Faculty in the News: October 16-31, 2016

If you feel like Internet ads are more pervasive and invasive than ever before, you're not alone. Author Tim Wu tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the Web has gotten worse over the years, not better — and unrelenting ads are to blame.

 

Note: Wu’s new book, The Attention Merchants, has been covered extensively in other outlets including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, C-SPAN, and The New Republic.

 

Jaclyn Friedman, activist and author of "Yes Means Yes," and Kimberle Crenshaw, professor at UCLA and Columbia Law and the executive director at the African American Policy Forum, joined the program.

 

Professor Katherine Franke, chair of the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights said: "Filming Native Americans being violently attacked as they defend their land is not rioting, it’s called journalism, it is protected by the First Amendment, and indeed, it is an essential function in a democratic society." 

 

Columbia Law School professor John Coffee said: "This is going to be a long, complicated litigation in which the defendants will be attacking whether the class action can be certified." If the class action proceeds, he said it would be very complicated for the investors to prove and quantify any losses suffered.

 

Another example is Obama's decision to not strictly enforce federal laws on cannabis — and instead let more lax state laws take precedence, said William Simon, a constitutional expert and professor at Columbia Law School. "The president has a lot of discretion in respects to law enforcement and can basically decide not to enforce certain laws and let them languish," Simon told Mic in a phone interview.

 

Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor with Columbia Law School, tells ME the "decision will divert some EPA resources to carry out the studies, but otherwise would not seem to have direct impacts."

 

Vincent Blasi, a first amendment and civil liberties scholar at Columbia law school, said in an email that he was puzzled “why, of all the things published about Donald Trump in conjunction with his alleged groping, this seemingly friendly, cordial exchange with Melania should be singled out for a demand for retraction.”

 

By Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary

On September 22, Yahoo! announced that the personal data of half a billion users had been stolen in 2014. The theft of data was attributed to “state-sponsored” hackers, which some informed sources in California and Washington, D.C. said meant the Chinese secret service. Subsequently, claims emerged about a cracker selling personal information of Yahoo! account users on the dark Web.

 

The upshot: Trump's list of 21 potential nominees to replace Scalia and fill any future vacancies is far more specific than Clinton's, who cannot bring herself even to cite federal appeals court Judge Merrick Garland by name. She endorsed him only as "the nominee that President Obama has sent" to the Senate. "I think she's clearly keeping her options open," said Columbia Law School Professor Jamal Greene.

 

Jagdish Bhagwati, a celebrated professor of economics and law at Columbia University and champion of free trade economics, faults Clinton as well as Trump. “This election is crazy,” Bhagwati, an emphatic Democrat, told The Daily Beast. “What Trump is saying is worrying, but you can’t give Clinton a pass.”

 

Michael Gerrard, climate law expert at Columbia University: What do you see as the future of fossil fuels in the U.S.? Should we have a program to phase out the extraction and use of coal, oil and natural gas? What would that program look like? How would you prepare the country for the sea level rise and extreme weather events that we know are coming? What is the appropriate role for the federal government?

 

He said there were numerous shortcomings in the way rules targeted primarily the banking system before the 2008 meltdown. Such areas should be “central to the further development and refinement of a regulatory system that takes account of the financial system as a whole,” said Mr. Tarullo in remarks prepared for an event on financial regulation at Columbia University’s Law School.

 

Note: Tarullo’s speech at the Law School’s Oct. 21 “The New Pedagogy of Financial Regulation” conference was also covered by Reuters.

 

Kenny is currently interning at the nonprofit African American Policy Forum, working alongside Kimberlé Crenshaw, the organization’s co-founder and a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia…“Niya’s case alone is simply a powerful example about how leadership skills and courage and the ability to reason right from wrong ... get turned into a justification for bringing them into the juvenile justice system,” said Crenshaw. “[Black] girls in particular tend to run into trouble because they’re seen as defiant, they’re seen as having an attitude or being in need of discipline rather than being rewarded and recognized for exercising leadership.”

 

If voters decide next November to launch a constitutional convention, what might a convention do to clarify and modernize home rule law? Columbia Law professor Richard Briffault laid out several suggestions…“Local governments don’t have the power to tax, that’s authorized by the state,” Briffault said. “It would be worth considering whether local governments should be given more freedom to set their own tax policies.”

 

“Betrayals of public trust occupy a special place in sentencing calculations,” said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Columbia University Law School.

 

Historians debate whether in times of great change it is the man or the moment that matters. But most of us think it is both. Things happen when deep causal factors combine with the rise of an individual who represents that underlying change. So it is now in America.

 

“Over the last 40 to 50 years, antitrust law has evolved to be almost completely indifferent to vertical mergers,” said Tim Wu, an antitrust and internet expert at Columbia Law School who coined the phrase “net neutrality” and recently wrote “The Attention Merchants” on the advertising business.

 

Simon Lazarus, senior counsel at the constitutional accountability center, and Robert Jackson, a professor at Columbia University Law School, discuss the government’s attempt to have MetLife re-labeled as "too big to fail." They speak with Bloomberg Law hosts Greg Stohr and June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio’s "Bloomberg Law."

 

"Reasonable minds could easily differ in a case like this because of the nature of the legal standard,” said Daniel Richman, professor of law at Columbia Law School.

 

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the Paris Agreement calls for “a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases,” which implicitly means fossil fuels should be phased out. “However, the agreement assiduously avoids saying anything explicit about that or about halting oil exploration and development, otherwise some countries would have refused to sign,” Gerrard said. “Achieving the Paris temperature goals and continuing to develop new oil fields are inconsistent, but the Paris Agreement has nothing that in itself will stop this development.”

 

Shortly after a recent gala celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Center for Constitutional rights (CCR), received word that the U.S. Supreme Court is going to take another look at a favorable ruling it obtained in a case it has been pursuing for more than 14 years…Katherine Franke, who is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, has been CCR chairwoman for two years.

 

Through her theory of intersectionality, she explains the overwhelming underrepresentation of violence against African-American women in activism, politics and media. “The problem is, in part, a framing problem,”Crenshaw says. “Without frames that are capacious enough to address all the ways that disadvantages and burdens play out for all members of a particular group, the efforts to mobilize resources to address a social problem will be partial and exclusionary.”

 

Net neutrality is that essential quality of the internet that makes it so powerful. Columbia University law professor Tim Wu coined the term “net neutrality.” After the Federal Communications Commission approved strong net neutrality rules last year, Wu told us on the Democracy Now! News hour, “There need to be basic rules of the road for the internet, and we’re not going to trust cable and telephone companies to respect freedom of speech or respect new innovators, because of their poor track record.”

 

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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. 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.