Faculty in the News: April 15 - 30, 2017

The person who coined the phrase “calculated misery” is a man named Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, an author, and a contributing writer at the New Yorker. His expertise covers topics like net neutrality theory and antitrust law — topics that aren’t far removed from his observations about the airline industry.

 

A third possible response, Jessica Bulman-Pozen and David E. Pozen argued in a valuable, important, and still under-examined 2015 article, is uncivil obedience: a conscientious, communicative, reformist act of strict “conformity with . . . positive law,” “in a manner that calls attention to its own formal legality, while departing from prevailing expectations about how the law will be followed or applied.”

 

She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle—and the women’s movement. Why haven’t you heard of her? … And, four decades before another legal scholar, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, coined the term “intersectionality,” Murray insisted on the indivisibility of her identity and experience as an African-American, a worker, and a woman.

 

Adam Feldman, a postdoctoral fellow in the Empirical Study of Public Law at Columbia Law School, used a topic-modeling program to analyze the language and reasoning in Gorsuch’s Tenth Circuit opinions. The cases dealing with religious freedom are “similar enough that we can get a sense of how he might rule” in Trinity Lutheran, said Feldman, who found Gorsuch has frequently taken a “loose approach” to church-state separation.

 

Michael Gerrard, the Andrew Sabin professor of professional practice at Columbia Law School in New York and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, spoke with Carbon Brief about the election of President Trump, using the legal system to fight Trump’s anti-climate agenda, and the ramifications for the U.S. if it weakens its emissions reductions pledge.

 

By Tim Wu

The remedy is simple: The government can create a means for pharmacies to get supplies from trusted nations overseas at much lower prices. Doing this would not only save Americans a lot of money but also deflate the incentive to engage in abusive pricing in the first place.

 

“We’re talking about a high-stakes game here that affects every business in the country and virtually every individual,” said Michael Graetz, the former deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department who now teaches at the Columbia Law School. “There are billions of dollars at stake.”

 

The federal court system "has the capacity to be pretty powerful," said Gillian Metzger, a professor at Columbia Law School. "We have a very legalistic system," Metzger said. "A lot of what the government does can be challenged in court."

 

On the third episode of Make Me Smart, we talked with Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and the man who coined the phrase “network neutrality” all the way back in 2003 when he was talking about the future of the internet. He discussed his recent book, “The Attention Merchants,” and who could be the winners and losers if net neutrality policy does change. 

 

“If we’re serious about board accountability in this country, it’s hard to understand the case for keeping these directors,” said Robert J. Jackson, a professor at Columbia Law School and the director of the school’s program on corporate law and policy.

 

"These numbers are more than not good, they're reflective of an overwhelming rejection of the directors," said Columbia Law School professor Robert Jackson, who studies corporate governance. Jackson expects at least a few directors step down in a month or two, much like two directors left JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) after winning narrow majorities in 2013.

 

Alex Raskolniknov, a tax professor at Columbia Law School, was alarmed by the lack of precision in the plan. "If this were any other president, this would have been a huge embarrassment of a "plan,'" he wrote to ABC News. "He's had more detail in his tax plan when he was running for president. What was all the hype about this time? ... It's hard to take this seriously ... except it comes from the President of the United States."

 

Let’s get a view now from someone who has tried to shape tax policy from the inside. He’s Michael Graetz, professor of tax law at Columbia Law School in New York, and a former special adviser in the administration of George H.W. Bush. What does he make of what’s going on in the White House?

[NOTE: interview starts at 33:00]

 

Michael J. Graetz, a tax law professor at Columbia University, is not very worried about shifting shenanigans, given that the president is pushing to drop the corporate tax rate to 15 percent. “Once you get the rate down to that low, then the incentive to shift profits offshore decreases,” since the difference between the American rate and other countries’ is so much smaller, Mr. Graetz said. “Safeguards are then less important.”

 

Although EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt publicly doubts a connection between human-produced carbon emissions and global warming, any attempt to undo this rule “would be walking into a legal buzz saw,” says Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

 

“They are telling them all the good news,” says Michael Graetz, a tax law professor at Columbia University, “but there must be some bad news for someone.”

 

Massachusetts v. EPA "clearly means that the administration can't simply say we're going to ignore climate change," said Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. "That decision, plus the court's upholding of the endangerment finding, means there is now solid authority that EPA needs to act on greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "It means they will at least have to pay lip service to the importance of regulating greenhouse gases."

 

“This was all ponies and no manure,” said Michael Graetz, a Columbia University tax law professor and a former Treasury Department official.

 

Michael Graetz, Columbia Law School professor and former deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at the Department of the Treasury and co-author with Linda Greenhouse of The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (Simon & Schuster, 2016), discusses the White House's tax plan, which most notably proposes sharp cuts to both individual and corporate income tax rates.

 

Tim Wu, the Columbia University law professor and anti-trust/competition expert who coined the term "Net Neutrality," has published an open letter to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

 

If the facts in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Pauley are straightforward and easily understood, the legal issues raised by the case are anything but. It’s a classic example of “hard facts make bad law,” explained Elizabeth Platt, director of Columbia Law School’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project.

 

By Tim Wu

The idea of killing net neutrality certainly has nothing to do with voters or majority will. Instead, the proposal, like Mr. Pai’s earlier gutting of privacy protections for cable customers, is at war with the economic populism that voters claimed they wanted and that Mr. Trump promised last year.

 

“A conviction changes everything,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former prosecutor who serves as executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School. “He now has an incentive to try to wrap things up into one global plea agreement.”

 

“Black Girls Matter,” a new report by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, highlighted the troubles facing black girls in school.

 

Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw talks intersectionality and #SayHerName on podcast with Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton.

[NOTE: interview begins at 12:50]

 

The kids suing Donald Trump are marching to the White House"After several years with little success, environmental plaintiffs have now won climate change cases in several countries based on constitutional, human rights and international law grounds, as opposed to the more traditional statutory grounds -- the Netherlands, Pakistan, Austria and South Africa," Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said in an email. "The Oregon case now joins that list, and its symbolic importance has added weight now that Washington is run by climate deniers."

 

Suzanne D. Goldberg, Columbia Law School professor and director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality at Columbia Law School, said she believes stealthing has been going on for a long time, but the aspect of internet promotion among men is new. "I do think that it is the group of people — the group of men, who seem to celebrate and promote stealthing online, that seems to be a new phenomenon," Goldberg told NBC News.

 

Professor Michael Gerrard, of Columbia Law School in New York and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, was equally downcast, saying the US policy on climate change was “completely reversing” in a recent interview with the CarbonBrief website.

 

In other words, a family law that specifies “husband” and “wife” could lead a judge to deny the existence of same-sex marriage. But if that conflict brought such a case to court, the Supreme Court’s ruling would prevail, Katherine Franke, a professor and director for the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, told the NewsHour Weekend. “State laws cannot be read to conflict with the Tennessee or the U.S. Constitution,” she said.