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Allen Grubman ’67 is a legend in media and entertainment law, and he often credits his skills as a powerful negotiator and dealmaker for famous clients to having sechel, a Yiddish term he uses to describe a combination of intellect, street smarts, and common sense. Another not-so-secret weapon: where he went to law school. “Everybody who matters in media and entertainment, be it creative people—the performers, rock stars, actors—or the businesspeople, know that I went to Brooklyn Law School,” said Grubman, senior partner of Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks. “I brag about it because so many lawyers in the industry went to Harvard or Yale, and I make it clear that I went to Brooklyn Law School, and I'm proud of it.” Now, in his latest demonstration of that pride and gratitude, Grubman and his wife Deborah have generously committed a $1.5 million gift to endow the Allen Grubman Chair in Media and Entertainment Law. The endowment will allow Brooklyn Law School to recruit a nationally recognized scholar in media and entertainment law and further cement its reputation as a national leader in the field. Already the School is regularly recognized as a top law school for producing “power lawyers” in media, sports, and entertainment law. In April 2023, Billboard magazine rated Brooklyn Law #2 in the country on its list of the “Leading Law Schools of the Top Music Lawyers.” Later that same month, The Hollywood Reporter named Brooklyn Law #9 on its annual list of the top law schools in the country for aspiring entertainment lawyers. “We could not be more grateful to Allen and Deborah Grubman,” said David Meyer, President and Joseph Crea Dean. “This landmark gift lays the foundation for an ambitious expansion of Brooklyn Law’s leadership in media and entertainment law.” “It gives us major momentum toward the goal of ensuring that Brooklyn Law School is a hub for leading academics, lawyers, dealmakers and others in media, sports, and entertainment,” he said. The gift will be formally announced and celebrated at a special event at the Law School on Friday, Feb. 9. It will be live streamed on the school’s YouTube channel. A highlight of the event will be a conversation between Allen Grubman and pioneering television journalist Bryant Gumbel, one of Grubman’s celebrated clients. Gumbel will interview Grubman about his path from being a student at Brooklyn Law School to his storied career representing superstars including Bruce Springsteen, LeBron James, Elton John, Lady Gaga, Madonna, and Martha Stewart. Grubman’s firm, Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, is the largest U.S. law firm specializing in media, entertainment, and sports law, and boasts a client list that includes stars of film, television, music, Broadway, sports, journalism, and other media. Grubman, who claimed he was a “mediocre student at best” at Brooklyn Law School, credits his Professor Joe Crea ’47, for saving his law school career. Grubman flubbed a 40-point essay on his Torts final, and knew that Crea was likely to give him an F for the six-credit class. At a friend’s suggestion, he telephoned Crea, who told Grubman that he would give him a D rather than an F if he could pass his two other finals with a C or better, which he did. “I've said this many times: If I didn’t make that call on Sunday, to Professor Crea’s house, I'd probably be a very successful salesman in the Garment Center right now,” Grubman said. “I owe that man my career—period, end of conversation. There are certain moments in a person’s life that determine their future, and that point in my life was it.” To honor Crea, who died in 2019 at the age of 104, Grubman previously provided a major gift to support the construction of the Joseph Crea Reading Room in the school library. He wishes Crea was alive to see the establishment of the latest gift. “He would be so proud,” Grubman said. Grubman grew up in a working-class family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and first fell in love with the entertainment industry when he was a child singer on a weekly Sunday afternoon NBC show called the “Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour.” His singing career ended after his voice changed at age 13, but the glamorous perks of the entertainment industry were seared into his memory. “I was brought up modestly,” Grubman told Brooklyn Law Notes in a 2010 interview. “I remembered when I was on the show everyone appeared to love what they did. They took us to great restaurants. I was taken to rehearsal in a limousine. I knew then that I wanted to be an entertainment lawyer.” He attended Brooklyn Law School, and worked after school in the entertainment industry, including in the mailroom of the William Morris agency, and later as a CBS page—which he described as “a fancy word for an usher.” The page position meant he would often arrive at class in a gray sport coat with a CBS eye icon on it, attracting quizzical glances from other students who thought he was “eccentric,” Grubman said. He was, however, honing the people skills that proved so important. After graduating, and passing the bar on the first try, Grubman knew he was not able to rely on his grades to get a job, so he put together a list of entertainment lawyers and started knocking on the doors of law offices, asking if he could speak to a partner. Finally, one of them, Walter Hofer, who represented the Beatles, said yes. Grubman recalled the story of meeting Hofer at a luncheon honoring him as Brooklyn Law School Alumnus of the Year in 2018. “I said to him: ‘My family doesn’t have much money. How much money will I have to pay you to allow me to work for you?’” Grubman recalled. “He looked at me and said: ‘I like that. I’m going to hire you for a $125 a week.’ And that’s where my career started.” In 1974, Grubman started his own firm. His earliest clients included disco acts that hit it big, including the Village People. By 1983, he was representing Madonna, Elton John, and Bruce Springsteen, and was invited to a luncheon where he joined a group of music industry insiders who decided to create the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2022, Grubman became the first lawyer ever inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In his induction ceremony, he received the Ahmet Ertegun Award, dedicated to non-performers, in honor of his decades of negotiating successful deals on behalf of his music clients. Now, looking back at his career, Grubman has some advice for Brooklyn Law School students. “If you work hard, you're ambitious, and you're honest, you can do as well as any Harvard lawyer and better, and I’m living proof of it, and that’s a very important message,” he said.

Dan Rosenthal, who spent the last decade helping filmmakers depict his father, Lt. Col. Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal ’41, in the new Steven Spielberg war drama series Masters of the Air, visited the Law School on Thursday to share the story of his dad’s life and heroics with our community.   The event, which included the screening of several key clips from the Apple TV+ series (which may be viewed here) began coalescing several months before the series premiered in January, when Rosenthal shared news of the series and his dad’s role in it with President and Joseph Crea Dean David D. Meyer.  “I looked up Robert Rosenthal to learn more about him and was suitably blown away, and enormously proud that Brooklyn Law School has such an incredible figure connected with our history and was so grateful that Dan was willing to come and share the story with us,” Meyer said.  The illustrious Brooklyn Law alumnus, known both as “Rosie” and “Legal Eagle” in his military pilot days, was a Brooklyn native who flew 52 missions over Germany as a World War II Army Air Corps bomber pilot and survived after his plane was shot down twice. Depicted in the series by actor Nate Mann, the young pilot and his cockpit maneuvers became the stuff of legend among fighters in the “Bloody Hundredth,” the nickname for the 100th Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force, which is the focus of the series.   One thing the series brings home is how frightening the missions were. For example, since U.S. fighter planes did not have the range at that time to fly all the way to Europe as escorts, the bomber planes that the 100th pilots flew were on their own, serving as “sitting ducks” as they attempted to bomb enemy territory.  “As my father would say, during his first 25 missions, [the bombers] were escorted by the U.S. planes to the to the edge of Europe, to the coastline. And then we were promptly escorted by the German fighter pilots to and from the target,” said Dan, a former president of the 100th Bomb Group Foundation, which his father co-founded.  To add to the terror, the bombers themselves provided little protection for those within.   “During World War Two, it was so bloody up in the sky…you were flying five miles up in the air in open windows … it was 50 to 60 below inside the plane,” Dan said. “These guys would have to wear extremely heavy suits, and they had new oxygen (systems) that they were utilizing. And the pilot or copilot would call around every five minutes up in those conditions to check in whether the oxygen was working.”  One time, the co-pilot of a 100th Bomb Group plane had ice develop around his feet, and he had to have them chiseled out of the plane after returning from a mission. Waist gunners would find they had to take off their gloves to work the weapons, and their hands would stick to the cold metal.  After the war, Robert Rosenthal went on to serve as an assistant to the U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, meeting Dan’s mom, another lawyer, on the way to Europe. They married in Germany.   Robert died of multiple myeloma in 2007. He was inducted into the Jewish-American Hall of Fame, which featured him in the documentary “From Brooklyn to Berlin,” where his storytelling abilities, keen memory for detail and drive to do his best were on display.   “He was my best friend, the hero role model, and somebody we could easily share a laugh or a cry or an ice cream with,” said Dan who described his father’s entertaining personality. “He would make us breakfast every day. And on the occasional days that he would make pancakes, we would challenge him to see how high up he could flip these pancakes.”  The pancakes had to be cleaned off the ceiling, he recalled. His dad grew up in Flatbush, at 21st Street and Avenue S, which was farmland at the time. “At one point, he rode a horse down Flatbush,” Dan recalled. Despite a love of singing, he was ejected from the glee club at James Madison High School after the teacher discovered he was the source of a “sour note.”   Instead of his beloved music, his father played football and baseball and was a “fabulous athlete.” He attended Brooklyn College and then Brooklyn Law School, after finding that he had a real interest in constitutional law. His family was of humble means, and Robert worked as a soda jerk, and in a cafeteria, attending the Law School at night.   “So, what he wound up doing was he developed this photographic memory of all of the case studies and all of the notes that he was learning and memorized everything,” Dan said. After graduation, he worked as a lawyer, but as a history buff, became deeply disturbed by the rise of antisemitism. His concern heightened especially after the Kristallnacht pogrom of Nov. 9, 1938.   “The country was severely divided and didn't want to enter the war. My father was feeling very, very frustrated by that time,” Dan said. He felt that something had to be done to curb Nazism and stop Adolph Hitler, whom he considered not just a threat to Jews like himself, but “a menace to decent people everywhere." He enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, and the rest is history.  Joining Dan Rosenthal at the Q&A was his son, Sam Rosenthal, who played a gunner in Masters of the Air, as well as his wife, Paula Rosenthal; daughter Joanna Rosenthal; and niece, Kate Schneiderman. See event photos on Flickr. 

A panel of community activists who have flipped the script on criminal case outcomes through collective “participatory defense” activities spoke at the Law School Wednesday night, explaining how the burgeoning grassroots practice is allowing communities to support people facing criminal charges and one another.  The event, held at the Subotnick Center and sponsored by the school’s Center for Criminal Justice, also celebrated the new book Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration (The New Press, August 2024), by panelist Raj Jayadev, a MacArthur “genius” fellow. Other panelists were local participatory defense organizers Heather Lewis, executive director of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund, and Justine "Taz" Moore, director of training at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Leading the conversation was Professor Jocelyn Simonson, author of the 2023 book Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration (The New Press). It was a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event, held ahead of the main festival day, Sunday, Sept. 29.   Pioneered by Jayadev while he was working as a community organizer with Silicon Valley De-Bug in San Jose, Calif., the practice of participatory defense has expanded to about 50 cities. Organizers such as Lewis and Moore, who trained with Jayadev, have used a variety of tactics including court watching (showing up to support defendants at criminal court proceedings), creating social biographies for criminal defendants to tell their individual stories, raising bail money collectively, and helping defense attorneys utilize community experts to challenge misperceptions and false narratives at trial. Their work has helped those who are convicted receive reduced sentences, prevented young people from being charged as adults, helped the accused avoid pretrial detention, and influenced policy changes, such as ending cash bail for homeless individuals.   Key to participatory defense, says Simonson, is that it is not advocacy on behalf of individual cases, but people uniting to help not just loved ones, but total strangers. “We went from fighting individual cases to really 10 steps down the line, where we’re challenging, or even dismantling, the entire system of mass incarceration,” Simonson said.  Silicon Valley De-Bug initially focused on police accountability, but Jayadev realized that those making allegations of harm at the hands of the police also needed legal help. Furthermore, addressing individual incidents was not allowing the organization to corral the strength of the wider community.   “We thought, what if we brought that community-organizing IQ that we knew in every other aspect of our lives and laid it on top of a court system that had been separated from the community?” he said, explaining this led to the launch of weekly community meetings. “We just said, instead of us individually running a justice for so-and-so campaign, let’s bring people together, and let’s do this collectively, and let’s see where we could go.”  That message made its way to Montgomery County, Pa., after Heather Lewis, executive director of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund, learned about participatory defense from the group’s chief public defender who had seen Jayadev speak. Soon, Lewis was in Zoom training with Jayadev and human services professionals from across the country.   “There were nine cities at that first national gathering,” Lewis said, adding that in Montgomery County, almost every criminal defendant is Black or brown and wearing shackles in a courtroom that resembles a slave auction. “And I told Raj, this is the modern-day civil rights movement. What other arena could you push back in, other than the criminal legal system, when families are being destroyed and children are being [taken into custody] and all the atrocities, and so we started there.”  Moore, who was formerly incarcerated for 16 years in a federal prison, now trains other community workers through her role at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. One of the most emotional parts of the work, for Moore and Lewis, is the impact of people appearing in court on behalf of defendants, some of whom may have been abandoned by their families.   Although her family and friends were in the courtroom for her, Moore recalled her viewpoint was only of the judge, not those behind her.   “He’s on the bench looking down on me and my attorney, and most of his eye contact is going to the prosecutor, not even acknowledging the fact that my lawyer is speaking or I’m there,” Moore recalled. “It’s a depressing feeling, it’s a scary feeling.… Now, sitting on the other side with participatory defense in a courtroom, I feel powerful and I’m sitting with a family, and I'm able to have other people stand up with me, with that family, because when they call that person that’s facing charges or facing a judge, 10 of us stand up. We let that judge and the prosecutor know that the person is not alone.”  Moore has also helped provide unconventional expert witnesses for the defense, including a recovered crack cocaine user who was able to testify on behalf of a defendant that the amount of crack that person possessed was only sufficient for personal use, and not for distribution to others, which would result in a longer sentence.   Making inroads with defense attorneys is important, and one of the reasons the panelists enjoy speaking at law schools, where they can address students who are interested in challenging the existing criminal justice and mass incarceration systems.   Initially, defense attorneys thought of participatory defense “hubs” as akin to just an “angry mob,” but they have gradually come to see the power of working with the groups and the family members who are part of them, Jayadev said. Some ask that the hub members attend court, wearing t-shirts that state their hub affiliations for the prosecutor and the judge to see.   “It signals things toward these actors, that this is not going to be business as usual, and there's a measure of accountability that’s in the air, and the smart public defenders know how to leverage that,” Jayadev said.   

Brooklyn Law School honors Andrew Schwartz ’84 with an endowed scholarship supporting students pursuing public service careers, continuing his legacy of impact.

After Leah Goodridge, a managing attorney for housing policy at Mobilization for Justice, wrote an essay that was published in the UCLA Law Review titled “Professionalism as a Racial Construct” last spring, it struck a familiar chord with Black professionals and went viral.   That essay, which examined the role of professionalism as a tool to police and regulate people of color in the legal field, was the topic of an intriguing Feb. 8 lunchtime talk at the Law School attended by faculty and students.   Goodridge, who is also a New York City Planning Commissioner and has taught at Brooklyn Law, said she initially wrote a comparatively tame essay for UCLA, her alma mater, about her experiences as a lawyer, leaving out the negative experiences related to being a Black woman in the field.    “I didn’t want to anger any of my white colleagues, I didn’t want to tell the truth,” Goodridge said. “So, I wrote it for a white audience, and then the experiences kept coming, and I decided I’m done and I’m going to write the truth.”  The experiences she referred to were times throughout her career in law where opposing counsel, colleague, or other professional —often a white man with several decades in the field, but sometimes a white woman—would belittle or denigrate her statements publicly, making her feel humiliated. After questioning her own perceptions and speaking with friends, Goodridge said she ultimately realized the behavior was driven by racism, misogyny, or both.  It led her to question what is really meant by “professionalism,” Goodridge said. She had always been told that addressing discriminatory behavior by filing a complaint or challenging a person’s behavior as discriminatory would make her appear “unprofessional” and that she would be labeled as a disruptor or “the enemy,” even though the unprofessional behavior was directed at her.  In the paper, Goodridge coined the term “bias threshold” to explain why such flipped-around narratives persist in the workplace.  “The expectation for marginalized people to endure toxic, abusive behavior is the ‘bias threshold,’” Goodridge said. “And when a person doesn’t do that and they seek to disrupt it, they are often labeled as unprofessional. That person’s level of professionalism is literally judged by how well they can endure toxic, abusive, racist, transphobic, ableist [or otherwise discriminatory] behaviors.”  That expectation extends to the legal field, where lawyers are told, “this is the way it is, either you’re going to have a thick skin or you won’t,” Goodridge said. On top of this, lawyers are instructed to be non-emotional, so it becomes difficult to describe discriminatory incidents in an authentic, transparent way. Someone might say, “that is not okay,” where they should really be saying, “that is racist” or “that is transphobic,” and so on.   Another concept in her essay is called “selective offense.” In the workplace, people who discriminate against others and denigrate them often get away with it for an array of reasons. In some cases, they’ve been in their position for decades and have acted in a discriminatory way in the past and others have failed to call them out. In other instances, the person’s colleagues have made excuses for their behavior, laughed at their jokes, or said, “that’s just the way he or she is,” doing nothing.  Critically, no one expresses that they are “offended” by this person, Goodridge said.   Selective offense is when someone does call a person out for discriminatory behavior, and that person— rather than the actual antagonist—is criticized as being offensive or rocking the boat in the workplace.   “You’re [labeling] someone who wants to make the institution better ‘unprofessional,’ but normalizing the actual players who are harmful to the institution and are ostracizing and marginalizing people,” Goodridge explained.    In some instances, the initial interaction where the discriminatory behavior took place is dismissed as a personality clash, or just two people “going at it.”  When that happens, it’s important to consider who the two people are and what their roles are in the workplace, because there is most likely a “power imbalance,” in which the antagonist is senior to the person who is being disparaged publicly.  “I want us to start challenging how we talk about these interactions, because they’re not two people going at it, especially if one has a higher title than the other,” Goodridge said.   The solution to these issues, Goodridge said, is to speak up against discriminatory behavior and not allow it to be normalized. A person who finds themselves the victim of this type of behavior should—ideally— find similarly minded colleagues to support their efforts and communicate those concerns as group. Then, choose someone higher up the ranks who you can trust to reach out to about what’s happening.   “A lot of us [when approached about discrimination] are trained to say, ‘I don’t want you to get fired,’” and urge them not to act, Goodridge said, adding that she’s done it herself in the past. “We have to disrupt that, because that’s just another form of ‘let’s keep this the way it is’… The more people become offended about the right things to be offended about, the more people set the standard of what’s not OK, the more things will change.”  Goodridge’s discussion was co-sponsored by the Public Service Law Center; Associate Dean for Inclusion and Diversity and Associate Professor of Clinical Law Karen Porter; the Latin American Law Students Association (LALSA) and the Asian-Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA). 

Many of us exert time and energy on the unpaid and invisible chores of everyday life, but “life admin” is less trivial and more taxing than it may seem, and its heightened impacts on the lives of people with disabilities was the focus of a guest professor’s discussion at the Ira M. Belfer Lecture.   This lecture, titled “The Invisible Labor of Being Disabled and Facilitating Access,” was held April 12 at the Subotnick Center and moderated by Jeffrey D. Forchelli Professor of Law Frank Pasquale. He was joined by scholar and guest lecturer Elizabeth F. Emens, the Thomas M. Macioce Professor of Law and director of the Mindfulness Program at Columbia Law School, as well as the author of The Art of Life Admin: How to Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More (2019).  Pasquale, who teaches Health Law and served in an advisory role on the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, described excess paperwork as an enduring problem. For example, he explained, the documentation demanded by insurers prior to authorizing coverage for treatment can delay care and exhaust patients. The “unwinding” of COVID-19 benefits portends further paperwork headaches for millions of Americans on Medicare, Pasquale said.  “We’re seeing the power of paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles to deeply undermine people's lives and well-being, and this is something that both in her book and in numerous articles written in her extraordinary career, Professor Emens has taken on with great eloquence and acuity,” Pasquale said.  Among the key issues that Emens addressed was Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear next term that involves enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law in 1990 and amended by Congress in 2008.  “It’s a case that divides people strongly, though not in the usual way as we think of divisions in this country right now,” Emens said. “It’s not around deeply held beliefs about profound and fundamental matters like abortion or marriage. Rather, this case divides people as to whether the rights at issue even matter at all.”  Before diving deeper into the Acheson case, Emens discussed the gap between what she called the “inside” and the “outside” view of disability. The outside view assumes that the challenges that people with disabilities face are individual medical problems and that quality of life with a disability is poor. This view also focuses on the costs and limitations for businesses and employers in providing the “reasonable accommodations” required under the ADA.  Those with an inside view of disability have a more inclusive perspective and, if not currently disabled, they may consider themselves as “not yet disabled,” since most people will become disabled in some manner as they grow older, said Emens. Insiders are also more appreciative of the benefits and opportunities that accessibility for people with disabilities can provide to everyone.  “Much of what makes disability disabling is the way that the environment is structured,” Emens said. “Changing the environment to accommodate disability may just involve broadening the kinds of accommodations provided in order to include those people neglected by typical design principles.”   After the ADA passed in 1990, judges had narrow interpretations of it, such as considering people “disabled” only if their major life activities were severely restricted; and overlooking third-party benefits even when considering third-party costs in analyzing what constitutes “reasonable accommodations” for people with disabilities.  This runs counter to the inside view which “also appreciates that adaptations and accommodations for disability can benefit more than just the disabled person who needs them,” Emens said. Such “third-party benefits,” range from closed captioning to ergonomic furniture design to ramps to telecommuting initiatives, and, Emens asserts, should be considered when considering the cost-benefit analysis of ADA accommodations.  The “reasonable accommodation” question is at the heart of Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, which involves Deborah Laufer, a disabled plaintiff from Florida, who filed suit against the owners of a Maine inn whose website did not provide information about accessibility required by law. Laufer is not seeking damages, which are not an available remedy. Rather, Laufer tests websites for ADA violations and has filed over 600 lawsuits to compel compliance with the ADA.  “Understanding the invisible work of being disabled and of navigating disability will help explain why this case is important,” Emens said. “The case doesn't focus on whether the hotel rooms themselves are accessible or inaccessible. The case is strictly about access to information accessibility on the websites, and whether the websites themselves are providing the information about accessibility… Laufer describes the frustration and humiliation she experiences when facing these inaccessible websites.”  Once you see the “woeful underenforcement of the public accommodations title of the ADA,” Emens said, “we can see…how vital Laufer’s work is. We can see that every disabled person can’t possibly have time or energy to battle each violation of the ADA just to book a trip, and so someone like Laufer is needed to do this serious labor of searching for violations and contesting them.”  Moreover, Emens noted, “we can see…how the injury of having to use a different mode of access is not merely inconvenient but is stigmatizing, because it is such a common way that places of public accommodation in this country broadcast the message that people with disabilities are not part of the clientele they seek.”   In addition to basic “life admin,” people with disabilities are bombarded by other types of admin, Emens said, including medical admin (e.g., doctor’s appointment logistics and billing), benefits admin (e.g., repeatedly documenting disability for benefits providers and employers), and discrimination admin (e.g., addressing discrimination by filing complaints, advocating for relief, or requesting accommodations).  Joseph Crea Dean Michael T. Cahill, who introduced the lecture participants, pointed out that the first Belfer lecture in November 2000 featured Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg discussing the importance of pro bono service to the legal profession and that the lecture has, over the years, continued to offer “weighty and significant figures discussing weighty and significant topics,” with this year’s event, featuring Emens, the latest example.    “I am pleased that the Belfer series brings us here today with the opportunity to hear from another Columbia law faculty member, who, like Justice Ginsburg, is a champion and advocate for the marginalized and vulnerable,” Cahill said.  The Belfer lecture was sponsored by the Center for Health, Science & Public Policy and the Disability and Civil Rights Clinic. It is held in honor of Ira M. Belfer ’33, who was a leading practitioner of corporate, real estate, and trust and estates law for more than half a century, a member of the Brooklyn Law School Board of Trustees, and a generous benefactor of the Law School. The Belfer family created the lecture series to honor Ira, whose generous gift to the Law School endowed the lecture series.                         

Aaron Twerski, the Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law, is recognized as one of the most distinguished living scholars in the field of tort law.  On April 20 and 21, the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law Annual Symposium celebrated his contributions to the Law School and the academy. Bringing together scholars from around the country, the symposium, titled “Professor Aaron Twerski and the Law of Torts: Duty, Design, and Conflicts,” honored Twerski through the presentation of papers that explored duty, product liability, mass torts, immunity, and conflicts of law—all areas where Professor Twerski has made lasting contributions. The papers will be published this fall in a “Festschrift” volume of the Journal. “This Festschrift is a celebration of both Aaron and his career,” said Edward Janger, Brooklyn Law’s David M. Barse Professor of Law and Co-director of the Center for the Study of Business Law & Regulation, who organized and led the symposium. “Festschrifts are traditionally prepared in honor of a valued scholar’s 70th birthday. We are a bit late. These papers are ambitious and do a wonderful job of engaging with Aaron’s work, but also advance the discussions in which Aaron has participated.” He added, with a laugh, “I’m hoping that Aaron is going to be taking notes, because we’ve set aside some time at the end for him to tell us all why we are wrong.”   Professor Twerski is “a lion of our faculty and of his field,” said then-President and Joseph Crea Dean Michael Cahill in his welcoming remarks. “He has been and done everything that one can over the course of his distinguished and illustrious career,” said Cahill, who has returned to his role as professor at the Law School.  Twerski’s career as teacher and scholar began more than 50 years ago at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1967. His scholarly work, as the co-Reporter of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Product Liability (American Law Institute, 1998) along with numerous articles and casebooks, has covered the entire landscape of tort law, and his contributions have been noted for their combination of wisdom, pragmatism, and a prudent and principled sense of justice. The American Law Institute designated Twerski the R. Ammi Cutter Reporter for his work on the Restatement. He was also awarded the Prosser Award by the Torts Section of the American Association of Law Schools for his outstanding contributions to the scholarship and teaching of torts and compensation systems. Twerski joined the Brooklyn Law School faculty in 1986, after serving as interim dean at Hofstra University School of Law, where he taught for many years and where he was dean from 2005-2007 before rejoining the faculty at Brooklyn.  In presenting their papers, participants also shared their thoughts on Twerski and his importance to their own lives and work. Among them was Brooklyn Law Professor Lawrence Solan, who, during the panel discussing tort duties, recalled Twerski visiting one of his classes and making a concise, no-nonsense comment from the back of the classroom during a discussion of empirical work on punitive damages. “Aaron made the point without using a lot of legalese,” Solan said. “The problem of punitive damages is not one we’re going to solve by reasoning. We’re going to solve it by making moral and other judgments about what they should be, if anything. And that is typical of what it's like to work with Aaron. He is not only an expert on torts and product liability law, but an expert on what the law can do and cannot do.”  In the first of two panels on product liability, Ellen Bublick, Dan B. Dobbs Professor of Law and Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law, saluted Twerski’s pedagogical skills.  “Professor Twerski is a teacher of teachers,” Bublick said. “I have long admired his commitment to the common law, to working with it, to understanding it, to improving it, and not wavering from that commitment.”  Douglas Kysar, Deputy Dean and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, spoke of being initially intimidated to meet Twerski, whose product liability articles and successful early teaching days preceded him.   “Aaron seemed to be the embodiment of wisdom and penetrating insight,” Kysar said.  Benjamin C. Zipursky, Professor of Law, and James H. Quinn ’49 Chair in Legal Ethics at Fordham University School of Law, spoke for both himself and John C. P. Goldberg, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School, his co-author of a symposium paper on product liability and duty law within New York State.   “John and I identify most strongly as torts professors who want to shed light on the law so that lawyers and judges can do their best to get the law right and make it the best it can be,” Zipursky said. “Aaron’s clear intellectual and moral commitment to these goals and his excellence in reaching them have been an inspiration to us.”  Neil B. Cohen, 1901 Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, called Twerski “my great friend and mentor for close to 40 years.”  “In the area of conflict of laws, Aaron has been my tutor, co-teacher, and casebook collaborator,” Cohen said. “I learned from Aaron the importance of a strong theoretical framework, but also that ultimately most choice-of-law rules are highly imperfect. They work better in some contexts than others and, as a result, application of conflict-of-laws theories has to be tempered with recognition of how they work on the ground, with both a sense of their economic impact and a sense of human compassion. Without Aaron, there would be no Neil in conflict of laws.”  Harking back to her own days in Twerski’s classroom, Hon. Claire R. Kelly ’93, Judge, United States Court of International Trade, called herself “an expert witness” on Twerski’s teaching style. “Once you take one Twerski class, you tend to sign up for them all. As a first-year student, to have him as a torts professor was nothing short of magical. And in case you think I am exaggerating, I will tell you a true story. A classmate of mine once brought a date to his class and she wasn’t even a law student or a lawyer. But his class was that good that his pedagogical skills were something that someone chose to use to impress the object of his affection.”  At the close of the panels, a humbled Twerski thanked Festschrift participants.   “My head is swelling from all of this praise—much of it is undeserved. And that's not false humility,” Twerski said. “It has been a high for me, and I hope that I can continue to earn your respect and your praise. And I hope to continue to be able to do scholarship and to teach. I'm very grateful for the opportunity that was given to me. I love to teach, I love to write, and then I get paid for it, which is also something. Through all the years at Brooklyn Law School … that group of colleagues that could not be matched anywhere else in the world. They are great colleagues, great friends, and great human beings. I'm grateful to all of you for all your interactions with me, and I just pray to God that we can continue.” 

As a scholar exploring the interdisciplinary issues relating to law, language, and psychology, Larry Solan, 1901 Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, is recognized as a pathbreaker. On Nov. 3, Brooklyn Law School’s Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition and the Journal of Law and Policy hosted a symposium to celebrate Solan’s significant impact on and contributions to the Law School and to the field as teacher, scholar, and mentor. The symposium brought together noted scholars and experts in linguistics and the law from around the country to present papers exploring issues of textualism in the context of Congress and the Supreme Court, corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, and more. The papers will be published in a special “Festschrift” issue of the Journal. “Larry is a giant in the field of law and language,” said Director of the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition and Professor James Macleod, who organized and led the symposium. Initially intimidated by joining the illustrious Solan as a colleague at Brooklyn Law, Macleod said, he was warmly welcomed. “It’s rare for such an intellectual heavyweight to have such a down-to-earth, friendly disposition,” Macleod said. “Larry is one-of-a-kind.” Also one-of-a-kind is the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition, which Solan started in 2002, after joining the Brooklyn Law faculty in 1996. It is the only center in the nation to explore how developments in the cognitive sciences—including psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics—have dramatic implications for the law at both theoretical and practical levels. In addition to directing the Center, Solan also guided the school as Director of Graduate Education and as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (2006-2010). Since earning both a law degree and a Ph.D. in linguistics, Solan has devoted his career and scholarship largely to interdisciplinary issues in the areas of statutory and contractual interpretation, the attribution of liability and blame, and linguistic evidence. His publications include a raft of scholarly articles, as well as books, including The Language of Judges (1993), widely considered the seminal work on linguistic theory and legal argumentation; The Language of Statues: Laws and Their Interpretation (2010); and The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law (2012), among many others. The symposium kicked off with a panel focusing on corpus linguistics and related tools for ascertaining linguistic meaning. Professor Jill Anderson, of the University of Connecticut School of Law, dove into artificial intelligence and large language models like ChatGPT, and also spoke of Solan’s influence on the scholarly community. “Larry once described himself as a tour guide of sorts, through your own minds, pointing out things that he sees and understands from his training in linguistics so that we can all see and understand those things too,” Anderson said. “And Larry Solan is the best kind of tour guide there could be, because of the kind of person that he is. He is full of joy, and he takes joy in helping us see and learn. In doing this, he takes our vague collections of intuitions, and he gives us a structured sense of our own language.” Forensic linguistics scholar and frequent Solan collaborator Professor Tammy Gales, of Hofstra University, spoke of Solan’s "generosity in integrating emerging and established scholars into the field and at his brilliance in bringing innovative new ideas to cross-disciplinary audiences," and reviewed some of the duo’s work together. This spans from one of their first collaborations, Witness Cross-Examinations in Non-Stranger Assault Crimes: An Appraisal Analysis to their most recent projects, which include a forthcoming second edition of the book Speaking of Crime, originally co-authored by Solan and the late Peter Tiersma. Gales also shared testimonials from others who have been inspired by Solan. Among them was symposium participant and former visiting scholar at Brooklyn Law João Padua. “I was humbled by Larry’s ability to seamlessly navigate between psycholinguistics, semantics, pragmatics, criminal law, contract law, and many others,” Padua said. “He is a true professor, researcher, and academic. He is generous, funny, and humble.” Panelist Stephen Mouritsen, litigation partner at Kirkland & Ellis, discussed Solan’s “prophesy” on the use of linguistic corpora, and remarked on seeing so many familiar faces at the symposium: “The reason is in no small measure the result of the community of scholars that Larry has built in the collaboration among linguists and lawyers and law professors using the science of linguistics to tackle interpretive questions,” Mouritsen said. The day’s second panel featured Edward Finegan, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Law at the University of Southern California School of Law, who explored the use of dictionaries and interpretation. Pragmatics and textualism was the subject of panelist Lawrence Solum, William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law and Douglas D. Drysdale Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Every time I read an article or a book by Larry, I learn. And I learn deeply,” said Solum. “And I learn things that are new to me, and, in many cases, things that are new to the world of legal thought because they come from Larry. He has been a powerful force and his influence extends far beyond his own work.” In a panel exploring textualism, Anita Krishnakumar, Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Legislation at Georgetown Law, was joined by Abbe Gluck, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Solomon Center for Health, Law and Policy at Yale Law School. Krishnakumar considered the role of grammar arguments in the modern Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation decisions, while Gluck’s talk concerned whether the Court’s “new textualists” have abandoned Congress (the subtitle of her talk: “No”). In addition to their remarks that Solan’s scholarship had laid a foundation for the discussion of textualism that still holds true today, both spoke of how Solan had also been instrumental in helping them to forge their own careers. Krishnakumar recalled being invited as a junior scholar to a 2010 Solan-led conference at Brooklyn Law where, she said, “I met and got to know several senior scholars in the field, some of whom have since grown to be friends and some of whom are now my Georgetown colleagues.” Gluck, previously an associate at Paul, Weiss, had her first professorship at Brooklyn Law School, teaching Solan’s Legislation class when he was on leave in 2002. “I actually owe my entire career to Larry Solan,” Gluck said. In the day’s final panel, Brian Slocum, Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at the Florida State University College of Law, and Professor Kevin Tobia, of Georgetown Law, discussed the linguistic concepts of “ordinary meaning,” and “term-of-art meaning,” both as they were applied in the 19th-century landmark Supreme Court case Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892) and in modern textualist applications. A Solan and Gales article, Revisiting a Classic Problem in Statutory Interpretation: Is a Minister a Laborer?, 36 Georgia State University Law Review 491 (2020), said Tobia, is “an example of law and language as discovery. Larry and Tammy took an old case where it was thought there was not much else to say and actually discovered, with tools of corpus linguistics, something new, fascinating, and exciting, breathing new life into this case.” William Eskridge, Jr., Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law at Yale Law School, elaborated on the Holy Trinity case, and spoke of being inspired in his own work by a Larry Solan presentation in which Solan expanded on “the famous linguistics principle that a lot of phrases are more than or less than the sum of the prototypical meanings of the words in the phrase.” Of the Gales and Solan paper on the Holy Trinity case, Eskridge said, “I think it is the most successful corpus linguistics paper ever written, and maybe ever will be written.”

After two years of gathering virtually for the Brooklyn Law School Alumni Association’s annual Alumni Luncheon, more than 300 alumni, faculty, students, and friends reunited and celebrated in person at the May 6 luncheon at the beautiful Cipriani 25 Broadway. The event also saluted the great accomplishments of Alumni Rising Stars Dong Joo Lee ’13, Mary Willis White ’13, and Alumni of the Year Frank V. Carone ’94 and Wanda K. Denson-Low ’81.   “It’s so exciting to see real people. You all look a lot better than you did on Zoom!” said Association President Valerie Fitch ’88 in her welcome to the group. Thanking all at the Law School who helped make the day possible, Fitch also paid a heartfelt tribute to the late Deborah Morse ’80, former Alumni Association Secretary and Assistant District Attorney with the New York County District Attorney’s Office Appeals Division, who passed away in 2021. Dean Michael Cahill then took the stage to extend his welcome to the alumni who, he said, “inspire and motivate our students who want to be what you are and are inspired by what they can do and will do by the example you have set for them.” He acknowledged and thanked Valerie Fitch, “one of the great supporters and champions of Brooklyn Law School,” along with the many board members and former board members who were present, the faculty, and recognized a “future alum,” Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who, he said, “in addition to her day job as State Assembly Member and Chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, just wrapped up her second year in our evening program.”  In welcoming special guest Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Dean Cahill thanked her and Wanda Denson-Low for facilitating an exciting new partnership between RPI and Brooklyn Law School through the Rensselaer Institute for Energy, the Built Environment, and Smart Systems. The Institute, said Cahill, “will include industry leaders to address the major twenty-first-century challenge of climate change by trying to reimagine both large-scale urban environments and small-scale architectural design and development. The Law School plans to expand our own programs in the area of sustainable development, which builds on a longstanding strength of this school and alumni, the real estate sector.” Dean Cahill also paid tribute to alumnus Warren Estis ’73, a titan of real estate law and a great friend and supporter of the Law School, who passed away earlier this year. Mr. Estis’ son Alex Estis ’17, and legal partner Gary Rosenberg ’74, were in attendance at the luncheon.  Before introducing the Rising Stars and Alumni of the Year, the Alumni Association’s Tim Oberweger ’05, Chair of the Philanthropy Committee, encouraged all alumni to continue their generous support of the Law School, both financially and through providing opportunities to fellow alumni. Rising Star Dong Joo Lee, a veteran of the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, currently an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, and recipient of numerous awards for his service to the legal community and to community organizations, was congratulated via video message by Rear Admiral Les Reardanz, who recognized Lee for his distinction and distinguished service. In accepting his award, Lee thanked Professors Lisa Smith and Karen Hennigan, whose clinical work, he said, set a path for and deeply impacted his career. He also paid tribute to his parents, who, when he was just four years old, he said, "left South Korea and everything they had known to give us a better life and become people who care about the world." Fellow Rising Star Mary Willis White, a Partner at boutique real-estate law firm Kriss & Feuerstein LLP and an active member of the Women’s Leadership Circle, gave her thanks for the award, especially to her favorite alumnus, her husband Paul Means ’11. White, who oversees the firm’s Summer Associate Program and is the partner sponsor of K&F’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee, said that if she had been asked at her K&F interview a decade ago where she would see herself today, “I hope I would have been bold enough then to imagine the things I could do in real estate in the greatest city in the world. That I would be hiring fellow alumni.” The training she and her fellow alumni received at Brooklyn Law School, White said, “gave us the tools for well-rounded, practical, and effective leadership for our clients.”  New York Supreme Court Justice Devin P. Cohen ’95 then introduced Alumnus of the Year Frank Carone, Chief of Staff to New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Carone, a negotiator and business litigator who was formerly Executive Partner at Abrams Fensterman LLP, has long devoted himself to serving on the boards of local organizations. He recalled that he entered Brooklyn Law School with “insecurities and fixed opinions, but my Law School education transformed the way I thought.” He made special note of William Hellerstein, Professor of Law Emeritus, and Aaron Twerski, Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law, “great teachers who helped shape my way of thinking and helped my theory of law evolve.” Now, building a team at City Hall, he added, he looks forward to helping the city “emerge from a time of crisis to reinvention.” Via video message, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla of California congratulated Alumnus of the Year Wanda Denson-Low, retired Senior Vice President of the Office of Internal Governance at the Boeing Company and currently Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Following was a very personal introduction by Denson-Low’s son Cameron Low ’19, who told of his mother’s personal sacrifice, of her being a trailblazer as a woman of color in her field, one who has paid it forward through mentorship and many diversity initiatives. Denson-Low and her husband, Ron Low, have created many scholarships at Brooklyn Law School to help recruit promising applicants. “Brooklyn Law School gave me a sense of community and taught me how to be an advocate,” said Denson-Low. “As lawyers, upholding equity and the rule of law, you can always do something from whatever place you’re in to make the world better.” In closing remarks, Valerie Fitch, who is ending her latest term as Alumni Association president, said, “These events show what an amazing place Brooklyn Law School is and how incredible our graduates and faculty are. I’ve been proud to be president and enjoyed every minute.” She then introduced incoming president Deborah Riegel ’93. “I want to thank Valerie,” said Riegel, “for stewarding the Alumni Association with grace, with an iron fist when necessary, with compassion, and a welcoming and collaborative nature. I have extraordinarily big shoes to fill!” Our thanks to the many generous sponsors who made the 2022 Alumni Luncheon possible, including Frank Aquila ’83, Chair of the Board of Trustees; Rosenberg & Estis, P.C.; Vdiscovery; Abrams Fensterman LLP; Allegaert Berger & Vogel LLP; Wanda Denson Low ’81 and Ron Low; Valerie Fitch ’88 and Ed Flanders ’89; Kramer Levin; Kriss & Feuerstein LLP; Sasha L. Linney ’11; and S & E Azriliant P.C. For additional sponsors and to read full biographies of our Rising Stars and Alumni of the Year, visit our Alumni Luncheon page here.   

The Women’s Leadership Network (WLN) had much to celebrate at its five-year anniversary gathering. Besides mixing and mingling in person, attendees heard inspiring words from alumnae who are advocates for reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and Brooklyn Law School students who expressed appreciation for the scholarships WLN provides.  The WLN is led by the Women’s Leadership Circle, a group of 36 alumnae who oversee and guide the activities of the larger WLN, which has expanded its influence and size since launching in 2017—a feat the Law School’s leadership has noted. A key update at the anniversary celebration, which took place in the Forchelli Conference Center, came from Debbie Epstein Henry ’94, chair of the Women’s Leadership Circle, who said the WLN scholarship program, which already had raised $115,000, plans to support students even more.   “What I’m excited to announce tonight, is given the excitement and the success of the scholarship over the last five years, we at the Women’s Leadership Circle have voted to endow the scholarship, and that will now ensure that we have scholarship recipients every year,” said Henry, who added that the goal is to raise another $100,000 for the endowed scholarship. “This is about paying it forward. This is about creating opportunities for women and making a huge impact as we continue to grow as an organization, as a school and as a community.” Dean Michael T. Cahill, in opening the event, described WLN as “one of the central groups tying our alumni and our students together,” and prompted applause after noting that women students comprise 60 percent of the Law School’s latest incoming class. “So, the students that we have now will be literally changing the face of the legal profession in the future and we are deeply appreciative to the alumnae who are going to help them grow and flourish as lawyers in the profession,” Cahill said, adding that Henry is chief among them.  “What we do at the Women’s Leadership Network is everything we can to influence and impact alumnae and women law students,” Henry said, outlining four key activities, including: programming (Nov. 2nd anniversary was its 10th event), networking; mentoring, including six mentoring circles; and philanthropy, providing student scholarships. The programming for the evening, Empowerment through Advocacy, Obstacles and Opportunities for Impact, was moderated by Sonya Smith-Valentine ’97, CEO of Financially Fierce, and a member of the Women’s Leadership Circle. Panelists were Julie F. Kay ’95, women’s rights attorney, activist and author and Carol Buell ’80, principal of Carol L. Buell Law & Mediation and cofounder of the LGBTQI Family Law Professionals of New York. In discussing advocacy and obstacles in their work, Kay and Buell both pointed to the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which upended Roe v Wade. Kay, who co-authored the book, Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom, said one way to move forward is to reframe the discussion as a human rights issue as well as a women’s health issue.  “The abortion issue itself is often described as a religious debate, or a philosophical question about when life begins,” Kay said. “Those are pieces of it but for so many of us, it really is about the fundamental human right and deciding when and with whom to parent…As we’re working towards reproductive rights, reproductive freedoms, we need to bear in mind the horrific maternal mortality rates in this country. Particularly for women of color and for black women in New York City, we are not much better off than rest of the country.” For Buell, her work has changed with an expansion of LGBTQ rights over time, notably with the passage of the Marriage Equality Act in New York State, legalizing gay marriage and changing the nature of the work she does for clients. Before the Act, she helped LGBTQ clients with the “papering of relationships,” providing legal documents to ensure their rights since they did not have next-of-kin status. That included documents for guardianships, healthcare, and funeral arrangements, as well as dissolution and parenting agreements and, in the last 15 years, adoption papers.  “So, 10 years ago, when Marriage Equality was finally passed in New York, it was an amazing moment and I noticed that first of all, I had to figure out what marriage was all about, because I didn’t really know what marriage was all about,” Buell said. “I had to use (my own) prism for my client base of people who had been together 40 years and are thinking ‘Do I want to marry? Do I not want to marry?’ And quite frankly, these were lesbian feminist clients who wanted nothing to do with the patriarchy and nothing to do with marriage….I became a ‘marriage pusher,’ which was a profound experience that I had for almost every client to do that deep dive into the pros and cons of marriage, and, what do they get from it.”  Now, with the conservative Supreme Court, and fears that marriage equality could be removed, Buell is facing clients with questions, once again.   Both Buell and Kay urged attendees to stay active in their communities to ensure all voices are heard.   “I talk a lot in the book about how everybody doesn’t have to do the same thing, but everybody can do something with activism, and I think particularly in a group like this where there are women who are bringing new voices and bringing their life experiences into the workplace in positions of power, that de-stigmatizes [conversations around reproductive rights],” Kay said. “I do a lot of speaking in law firms, and sometimes you can see when you actually start talking about abortions and people’s experiences, it opens the door to people talking about that they actually have families outside of work and what does that mean? And I think particularly supporting the next generation in the way this leadership network has done, and the way people are doing within the workplace is really important, both within those private conversations and also in [the area of] who do you bring into your workspace.”  On hand to demonstrate the impact were three scholarship recipients: Anastasia Kyriakos ‘23, Chelsea Daniel ’23, and Jara Jacobson ’22, each of whom embody WLN’s mission.   Jacobson, who graduated in May and recently passed the bar noted that she started a position at Winston & Strawn a month ago. As a second-year law student, she had met an alumna who was a partner there: Katie Chastaine ’06, who served as a mentor as she was seeking employment.   “It’s been a wonderful experience so far and I hoped that I got [the position] on my own merits, but it does not hurt to have someone in your corner, cheering you on and supporting you from the background, and I think that’s what this organization does for so many of us,” Jacobson said.            

Students rise to their feet to practice “box breathing” as part of a panel discussion led by a team from the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice with a focus on how to find resilience to help deal with the secondary trauma of public interest work.  Staff attorneys and social workers from the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice addressed the impact of “secondary trauma stress” on public interest professionals, and shared advice on how best to cope with the repercussions of working closely with clients who have experienced trauma directly. The panel discussion, titled “What Our Work Does to Us,” was held at the Subotnick Center Monday night.  The discussion, primarily attended by students who are interested in careers in public interest law, focused on identifying secondary trauma stress and vicarious trauma and developing strategies for resilience. Panelists, all from the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice (LAS JRP), included Vicki Light, an attorney who represents children in the New York City Family Courts in the Bronx; attorney Lina Del Plato ’00 in the Brooklyn office; attorney Brad Martin in the Manhattan office; and social workers Eileen Lopez and E. Jean-Marie Catlett. Cosponsored by the Public Service Law Center and the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship program, the program was introduced by Public Service Law Center Executive Director Amy Hsieh ’11 and Professor Vijay Raghavan, co-director of the Sparer Fellowship program.  Opening the discussion was Light, who mostly represents children in abuse and neglect cases in Bronx Family Court.   “We have found that public interest work can be meaningful, fascinating, invigorating, and all those good things, which is why we chose to do it. However, it can also be overwhelming: we miss doctor’s appointments, we skip lunch, we work long hours, and we feel overwhelmed,” Light said. “We know that it can take a toll on us, and we have found that it’s good to talk about it and awareness is key.”  The Legal Aid Society started a Wellness at Work program in 2009 to address the high levels of stress of public interest work that was shared by employees via a survey. The panelists shared information on how to identify secondary trauma stress and offered helpful strategies that have been developed as a result.   Martin explained that the stress of people who work in the “helping professions,” such as in public interest work, result in what is popularly called compassion fatigue. Unlike the type of stress that can be beneficial (such as the drive to study for the bar exam or prepare for an upcoming court case), this type of fatigue and stress can result in feeling helpless, chronic exhaustion, anxiety, poor sleep, and anger and cynicism, among numerous other impacts.   “This is not day-to-day stress that you will get on the job, like clients who are demanding or judges who are demanding or opposing attorneys who are not cooperative,” Martin said. “This is something that very much stems from the subject matter that you're going to be dealing with.”    The key is to recognize it and address it before it leads to burnout, because once someone burns out, they can no longer effectively help clients, he said.  One simple strategy to cope with secondary trauma stress daily is through breathing. Martin led the audience through a round of “box breathing,” which entails inhaling to the count of four, pausing for a count of four, exhaling to a count of four, and again pausing for a count of four to “close the box.”  Del Plato, who described working with children who were removed from homes by Child Protective Services, spoke about the complexities of a system in which children may want to return home but cannot because their parents don’t have the ability or the resources or training needed to make that possible. “Parents aren't able to follow through with the conditions that allow them to have the children return home… and then we're left with telling those children that they can't come home yet, even if they want to,” Del Plato said. “We often end up experiencing a general feeling that success or failure of a client situation falls solely on our shoulders.”  At that point, it is important to take a step back, she said. “We are their attorney or their social worker. We are not the one that saves them or their family,” Del Plato said. “So it's important to remember that our work is directed by our clients and our clients’ wishes, and thus, both our scope of action and our ability to achieve what we might see as the best result are also limited, and we have to then trust our clients’ decisions.”  One of her favorite tactics for dealing with stress is using a gratitude journal to write down things for which she is grateful.   Lopez, who works with clients as a social worker, said that empathy drives the work, but there are limitations to that. “We have younger clients that have gone through quite a traumatic experience, and all you can think about is you want to make sure that you are there for them. And while you can understand some of what they're going through, you can’t fully be in their shoes,” Lopez said. One of her strategies for dealing with secondary trauma is discussing situations with a colleague to try to sort it through. As a supervisor, she is also careful not to contact her subordinates who are on vacation or out sick unless necessary.   Her colleague, Catlett, agreed that setting distinct boundaries between her work and personal life is especially important, and that having a mobile phone that is just for work, a perk that started during the pandemic, has helped immensely with that.   “A lot of my clients, especially teenage clients, want to reach me on my cell phone, and I tell them that I generally work until x hour, and if they text me or reach out and I don't answer, the reason is because it’s after that hour or over the weekends,” Catlett said. Similarly, it is important to have colleagues who help protect one another’s boundaries, as Lopez does. “We may not always have boundaries protected by our supervisors or the places we're working,” she said, “but we still deserve to put those in place for ourselves so we can do the best work that we can.”   To see photos from the event, click here.

Brooklyn Law School is proud to announce that three exceptional alumni have recently been elected to the Board of Trustees: Meeka Bondy ’94, Jeffrey T. Scott '96, and Jason Jia '11. They bring a rich mix of professional backgrounds and fresh perspectives spanning litigation, entertainment, immigration, labor and technology law.   These accomplished graduates, representing multiple generations of Brooklyn Law alumni, will play a key role as the Law School celebrates its 125th anniversary in 2026.  “Meeka, Jeff and Jason have already given back so much to the Law School, and we are so delighted that they have now agreed to join us on the Board,” said Board of Trustees Chair Frank Aquila ’83, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. “I am confident that their experience and insights will help us chart the next chapter as we celebrate our 125th Anniversary.”  Meeka Bondy ’94 is a veteran media, entertainment, technology, and intellectual property attorney with more than 30 years of in-house counsel and law firm experience advising the world's most innovative companies. She most recently served as senior counsel at Perkins Coie, where she advised media companies and technology companies wherever their work coincided in the content life cycle. Bondy was previously the senior vice president of legal affairs for Home Box Office, where she oversaw legal matters and a team of attorneys and administrators in support of the company's domestic syndication and worldwide distribution of HBO and Cinemax programming. She held previous roles at Time Warner Interactive Video Group, where she was vice president of legal affairs and at Time Inc., where she was associate counsel.   An active alumna at Brooklyn Law School, Bondi chairs the Women’s Leadership Circle, which oversees and guides the activities of the larger Women’s Leadership Network in its efforts to impact and influence female students and alumnae through programming, networking, mentoring, and philanthropy.   “As Chair of Brooklyn Law School’s Women’s Leadership Circle, I am honored and humbled to now be named to the Board of Trustees,” Bondy said. “Serving as a Trustee gives me the opportunity to give back to this uniquely independent institution that has given me so much – from launching my career in media, entertainment, and technology law -- to introducing me to my best friend, husband and fellow alum, Joseph Bondy ’94. But it’s not just about giving back, it’s about building forward and preparing the law students of today to be the business-minded, ethically grounded, and technology-forward leaders of tomorrow. I am grateful and excited to work with such an esteemed and dedicated board on such important and meaningful work in educating and equipping the next generation of legal, business, and civic leaders.”   Jeffrey T. Scott '96 is a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell’s litigation group and co-head of the firm’s securities litigation practice. Over the past 25-plus years, Scott has secured significant successes for clients in a wide range of areas, including securities, antitrust, and commercial civil litigation and regulatory and criminal investigations. With a client list that includes Barclays, UnitedHealth, Rocket Mortgage and other leading companies, Scott is a nationally recognized litigator and has earned numerous accolades over the years. Most recently, Lawdragon named Scott as one of the 500 Leading Litigators in America (2023–2025) and one of the top 500 Leading Global Antitrust & Competition Lawyers (2025). In 2019, The National Law Journal recognized Scott as a Litigation Trailblazer and Winning Litigator. He also has been recognized by Law360 as securities litigation MVP. Scott also serves on the Board of Advisors for his alma mater Providence College.  In 2024, Scott established the Jeffrey Scott ’96 Scholarship to recognize Brooklyn Law School’s role in shaping his career and to pay forward the 3L-year scholarship he received as Brooklyn Journal of International Law’s managing editor. “When I graduated and started as a clerk and then became a young practitioner, I felt that I had a substantial leg up on a number of my peers because of the quality of education that I received from Brooklyn Law School and that advantage has further solidified the longer I have practiced law. Brooklyn Law School teaches you to think like a lawyer, in a very practical way,” he said.   Now, Scott is giving back in a different manner.   “It is a tremendous honor to have been elected to the Brooklyn Law School (BLS) Board of Trustees,” Scott said. “For nearly 125 years, BLS has been one of the country’s leading law schools, producing generations of skilled lawyers who have served their clients, the legal profession, and their broader communities with great distinction. I consider myself fortunate to have attended BLS and received a first-rate legal education that was an indispensable springboard to my legal career. I look forward to collaborating with my distinguished colleagues on the BLS Board of Trustees to help ensure that BLS continues to be a critical part of the foundation of the legal profession in the heart of New York City and beyond.” Jason Jia '11 is the managing partner and founder of Jia Law Group (JLG), a Wall Street–headquartered firm he launched in 2018. Since its founding, JLG has expanded its presence to Toronto, Beijing, and Irvine, Calif. and employs 50 full-time professionals, including six attorneys who are Brooklyn Law alumni. Two of Jia's partners—Thomas Kung ’09 and Joseph Hamel ’11—are fellow alumni whom he first met while attending Brooklyn Law. JLG advises cross-border clients on immigration, labor and employment, corporate, and litigation matters across the biotechnology, banking and finance, hospitality, technology, real-estate ecosystem, and non-profit sectors.  Jia is also the founder and CEO of Unfold Legal AI, a generative-AI (artificial intelligence) platform that helps immigration law firms streamline research and draft petitions, motions, and related filings. Additionally, he is an active investor in hospitality and entertainment business, including Double Chicken Please, Sandbox VR New York, Raku, Patisserie Fouet, and UNnecessary.   In 2010, Brooklyn Law School presented Jia with the Rising Star Award and he established the Jason Jia and Professor Barbara Gartner Scholarship the same year to support first-generation law students for whom English is not their first language. “Brooklyn Law School gave me the tools, discipline, and confidence to build a career at the intersection of law, business, and technology,” Jia said. “There I learned not only doctrine, but a mindset of problem solving and resilience—lessons that have guided every stage of my professional journey. It is also where I formed enduring professional partnerships and lifelong friendships that continue to shape my work.”  Returning to the school as a Trustee is humbling and deeply meaningful, Jia added.    “I view it as both a responsibility and a privilege: to help ensure the Law School thrives, adapts, and continues to equip future generations with the knowledge, courage, and integrity to lead. I am proud to have given back through scholarship and to support innovation in legal practice through Unfold Legal AI; my hope is that Brooklyn Law graduates will have even greater opportunities than I did, and that my service on the board will help make that possible,” he said.  

Brooklyn Law School unveils a refreshed brand identity as it celebrates its 125th anniversary, honoring its history while embracing a future of innovation and excellence.