Low-income city-dwellers are struggling to hold on to their homes and neighborhoods—and many are losing the fight. Skadden Fellowship winner Akilah Browne aims to change that. Akilah Browne believes that New York City belongs to everyone who lives there, whether rich or poor, new immigrants or longtime residents. And as the recipient of a prestigious Skadden Fellowship, she intends to fight for this right by helping make permanently affordable housing available to those who are losing their homes and communities to gentrification. Browne, 29, spent her earliest years in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a historically low-income neighborhood that was dangerous at times…
Author: ryasharian
Six Fordham Law faculty members reflect on what it takes to be prepared in our wired, complex, 21st-century world. Just 15 years ago, smartphones weren’t all that smart, blockchain was a nonsense word, and legal research required hours of perusing guides and indices. But technology has fundamentally altered the world in which today’s law students will launch their careers, and the legal profession has changed along with it. To be ready, lawyers will need to solve old problems with new tools and apply established law in innovative ways. They may even find themselves practicing in areas that didn’t exist when…
It’s not a question commonly asked of Supreme Court justices—“Who is your favorite comic book superhero and why?”—but when Fordham Law 1L student Katherine Ballington asked it of Elena Kagan, who was at Fordham Law on February 4, 2019, to talk with students and accept the Fordham-Stein Prize, Kagan was quick with her answer: “It’s got to be Spider-Man.” Kagan’s response will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the majority ruling she wrote in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment—a case involving the payment of royalties to the inventor of a “web-slinging toy”—in which the justice had great fun peppering…
Part of D’Amico’s work is combating nonconsensual pornography (NCP), which is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos without the consent of the pictured individual. Colloquially known as “revenge porn,” this type of behavior is also referred to as cyber exploitation, sexual cyber harassment, and image-based abuse. But whatever you call it, NCP can destroy a person’s reputation, family, and career in the space of a few malevolent clicks. “These days, whether we like it or not, we are what our digital footprint says we are,” says D’Amico, 38, co-founder of the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project (CCRLP) at…
When Professor Maria L. Marcus and her husband first laid eyes on their Upper West Side apartment, they loved that it “looked very European,” says Marcus, Joseph M. McLaughlin Professor of Law Emerita and moderator of the Moot Court Board. So much so that Marcus has made a home there for 50 years (and counting), filling the space with greenery, family photos, artwork and collectibles from her travels around the world, mementos from her legal career, and now-cherished objects purchased on a whim. In this new column, which will feature people in the Fordham Law community in their natural habitats,…
What goes around comes around, especially when it comes to this group of grads and their commitment to feeding the Fordham Law School pipeline. There are many different paths to success, but in some ways, particularly when it comes to Fordham Law, all paths originate from (and lead back to) the place where it all started: the classrooms and clinics and friendships formed at the Lincoln Center campus. The interconnected group, below, exemplifies the power of the Fordham Law bond, and how it seems to naturally generate mentoring, which leads to great hires and often, lifelong support. Here’s how one…
As a corporate litigator and the first woman elected to Milbank LLP’s five-member Global Executive Committee, Stacey J. Rappaport is as tough as they come. But what truly drives her is helping other women, whether they’re colleagues on the way up or those who are utterly powerless. Ask Stacey Rappaport if it was intimidating for her, as a woman, to land a high-powered corporate law job in the ’90s, and she laughs. “After transferring from engineering school? I was undaunted.” Still, while law might have seemed less daunting and more female-friendly than a career in engineering, Rappaport—a partner in Milbank’s…
The new Women in Urban Law Leadership Initiative aims to overturn the barriers that prevent women from pursuing their dreams—whether heading up a government agency, running for city office, or staying home to take care of the kids. By 2050, a whopping 68 percent of the world’s population is projected to live in cities, according to 2018 statistics by the United Nations. At least half of those people will be women. Cue the Urban Law Center (ULC), which is now actively looking at how leaders and laws in cities can redress access to justice issues that often affect women in…
As an evening division student, you learn very quickly that you have to take advantage of small gifts of free time as they come, including your commute. Which leads me to a funny story: One night, my best friend, Angela Park [’15], and I got out of class and headed to the subway. Both of us worked full time, and were exhausted. We were studying for finals, probably had bags under our eyes, were carrying backpacks bigger than our bodies, and were generally running on steam. Basically, we were a mess. But when the 1 train came, lo and behold,…
For two decades, Judge Alex Calabrese ’79 has been pioneering a more compassionate way of administering justice in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The world is taking notice. It’s a quiet April morning on the streets of Red Hook. A pair of high-tops swings from a telephone wire. A few workers wearing hard hats make their way to a construction site. And in the shadow of the neighborhood’s once infamous housing projects, the trees in Coffey Park are starting to bloom. But just across the street from the park, in a rehabbed Catholic school on Visitation Place, one drama after another is…