As a 2L in Professor Bruce Green’s Ethics in Criminal Advocacy seminar, Stein Scholar Brandon Ruben pored over prison emails, judge’s orders, and other archival documents to write an award-winning student note on attorney-inmate email monitoring for the Fordham Law Review.
Sensing the issue’s import—both in legal and political terms—Ruben invested himself further as a 3L, organizing a panel featuring a U.S. Congressman, as well as a federal defender, U.S. attorney and a former federal inmate.
Ruben will be the most junior member on the stage Thursday night at the New York County Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA), but his status as co-moderator is well deserved, Green said. Ruben, in turn, credited Green for providing guidance in organizing the panel, and the Feerick Center’s Dora Galacatos and Professor John D. Feerick as inspirations for staging social justice interventions.
“I thought it would be a great way to move the ball forward in terms of solving a problem for a group—prisoners—who don’t have a lot of political capital,” said Ruben, who in addition to being a Stein Scholar serves as the Fordham Law Review’s executive notes editor. His note, “Should the Medium Affect the Message?: Legal and Ethical Implications of Prosecutors Reading Inmate-Attorney Email,” won the Dean John D. Feerick Student Writing Award for the Law Review’s best note in March 2015.
The panel, Ruben added, provided an “empowering and purposeful” connection between intellectual work and real world political progress.
At the recommendation of a recent NYCLA report, which relied heavily on Ruben’s research, in February the American Bar Association adopted a formal resolution urging the Bureau of Prisons and Department of Justice to provide inmates with confidential legal email, as they do phone calls, snail mail, and in-person meetings. Prior to the ABA’s action, U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York’s Eighth District co-sponsored a bill last fall seeking to make all such email communications private.
Jeffries will participate on the NYCLA panel with Federal Defenders Executive Director David Patton; James McGovern, chief criminal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Eastern District of New York office; and Walt Pavlo, a formerly incarcerated individual who now runs Prisonology.com, a prison consulting firm. Professor Ellen Yaroshefsky of Benjamin Cardozo Law School is co-moderating.
Green praised Ruben’s initiative in contacting the panelists and inviting others to work on an organizing committee. Committees of lawyers organize most panels presented at the city’s bar associations, Green said, but Ruben’s hard work and ability to interact with anyone made him the rare law-student exception.
“He wanted his note to have an impact on the law and what judges, legislators, and prison administrators actually did,” Green said. “When he finished the note, he didn’t just stop and move on to another project.”
Early Observations
Ruben grew up in the mixed-income, racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse Mitchell-Lama apartment building in Tribeca’s Independence Plaza in the 1980s. Through his high school and college years, he saw many childhood peers fighting to define their burgeoning adulthood; some of them ultimately encountered the criminal justice system. A common thread among those who met that fate was unequal access to expansive social and educational opportunities.
Their offenses, which yielded profound consequences, had equally profound roots, he recalled.
“I saw the battle for social mobility that some young people had to engage on their own,” he said. “It placed a significant burden on them to avoid pitfalls that led to interactions with the criminal justice system. That motivated me to be a teacher.”
After earning a master’s degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, Ruben taught fourth grade at Leadership Prep in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, as part of Teach for America. Then he spent nine months as an English language teaching assistant at a diverse public middle school in Limoges, France.
Ruben arrived at Fordham Law soon afterward in July 2012 through an AmeriCorps program seeking a candidate with teaching experience in urban areas and an interest in public interest law. For the next year, Ruben co-directed the Feerick Center for Social Justice’s Legal Economic and Educational Advancement Program (LEEAP) in its inaugural year, training volunteer attorneys to assist New York City students with the high school application process and experiencing the Fordham Law Network Effect firsthand.
“That was a special year,” Ruben recalled, adding his Feerick Center work allowed him to take part in the service ethic its namesake infused in the Law School.
Justice in Action
Ruben’s personal observations about the criminal justice system’s disproportionate impact on people based on race and socioeconomic upbringing motivated him to focus on criminal defense when he started law school in 2013.
His subsequent fellowships at the Legal Aid Society and Federal Defenders of New York, Eastern District, affirmed his view that criminal defendants are largely individuals in difficult situations living in heavily policed neighborhoods, where the state often resolves issues in their lives.
In these communities, those who enter prison face hardship before doing so. Once inside, they are unable to communicate with their attorneys “in the dominant communicative medium of our time,” Ruben noted.
Prosecutors have stated on the record that screening inmates’ legal emails from their non-legal emails creates an administrative burden and accordingly stand by their decision to read all emails an inmate sends. In the process, questions about prosecutorial self-regulation arise, Ruben said.
So far, defense attorneys have raised challenges about individual prosecutors reading emails. Perhaps a more effective approach, Ruben suggested, would be a prisoners’ rights group filing a constitutional challenge to the Bureau of Prison’s email monitoring policy.
Ruben’s passion and spark for legal scholarship has been “contagious” for his peers on the Fordham Law Review, Editor-in-Chief Hopi Costello reflected.
Ruben helped institute note-writing workshops that resulted in a record 37 note submissions, including 30 published in the Fordham Law Review. Ruben reminded his peers that each note needed three key attributes: human stakes, an understanding of its argument’s location in the previous scholarly literature, and awareness of audience.
Costello attributed the increased participation to Ruben’s treatment of 2Ls as burgeoning legal scholars and the success of his own note.
She also credited Ruben for innovating the topics students could write about, allowing for notes that veered away from the traditional circuit split format, and cutting the length of notes, encouraging students to avoid repetition.
Legal Leader in the Making
In the workshops, Ruben often reminded his 2L charges there was “no time like the present” to write a scholarly article or present oneself as a legal intellectual. He will soon have new opportunities to cement his growing status as a legal intellectual.
Ruben has two federal court clerkships lined up with U.S. District Court Judge Terrence G. Berg in Michigan (in 2016–17) and U.S. District Court Judge Claire V. Eagan ’72 in Oklahoma (in 2017–18).
The clerkships will provide him an opportunity to learn to write and think like a lawyer from judges, Ruben said, and provide him and his wife, both native New Yorkers, an opportunity to experience living in other areas of the country.
But first, he will take the stage on Thursday night, to advance the conversation surrounding those whose communications are not yet privileged.
