, over 1,000 climate-change cases have now been filed against governments, corporations and individuals in 24 countries.


Forbes Brasil—Jan. 4
Musk deveria ter comunicado sobre o risco da Tesla? (Portuguese)
"You do not have the obligation to disclose relevant events on a daily basis," says John Coffee, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. "Silence is not subject to judicial action unless there is a duty to disclose."


FOX Business—Jan. 7
IPO holdup: SEC can't process applications during partial government shutdown
According to Columbia Law School professor John Coffee, individual IPOs this year could reach “record-breaking levels of $20 billion or more.”


ThinkProgress—Jan. 7
Supreme Court issues ‘crushing blow’ to Exxon in major climate case, legal experts say
“Courts have repeatedly rejected Exxon’s attempts to stop the state attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts from investigating the company’s historic knowledge about climate change and what it did with that information,” Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told ThinkProgress.
 

Newsmax—Jan. 7
SCOTUS Must Replace Auer With Constitutionally Sound Rule of Construction
Likewise, Columbia University Law Professor Philip Hamburger, in his 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?,” cited Auer when he wrote: “The Supreme Court notoriously explained ‘the principle of deference to administrative interpretations’ in Chevron.”


SCOTUSblog—Jan.8
Argument preview: Justices to consider removal of class actions to federal court
By Ronald Mann
When the counterclaim defendant is the original plaintiff, we know from a 1941 Supreme Court decision (Shamrock Oil v. Sheets) that the plaintiff’s status as a counterclaim defendant does not make it a “defendant” that can remove the case to federal court under Section 1441. The question here is what happens when the original defendant’s counterclaim brings new parties in to the litigation.
 

New York Law Journal—Jan. 8
NY Lawmakers, Attorneys Propose New Ethics Watchdog Modeled on Judicial Conduct Monitor
It has the support of several good government and civic organizations, including the New York City Bar Association and the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School. Berit Berger, executive director of the center and a former federal prosecutor, said the legislation has the potential to put New York on the same level as other states with strong ethics enforcement agencies.


Law360—Jan. 8
High Court Decision Sets Arbitration, Court Power Balance
At issue is the interpretation of the so-called First Options test … The issue had been opined on by George Bermann, the director of the Center for International Commercial and Investment Arbitration at Columbia Law School, in an amicus brief submitted to the high court last fall.


WGN-AM | The Opening Bell—Jan. 8
The Opening Bell 1/8/19: How Much “Administrative” Work You Do In Your Own Life? (Audio)
Steve Grzanich talked with Elizabeth Emens (Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Author of Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More) about how we can break down the daily tasks that bog us down and simplify our lives.
[Note: Amid the release of Prof. Emens’ new book Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More, she was interviewed and quoted extensively in media outlets including WAMC’s The Roundtable and WOSU Radio’s All Sides with Ann Fisher.]
 

Medium | Bunk—Jan. 8
Best American History Reads of 2018
Legal History, Honorable Mentions: No Law Without Politics (No Politics Without Law) [Jedediah Purdy, Law and Political Economy]
 

BookRiot—Jan. 8
50 MUST-READ BOOKS ABOUT TECH AND STARTUP CULTURE
THE MASTER SWITCH BY TIM WU
… Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of ‘the master switch’? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.”
 

Inter Press Service—Jan. 8
Rethinking Free Trade Agreements in Uncertain Times
As trade liberalization advocate Jagdish Bhagwati has argued, bilateral and plurilateral FTAs have long undermined WTO-led trade multilateralism.


The New York Times—Jan. 9
CLIMATE FWD: Round and Round We Go
Legal analysts are unsure of those prospects. “It is possible that the trial will never happen,” Michael Burger and Jessica Wentz wrote recently on Columbia Law School’s Climate Law Blog.
 

New York Law Journal—Jan. 9
New York Environmental Legislation in 2018
By Michael B. Gerrard and Edward McTiernan
In their Environmental Law column, Michael Gerrard and Edward McTiernan report on several significant environmental developments and laws enacted in 2018.


SCOTUSblog—Jan. 9
Opinion analysis: Kavanaugh’s first opinion rejects vague exception limiting enforcement of arbitration agreements
By Ronald Mann
As it turns out, Henry Schein will shed no light on that broader question, because even the justices more skeptical about arbitration saw no merit in the arguments against arbitration here.
 

Reuters—Jan. 9
Cato sues SEC over ‘gag rule’ barring defendants from protesting allegations after settlement
Judge Rakoff’s crusade against the SEC’s policies ended abruptly at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2012, but a group called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is headed by Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger, has recently taken up the mantle of protest against SEC gag provisions.


New York Law Journal—Jan. 9
NY Law Schools Fear That Government Shutdown Is Discouraging Public Service
“These shutdowns not just only undermine the public confidence but I also think it derails bright young law students from entering government service,” said Rachel Pauley, who oversees D.C. externships for Columbia Law School. “I think it will be a real shame if students miss out on that experience. It upsets me horribly,” said William Yeomans, a former federal employee who teaches the Columbia students an ethics course leading into the externship. “I think what’s going on is an exercise in irresponsibility. The government should never be shut down.”
[Note: This article also appeared in Nonprofit Quarterly.]


Propmodo—Jan. 9
Hines Chooses Its Weapon in the Battle for Tenant Engagement
As Tim Wu said in his book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, “When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it.”


L’Obs—Jan. 9
Kimberlé Crenshaw, la juriste qui a inventé "l’intersectionnalité" (French)
Kimberlé Crenshaw coming to Paris for a series of meetings (this January 9, then January 17 and 18) at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne is an exceptional event, particularly important in a context where all kinds of things are said about "intersectionality".


The Chronicle of Higher Education—Jan. 10
Keep Cross-Examination Out of College Sexual-Assault Cases
By Suzanne Goldberg
But to override current, experience-based procedures and impose a national cross-examination rule across all higher-education institutions in the United States would undermine, not enhance, the fair and impartial treatment that all students deserve.
 

Lawfare—Jan. 10
Remembering the Ludlow Amendment
By Matthew Waxman
The proposal was the closest the United States ever came to formally amending the Constitution’s allocation of war powers, and it would have revised them in exactly the opposite direction in which their interpretation has evolved in practice since the amendment’s defeat.
 

The New York Times—Jan. 10
After the ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ Documentary, #MeToo Has Finally Returned to Black Girls
That’s because black girls experience racial, gender and economic oppressions all at the same time, a phenomenon the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality. As a result, their voices and experiences do not neatly fit into a single-issue narrative of gender or race.


NBC News—Jan. 10
The 'doomsday' scenario: Here's what happens if the shutdown drags on
"The market was waiting for this huge avalanche of IPOs," said John Coffee Jr., director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. "All of this stuff is on hold. The market is fluctuating wildly, and this is going to remove a stimulus."
[Note: This article appeared in numerous publications worldwide.]


Idaho Business Review—Jan. 10
Law school enrollment is up, and that’s a good thing
Recently, New York-based Columbia Law School, one of the top law schools in the country, announced it will invest $4.5 million in the next three years to attracting and educating students pursuing public interest and government careers.


New Haven Independent—Jan. 10
Legal Aid To City: Get Moving On Lead Paint Law
Legal Aid secured a commitment from Emily Benfer, a Columbia University professor, and from the national nonprofit Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI) to volunteer time to serve on the working group.


Catholic Herald—Jan. 10
Can the natural law tradition be revived?
Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum, “the common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky”, today serves as an epitaph for the natural law tradition. In its place, legal positivism became the dominant theory of jurisprudence. Its dominance goes across ideological bounds. Compare Antonin Scalia on the Right with Joseph Raz on the Left – both very different in their ideological orientations, but nonetheless equally ardent legal positivists.


Sampan News—Jan. 10
Paid to be pregnant: American women having Chinese babies
Currently, there are no federal surrogacy laws; the laws vary from state to state. In 2016, 14 states permit some form of surrogacy, according to the Columbia Law School Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic.


First Things—Jan. 11
A DISMAL TRADITION
By Philip Hamburger
Readers of First Things will already know of the recent senatorial attacks on judicial nominees for their Catholicism. … Are they so immersed in old-style nativism that they do not understand what they are doing? Whatever the answer, it is clear that this dismal tradition persists.


WNYC | The Takeaway—Jan. 11
Playing Dirty or Just Plain Playing — The Game of Political Hardball (Audio)
What exactly is political hardball? “Political behaviors that don’t necessarily break the law, but nonetheless break the perceived rules of constitutional politics.” That’s David Pozen, he’s a professor at Columbia Law School.


The American Prospect—Jan. 11
ExxonMobil Can’t Hide Its Climate Records Any Longer
“The claims that Exxon was making in that lawsuit were on the fringe. They were trying to block an investigation at the very start claiming that the investigation itself violated Exxon’s First Amendment rights to say what it wanted to say about climate change,” says Michael Gerrard, a Columbia law professor and director of the school’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.


Medium—Jan. 11
“Sex Work” is a Neoliberal Term
Critical race theorists, like Gerald Torres, and feminist/womanist interlocutors, like Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberle Crenshaw, have noted how the prostitution debate, framed in (neo)liberal/libertarian terms, has not only effaced gender domination structures that preface the phenomenon of prostitution, they have effaced the racialized structures that are manifest in prostitution and force women of color into prostitution disproportionately.


CNN—Jan. 13
How Michael Cohen's testimony could complicate life for President Trump
By Jennifer Rodgers
While Cohen did not provide any details about the subjects of his testimony … there are at least three avenues of inquiry that could be pursued by committee members or volunteered by Cohen that could potentially cause President Trump and his three eldest children a whole heap of trouble.
[Note: Rodgers is a lecturer at the law school and serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (CAPI).]


Law.com—Jan. 14
Ahead of the Curve: LRAP Arms Race
Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and New York University School of Law have since the summer announced improvements to their existing programs that expand coverage and options for graduates. … Columbia announced in November that it's pumping an additional $4.5 million into its public interest support programs over the next three years. The school is upping the income threshold for the program to $55,000 from $50,000.


Lawfare—Jan. 14
Indicting and Prosecuting a Sitting President
By Philip Bobbitt
… I confess I am a bit jaded when I hear cries of, “No man is above the law!” While this states an important precept, it invites rather than decides a further question: What exactly is the law with respect to presidents whose constitutional role is unique?


SCOTUSblog—Jan. 15
Argument analysis: Quiescent bench dubious about broad fee awards in copyright cases
By Ronald Mann
My strong impression from the argument is that we should expect a consensus limiting the permissible costs to the traditional “taxed” costs set out in Section 1920, and that we should expect an early opinion explaining that result.
[Note: Prof. Mann also wrote a preview of Rimini Street v. Oracle USA for SCOTUSblog.]


SCOTUSblog—Jan. 15
Opinion analysis: Justices uphold arbitration exemption for transportation workers in rare victory for arbitration opponents
By Ronald Mann
New Prime, though, is anything but business as usual: Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for a unanimous court rejects a claim for arbitration for the first time in a string of more than a dozen of the Supreme Court’s cases stretching back more than a decade.


Voice of America—Jan. 15
Attorney General Nominee Faces Tough Questioning
William Yeomans, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Justice and a lecturer in law at Columbia University, said Rosenstein has protected the Mueller investigation from "political interference." He added that there is "an inherent problem in having this president select the person who's going to oversee the investigation into this president."
[Note: Yeomans is a lecturer at the Law School through the externship on the federal government in Washington, D.C.]
 

City & State New York—Jan. 15
Focusing on William Barr’s antitrust record
“I think New York, in particular, can have a reinvigoration of state antitrust, as opposed to federal,” Tim Wu, author of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” told City & State in December. “If New York challenges (the T-Mobile-Sprint merger), it’s like New York is at the center of antitrust enforcement.”
 

Diverse: Issues In Higher Education—Jan. 15
‘Mascu’sectionality: Theorizing an Alternative Framework for Black Males
The term intersectionality, coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, underscores the ‘multidimensionality’ of marginalized subjects’ lived experiences (Crenshaw, 1989: 139). From its inception, intersectionality has had a long-standing interest in one particular intersection: the intersection of race and gender.
 

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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.