Digital Commons Network^™

The Limits Of Change: International Human Rights Under The Obama Administration, Paul B. Stephan

Fordham International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Advancing Transgender Civil Rights And Equality In New York: The Need For Genda, New York Civil Liberties Union, Lincoln Square Legal Services, Inc.

Policy and Legislative Advocacy Clinic

Currently, no statewide law in New York explicitly prohibits discrimination against people whose appearance or identity does not conform to gender stereotypes. This means that people who are fired from their jobs, denied housing and services, and mistreated in the workplace, in stores and in restaurants merely because of their appearance or gender identity do not have clear legal protection. The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) would fix this problem by adding gender identity and gender expression to the categories currently included in New York State’s antidiscrimination laws, such as sex, sexual orientation, race, religion and disability. This report explains …

Tangled Up In Law: The Jurisprudence Of Bob Dylan, Michael L. Perlin

Fordham Urban Law Journal

In this Article, I will try to create a topography of Bob-as-jurisprudential scholar by looking at selected Dylan songs in these discrete areas of law (and law-and-society): civil rights; inequality of the criminal justice system; institutions; governmental/judicial corruption; equality and emancipation (political and economic); poverty, the environment, and inequality of the civil justice system; and the role of lawyers and the legal process.

Making Good Lawyers, Eli Wald, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Today, the criticism of law schools has become an industry. Detractors argue that legal education fails to effectively prepare students for the practice of law, that it is too theoretical and detached from the profession, that it dehumanizes and alienates students, too expensive and inapt in helping students develop a sense of professional identity, professional values, and professionalism. In this sea of criticisms it is hard to see the forest from the trees. “There is so much wrong with legal education today,” writes one commentator, “that it is hard to know where to begin.” This article argues that any reform …

Subsidizing Hate: A Proposal To Reform The Internal Revenue Service's Methodology Test, Alex Reed

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Although a wide variety of organizations may qualify as tax-exempt public charities, reform is needed to ensure that hate groups masquerading as educational organizations do not receive preferential tax treatment. Since 1986, the Internal Revenue Service has utilized a methodology test to determine when advocacy of a particular viewpoint may be deemed educational so as to qualify the underlying organization as a public charity. Because Service has been reluctant to apply the test rigorously, however, a number of hate groups have been able to obtain charitable status under the guise of operating as legitimate educational organizations. This Article argues that …

The Community Prosecutor: Questions Of Professional Discretion, Bruce A. Green, Alafair S. Burke

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Neuroscience And The Child Welfare System, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

A growing body of research by neuroscientists demonstrates that a child’s early life experiences and environment literally shape the child’s brain architecture, with lifelong consequences that are very difficult to reverse. Children’s relationships with their primary caregivers are at the core of this brain development, but when this relationship is severely deficient, the developing child’s brain is deeply affected. This research has not gained sufficient recognition in policy debates about the child welfare system because much of the work is complex and hard for non-neuroscientists to decipher with nuance. This essay brings a family law scholar’s perspective to understanding the …

Dylan And The Last Love Song Of The American Left, John M. Facciola

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The reminiscences of an old man who had the joy of being a New York kid when an old American music form was transformed by the extraordinary efforts of a group of musicians who saw a new creative force that they thought could cause revolutionary social change. This article examines the impact of the friendship between Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie on folk music and describes the political consciousness of the music.

Symposium: Bob Dylan And The Law Foreword, Samuel J. Levine

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Taken together, the articles in this Symposium Issue provide a journey through both Bob Dylan’s career and the American legal landscape. Befitting a legal prophet, Dylan is often critical, skeptical, and cynical, at times uncompromising in his portrayal of the failures of American law and society. The presentations at the Dylan and the Law Symposium reflected, in part, the disappointment and frustration expressed in Dylan’s words and music. Yet, the speakers at the Symposium echoed another side of Bob Dylan’s work: a refusal to surrender or despair in the face of disheartening reality. Instead, drawing upon Dylan’s prophetic dreams and …

"No Older 'N Seventeen": Defending In Dylan Country, Abbe Smith

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article is about an actual experience the author had defending a teenager accused of a serious crime where Bob Dylan grew up-- the Minnesota Iron Range. In order to protect the young man's privacy, it does not divulge the actual time period of the case. Likewise, details about his life and the charges he was facing have been changed. His name has been changed to Jamal. Things did not go well for Jamal. Though a child when he was sent from the juvenile jail outside of Washington, D.C. to a secure treatment facility for serious juvenile offenders in the …

Leveraging Bias In Forensic Science, Roger Koppl

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Dr. Simon Cole calls for a more hierarchical organization of forensic science in his challenging Article, Acculturating Forensic Science: What is ‘Scientific Culture’, and How can Forensic Science Adopt it? Koppl thinks Dr. Cole is right to say that there are different roles in forensic science, but somewhat mistaken in his call for hierarchy.

Answering To A Higher Authority: Sovereign-Mandated Oversight In The Board Room And The C-Suite, Thomas F. O’Neil Iii, T. Brendan Kennedy

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The relationship between business organizations and the sovereign agencies that regulate them is being redefined domestically and abroad. In the context of corporate enforcement proceedings, a critical challenge is how to achieve, most effectively, the timehonored public sector objectives of punishment, deterrence, financial restitution and rehabilitation. At issue are important policy considerations and at stake are the integrity and security of the commercial marketplace. The public sector increasingly must balance the pressures of limited resources against the need to ensure that corporate citizens behave not only lawfully, but ethically and responsibly. One solution that has been adopted is the imposition …

It's Time For A Good Hard Look In The Mirror: The Corporate Law Example, John A. Barrett, Jr.

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Article asserts that the move from the industrial age to the

information age represents a fundamental change to our society on

such a widespread basis that the legal order must reexamine the

premises about how our society functions, assessing whether

foundational elements of U.S. Common Law remain valid. This

Article first confronts briefly the continuing acceptance of certain

foundational premises in contract and intellectual property law,

illustrating that such premises are no longer supported by the

realities of modern society. With fundamental change challenging

multiple areas of law in the information age, this problem is worthy

of widespread inquiry …

A Conversation With United States Senator Jim Webb, Jim Webb

Fordham International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Legislating Human Rights: The Case For Federal Legislation To Facilitate Domestic Judicial Application Of International Human Rights Treaties - Human Rights In The Obama Administration: A Stein Center & Leitner Center Colloquium, David Sloss

Fordham International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Micro And Macro Causes Of Prison Growth, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why Proportionality Matters, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prosecutors And Professional Regulation, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Prosecutors often express mistrust of professional regulators, their rules and their processes. This may have been more understandable twenty years ago, when prosecutors perceived that the organized bar had been captured by defense lawyers seeking to use professional regulation as a means of imposing limits on criminal investigative authority that the law did not otherwise recognize. Although that criticism no longer has much basis in reality, it has persisted in the rhetoric prosecutors employ in advocacy regarding their professional conduct. This article explores prosecutors’ public attitude toward professional regulation, beginning with a brief account of their responses two decades ago, …

Patient Racial Preferences And The Medical Culture Of Accommodation, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

One of medicine’s open secrets is that patients routinely refuse or demand medical treatment based on the assigned physician’s racial identity, and hospitals typically yield to patients’ racial preferences. This widely practiced, if rarely acknowledged, phenomenon — about which there is new empirical evidence — poses a fundamental dilemma for law, medicine, and ethics. It also raises difficult questions about how we should think about race, health, and individual autonomy in this context. Informed consent rules and common law battery dictate that a competent patient has an almost-unqualified right to refuse medical care, including treatment provided by an unwanted physician. …

Foreword: Root Causes Of The Pro Se Prisoner Litigation Crisis, Michael W. Martin

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Computers As Castles: Preventing The Plain View Doctrine From Becoming A Vehicle For Overbroad Digital Searches , James Saylor

Fordham Law Review

The plain view doctrine is based on the practical logic that an officer need not turn a blind eye to evidence that is immediately apparent as incriminating when he is lawfully present, where the object can be seen, and where he has a legal right to access that object. However, in the context of digital searches, this basic logic is stretched to a point that directly conflicts with the original purposes of the Fourth Amendment. The immense amount of data present on computers makes these searches much more intrusive. Officers employ search methods and techniques to access files that involve …

Blanket Policies For Strip Searching Pretrial Detainees: An Interdisciplinary Argument For Reasonableness , Daphne Ha

Fordham Law Review

In 2010, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Third and Ninth Circuits joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in upholding the constitutionality of blanket strip search policies in correctional institutions. As a result, more government officials across the country can strip search arrestees and pretrial detainees as a matter of routine procedure without any reasonable suspicion that the detainees have contraband. These detainees include individuals without criminal histories who are arrested for traffic or other minor offenses, and who have done nothing to suggest that they are attempting to smuggle contraband into correctional facilities. This …

Extracting Compassion From Confusion: Sentencing Noncitizens After United States V. Booker, Francesca Brody

Fordham Law Review

A noncitizen facing a federal judge for sentencing confronts a demonstrably different future than an otherwise identical citizen. Deportation, immigration detention, harsher prison conditions, and a longer actual sentence may all await the noncitizen federal inmate. The U.S. Courts of Appeals have disagreed as to whether a district judge can consider those consequences in crafting a sentence under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. This Note argues that the circuit split results from circuit courts’ varying appellate scrutiny of sentencing decisions after United States v. Booker. To resolve the split, this Note encourages the U.S. Sentencing Commission to adopt an amendment to …

Alien Language: Immigration Metaphors And The Jurisprudence Of Otherness , Keith Cunningham-Parmeter

Fordham Law Review

Metaphors tell the story of immigration law. Throughout its immigration jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court has employed rich metaphoric language to describe immigrants attacking nations and aliens flooding communities. This Article applies research in cognitive linguistics to critically evaluate the metaphoric construction of immigrants in the law. Three conceptual metaphors dominate legal texts: immigrants are aliens, immigration is a flood, and immigration is an invasion. In order to gauge the prevalence of these metaphors, the Article engages in a textual analysis of modern Supreme Court opinions and presents original empirical data on the incidence of alienage terminology in federal court …

Holland V. Florida: A Prisoner’S Last Chance, Attorney Error, And The Antiterrorism And Effective Death Penalty Act’S One-Year Statute Of Limitations Period For Federal Habeas Corpus Review, Marni Von Wilpert

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Possibility Of Transfer(?): A Comprehensive Approach To The International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda’S Rule 11bis To Permit Transfer To Rwandan Domestic Courts, Jesse Melman

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Lawyer's “Prisoner's Dilemma”: Duty And Self-Defense In Postconviction Ineffectiveness Claims, Jenna C. Newmark

Fordham Law Review

Many criminal defendants who face significant sentences and are unsuccessful on appeal petition for collateral habeas corpus relief. One common ground for postconviction relief is that defense counsel was unconstitutionally ineffective before, during, or after trial. This presents an ethical dilemma for those defense attorneys who have withdrawn from representation and are accused of being ineffective. Should an accused lawyer disclose confidential client information to the prosecution in self- defense against these claims? Or should the lawyer, even in the face of attacks on his work, help his former client in substantiating ineffectiveness claims? Lawyers and courts must balance the …

Panel Two: Should There Be Remote Public Access To Court Filings In Immigration Cases?, The Honorable Robert Hinkle, David Mccraw, Daniel Kanstroom, Eleanor Acer

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Broken Borders, Broken Laws: Aligning Crime And Punishment Under Section 2l1.1(B)(7) Of The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, Genevieve Quinn

Fordham Law Review

Despite the intensifying militarization of the United States’ borders, roughly 4,000 undocumented immigrants attempt to cross into the U.S. each day. Increased border security has not stopped the flow; rather, it has diverted migrants’ journeys into the most perilous stretches of borderlands and coastlines. In response, migrants increasingly rely on human smugglers to guide them across the border, even in the face of the well-known risks of injury and death. Under section 2L1.1(b)(7) of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, defendants convicted of smuggling illegal immigrants are subject to a sentence enhancement for any bodily injury or death that occurs. The Guidelines …

The Supreme Court Assumes Errant Prosecutors Will Be Disciplined By Their Offices Or The Bar: Three Case Studies That Prove That Assumption Wrong, Joel B. Rudin

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.