Adjunct Professor Joel Cohen wrote a piece published in the New York Law Journal analyzing the conduct of the Philadelphia District Attorney and an Assitant District Attorney during a hostage situation. In it, he examines the question of what lawyers should do when The Rules of Professional Conduct conflict with public safety. So, in the midst of the stand-off, the shooter calls his lawyer, a man named Shaka Johnson, who is a former Philadelphia police officer and Assistant DA. Johnson, sizing up the situation, proposes to his client (the shooter) that he (Johnson) should patch in the District Attorney himself.…
Author: Newsroom
Professors Jed Shugerman and Ethan Leib wrote a New York Times op-ed discussing the recent efforts by the Justice Department to get the Supreme Court to look at cases regarding the authority of the President to fire independent agency heads. First, the Department of Justice asked the court to strike down the job security protections for the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild. Such restrictions on a president’s removal power, the argument goes, violate the separation of powers. Afterward, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders filed a surprising petition making a similar argument…
Professor Daniel Capra was consulted by the Washington Post for his expert opinion on which of President Trump’s communications with his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, fall under the protection of attorney-client privilege should Giuliani have to testify before congress. Some legal experts have said that Congress does not recognize the attorney-client privilege because it is a common-law privilege, and Congress has authority, by statute, to override federal common law. That reasoning is not correct, said Daniel Capra, a leading expert in evidence and legal ethics at Fordham University School of Law. It is a statute that establishes the federal…
In a New York Times op-ed, Professor Zephyr Teachout explores the main lessons of “Beaten Down, Worked Up,” a recently published book by former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse. Greenhouse probably knows more about what is happening in the American workplace than anybody else in the country, having covered labor as a journalist for two decades. He achieves a near-impossible task, producing a page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes, without overcondensing or oversimplifying, and with plausible suggestions for the future. This is labor history seen from the moments when that history could have turned out…
Holland & Knight LLP’s Sarah Passeri ’08 was one of four transportation attorneys under age 40 to be selected by Law360 as a Rising Star for her work on a number of high profile aviation cases. Why she’s a transportation attorney: Passeri said she has been “enchanted” by the idea of aviation for as long as she can remember, and comes from a family with “deep roots” in the industry. Her father taught her how to fly a plane at the age of just 15, before she even knew how to drive a car, she said. When she decided to…
Professor Jed Shugerman acted as a legal expert for a Washington Post article that discusses recent incidences where the Department of Justice has come to President Trump’s defense in lawsuits where he is being sued and is supporting him in lawsuits where he is suing others. Legal experts have said Trump’s arguments are a sharp departure from existing precedent: In the 1970s, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that President Nixon had to turn over Oval Office tape recordings sought by prosecutors. “What [Trump is] asking for, it seems implicitly, is for lower federal courts to ignore U.S. v.…
Cass R. Sunstein, author of Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide and the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University, will be the featured speaker at a free Continuing Legal Education (CLE) event co-sponsored by Fordham Law Scool, the New York State Writers Institute at the University of Albany, and the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA). The program, “Impeachment: A Guide to the Legal Process and Its History,” will take place Oct. 15 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Fordham University School of Law. The TED-style talk will be moderated by NYSBA President Hank Greenberg and will feature a question-and-answer…
Journalist Sara Rimer profiled New York State Supreme Court Justice La Tia W. Martin, the founder of the Scales of Justice Academy, a program based at Fordham Law School and administered by Professor Leah Hill. A decade ago, Bronx-born-and-bred New York State Supreme Court Justice La Tia W. Martin wanted to find a way to encourage young women from disadvantaged families to do what she had done: pursue a career in the law. So she founded Scales of Justice Academy, a nonprofit summer college preparatory program for students from New York City area public high schools. Based at Fordham University and…
An article published in The Atlantic by George T. Conway III references a Harvard Law Review article titled Faithful Execution and Article II written by three Fordham Law School professors, Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, and Jed Shugerman. Hamilton’s use of the word trust in The Federalist Papers to describe the presidency was no accident. The Framers intended that the president “be like a fiduciary, who must pursue the public interest in good faith republican fashion rather than pursuing his self-interest, and who must diligently and steadily execute Congress’s commands,” as a recent Harvard Law Review article puts it. The concept is akin to the law of…
Professor Bruce Green was quoted in an ABA Journal article following the ongoing debate over the ethical duties of prosecutors when it comes to evidence disclosure. States remain split on whether a prosecutor’s ethical duties for disclosures in a criminal case should extend beyond their constitutional obligations set by the U.S. Supreme Court. Most recently, the Tennessee Supreme Court vacated a formal ethics opinion from its Board of Professional Responsibility that determined a prosecutor’s ethical duties were more expansive than those required under the Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland (1963). … Bruce Green, who helped draft the ABA…