Faculty in the News: February 16-28, 2017

 

 

How much trouble could leakers really be in? If Trump does catch them, what kind of legal jeopardy could they be in store for? I reached out to Steven Aftergood, the head of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, and David Pozen, a professor at Columbia Law School who has written extensively about leaks, to learn more…Pozen: Much leaking of government information is not illegal; it depends on the nature of the information, who is revealing it, in what ways, and for what purposes. 

 

Note: Pozen has been quoted extensively on this topic recently in publications including Politico, Financial Times, Wired, Bloomberg, Politifact, Columbia Journalism Review, again in The Washington Post, and more.

 

Mr. Trump directed all agencies to ensure that the “incremental cost” of all new regulations is no greater than zero. He also directed that agencies must identify two regulations to repeal for every new regulation proposed. The order seeks to extend the president’s authority, but it suffers from a fundamental problem: It conflicts with congressional legislation and undermines agencies’ abilities to implement their responsibilities faithfully. 

 

Note: Burger is executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law; Wentz is staff attorney and associate research scholar for the center

 

In other words, “no institutional investor could hire the same law firm more than once in a class action,” John Coffee Jr., director of Columbia Law School’s Center on Corporate Governance, told CIO. “It’s like saying you can’t see the same doctor twice.”

 

Today, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the “State of Religious Liberty in America.” What was perhaps most striking about the hearing was how dated many of the speeches and arguments felt—as if an Obama-era hearing was being held nearly a month into the Trump administration.

 

Note: Platt is Director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. 

 

Both sides in this situation should tread carefully, says John Coffee, a law professor and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. "Time Warner is extremely vulnerable to pressure in this context — although the slightest application of pressure would backfire explosively," he said. "Trump really cannot afford another fiasco right now when his administration keeps stumbling over itself. Thus, we may be witnessing another self-inflicted wound that is about to occur."

 

Michael Gerrard, a professor at Columbia Law School, agrees that a wholesale gutting of the EPA is off the table. “I don’t think that they’re going to abolish EPA,” he tells Inverse. “I know that bills have been introduced, but I think that’s just grandstanding by the politicians who are announcing those bills. I don’t really see that happening, any more than when Rick Perry said he would abolish DOE until he figured out what DOE does, and he backed off on it.”

 

Jeong-ho Roh, director at the Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School, told CNBC's "Street Signs" that Lee's arrest implied that South Korea will no longer tolerate the special privileges that chaebols enjoyed under previous governments. "From a legal perspective, he has, in the eyes of the prosecution, committed a crime, which is legally punishable. And he will be held accountable for this," said Roh. "This is the entire process we're seeing right now, that is the process of establishing the rule of law in (South) Korea."

 

“That’s what the popular demand in Korea is at the moment: a demand for a type of retribution,” said Roh Jeong-ho, director at the Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School in New York.

 

But even if Trump doesn’t do this—and even if his policies, in aggregate, don’t change the country’s downward trajectory on overall emissions—the problem of climate change won’t fix itself, according to Michael Burger, executive director of the University of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law…“It’s possible the market will work all this out ... [but] to make the bend in the curve that’s really necessary, there needs to be radical transformation in how energy is supplied,” Burger told Bloomberg BNA. “If there’s no federal policy, it’s hard to see that happening.”

 

There is a mystique about the F.B.I., but the organization is still made up of human beings. “It is a really complicated agency and there have always been managerial issues,” says Dan Richman, a Columbia Law School professor and former federal prosecutor who has known Comey for 30 years. “It is supposed to be apolitical, but in a world where criminal investigations have an impact on politics it is going to be complicated.”

 

"Doing major tax reform with familiar income or consumption taxes has proved remarkably difficult -- even when everyone agrees that reform is necessary," notes Michael Graetz, a Columbia Law School professor and former Treasury Department tax official who has written extensively on the issue.

 

Norma McCorvey, the real Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, died one week ago. Although McCorvey later changed her views about abortion after a religious conversion in 1995, her original role in the iconic case recalls issues that are on the table once again for women with unwanted pregnancies.

 

According to the Pew Research Center, about 44 per cent of Americans cite Facebook as a news source. It is a crucial part of "where we put the cursor of our attention all day long," says Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Master Switch.

 

What is the impeachment process, and what does a president have to do to get impeached? Columbia Law School's professor of legislation Richard Briffault stopped by the Business Insider newsroom to spell out exactly how the impeachment process works.

 

In contrast to CCAT’s focus on business law, a tracker out of Columbia Law School is devoted to human rights issues. The Trump Human Rights Tracker follows the administration’s actions and their implications for human rights. It is a project of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review and Columbia Law School’s Rightslink, Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Institute.

 

But a new brief filed by student and faculty at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Clinic argues the state has an obligation under a patchwork of international human rights conventions to protect the right to organize. If successful, the argument would be one of a growing number of legal cases that invoke such conventions to affect local law, including a 2012 resolution in Albany County that determined freedom from domestic abuse is a human right.

 

With an assist from two students at Columbia Law School, the legal team for Texas death row inmate Duane Buck found that going the extra mile in the research phase paid off with a major win.

 

Bernard Harcourt, a law professor at Columbia University, has called for a boycott of Hotwire on Twitter, saying he searched for a room in Chicago on Hotwire to attend a protest of Trump’s travel ban and got booked into the Trump International Hotel & Tower.

 

Rick Hasen, a professor at University of California Irvine School of Law and founder of the Election Law Blog, and Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School, discuss an announcement by the Justice Department that it was dropping a crucial objection to Texas’ script voter ID law. They speak with June Grasso and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio’s "Bloomberg Law."

 

“If they put forward some alternative, I think they have a higher likelihood of surviving,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, who represents cities supporting the carbon dioxide standards in litigation over the rule.

 

A Brooklyn Federal courtroom turned into a classroom Tuesday when a Columbia Law professor testified at a sentencing for a gun case. Jeffrey Fagan, an expert in policing and crime deterrence, said stiff sentences for one person didn't seem to have much of a general effect to turn off others from gun violence. “Lengthy sentences don't add much" to an offender's thinking about the pros and cons, he said.

 

"[Grimm’s] injury has not changed, and an important question remains about whether schools can discriminate against transgender students by singling them out for different bathroom rules,” said Columbia University law professor Suzanne B. Goldberg. Goldberg added that “the bottom line” is that federal law prohibits sex discrimination which includes gender stereotyping.

 

 

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. Faculty members who are featured in the media are encouraged to send their clips to press@law.columbia.edu 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].edu or call us at 212-854-2650.