Faculty in the News

Forward.com—November 30, 2017
Shadowy Israeli App Turns American Jews Into Foot Soldiers In Online War
According to David Pozen, a professor at Columbia University’s law school, “flooding” constitutes blasting a large amount of content into a particular web space. “You just distract attention away from messages that you don’t want to get focused on, and take advantage of the scarcity of listener attention to dilute the force of messages,” Pozen said.

Bloomberg—December 1, 2017
Messy Clouds and Inferior Officers—The SEC, ALJs and Order Maintained
As noted above, the SEC may not be the most nimble of agencies when reacting to challenges. Columbia University Law Professor John C. Coffee Jr., compared the Commission to the Vatican, with a bureaucracy that often moved at the pace of the Roman Curia when it came to fundamental changes.

Buzzfeed—December 1, 2017
Flynn's Plea Deal Makes It Clear He's A Key Witness. But Against Whom?
“What we really are waiting for is the ultimate chess move by the Mueller team,” former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers, who is now executive director of Columbia Law School’s Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity, told BuzzFeed News.

Foreign Affairs—December 1, 2017
A Reckless Tax Plan: Why Its Provisions Offer No Guarantee of Growth
By Alex Raskolnikov
“As I wrote in “A Tale of Two Tax Plans” (July/August 2017), the central tension underlying the tax overhaul has been apparent for some time. That tension is between the reform’s clear immediate effects and its speculative long-term consequences.”

CBC—December 2, 2017
Flynn flipping is a major break for Mueller — and bad news for the next big target
Dan Richman, the Columbia University law professor and friend of former FBI director James Comey who leaked Comey's memo detailing conversations with Trump, said in an interview that “no reputable prosecutor” would accept a co-operator they haven't already carefully vetted through debriefings.

Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien—December 2, 2017
Net Neutrality: Without Regulations, Could Harm Democracy (Video)
Tim Wu coined the term net neutrality. He is a professor of law. Give us a sense of how net neutrality affects consumers? How do we experience that?
“It's what we are used to. You go to whatever site you want. you watch videos on netflix, amazon or whatever you want, and it is all there.there is no blocking or throttling.”

WCNY—December 3, 2017
December 3, 2017: The Capitol Pressroom (Audio)
Guests: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D); Shauna O’Toole, openly transgender candidate for the 54th NYS Senate District; Tim Wu, Columbia Law School Professor; and Jessica Post, Executive Director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

EurekAlert—December 4, 2017
Serious risk of mental health crisis in Yemen, say experts
“Despite the likely massive immediate and long-term mental health implications of the current conflict in Yemen, the issue has largely been neglected by both domestic authorities and the international community,” said Professor Sarah Knuckey, the director of the Human Rights Clinic.

Slate—December 4, 2017
How a Supreme Court Decision for Masterpiece Cakeshop Would Harm Religious Minorities
By Katherine Franke and Johnathan Smith
“On Tuesday, lawyers representing Jack Phillips, a baker from Lakewood, Colorado, will argue to the U.S. Supreme Court that religious freedom is under serious, if not mortal, threat…Phillips and his lawyers have it exactly wrong—it is they who pose a threat to religious freedom.” 

The Times of India—December 5, 2017
TRAI and fail: By decreeing net neutrality, India’s regulator has trumped America’s FCC for an open internet
By Eben Moglen & Mishi Choudhary
“Thanks to the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India, a crucial natural experiment in internet policy is about to be conducted between the world’s largest and the world’s richest democracy.”

CNBC—December 5, 2017
‘Father of net neutrality’ weighs in on the battle over internet regulations (Video)
Tim Wu, Columbia University School of Law professor, discusses the fight to keep net neutrality.

Wired—December 6, 2017
How the FCC's Net Neutrality Plan Breaks With 50 Years of History
By Tim Wu
“Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than that. So where did net neutrality come from? How did it get started?”

New Republic—December 6, 2017
How Justice Kennedy Fell for a Right-Wing Meme
In fact, a ruling in favor of the cake shop may later enable discrimination against members of minority faiths, as Columbia Law School professor Katherine Franke has pointed out. “Religious minorities . . . depend on non-discrimination laws to make it possible for them to work,” she said Tuesday.

The Washington Post—December 6, 2017
The Energy 202: Legal battle over national monuments is just beginning
“This move is consistent with other attempts by the Trump administration to upend the administrative state,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “It puts the operation of the government into a state of suspended animation.”

PBS—December 6, 2017
Opinion: The Republican tax bill is a fiscally irresponsible, loophole-ridden mistake
By Alex Raskolnikov
“The most significant tax legislation in decades is about to become law. The tax bill brings some good news and some bad news, but the two will not be evenly distributed.”

Vanity Fair—December 6, 2017
G.O.P. Tax Plan “Riddled“ with Loopholes Just Begging to Be Exploited
Once you offer a 25 percent [rate] to someone who is looking at 39.6 percent there is a tremendous incentive to find ways to drop from basically 40 to 25,” Alex Raskolnikov, a tax professor at Columbia Law School, told me. “This is going to put tax planning on a whole new level.”

WNYC—December 7, 2017
How the Law Separates Sexual Harassment, Assault and Other Abuses in the Workplace (Audio)
Legal principles can help guide the answers to those questions, said Suzanne Goldberg, a professor at Columbia Law School and leader of the school's Center for Gender and Sexuality.

Press of Atlantic City—December 7, 2017
Senate committee fails to vote on governor's Pinelands Commission appointee
Environmental groups had speculated that Christie intended to replace environmental law expert Commissioner Edward Lloyd, who voted against both pipelines and is one of many gubernatorial appointees whose term has expired.

The Washington Post—December 8, 2017
The Finance 202: GOP drive to repeal estate tax risks making its tax plan more unpopular
“It seems to me it ought to be a remarkably low priority for tax reduction,” says Michael Graetz, a law professor at Columbia University and former Treasury Department official under George H.W. Bush whose 2006 book “Death by a Thousand Cuts” chronicled the history of estate tax lobbying.

The New York Post—December 9, 2017
City Council speaker candidates support citywide ‘diversity’ audit
Race-based hiring quotas could violate anti-discrimination laws, according to Katherine Franke, a Columbia Law professor and director of the school’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. “They [audits of the city’s workforce] might document gross imbalances in some departments or in some parts of the hierarchy,” Franke said. But she cited several studies that show “it’s not clear that having more women or people of color or gay people in leadership will result in policies that are nondiscriminatory.”

The Regulatory Review—December 11, 2017
Of “Workarounds” and Bureaucrats
Government officials must reckon with the messy realities of what Columbia Law School Professor Gillian Metzger and Vanderbilt Law School Professor Kevin Stack have called “internal administrative law” if they are to carry out faithfully their obligations to the public rather than just push paper and collect a paycheck.

Bloomberg—December 11, 2017
Ambitious Climate Suit Pitting Teens Against Trump Faces Test
That was a “novel and unusual decision” that immediately raised the stakes in the case, said Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at Columbia Law School.

Buzzfeed—December 11, 2017
The Trump Administration Just Went To Court To Stop Kids From Suing Over Climate Change
“In terms of reading through the tea leaves, I think the short answer is: It appears to look good for Our Children’s Trust,” Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told BuzzFeed News after the Monday arguments.

Inside Climate News—December 11, 2017
In Kids’ Climate Lawsuit, Judges Question Government Effort to Get Case Dismissed
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, has been following the case and said the judges' questions and comments on Monday suggested they would send the case back to the district court and allow it to proceed. "They said it's too early to be here," Gerrard said.

DW—December 12, 2017
What will Sarraf get from his confession?
Daniel Richman
(Turkish language version)

Financial Times—December 12, 2017
‘Spirit of the law’ returns to US courts
Ronald Mann, a professor at the Columbia Law School in New York, thinks Mr Katyal’s success was in persuading the court to see the case as an effort to work around the decision of previous cases. “The groundwork for this case was set in two previous cases — Daimler AG v Bauman and BNSF Railway Co. v Tyrrell — in which the Supreme Court put limitations on the jurisdictions of state courts,” says Mr Mann.

WNCY—December 12, 2017
December 12, 2017: The Capitol Pressroom (Audio)
What is net neutrality and how will the internet be impacted if it is taken away? Tim Wu, Author and Professor at Columbia University broke it down for us.

Public Radio International—December 12, 2017
An FCC vote to dismantle net neutrality is expected this week. Here’s what that means (Audio)
Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality,” says without internet regulation, companies like Netflix likely wouldn’t have succeeded. “Why would cable companies allow Netflix to exist?” he says.

Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross—December 12, 2017
Life without net neutrality hard to imagine in Seattle (Audio)
It will begin with services such as Netflix. People will see the price of streaming services increase if the FCC ditches the country's net neutrality rules. Internet service bills will increase and everything on it could be priced separately. That's according to Tim Wu, the man who coined the phrase "network neutrality."

The New York Daily News—December 12, 2017
De Blasio plans to turn cluster sites that shelter the homeless into affordable housing
Thomas Merrill, a property law scholar and eminent domain expert at Columbia Law School, called it an “odd one.” “Usually eminent domain is used for some kind of situation where there’s sort of a site-specific problem — you need to expand on an existing facility or you need to put a highway through on a certain route or you need to do something like that,” he told the News.

New York Law Journal—December 12, 2017
How Columbia and NYU Law Schools Position Graduates for US Supreme Court Clerkships
“These are really top jobs to get and I like to think that our students are top students,” said Columbia Law School Dean Gillian Lester. “Part of it is that the judges are looking for really talented people to serve as their apprentices and deputies. There are ways you can use your time at Columbia to make yourself a candidate for these coveted jobs.”

Slate—December 13, 2017
What’s Next for Net Neutrality? (Audio)
The hosts speak with Columbia Law professor Tim Wu — who coined the term net neutrality — about why it’s so crucial to save it and what we might expect from legal challenges stemming from Thursday’s announcement.

AL.com—December 13, 2017
Execution date set for convicted killer in Alabama who is terminally ill
Attorney Bernard E. Harcourt, his lawyer and a professor of law and political science at Columbia, said Hamm has been battling cranial and lymphatic cancer for over three years. Treatment for the illness has compromised his veins, and lethal injection would likely cause “cruel and needless pain,” according to papers filed by Harcourt, who has represented Hamm since 1990.

The Nation—December 13, 2017
Roy Moore Isn’t the Only One Who Thinks Dating Kids Is Fine
By Patricia J. Williams
“The sad truth is that the United States tolerates a surprisingly high rate of child marriage for an industrialized nation. Although the age of consent to marry is pretty uniformly 18 across most of the country, many states allow exceptions, such as in instances of pregnancy or parental consent.”

ABC—December 14, 2017
Judges to examine if drug stash-house stings racially biased
Their main witness is Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School. In his report for defense lawyers, he notes that out of 94 stash-house defendants in the Chicago area between 2006 and 2013, 74 were black, 12 were Hispanic and just eight were white. That and other data, he writes, proves a “pattern of discrimination.”

CNN—December 13, 2017
Another battle of giants: Amazon and Google
“Antitrust is usually about the big guy vs. the little guy; this is new -- it's two giants going at it,” said Tim Wu, professor of antitrust law at Columbia Law School. “It's not something that is within a traditional regulator's realm.”

AP story in The New York Times—December 14, 2017
The Latest: Statistics Key at Phony Stash-House Hearing
Defense expert Jeffrey Fagan testified first. He said statistics prove racial bias.

Chicago Sun-Times—December 14, 2017
Claims of racial discrimination in ATF stings to get rare hearing
Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey Fagan says the odds of the ATF properly charging a group with such a disproportionate racial makeup are less than 0.1 percent. “These analyses show that the ATF is discriminating on the basis of race in selecting stash house defendants,” Fagan wrote in a 75-page report.

New York Daily News—December 14, 2017
Why tax-bill sloppiness hurts you
By Alex Raskolnikov
“It is Congress’ job to make sure that no group of Americans reaps large benefits from new laws only because these laws were ill-conceived and poorly drafted. By enacting a sloppy, loophole-ridden tax law, congressional Republicans are failing to do their job.”

Consumer Reports—December 14, 2017
How You’ll Know Net Neutrality Is Really Gone
“I think one core argument is that broadband pricing will become more like airline pricing—you start paying more fees for the different parts of the internet,” Tim Wu, the Columbia University law professor who coined the term "net neutrality" back in 2003, wrote in an email to Consumer Reports.

Popular Science—December 14, 2017
Net neutrality: where do we go from here?
“I think this thing is doomed in court,” says Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, who is credited with coining the phrase “network neutrality” back in 2002. “They went way too far.”

Note: Tim Wu has been interviewed extensively by major news outlets since the Dec. 14 announcement by the FCC that it would “restore internet freedom.” He has been quoted in outlets including: City & State; Vanity Fair; Forbes; and Wired; among others.

CBS—December 14, 2017
Unprecedented Hearing in Federal Court Examines ATF Tactics in Stash House Stings
Defense expert Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University, testified that his analysis of a universe of nearly 300,000 potential targets in the Chicago area, indicated a far lower percentage of minorities than end up being targeted in the stash house operations.

Bloomberg—December 14, 2017
Exxon Mobil, BP, Others Face New Climate Change Suits
Climate change public nuisance suits are “the wave of the future,” Professor Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in New York, told Bloomberg Law.

The Washington Post—December 15, 2017
Trump environmental officials are keeping tight rein over stampede of FOIA requests
“The desire to consolidate duplicative FOIAs isn’t in itself a sign of something untoward,” said David Pozen, a professor at Columbia Law School and expert on information law. “But the consolidation of the FOIA requests in a political office strikes me as more notable and concerning.”

Law & Crime—December 15, 2017
‘Harlem Shake’ Creators Have Weak Claim Against Daily Caller‘s Video Featuring FCC Chairman
Professor Jane C. Ginsburg doesn’t see the threat going anywhere, however. She teaches copyright law over at Columbia Law School, and argued that The Daily Caller video seems to fall under fair use. 1) Very little of the “Harlem Shake” appeared in the video; and 2) it’s used as an apparent parody.

National Public Radio—December 15, 2017
Court Decision Could Force Changes To ATF's Undercover Operations (Audio)
Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan says his research finds nearly zero percent probability that the ATF stings' racial disparities are by chance.

BBC—December 15, 2017
A shakeup at Airbus (Audio)
According to Anu Bradford, professor at the Columbia School of Law, no one who trades globally can avoid what she calls “the Brussels effect.” “One of the biggest false promises of the campaign is the idea that the UK could somehow untangle and unleash itself from the EU’s regulations. UK companies continue, after Brexit, to need access to the EU market.”

Arkansas Times—December 15, 2017
Report: LGBT elders face risks from laws allowing religious exemption for discrimination
A new report demonstrates the ways in which LGBT elders are harmed by laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Arkansas. The report — "Dignity Denied: Religious Exemptions and LGBT Elder Services" — was released today by the think tank Movement Advancement Project, Columbia Law School's Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, and Sage, an advocacy group for LGBT elders.

The Guardian—December 15, 2017
What the Colorado baker who refused to sell to a gay couple gets wrong
By Suzanne Goldberg
Last week, I listened as the US supreme court wrestled with whether a Colorado baker could refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple . . . During the argument, it became clear that the baker’s lawyers had also missed a basic lesson in how anti-discrimination laws work.

The Atlantic—December 16, 2017
'The Court System Shouldn't Interrupt the Treatment Process'
These analogies make sense to Kristen Underhill, a Columbia Law School professor who studies how law influences health choices and risk behavior. “Expecting people to remain drug-free as a condition of probation is not a realistic condition given what we know about how this addiction works,” she said.

New Zealand Herald—December 16, 2017
Should killer inmate suffering terminal illness still be executed?
His lawyer, Bernard Harcourt, who is also a professor of law and political science at Columbia, said the execution would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution.

LA Times—December 17, 2017
A New York lawsuit asks: Is graffiti art protected under federal law?
The law, however, does not define “recognized stature,” and it has been relatively untested in the courts, said Philippa Loengard, who teaches art law at Columbia Law School and was not involved in the case.

New York Daily News—December 17, 2017
New York, California senators working on bill in response to net neutrality repeal
Tim Wu, a Columbia Law professor credited with coining the term “net neutrality,” said he expects a legal fight from the feds if the bills are passed, but believes the states could overcome this obstacle. “There's no straightforward answer,” Wu said.

Politico—December 18, 2017
Don’t call Trump strategy a ‘return to sanity,’ aide says
“This one will be widely read because Trump has promised to overturn conventional wisdom and because his foreign policy communication has been so jumbled, including disconnects between the president and his national security principals and the president’s own self-contradictions,” said Matthew Waxman, a professor of national security law at Columbia University and a former George W. Bush National Security Council aide.

Law and Disorder Radio—December 18, 2017
Columbia University Protesters Charged For Disrupting Controversial Speaker (Audio)
Guest – Columbia Law Professor Attorney Katherine Franke about the commission’s findings and recommendations and the objections to the reports conclusions.

Lawfare—December 18, 2017
What To Do About North Korea
By Philip Bobbitt
“Our current approach to the North Korea problem is a combination of both kinetic and diplomatic threats occasionally alternating with the offer of incentives. This approach cannot succeed.”

McKnight’s Senior Living—December 18, 2017
Report: Some residents at risk for a new kind of religious discrimination
“Dignity Denied: Religious Exemptions and LGBT Elder Services” was released by the think tank Movement Advancement Project, Columbia Law School's Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, and SAGE, an advocacy group.

The New York Times—December 18, 2017
The Bitcoin Boom: In Code We Trust
By Tim Wu
“Bitcoin’s rise may reflect, for better or worse, a monumental transfer of social trust: away from human institutions backed by government and to systems reliant on well-tested computer code.”

The New Yorker—December 19, 2017
The Decades-Long Defense of an Alabama Death-Row Prisoner Enters a Final Phase
Harcourt, now fifty-four, earned a law degree and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, wrote six books, edited eight more, and became a professor at Columbia Law School. He also, for the past twenty-seven years, has been representing a prisoner on Alabama’s death row named Doyle Lee Hamm.

Business Insider—December 19, 2017
The first bill to examine 'algorithmic bias' in government agencies has just passed in New York City
Bernard Harcourt, a law professor at Columbia University who has studied risk assessment programs extensively, told Business Insider that “algorithmic bias in government agencies is widespread and growing, especially in areas like policing and criminal adjudication that are getting cannibalized by the facile solution of predictive tools.”

The New York Times—December 20, 2017
The Ghoulish Pursuit of Executing a Terminally Ill Inmate
By Bernard E. Harcourt
“When judges schedule a lethal injection for a terminally ill prisoner whose struggle against lymphatic cancer and extensive medical history has left him without any easily accessible veins, our law descends into a ghoulish inferno.”

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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.