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Articles 1 - 30 of 117
Full-Text Articles in Law
Regulating The Public Defender Identity, Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe
Regulating The Public Defender Identity, Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe
Fordham Law Review
The public defender institution has trouble meeting its mission. This is partly because, despite the specific and clear purpose of representing indigent defendants in criminal proceedings, public defender offices rely on various centering principles to meet this objective. The institution falters if it chooses a centering principle that unwittingly complicates its ability to meet the institution’s central mission. For public defender leaders tasked with developing and maintaining an institutional identity for a particular office, neither legal nor professional regulations supply the type of considerations that guarantee that an adopted identity will comply with core institutional responsibilities. This project seeks to …
Chicken Or Egg: Diversity And Innovation In The Corporate Legal Marketplace, Michele Destefano
Chicken Or Egg: Diversity And Innovation In The Corporate Legal Marketplace, Michele Destefano
Fordham Law Review
Although their bank accounts might suggest otherwise, these are not the best of times for lawyers who work in the corporate legal marketplace. Instead, the trouble with lawyers in the corporate legal marketplace is that they are failing to answer two calls to action made by corporate clients, both of which are of great magnitude and importance for the future of the profession. The first call to action is one that Professor Deborah L. Rhode focused a lot of her scholarship on: the call to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) in the profession. The second call to action is …
Why State Courts Should Authorize Nonlawyers To Practice Law, Bruce A. Green
Why State Courts Should Authorize Nonlawyers To Practice Law, Bruce A. Green
Fordham Law Review
The unauthorized practice of law (“UPL”) is a crime in most states. Many scholars have criticized UPL laws as unnecessary impediments to low-income individuals’ ability to obtain legal help. Meanwhile, courts often defend these laws by analogizing the dangers posed by unlicensed legal practice to those posed by unlicensed medical practice. Chronicling two notable UPL suits to illustrate how nonlawyers may help low-income individuals seeking legal assistance and arguing that comparison to the medical profession in many ways favors liberalizing UPL enforcement, Professor Bruce Green concludes that state courts should allow nonlawyers greater freedom to provide legal assistance.
A Ram From Sparta, Constantine N. Katsoris
A Ram From Sparta, Constantine N. Katsoris
Fordham Law Review
At some point in our lives each of us must decide upon a career or profession and the path necessary to achieve that goal. Some make that decision at an early age; others make it much later in life and are often influenced by outside forces, experiences, opportunities, and obligations. Choosing which path to take is not easy, and in this regard, Professor Constantine Katsoris would like to share the crossroads he encountered throughout his six decades of teaching at Fordham Law School—a school he has come to describe as the school of opportunity. This Essay outlines his career …
Foreword, Bennett Capers, Bruce A. Green
Foreword, Bennett Capers, Bruce A. Green
Fordham Law Review
Is there such a thing as subversive lawyering? And if so, what is it? These are the questions that motivate this colloquium issue. To be sure, other, similar terms exist and have been explicated. Movement lawyering. Rebellious lawyering. Resistance lawyering. Indeed,we were particularly inspired by Daniel Farbman’s article Resistance Lawyering, in which he uncovers the stories of abolitionist lawyers who, confronting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, “employed every means at their disposal to frustrate, delay, and dismantle the system within which they were practicing.” But still, we wondered if subversive lawyering might be something different. Something akin to resistance …
Progressive Prosecutors Are Not Trying To Dismantle The Master’S House, And The Master Wouldn’T Let Them Anyway, Paul Butler
Progressive Prosecutors Are Not Trying To Dismantle The Master’S House, And The Master Wouldn’T Let Them Anyway, Paul Butler
Fordham Law Review
The first thing to note about Audre Lorde’s famous phrase “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is that it cannot literally be true. If tools can dismantle the master’s house, the master’s own tools would be good as anyone’s. The main problem would not be that the tools don’t work, but rather how to get them to the people who most need the master’s house dismantled—the enslaved ones. But the considerable work that the phrase does in social justice movements and critical theory is figurative rather than literal. It is usually intended as a rebuke of liberal …
No Justice, No Pleas: Subverting Mass Incarceration Through Defendant Collective Action, Andrew Manuel Crespo
No Justice, No Pleas: Subverting Mass Incarceration Through Defendant Collective Action, Andrew Manuel Crespo
Fordham Law Review
The American penal system is a system of massive, racially unjust incarceration. It is also, to quote the U.S. Supreme Court, a “system of pleas.” The latter drives the former, as coercive plea bargaining makes it possible for the state to do two things that are otherwise hard to pull off at once: increase convictions and sentence lengths. Mass incarceration is a predictable result. But while plea bargaining is intensely coercive when leveraged against individuals, the system of pleas has a structural weak point. That Achilles’ heel is exposed once we see people facing prosecution not as isolated individuals but …
A Commons In The Master’S House, Daniel Farbman
A Commons In The Master’S House, Daniel Farbman
Fordham Law Review
Almost everyone who reads these words is an institutional insider in some form. Those of us who aspire toward transformation, liberation, and resistance from our institutional settings are forced to confront Audre Lorde’s striking admonition that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” For some, finding themselves in the master’s house is a spur towards purism—a rejection of institutional power in search of a “pure” remove from which to critique it. For others, it is a dispiriting check on their aspirations and an invitation to sullen fatalism. This Essay questions whether we are bound to the hard consequences …
When We Fight, We Win: Eviction Defense As Subversive Lawyering, Eloise Lawrence
When We Fight, We Win: Eviction Defense As Subversive Lawyering, Eloise Lawrence
Fordham Law Review
This Essay will examine the “sword and shield” model in action to explore the meaning of “subversive lawyering” in the housing context, particularly in eviction defense. In this model, we—the lawyers and law students— provide the “shield” (i.e., legal defense), while the organizers and members of grassroots housing justice organizations provide the “sword” (i.e., public pressure and protest). The lawyers are shielding tenants and foreclosed homeowners in the courts, which allows these “defendants” to simultaneously work with organizers to take necessary extralegal actions to ensure they are protected from displacement.
Racial Allies, Atinuke O. Adediran
Racial Allies, Atinuke O. Adediran
Fordham Law Review
Racial allies are white individuals and institutions that actively work to dismantle systems of racial inequality and the consequences of poverty that disproportionately impact communities of color and that are willing to both confer and share power with members of subjugated groups. There is no other sector of the legal profession that professes to be racial allies more than individuals and institutions within the public interest law sector. Yet, these institutions that address structural racism and disproportionately serve communities of color appear not to share power with racial and ethnic minorities. The public interest law sector has been at the …
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Fordham Law Review
What if instead of seeing criminal court as an institution driven by the operation of rules, we saw it as a workplace where people labor to criminalize those with the misfortune to be prosecuted? Early observers of twentieth century urban criminal courts likened them to factories. Since then, commentators often deploy the pejorative epithet “assembly line justice” to describe criminal court’s processes. The term conveys the criticism of a mechanical system delivering a form of justice that is impersonal and fallible. Perhaps unintentionally, the epithet reveals another truth: criminal court is also a workplace, and it takes labor to keep …
Policy By The People, For The People:Designing Responsiveregulation And Buildingdemocratic Power, Scott L. Cummings, Doug Smith
Policy By The People, For The People:Designing Responsiveregulation And Buildingdemocratic Power, Scott L. Cummings, Doug Smith
Fordham Law Review
Policymaking in American democracy is often a process that happens to people rather than by them. This is especially the case with respect to policy that affects people with less power in low-income communities and communities of color. Urban policy, in particular, has historically been driven by business elites and white homeowners’ interests, which have shaped exclusionary policies, such as redlining and single-family zoning— etching racial and economic segregation into the fabric of city space. Even when outsider interest groups and social movement organizations gain enough power to shape the policy agenda, give input into the content of policy, and …
Subversive Legal Education:Reformist Steps Towardabolitionist Visions, Christina John, Russell G. Pearce, Aundray Jermaine Archer, Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Aron Pines, Maryam Salmanova, Vira Tarnavska
Subversive Legal Education:Reformist Steps Towardabolitionist Visions, Christina John, Russell G. Pearce, Aundray Jermaine Archer, Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Aron Pines, Maryam Salmanova, Vira Tarnavska
Fordham Law Review
Exclusivity in legal education divides traditional scholars, students, and impacted communities most disproportionately harmed by the legal education system. While traditional legal scholars tend to embrace traditional legal education, organic jurists—those who are historically excluded from legal education and those who educate themselves and their communities about their legal rights and realities—often reject the inaccessibility of legal education and its power. This Essay joins a team of community legal writers to imagine a set of principles for subversive legal education. Together, we—formerly incarcerated pro se litigants, paralegals for intergenerational movement lawyering initiatives, first-generation law students and lawyers, persons with years …
Free-Ing Criminal Justice, I. Bennett Capers
Free-Ing Criminal Justice, I. Bennett Capers
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
A2j Summit Collection Contributors, David Udell
A2j Summit Collection Contributors, David Udell
Fordham Law Review Online
A compilation of biographies for the authors and participants in this Collection.
All Rise For Civil Justice, Martha Bergmark
All Rise For Civil Justice, Martha Bergmark
Fordham Law Review Online
Equal justice under law is an American ideal. But every year, millions of people lose their cases in civil courts, not because they have done something wrong, but because they do not have the information or legal help they need to make their case. The United States civil justice system must be reformed so that it works for everyone, not just for the wealthy and the represented. For guidance, advocates of civil justice reform should look to the movement for criminal justice reform, which has successfully raised awareness and galvanized coalitions to effect policy change. I eagerly await the case …
The Role Of Data In Organizing An Access To Justice Movement, James Gamble, Amy Widman
The Role Of Data In Organizing An Access To Justice Movement, James Gamble, Amy Widman
Fordham Law Review Online
reminds us that civil justice reform has to start with compelling human stories. She’s right. Building a movement requires drawing in the care and effort of those who previously had not seen the problem. A story of a mother and her family unjustly evicted from their home, of an older gentleman whose life savings are unjustly taken, or of a father fighting for visitation rights unjustly denied: each of these personal stories is an outrage and will often generate anger in the listener. Stories lead those who do not live the injustices of our civil justice system every day to …
A Few Interventions And Offerings From Five Movement Lawyers To The Access To Justice Movement, Jennifer Ching, Thomas B. Harvey, Meena Jagannath, Purvi Shah, Blake Strode
A Few Interventions And Offerings From Five Movement Lawyers To The Access To Justice Movement, Jennifer Ching, Thomas B. Harvey, Meena Jagannath, Purvi Shah, Blake Strode
Fordham Law Review Online
We are five lawyers who occupy very different corners of justice work. We are civil rights, human rights, and criminal defense lawyers, and we have worked at and managed legal services programs. We have taught law at law schools and universities and have built our own organizations. We currently work in interdisciplinary spaces with community organizers, funders, and other stakeholders in the justice system. As diverse as our perspectives are, we share a common belief that any mobilization around access to justice fails if it does not center the vision and strategies of larger social justice movements. We share here …
The Legal Empowerment Movement And Its Implications, Peter Chapman
The Legal Empowerment Movement And Its Implications, Peter Chapman
Fordham Law Review Online
Around the world, a global legal empowerment movement is transforming the way in which people access justice. The concept of legal empowerment is rooted in strengthening the ability of communities to: “understand, use and shape the law.” The movement relies on people helping one another to stand up to authority and challenge injustice. At its center are paralegals, barefoot lawyers, and community advocates. Backed up by lawyers, these advocates are having significant impacts.
A National Movement For Access To Justice Must Be Holistic, Justine Olderman, Runa Rajagopal
A National Movement For Access To Justice Must Be Holistic, Justine Olderman, Runa Rajagopal
Fordham Law Review Online
Jazmine Headley is one of many parents across New York City who depends on childcare benefits in order to work and to be the best single parent she can be to her one-year-old son. When her son’s daycare reported that it was no longer receiving payment from the city-issued childcare voucher, Jazmine’s only option was to take a day off of work to go to her local benefits center and figure out what was wrong. Making the trip to the benefits center meant that Jazmine had to miss a full day’s wage, and navigate the bureaucratic public assistance system, all …
Building A Movement: The Lessons Of Fines And Fees, Lisa Foster
Building A Movement: The Lessons Of Fines And Fees, Lisa Foster
Fordham Law Review Online
I doubt we will ever experience something we (or others) would call an Access to Justice Movement in the United States. The goal is too amorphous, lacks immediacy, and doesn’t resonate: If people don’t perceive that many of their problems have a legal solution, why would they rally to support “100 percent access to effective assistance for essential civil legal needs”? The legal system is too big, too complicated, and too removed from people’s everyday experiences. And especially in low-income communities of color, distrust of the justice system runs deep. People don’t want access to a system they believe is …
Integrating The Access To Justice Movement, Lauren Sudeall
Integrating The Access To Justice Movement, Lauren Sudeall
Fordham Law Review Online
Last fall, advocates of social change came together at the A2J Summit at Fordham University School of Law and discussed how to galvanize a national access to justice movement—who would it include, and what would or should it attempt to achieve? One important preliminary question we tackled was how such a movement would define “justice,” and whether it would apply only to the civil justice system. Although the phrase “access to justice” is not exclusively civil in nature, more often than not it is taken to have that connotation. Lost in that interpretation is an opportunity to engage in a …
Self-Representation Is Becoming The Norm And Driving Reform, Katherine Alteneder
Self-Representation Is Becoming The Norm And Driving Reform, Katherine Alteneder
Fordham Law Review Online
The impact of civil legal entanglement on individuals and communities in matters involving essential basic needs—such as housing, safety, food security, health, education, wages, and family matters—is profound, and, unlike criminal proceedings, there is no right to counsel. Thus, people are, for the most part, their own champions. The outcomes of these entanglements shape the culture, well-being, and capacity of our communities and ought to be of fundamental concern for those engaged in social justice, anti-poverty, and civil rights work.
Don't Go It Alone, Ariel Simon, Sandra Ambrozy
Don't Go It Alone, Ariel Simon, Sandra Ambrozy
Fordham Law Review Online
Civil legal challenges cut across an astonishing range of headline-making social issues. And so, while it is possible to make a compelling case for “access to justice” without tying it to issues of inequality, mobility, race, and equity, that is no way to build or ally with a movement. Access to justice should not just be about “justice” in a narrow legalistic sense, but in the way that the broader world understands it and people feel it, driven by imperatives such as: expanding opportunities for underserved populations; creating legal systems that protect the most vulnerable; and building institutions and structures …
Access To Legal Help Is A Human Service, Jo-Ann Wallace
Access To Legal Help Is A Human Service, Jo-Ann Wallace
Fordham Law Review Online
We are in a pivotal, transformational moment for justice reform in the United States. One of the key strategies undergirding the transformation is a redefinition of interrelated systems that can work together to improve lives. This includes defining access to legal help as an integral part of human services systems.
Striking A Match, Not A Pose, For Access To Justice, Gillian K. Hadfield
Striking A Match, Not A Pose, For Access To Justice, Gillian K. Hadfield
Fordham Law Review Online
One of the things that persistently puzzles and frustrates me in my work on access to justice is just how hard it is to light a fire under anyone about this issue. And I do not think that we are going to make progress on access to justice—to start a movement—until that fire is lit.
"What Do We Want!"?, Rebecca L. Sandefur
"What Do We Want!"?, Rebecca L. Sandefur
Fordham Law Review Online
If asked, most Americans would very likely say that they would rather have “justice” than something like “injustice.” And if asked what “justice” means, many would have an answer. Some responses would name abstract ideals from one religious or cultural tradition or another. One of this type that is particularly dear to me speaks of letting the oppressed go free and breaking every yoke. But other answers about the meaning of justice would be more concrete: “my son wouldn’t be in jail”; “I could pay my hospital bills”; “somebody would help me with this problem.” These definitions of justice reflect …
A Perspective From The Judiciary On Access To Justice, Jonathan Lippman
A Perspective From The Judiciary On Access To Justice, Jonathan Lippman
Fordham Law Review Online
I decided early in 2009, upon becoming Chief Judge and the steward of the justice system in New York, to focus my energy on ensuring that everyone gets their day in court. Regardless of how a person looks or where he or she was born, and regardless of whether or not a person has resources or power, justice cannot be about the color of your skin or the amount of money in your pocket. Justice must mean that when people are fighting for the necessities of life, for the roof over their heads, they must get the legal assistance that …
Building The Access To Justice Movement, David Udell
Building The Access To Justice Movement, David Udell
Fordham Law Review Online
There are innumerable individual problems of access to civil justice. Civil justice, or its absence, will often determine whether people can keep their homes, their family relationships, their health and well-being, their actual safety, their jobs, and their opportunity for a fair resolution of so many more of the challenges that life presents. There are presently many important efforts that enable people to obtain justice, both through the direct provision of legal services and through the broader pursuit of systemic reforms, such as securing and expanding civil rights to counsel, expanding roles for non-lawyers to empower individuals and communities, making …
The Evolution Of Private Equity And The Change In General Partner Compensation Terms In The 1980s, Stephen Fraidin, Meredith Foster
The Evolution Of Private Equity And The Change In General Partner Compensation Terms In The 1980s, Stephen Fraidin, Meredith Foster
Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law
While the business model of private equity has remained largely unchanged since the 1980s, private equity as an industry has undergone a dramatic transformation. In the early 1980s, private equity was both highly profitable and highly controversial. Today, on the other hand, it is an important asset class and its returns are modest. This paper will document both of these changes and identify the several factors that contributed simultaneously to private equity’s declining profitability and to its increasing public acceptance. This paper will also identify another change that private equity underwent in the 1980s, which has been largely ignored: the …