Faculty in the News: January 1-15, 2017

“It’s certainly fairer to defendants to put this expert testimony in,” securities-law expert John Coffee of Columbia Law School said. “On the other hand, I think juries may give more weight to an investor saying, ‘We really want to know this [pricing information] for the following reasons.’”

 

Robert Jackson, a professor at Columbia Law School who served as an adviser on executive compensation issues to the Department of Treasury during the Obama administration, noted that though Tillerson is surrendering the unpaid shares, the company is still effectively giving him the benefit through the cash payment, awarding him with millions just as he is about to take on a diplomatic job that will have influence over America's oil interests. 

 

According to Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, “Administrative power is the key civil rights issue of our time. All Americans, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity, are at risk of having their rights violated by the administrative state.”

 

Yet across the nation there are only about 350 state regulators scrutinizing charity operations, according to a groundbreaking report released this fall by the Charities Regulation and Oversight Project at Columbia Law School and the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.

 

One danger here is that the fear of surveillance will have a homogenizing effect on us—that it will lead to a tempering of curiosity, to a tentativeness that infects the political and the personal, and even to whatBernard Harcourt calls the “mortification of the self,” a transformation that takes place when a person structures her life so that she has nothing to hide.

 

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper criticized President-elect Donald Trump's "disparagement" of the Russian hack findings. Former NSC, DOD and State Department official and professor at Columbia Law School Matthew Waxman joins CBSN to discuss.

 

The ability for hackers to influence the electoral process may spur the United States to speed the development of a stronger and more detailed cybersecurity strategy, said Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior national security official under President George W. Bush. But the changing magnitude of cyberattacks, their targets and the technologies used to execute them makes a unified response challenging. 

 

Michael Gerrard, who directs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University Law School, said it's unlikely Tillerson will end up testifying, given his position at the company. "It would be common procedure in such a case for a corporation to resist the deposition of its CEO,” he told Mashable. “And often such motions are granted.

 

Coats’ appointment would be one more mark of how empty—or dishonest—Donald Trump’s claim that he’s an ally of the LGBTQ community was. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Coats fought against LGBTQ equality far more stridently than his conservative colleagues in Congress. 

 

Note: Frank is director of the What We Know Project at Columbia Law School.

 

Noted economist Jagdish Bhagwati has today praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the demonetisation step. Speaking to ‘India Today’ channel he said that even while, the PM had taken a bold move with the decision, but he should have consulted more. He further said the decision to ban old currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 has served its purpose in the country, but it alone cannot fight the menace of black money and graft cases.

 

Tim Wu: ‘The internet is like the classic story of the party that went sour’
Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University. His specialties include competition, copyright and telecommunications law. 

 

The ongoing fall-out from the Volkswagen emissions scandal took another twist in the US today as court papers revealed VW executives knew about emissions cheating two months before the scandal broke…The company has said it can't comment on an ongoing legal matter, but what might the latest details mean for VW in the United States? Professor John Coffee of Columbia Law School joins us.

 

John C. Coffee Jr., director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School, said the monitor would be shoehorned in trying to ensure that the business resists potential problem points outside the monitor’s view. “What can the monitor do to prevent an outright, hundred-million-dollar gift from a government to Donald Trump?” Coffee said. “The monitor is not in the position to block the most obvious ways in which a foreign government or entity could benefit the company, in order to give a de facto bribe.”

 

“That’s not an indication one way or the other of whether individual lawyers at the firm agree with the law,” Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia, told BuzzFeed News, adding that the law firm “was being scrupulous in advising its clients on the state of the law.”

 

Richard Briffault, a government ethics expert at Columbia Law School, disagreed, saying: "Given the fact that the president is specifically mentioned, you would think that someone that is working for the president would be covered" by the anti-nepotism law.

 

Robert J. Jackson Jr., a law professor and executive compensation expert at Columbia University and a former Obama administration Treasury Department official, said Mr. Tillerson should owe the full tax up front because the cash will effectively be his, with little realistic chance that he will lose it. “Everything in the trust is his property today, which means he must pay tax on it,” Professor Jackson said. 

 

“There is this big difference between the rhetoric at the top and the day-in, day-out practice in the trenches of antitrust,” said Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University. “Even though there may be some vaguely more pro-enforcement mind-set, a lot of mergers have been approved over the last eight years.”

 

Climate Central asked climate and energy experts to talk about climate questions they would ask Trump’s nominees…Rex Tillerson, nominee for Secretary of State—Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law: Would you participate, or seek clearance to participate, in any discussions or decisions pertaining to climate change in your first year in office, even though you have stated that you will not participate in matters in which Exxon is a party? 

 

After [Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper] initiative was first announced, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw asked "what truths are missing here?" and responded, "black girls." If the White House was going to bring its influence to bear, Crenshaw asked that it bring it forth for the entire community. 

 

Remember Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the phrase net neutrality? Working with economist Michael Luca and three data scientists from Yelp, Wu recently published a Harvard Business School working paper showing that Google deviates from its organic search results to favor its own local properties in a search for cafes in Louisville. This is discrimination against edge providers, plain and simple. 

 

And though the companies may have had internal rules on the books against employees engaging in bribery, that isn't necessarily enough to get them off the hook, says John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in securities regulation and white-collar crime. "These bribes were paid to get business for the corporations," he said. "There is at least legal liability here. You could have a bylaw that says you may not pay a bribe — it has no legal effect."

 

Robert Jackson, director of the program on corporate law and policy at Columbia Law School, described the tax strategy as “one of the most aggressive and least successful tax positions executives have taken over the past two decades.”

 

“Many of them were not captured in the course of shootouts with American forces,” says Columbia Law school professor Matthew Waxman, who oversaw detainee policy at the Pentagon in 2004 and 2005. Both the Bush and Obama administrations “embraced a very broad understanding of the battlefield,” says Waxman, one that extended far from the “places where U.S. military forces are actively engaged in combat” to sites around the globe “where al-Qaida is operating from in significant ways.”

 

John Coffee, a professor at Columbia University Law School, and Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University, discuss charges against currency traders at major international banks, who are accused of market-rigging. 

 

But in a forthcoming study of New Jersey traffic stops between 2005 and 2007, researchers at Columbia University found that while the disproportionate stops of minority drivers fell, African-Americans and Latinos were still almost three times more likely to be searched than whites. In addition, researchers found that white troopers were 20 percent more likely to search minority drivers than were black troopers. “That’s the problem with consent decrees,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia Law School professor who oversaw the study. “They did everything that was asked of them except stop profiling.”

 

Tim Wu is a net-neutrality advocate and law professor who works for the National Economic Council, but he paid his way to be here, not content to watch from Washington. “I can kind of chart my life by the Obama speeches,” he said.  “I heard the first one at the DNC. I remember the first inauguration. These are milestones.”

 

Nearly every image of Coretta Scott King since her husband’s death has seemed suffused with preternatural stillness, her face fixed with the brave solitude of timeless interior bereavement. For all of her accomplishment and vivacity in real life, she has remained frozen in the collective imagination, among that sad pantheon of civil-rights-era icons: the political widow in a pillbox hat. King describes the weight of that identity in “My Life, My Love, My Legacy,” her posthumous memoir, as told to the journalist Barbara Reynolds over a period of 30 years. 

 

Carol Sanger is visiting professor from Columbia University teaching at the UH law school during J term. Her soon to be published book is About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in 21st Century America.

 

However, a recent study by University of Virginia law professor Albert Choi and Columbia University law professor Eric Talley found that deferring to the parties’ negotiated price may not be optimum. That rule “is defensible on economic grounds only in relatively narrow set of circumstances that can be demanding, in practice, to meet,” their paper says.

 

Josh Robin discussed Donald Trump’s latest plans to show he is distancing himself from his business empire with ethics expert Richard Briffault of Columbia University Law School. 

 

Joining We the People to discuss the administrative state in the Trump era are two of America’s leading experts in administrative and constitutional law. Gillian Metzger is the Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. David Bernstein is the George Mason University Foundation Professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School.

 

Our society reveres celebrities like gods, but if they are gods, jokes Columbia law professor Tim Wu, then they’re more like the Greek gods, who were hopelessly and petulantly flawed. Nobody as yet fully understands our culture’s obsession with the famous elites among us, but for Wu, the most compelling ideas so far are those that compare celebrity worship to our inherent instinct to look for things that transcend the normal, that hints at life on a different plane. 

 

An economist and a professor are among those being considered for the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy post, a source familiar with the proceedings told Bloomberg BNA. Alex Brill, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on tax issues, and David M. Schizer, dean emeritus and Harvey R. Miller professor of law and economics at Columbia Law School, have both been interviewed for the role, said the source, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the information.

 

Augusto Maxwell, a partner with the Akerman law firm, teaches a class about Cuba at Columbia Law School and is now struggling to come up with a way to explain the complexities to his next class…”I wondered how I would translate that to students in New York," said Maxwell, whose parents are Cuban. "It's been so normalized that we've lost track of how unusual it is for us to incentivize people to risk their lives in such a dramatic way to escape Cuba.”

 

Note: Maxwell is a lecturer in law.

 

Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School, and Josh Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, discuss a speech by former attorney general Eric Holder about the political risks of racial gerrymandering, on Bloomberg Radio’s “Bloomberg Law.”

 

“They change the ‘inputs’ through training, record keeping, community involvement and other internal reforms, but the inputs don’t necessarily translate into changes in ‘outputs’ including racial disparities, use of force, or other constitutional issues,” wrote Jeff Fagan, a Columbia University law professor. “The results have been quite variable.”

 

 

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