Too much (courtroom) drama in your life? Try dispute resolution. When asked to imagine a legal action, most people probably envision a scenario involving a judge, opposing lawyers, a jury, a plaintiff, a defendant—in other words, all the typical actors in a traditional courtroom drama. Yet this litigation scene is playing an ever-diminishing role in the legal profession. Growing in popularity are alternative forms of dispute resolution: arbitration, mediation, negotiation, and international conflict resolution, all of which are, by definition, less adversarial than a litigated case. Fordham Law’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Program, founded 30 years ago, finds the School’s professors,…
Author: lpelucacci
Highlighting a key partner in the A2J Initiative at Fordham Law School The ideal of justice knows no geographic boundary. Justice is blind to borders. If we wish to live in a more just world, we have to fight as fiercely on behalf of landless communities in Asia as we do for the homeless individual living at our doorstep. While improving justice in the United States might involve greater access to the court system, in a country like Nepal it might mean more predictable and safer access to water. All justice issues are valid, and all deserve thoughtful attention. The…
Rosevelie Márquez Morales ’02 makes sure there’s room enough for everyone to succeed. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Brooklyn, Rosevelie Márquez Morales lacked many of the formative opportunities that all but guarantee success for the most fortunate in America. But Márquez Morales handily beat socioeconomic odds through diligence, perseverance, and force of will. She became a lawyer who, having climbed her own summit of success, has turned her attention to underrepresented communities in order to inspire women and people of color to reach the heights of their potential. “Education, training, and continuing dialogue are the three main tactics…
Benjamin Reiser hears the message of Hamilton loud and clear. Benjamin Reiser listened intently as his 1L Constitutional Law professor, Catherine Powell, raised his favorite subject—the smash Broadway musical Hamilton—during her spring 2018 course overview. When Powell surveyed the room for fellow show attendees, students to Reiser’s left and right turned their gaze toward him. Among his peers, his obsession with the groundbreaking rap musical about American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton is legend: He has seen the show 10 times, peppers conversations with choice quotes from the musical, and authored both his law school personal statement and undergrad thesis on the…
One of the many voices of student scholarship at Fordham Law Brandon Ruben ’16 received the John D. Feerick Student Writing Award in 2015 for his Fordham Law Review note on attorney/inmate email monitoring, supplied much of the research in an influential New York County Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA) report on the topic, and organized and co-moderated a first-of-its-kind NYCLA panel featuring key stakeholders on the debate’s front lines, including U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. Yet for all the individual acclaim his work garnered, the Stein Scholar graduate’s written and spoken advocacy highlighting prosecutorial overreach always focused on something greater than his…
Anticipating the demands of a changing legal profession In a 2016 law review article, lawyer and entrepreneur Paul Lippe wrote the following: “Over the last generation, law and lawyers have fallen further behind other fields in their level of innovation, the use of new tools to improve productivity, and thoughtful design to respond to complexity. While some of this is inherent in the nature of law, much of it needs to change if lawyers hope to retain the respected role of their profession.” One of the objectives of Fordham Law Forward, the School’s strategic plan, is to anticipate the demands…
Alumni pass the support down to the next generation of Fordham lawyers. Through networking programs, local alumni chapter events, competition teams, and self-directed one-on-one efforts, Fordham Law alumni regularly reach out to mentor younger students and share their knowledge of life and the law. Here, some of them say what it means to be part of the legacy of support. Gavin White ’01 In addition to his work as a commercial and insurance litigator at Wilson Elser, Gavin White has been instrumental in building the Miami chapter of the Fordham Law Alumni Association. As part of his work with the…
Fordham Law team participates for first time in prestigious transactional moot court-type corporate competition. For two hours in Chicago this winter, 2L Jared Arcari and 3Ls Blessing Adeyeye and Immanuel Kim did something no other Fordham Law students before them had done. They sat at a boardroom table on the campus of Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law and negotiated the $2 billion sale of an American software company to a Beijing-based private equity firm. The negotiations, part of the Transactional LawMeet, a 96-team national competition held at eight law schools across the country, marked the first time Fordham competed in…
These young alumni make an impressive crowd. In 2011, only 29 students across the country were awarded Skadden Fellowships, a prestigious two-year award that gives graduating law students an opportunity to pursue public interest work. In 2010, that number was just 27. Despite their ultra-exclusive nature, three Fordham Law students—Elizabeth Joynes ’10, Dan Hafetz ’10, and Marni von Wilpert ’11—landed the honor in the past two years. Created in 1988, Skadden Fellowships are awarded annually to provide law school graduates with a salary and fringe benefits as they work on a project they’ve created with a public interest organization. Since…
A recent gift by alumni to support a project that helps asylum-seeking women is quite literally a lifesaver. Since June 2014, a surge of unaccompanied minors and women with small children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala has created a humanitarian crisis. Once these children and mothers cross the border into the United States, some of them are placed in expedited removal proceedings and are brought to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, where they await their credible or reasonable fear interviews, the first hurdle in the asylum-seeking process. Fordham Law alumni Scott FitzGerald ’92…