Brooklyn Law School - Faculty Scholarship

Brooklyn Law School faculty members are engaged in scholarly work on critical issues in the law and policy. Their nationally recognized scholarship is published in top law reviews and has a substantial influence in the legal community and beyond. Their work has been cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, shapes law and policy across the country, and fuels the dynamic intellectual life of the Law School.

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Latest Faculty Scholarship

William Araiza
Stanley A. August Professor of Law

Rebuilding Expertise: Creating Effective and Trustworthy Regulation in an Age of Doubt, (NYU Press, June 2022)

Americans’ trust in public institutions is at near historic lows and “bureaucracy” and “big government” are pejorative terms. Araiza investigates the sources of this phenomenon and explains how we might rebuild trust in our public institutions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, with insights from history, political science, law, and public administration, Araiza explores our current bureaucratic malaise and presents a roadmap to finding our way out of it, toward a regime marked by effective, expert regulation that remains democratically accountable and politically legitimate.

Miriam Baer
Vice Dean and Centennial Professor of Law

Forecasting the How and Why of Corporate Crime’s Demise, 47 J.Corp.L. 887 (forthcoming 2022) Recognizing the implausibility of corporate crime’s disappearance, Baer explores an adjacent topic, namely the identification of those dynamics most likely to depress corporate crime’s enforcement to intolerably low levels.

Book Review (Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, 2022) of John Coffee Jr.’s Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2020) Why does our society continue to underenforce corporate crime? This is the question that fuels Professor John Coffee’s newest book, and he answers it primarily with what he calls a “logistical mismatch” hypothesis, Baer writes.

Heidi K. Brown
Director of Legal Writing
and Professor of Law

The Flourishing Lawyer, (ABA Book Publishing, May 2022)

The Flourishing Lawyer offers an empathetic guide for members of the legal profession to cultivate their personal and professional well-being, identify and develop their individual strengths, and define success on their own terms. Drawing from lessons and research from the fields of psychology, health care, sports, and medicine, this book is an affirming guide to becoming a better contributor to the profession while living a flourishing life.

Steven Dean
Professor of Law

 Filing While Black: The Casual Racism of the Tax Law, Utah Law Review __ 801 (2022)

The tax law’s race-blind approach produces bad tax policy. The racial bias long tolerated—and sometimes exploited—by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax deductions that others in similar situations enjoyed. In 2000, Liberia was threatened with sanctions for being a tax haven, but Switzerland was not. In 2014, Eric Garner died in police custody after being suspected of evading a tax. In each instance, anti-Blackness played a role in ways the tax law either ignores or actively leverages.

Cynthia Godsoe
Professor of Law

The Place of the Prosecutor in Abolitionist Praxis, 69 U.C.L.A. Law Review (2022)

Progressive prosecutors have been widely hailed as the solution to mass incarceration, but Godsoe argues they are not the magic bullet. Prosecutors' institutional power and ethical mandate to "do justice" can be repurposed to start reversing decades of building the carceral state, but transforming the system entails ceding power to communities, divesting criminal system resources, and investing in societal supports that keep people safe.

Catherine Y. Kim
Professor of Law

Rights Retrenchment in Immigration Law, 55 U.C. Davis L. Review  1283 (2022)

The Modern Court’s stance toward immigrants tells a story of rights retrenchment, a scaling back from even the modest gains of the 20th century. In areas including the right to habeas corpus, procedural due process, discrimination, free speech, and detention, noncitizens today enjoy even fewer constitutional protections than they did at the end of the last century.

Sarah Lorr
Assistant Professor of Clinical Law & Co-Director of the Disability and Civil Rights Clinic

Unaccommodated: How the ADA Fails Parents, 110 California Law Review 1315 (2022)

Thirty years after Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), discrimination and ingrained prejudices against individuals with intellectual disabilities—especially poor Black and brown parents with disabilities—continue. Despite promising federal intervention with the promulgation of the new technical assistance in 2015, both family and federal courts still fail to vindicate the rights of parents with disabilities, by sidestepping responsibility for parents’ claims under the ADA. For the ADA to fulfill its promise, parents with intellectual disabilities must have a viable legal avenue to enforce it.

Vijay Raghavan
Assistant Professor of Law

Shifting Burdens at the Fringe, 102 Boston University Law Review 1301 (2022)

Raghavan offers a new descriptive account of consumer financial regulation. Leveraging insights from the recent literature on the legal design of money, he suggests that consumer financial regulation is best understood as a way to shift the incidence of financing the creation of new money and not as an intervention in private exchange. He considers how this framing can change the way we justify consumer law and regulate consumer credit markets. 

Irene Ten Cate
Associate Director of the Block Center for International Business Law and Assistant Professor of Legal Writing

Splitting the Baby, 61 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law __ (forthcoming 2022)

Compromise Awards in international commercial arbitration are widely condemned, but it is hard to articulate what is wrong with such awards if tribunal members genuinely disagree about the law or the facts. This article argues that the primary harm of compromise lies in its effects on the quality of individual and collective deliberation. These flaws, in turn, taint the award by turning reason-giving into an exercise in justification rather than an opportunity for continued assessment.