Law Commons^™

Idea Bank For New York City's Chief Public Realm Officer: Imagining A Broad, Equity-Enhancing Role For Creating Access To Public Space, Tara Eisenberg, Althea Lamel, Lindsay Matheos, Carolyn Weldy, Andrea Mcardle

City University of New York Law Review

By executive order on February 16, 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams created the position of the City’s Chief Public Realm Officer to promote a more centralized and coordinated approach to public realm policy, and appointed a chief strategy officer from his own staff, Ya-Ting Liu, to fill this position. This Article argues that the City should view the role of the Public Realm Office expansively and proactively to help achieve meaningful, equity-enhancing progress in stewarding public space. The authors, former students and a faculty member of CUNY School of Law’s Land Use and Community Lawyering seminar, offer a …

Editors' Note

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Adjusting The Focus: Addressing Privacy Concerns Raised By Police Body-Camera Footage, Dalton Primeaux

City University of New York Law Review

Many public safety advocates have called for the use of police body cameras to document the interactions between officers and the public. In light of the documented incidents of police violence and misconduct, some advocates and policy experts have urged law enforcement to use body cameras to discourage future wrongdoing and create a record of when such incidents do happen. In some states, body camera footage is considered public record and can be obtained upon request. Most policies concerning requests for the release of body camera footage require the chief of police to grant permission for sharing the video with …

Character And Fitness In America's Neo-Redemptive Era, Tolu Lawal, Al Brooks

City University of New York Law Review

The Character and Fitness process is the last major institutional hurdle that aspiring attorneys must overcome to gain licensure to the legal profession. A process held out to determine “moral” character, the Character and Fitness often goes uninterrogated, instead flattened into just a quotidian and inconvenient aspect of the profession’s admission procedures. However, the normalization of both the process and existence of the Character and Fitness obscures the reality that this unscientific process neither has particularized, inherent value to the profession nor is an accurate tool of determining the moral or ethical principles of potential attorneys. Instead, the advocacy of …

Access To Injustice: How Legal Reforms Reinforce Marginalization, Roni Amit

City University of New York Law Review

Marginalized individuals are largely excluded from making rights claims in the courts because their stories of rights violations fall outside of prescribed legal categories. Framing this exclusion as a lack of knowledge and access, proponents of the access to justice movement have sought to improve outcomes for unrepresented and marginalized litigants through measures that help them understand and navigate the system. The access to justice movement seeks to make the justice system more accessible to these litigants by focusing on procedural fairness. This Article draws on empirical data and observations from Tulsa’s eviction court to consider the limits of access …

On The Road To Nowhere: The Unique Challenges Stateless People Face In Removal Proceedings And The Untenable Legal Limbo Following Final Orders Of Removal, Rachel Marandett

City University of New York Law Review

Under a world order defined by nation-states, having one’s rights and dignity protected is inexorably tied to being a citizen of somewhere. Stateless people, who are citizens of nowhere, are thus left without the safeguards of a nation responsible for them. Today, there are over 200,000 stateless people living in the United States. Because the American immigration system is built upon the premise that everyone is a citizen of somewhere, stateless people are consistently trapped in a ceaseless legal limbo. In fact, the majority of stateless people in the United States have already gone through removal proceedings and have final …

An Exegesis Of The Meaning Of Dobbs: Despotism, Servitude, & Forced Birth, Athena D. Mutua

City University of New York Law Review

The Dobbs decision has been leaked. Gathered outside of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, pro-choice protesters chant: “Not the church, not the state, the people must decide their fate.” A white man wearing a New York Fire Department sweatshirt and standing on the front steps responds: “I am the people, I am the people, I am the people, the people have decided, the court has decided, you lose . . . . You have no choice. Not your body, not your choice, your body is mine and you’re having my baby.”

Despicable but not unexpected, this man’s comments …

Front Matter

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Compensatory Preliminary Damages: Access To Justice As Corrective Justice, Sayid R. Bnefsi

City University of New York Law Review

The access to justice movement broadly concerns people’s ability to resolve legally actionable problems. To the extent that individuals seek resolution through civil litigation, they can be disadvantaged by their unmet need for legal services, particularly in high-stakes cases and complicated areas of law. In part, this is because legal services and litigation are cost-prohibitive, especially for indigent plaintiffs. As a result, these individuals are priced out of litigation and, by extension, unable to use law to seek justice

This Note proposes an innovative legal intervention to this problem called “compensatory preliminary damages.” This intervention builds from the work of …

Extradition In Post-Roe America, Alejandra L. Caraballo, Cynthia Conti-Cook, Yveka Pierre, Michelle Mcgrath, Hillary Aarons

City University of New York Law Review

The United States is on the brink of a crisis brought on by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Eliminating the constitutional right to abortion will create a massive discordance in the criminal laws between states not seen since before the Civil War. This discordance in criminal laws will create tension between states that criminalize abortion and those that protect it as a state constitutional right. States such as Connecticut are already passing shield laws for abortion access and gender affirming care, while states such as Louisiana are proposing to classify abortion as …

Nysrpa V. Bruen And New York: A Lost Opportunity For Racial Equity In The Polarizing Gun Conversation, Zamir Ben-Dan

City University of New York Law Review

On June 23, 2022, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen,1 which invalidated the “proper cause” requirement of New York’s “Sullivan Law,” its gun licensing statute. Reactions to this deci-sion were predictably mixed, largely drawn along the regular partisan lines.2 For those concerned about racial justice, this decision created an opportunity for honest dialogue about how to enhance public safety in a nondiscriminatory way while being consistent with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, this was bound to be a lost opportunity in New …

Footnote Forum’S Moderated Conversation With The Authors Of The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act And Criminalized Immigrant Survivors, Assia Serrano And Nathan Yaffe, Assia Serrano, Nathan Yaffe

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reducing Multigenerational Poverty In New York Through Sentencing Reform, Jared Trujillo

City University of New York Law Review

The relationship between incarceration and poverty is circular, cyclical, and symbiotic – poverty is a cause of incarceration, and incarceration causes poverty. In the 1970’s and 1990’s, New York led the country in enacting draconian sentencing laws that required judges to sentence children and adults to longer periods of incarceration, while also reducing the ability of incarcerated people to earn time off of their sentences for participation in rehabilitative, vocational, and educational programming. For the past half century, these harsh sentencing laws have been the primary driver of mass incarceration in New York. As a result, generations of families with …

Front Matter

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

“What If You’Re Disabled And Undocumented?”: Reflections On Intersectionality, Disability Justice, And Representing Undocumented And Disabled Latinx Client, Elizabeth Butterworth

City University of New York Law Review

In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah L. Piepzna-Samarasinha asks a series of questions to illustrate how disability rights law fails to address the needs of those who experience multiple systems of oppression, including: “What if you’re disabled and undocumented?” This article draws on research from across disciplines, with a focus on personal narratives, to reflect on and respond to Piepzna-Samarashinha’s question, specifically with regard to the experience of immigrants who are disabled, undocumented, and Latinx. As such, it centers disability justice analyses and describes how ableism and white nationalism are mutually reinforcing bedrocks of immigration law, and how the …

No Settled Law On Settled Land: Legal Struggles For Native American Land And Sovereignty Rights, Laura Waldman

City University of New York Law Review

Since the early years of colonization, Native American people have engaged in continuous legal struggles for land and sovereignty, which have exposed the colonial underpinnings and white supremacist worldview that are the root cause of their ongoing subjugation. In modern times, that often takes the form of government-backed corporate control over natural resources. This note traces the historical links from treaty violations by early white settlers for the purpose of usurping plantation land and gold, to recent incursions by companies building unwanted oil and gas pipelines on Native American lands.

Both then and now, using law as a tool of …

Women's Dignity, Women's Prisons: Combatting Sexual Abuse In America's Prisons, Erin Daly, Paul Stanley Holdorf, Kelly Harnett, Jane Doe, Domonique Grimes

City University of New York Law Review

Staff sexual abuse is rampant throughout the American prison system. This is true despite a federal law—the aspirationally titled Prison Rape Elimination Act (“PREA”)—that has been in place for 20 years and despite the rare conviction of prison officials who are found guilty of rape or sexual abuse of people who are incarcerated. Sexual contact between prison staff and incarcerated people is by definition illegal because the power imbalance between people in custody and those who are under their control makes consent impossible as a matter of law. Staff-on-prisoner sexual abuse takes many forms, including sexual humiliation, sexually degrading language …

An Asian American Challenge To Restrictive Voting Laws: Enforcing Section 208 Of The Voting Rights Act In Texas, Kyuwon Shim, Michelle David, Susana Lorenzo-Giguere

City University of New York Law Review

Under Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”), any voter who is blind, disabled, or unable to read or write is entitled to assistance to vote by a person of the voter’s choice. Section 208 guarantees that such voter may choose a person they trust to assist them in navigating the voting process and cast a ballot, with only two limitations: To prevent financial influence on the voter’s ballot choices, the assistor cannot be the voter’s employer or union representative. In Texas, this law protects millions of limited-English proficient (“LEP”), disabled, and illiterate citizens. In 2015, the Asian American …

This Article Is Considered Terrorism In The Philippines: The Role Of People's Lawyers In Class Struggle, Amanda Katapang

City University of New York Law Review

Lawyers do not need to be confined to simply supporting the fight for liberation but can and should be part and parcel to the struggle. Legal theory and practice do not need to be divorced from revolutionary theory and practice. In the National Democratic (ND) Movement in the Philippines, people’s lawyers do not just participate in legal defense or campaigns but ultimately in class struggle against the exploiters and oppressors. This Comment explores these principles and lessons from the Philippines and their application in the ND Movement’s overseas component, building upon the canon of movement lawyering.

The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act And Criminalized Immigrant Survivors, Assia Serrano, Nathan Yaffe

City University of New York Law Review

This piece explores how New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (“DVSJA”), a law meant to grant freedom to criminalized survivors, plays out in practice for criminalized immigrant survivors. New York enacted the DVSJA to address the unjust, but common, harsh punishment of survivors for conduct that an abuser compels, coerces, or otherwise causes. When the court grants a survivor DVSJA relief, the material benefit is shortening that survivor’s sentence of incarceration.

However, for criminalized immigrant survivors, the DVSJA’s promise of freedom may amount to little more than a mirage because DVSJA relief does not expunge, vacate, or alter underlying …

High Risk Hustling: Payment Processors Sexual Proxies And Discrimination By Design, Zahra Stardust, Danielle Blunt, Gabriella Garcia, Lorelei Lee, Kate D'Adamo, Rachel Kuo

City University of New York Law Review

Sex workers are increasingly documenting financial discrimination when accessing banks, payment processors and financial providers. As hustle economy workers, barriers to digital financial infrastructure impact sex workers’ abilities to maintain their livelihoods, resulting in structural marginalization and vulnerability to violence. Internationally, peer-led sex worker organizations have documented payment processors that discriminate, collating public policies and user experiences. They report refusals of merchant services, being unable to open accounts, being denied loans, finance or insurance, higher premiums, and having money frozen, withheld or forfeited.

In this article, we examine the policies of banks and payment providers who refuse service to sex …

Made For Export: How U.S. And Philippine Policies Commodify And Traffick Filipino Nurses, Emlyn Dy-Cok Medalla

City University of New York Law Review

Filipino nurses have been celebrated as heroes over the course of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Some publications used this time to highlight the experiences of Filipino healthcare workers and the legacy behind the migration of Filipino nurses. However, the mass migration of Filipino nurses is a phenomenon that has grown out of a legacy of colonialism and imperialism. The United States relies on the exploitation of Filipino nurses as a band-aid solution to the nursing shortage that started in the 1970s. In response to two recent federal court decisions that make clear the practice of human trafficking in U.S.-Philippine employment …

"Inherently Expressive": Bds Organizing For Palestinian Liberation At Cuny School Of Law And Beyond, Students For Justice In Palestine (Sjp), Jewish Law Students Association (Jlsa), City University Of New York (Cuny) School Of Law

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Heirs' Property Problem: Racial Caste Origins And Systemic Effects In The Black Community, Brenda Gibson

City University of New York Law Review

This article enters the conversation about Black poverty in a new way—discussing the phenomenon of the heirs’ property ownership model as an impediment to Black wealth. Though heirs’ property seems a rather innocuous concept in property law, juxtaposed with the history of Black people in the United States, particularly through the lens of the South Carolina Low Country and American systems that have birthed and nurtured incalculable inequities for us, it becomes clear that heirs’ property ownership is much more. It is both cause and effect: cause as it was birthed out of America’s racial caste system; and effect in …

Sexual Intimacy As A Fundamental, Human Right: Conjugal Visits And The Right To Be Unmarried, Deema Nagib

City University of New York Law Review

The United States incarcerates approximately 2 million people on any given day, more than any other country in the world. Over the years, we’ve seen growing emphasis on the rights and human needs of the incarcerated. Specifically, there have been growing movements to end the use of solitary confinement; reduce or eliminate the costs of phone calls, visits, and other methods of communication; end prison slavery and implement living wages for incarcerated people; and increase opportunities for education and other meaningful programming. However, little emphasis has been placed on an incarcerated person’s right and ability to be sexual. A desire …

Prosecutors Must Use Their Immense Discretion To End The Criminalization Of Survivors Of Gender-Based Violence Who Act In Self-Defense, Tracy Renee Mccarter, Samah Sisay

City University of New York Law Review

In March 2020, Tracy McCarter defended her life during a domestic violence incident that resulted in the death of her husband. She was arrested and subsequently spent months at Rikers Island during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic after being charged with murder in the second degree by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. Tracy McCarter's case is only one example of how the United States' criminal legal system deems that certain individuals, particularly Black women, have no claim to self-defense. Discussing Tracy McCarter's case and other cases of self-defense, this Article provides an overview of the limited applicability of self-defense …

A Jailscraper Rises In New York City’S Skyline And Casts A Shadow Over Manhattan’S Chinatown: An Examination Of Its Approval Process, Kimberly Fong

City University of New York Law Review

New York City will soon have the distinction of constructing one of the tallest jails—if not the tallest—in the world. The jail will be a new addition to New York City’s skyline at 295 feet tall, even taller than Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. As part of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to close Rikers Island as a detention center, this jail is part of the Borough-Based Jail Program intended to accommodate a smaller jail population in four smaller jails located in the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. The impetus for closing Rikers came in part from increased concern that …

Casting Out From The Inside: Abolishing Felony Disenfranchisement In New York, Elizabeth Neuland

City University of New York Law Review

Felony disenfranchisement laws are an archaic practice, meant to silence a population that is often forgotten and overlooked by society. On the principles of rehabilitation and accountability, New York State ought to completely abolish felony disenfranchisement. It does not deter crime. In fact, recidivism rates show a decline when incarcerated individuals have rehabilitative opportunities through New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision ("DOCCS")-facilitated programming and family services. As the arguments laid out in this Comment demonstrate, it is imperative that the New York State Legislature takes prompt action to abolish felony disenfranchisement altogether.

Elderly, Detained, And Justice-Involved: The Most Incarcerated Generation, Rachael Bedard, Joshua Vaughn, Angela Silletti Murolo

City University of New York Law Review

The “graying” of the United States prison system is a well-documented phenomenon that describes the aging of the population currently held in U.S. state and federal prisons. This is generally attributed to the large number of individuals who are aging in place in prisons around the country due to long sentences and restrictive parole practices. Less well-known or well-characterized is the fact that the U.S.’s justice-involved population outside of prisons is also “graying”—that the demographics of people who are being arrested, jail detained, transferred to prisons on new criminal convictions, and monitored under community surveillance programs are also changing to …