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 …