Fordham Law Honors Grads in Diploma Ceremony

The Fordham School of Law celebrated its 105th diploma ceremony on Sunday, May 20 by honoring one of its own.

Michelle DePass, LAW ’92, assistant administrator for the Office of International and Tribal Affairs at the Environmental Protection Agency, received a doctorate of letters, honoris causa, and addressed the graduates at a ceremony at Radio City Music Hall.

The school awarded a total of 486 J.D.s (Juris Doctor) and 143 LL.M's (Master of Laws). Congratulations to the class of 2012!

Joseph M. McShane, SJ, the President of Fordham,  John N. Tognino, PCS ’75, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and Michael M. Martin, Dean of Fordham Law, give Michelle DePass her hood signifying her new honor

DePass addresses the graduates

Photos By Chris Taggart

Law School Examines Legal Activism and AIDS in China

Who are the Chinese anti-discrimination activists fighting for their nation’s disenfranchised? What are the obstacles that persons with HIV/AIDS face in China? How do human health rights NGOs deal with China’s regulatory environment?

These and other topics will be the focus of a daylong Fordham Law School conference on Thursday, Feb. 24 at the Lincoln Center campus, “Civil Society and Legal Activism in China: The Public Health Challenge.” The event is free and sponsored by the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice.

The conference gets underway at 9:30 a.m. in the 12th Floor Lounge of the Lowenstein Center, and consists of four panels throughout the day: Civil Society in China, Regulation and Practice; Anti-Discrimination Efforts in China; Public Participation Toward a Responsive Health System and China; and China: The Response to HIV/AIDS.

Scholars and activists who will be speaking include Timothy Webster, senior fellow at the China Law Center, Yale University; Benjamin Liebman, professor of law and director of Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University; Scott Burris, professor of law, Temple University and associate director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health; Wan Yanhai, director of Beijing’s Aizhixing Institute; and Sara L.M. Davis, executive director of Asia Catalyst.

For more information or to register, contact Joy Chia jchia@law.fordham.edu.

—Janet Sassi

Fordham Law Dispute Resolution Society World Champions

Dear members and friends of the Fordham Dispute Resolution Society:

I am extremely honored to announce that the Fordham Dispute Resolution Society became World Champions this morning in Paris, surpassing 57 universities from around the globe to win the International Chamber of Commerce Mediation Competition.

Please join me in congratulating competitors Matt Bress, Christie Houlihan, Pat Jacobs, and Veni Manickam. Matt, in addition to competing, directed the efforts of the team as this year's ICC Editor.

Each competitor's display of talent and hard work over the past several months and through the grueling 8 rounds of competition was truly phenomenal and sets an incredible standard for the Society going forward this year and in years to come. Thank you to each competitor for the success and the honor you have brought to our Society and the Law School.

Congratulations and many thanks are also due to Steve Grable ('07), who has built an impressive record coaching our ICC Team each year since graduating, dedicating numerous weekends and countless evenings preparing the competitors and working alongside them as they move into the finals in Paris. Special thanks also to alumni Dan Hope ’08, Henry Ko ’08, Kenny Shaw ’09, Cindy Alvarado ’10, Justin Elliot ’10, and Mike Kanatake '10, and DRS Managing Editor Tres Bulger for their huge support in preparing the teams. It goes without saying that the Society is indebted to our alumni and senior members for their continued dedication to our competitors.

Additionally, and as always, we are forever grateful for the matchless professional and academic guidance of Professor Jacqueline Nolan-Haley, who has been instrumental in establishing Fordham as a permanent presence at the invitation-only global competition.

Thanks and congratulations again,

Iverson
(you can read more about Fordham's Dispute Resolution Society here)

Iverson Long, Chairman
Dispute Resolution Society
Fordham University School of Law

Fordham Law's Dispute Resolution Program is ranked 8th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The Dispute Resolution Society competes in national and international negotiation, mediation, and arbitration competitions, hosts a leading annual symposium and international commercial arbitration practice tournament, and teaches a course on negotiation techniques to local high school students at MLK Jr. High School. For more information, please visit the Dispute Resolution Society website.

Former Jailhouse Lawyer Shares Insights on Pro Se Litigation

As a young man, an armed Shon Hopwood robbed five banks in rural Nebraska, netting some $200,000.

Luckily for him, and a score of terrified bank tellers, he got caught.

Hopwood went to federal prison in 1999 with a 13-year sentence; it was there that Hopwood turned his life around.

He got a job in the prison law library because it paid more than working in the kitchen. He trained himself in Supreme Court litigation, and built a national reputation as a jailhouse lawyer before he was released in 2009.

During his eleven-year incarceration, Hopwood wrote more than 20 petitions for certorari to the U.S. Supreme Court, and helped on between 50 and 100 appeals, motions and other documents - enabling a number of inmates to win sentence reductions. One of his cases, Fellers v. United States, was even adopted by Seth P. Waxman, former United States solicitor general.

Hopwood is currently writing an article for the Fordham Law Review. He spoke at Fordham Law School on Jan. 25 about obstacles that pro se litigants face in trying to advance a case.

“The increase in pro se litigation during these difficult economic times is pretty well documented,” Hopwood said. “There is nothing that will place pro se claimants on an even level with attorney representation. But just because they do not have an attorney doesn’t mean they don’t have a claim.”

Hopwood would know; today, he works at Cockle Printing in Omaha, which he says is the only printing house in the nation that works with pro se litigants. When a pro se brief comes in, he helps prepare it.

He also publishes A De Novo Review, a newsletter for inmates on the latest legal developments.

Hopwood outlined three remedies to help level the playing field for pro se litigants, especially for inmates:
-- modify the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (passed by Congress in 1996 as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America) to allow non-capital offense prisoners more than just one year to file a legal challenge to their conviction;
-- modify the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which has added case restrictions on prisoners who sue for violations of their rights, including a controversial “exhaustion requirement” which prohibits inmates from suing unless they have used all “administrative remedies” available to them;
-- educate pro se litigants in their chances and their filing obligations, including setting up online tools to assist them and providing sample petitions. Most pro se litigants, said Hopwood, don’t understand the odds that are against them.

“There is much demagoguery around prisoner issues in this country,” said Hopwood. “You never hear politicians say, ‘let’s rethink these policies’ – because that talk doesn’t get you elected and labels you soft on crime.”

He also advocates more “ghost writing” of pro se legal briefs by paralegals. "That's a win-win situation in these economic times," he said.

Hopwood’s article will come out in the Law Review in December; in the meantime, Hopwood has applied to Fordham School of Law, hoping to practice prisoners’ rights law one day.

—Janet Sassi

Fordham a Strong Presence in Presidential Management Fellowship Competition

Back in October, 2010, 9,100 graduate students from around the country applied to become Presidential Management Fellows. Of those, only 1,530 made it through the rigorous selection process to become semi-finalists, and ten of them hail from Fordham.

Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., associate professor of Economics and Director of the Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED), noted that the percentage of Fordham students who have made it this far (10 out of 39, or 26 percent) is much higher than the national average of 17 percent.

With five semi-finalists hailing from the School of Law, three from IPED, one from the Graduate School of Education (G.S.E.) and one from the Graduate School of Business Administration (G.B.A.), Fordham is well-positioned for one of the country’s most prestigious fellowships.

“The presidential management fellowship program is the flagship leadership development program for the federal government. It attracts and selects the best candidates coming out of America’s graduate schools,” he said. “It is designed to develop a cadre of potential government leaders for the future.”

The process of becoming a fellow is one that finishes in March, when 900 finalists are offered jobs within the federal government. Schwalbenberg noted that the final round of the process, which is taking place right now, involves a full day of interviews and observations in Washington D.C.

The payoff for such a grueling process is a two-year long fast track into the agencies that make the executive branch function. Former students who have completed the fellowship have gone on to work in the International Trade Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department, the Foreign Agricultural Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The aim is that towards the end of their career, these will be the leaders of the Civil Service,” Schwalbenberg said. “So they won’t be the political appointees, but they’ll be the people who actually run the bureaucracy for the different secretaries and political appointees.”

—Patrick Verel

Student Activist Tells How He Took On Diebold and Won

A student who successfully sued industrial security giant Diebold spoke on Nov. 19 at Fordham Law about copyright law, free culture and privacy issues in an increasingly technological world.

When Nelson Pavlosky was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, he sued Diebold in a precedent-setting case aimed at protecting freedom of speech from the abuse of copyright law.

In 2003, internal Diebold e-mails that focused on flaws in the company’s electronic voting machines were brought to light by hackers who retrieved them from the company’s computer network.

For example, in one message, an employee wrote that in the 2000 presidential recount, one district had recorded Al Gore receiving negative 16,000 votes. Another employee mentioned that when a voting machine would not cooperate during a demonstration, that employee would fake the results.

To alert the public to the problems with Diebold’s software, Pavlosky and his peers published the e-mails online. Diebold responded with a claim of copyright infringement and threats of legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA).

Pavlosky joined forces with the Online Policy Group (OPG) to file counter-litigation asserting that Diebold’s claim of copyright infringement was illegitimate.

Pavlosky argued that the e-mails fell under fair use copyright laws because:
• he wasn’t making a profit,
• it was in the public interest,
• the e-mails were not creative works,
• Diebold was not losing profits over the e-mails, and
• by publishing all 13,000 e-mails in their entirety, the public could discover for itself what information was troubling.

In the end, Diebold was found to have abused the DMCA by claiming a violation of copyright laws occurred when it knew no such violation actually took place—all in an attempt to restrain legitimate speech.

After winning the case, Pavlosky co-founded Students for Free Culture, a student activist group that promotes awareness about technology, copyright and free culture issues, affects changes in policy on the local and federal levels, and trains the next generation of activists. The group has branches at universities across the country, including Fordham Law.

—Jenny Hirsch

Psyching Out Student Financial Stress

To prepare students for the implications of the new law governing credit cards that takes effect today, Psychology Professor Harold Takooshian presented a public forum on the law’s provisions on Wednesday, Feb. 17.

The forum, “The U.S. CARD Act: Coping with students’ financial $tress,” was months in the making. It was prompted by statistics showing that half of all college students report financial stress. What is worse, seven percent of college students drop out as a result of this stress.

Seven experts, representing private industry, nonprofits and academia, each briefly described different facets of the problem. Among the presenters was Amanda Vardi (FCLC ‘10), who developed a one-hour workshop in “healthy financial habits for students” in September 2009 in collaboration with Takooshian and Economics Professor Michael Buckley. Based on the workshop, Psi Chi, the international honor society in psychology, awarded Vardi a grant to design a model workshop to circulate to honors students at the Society’s 1,100 U.S. campuses. The workshop includes a 25-minute DVD that includes information on aspects of credit and financial literacy for students.

“Our Fordham research finds too many U.S. students suffer alone with the problem of debt while trying to succeed in school,” said Takooshian. “There is now help available to our students in the CARD Act, our free Fordham DVD and workshop, and other new resources."

Additional public workshops on these issues will be conducted by Carol O’Rourke at Fordham School of Law’s Center for Debtor Education.

Reidenberg Tangles with Scalia!

Every year, School of Law Professor Joel Reidenberg assigns students in his Information Privacy Law class to compile a dossier of personal information, using available online resources, on an individual. Usually, that individual is Joel Reidenberg.

Not this year.

In response to recent remarks on the subject of privacy and the law made by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia at the Institute of American and Talmudic Law conference, Reidenberg assigned his students to compile a dossier on the Justice. Reidenberg described what types of information they were able to find at Fordham's recent privacy conference -- prompting a story in the online tabloid Above The Law. That, in turn, spurred an angry retort by Scalia, followed by a rebuttal by Reidenberg and another story, this time in the ABA Journal.

What will happen next? Stay tuned!

—Syd Steinhardt