Professor Tanya Hernández was inducted into the Puerto Rican Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation. Watch full video.
Author: Newsroom
Professor Richard Squire was quoted in a Vox article about the idea of corporate bankruptcy in the United States. Bankruptcy leaves the impression of utter failure, and when a company goes bankrupt, it’s easy to assume that it’s dead, may it rest in peace. According to this line of thinking, here’s an alarming tidbit: If you regularly travel by plane, there’s a decent chance you’ve flown with an airline that was bankrupt at the time. United filed for bankruptcy in 2002, followed by Delta in 2005 and American Airlines in 2011. … Since 2017, we’ve seen a wave of once-powerful…
Professor Bruce Green wrote an op-ed for Newsweek regarding the legal ethics of an attorney who might be facing a conflict of interest while representing a client. Two days before trial, the attorney representing Nicholas Acklin, a young man facing the death penalty in Alabama, met with his client’s mother. From her, he learned of critical evidence that, if presented, might save his client’s life: as a child, Mr. Acklin had suffered severe physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his father. The abuse of the young Mr. Acklin included beatings and threats at gunpoint. When angered, Mr. Acklin’s…
Adjunct Professor Joel Cohen wrote an op-ed in The Hill about President Trump’s ongoing troubles. Ty Cobb served as White House counsel before he and President Trump had a parting of ways, for reasons not completely clear. He certainly is a highly regarded attorney. The president, however, ideally would have wanted a more combative lawyer, with a style such as Rudy Giuliani’s, in dealing with special counsel Robert Mueller. However, Cobb clearly intended to act in the best interests of his client by urging full cooperation with the Russia investigation on the part of the White House and Trump. After…
Jed Shugerman wrote a New York Times op-ed that argues for the New York attorney general to open a special civil proceeding against the Trump Organization and its officials. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on to something. In her questioning of Michael Cohen, she asked if Donald Trump had ever provided “inflated assets to an insurance company.” He answered in the affirmative — and also testified to rampant tax fraud by Mr. Trump and allegedly by the Trump Organization officials Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari. The questioning apparently caught the attention of New York State regulators, who issued a subpoena…
Adjunct Professor Jerry Goldfeder was quoted in an Albany Times Union article about New York’s “fusion law,” which allows candidates to run on several party lines. If it were not for fusion voting — allowing a candidate to run on multiple lines and aggregating their vote totals — John F. Kennedy may not have been elected president in 1960. Kennedy won the election with 303 Electoral College votes, 34 more than the majority needed, to Richard Nixon’s 219. Harry Byrd won the remaining 15. … Without fusion, Nixon would have won New York, bringing his Electoral College vote up to…
Howard Erichson was quoted in a Reuters article about Logitech’s class action lawsuit. Facing a mandamus petition by a class action defendant challenging his policy of barring settlement discussions before class certification, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that his rule enhances the negotiating power of absent class members whose interests he is obliged to protect. … Logitech’s lawyers at Mayer Brown, as you may recall, contend that Judge Alsup’s policy of generally prohibiting pre-certification settlement negotiations is an unconstitutional prior restraint on defendants’ free speech rights. Judge Alsup told…
Joel Reidenberg, founding academic director of the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy, was quoted in an NBC News article about Facebook’s possible new technology that supports end-to-end encryption of messages. Every six minutes, on average, Facebook gets a request from a U.S. government agency for information about gangs, drug trafficking or other suspected crimes, and the social network generally cooperates, turning over at least some data 86 percent of the time, according to the company’s most recent report on the topic. But that close relationship could be reshaped by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s move this week to embrace a…
James Brudney was quoted in a New York Times article about tomato pickers’ successful labor-organizing efforts, and how their model might apply to the wider agricultural industry. A program created by a group that organizes farmworkers has persuaded companies like Walmart and McDonald’s to buy their tomatoes from growers who follow strict labor standards. But high-profile holdouts have threatened to halt the effort’s progress. Now the group, a nonprofit called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, is raising pressure on one of the most prominent holdouts — Wendy’s — which it sees as an obstacle to expansion. The Immokalee workers’ initiative,…
Professor Catherine Powell co-authored an op-ed for Fortune regarding “womenomics,” a concept to encourage women’s labor force participation and reduce pay disparity. At last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe boasted that women’s labor force participation had hit 67%, “an all-time high for Japan.” Abe deserves some credit: In the 1990s, Japan’s female labor participation was among the lowest in the developed world, now it is higher than in the U.S., where female labor force participation is just over 57%. To achieve this, and kickstart Japan’s stalled economy, Abe turned to “womenomics.” Womenomics, a…