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On March 3, 55 law school students and practicing attorneys attended the New York City Bar Association’s second “Using Your JD on Wall Street” webinar, exploring a wide range of topics for those wishing to explore or transition to a career at an investment bank, a hedge fund, or other Wall Street employer. Brooklyn Law School’s Michael Tenenhaus, Associate Director of Career & Professional Development, and Victoria Gokhman, Senior Professional Development Manager, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, moderated a panel of Wall Street professionals. They included Miguel Abugattas, Executive Director, Power & Renewables Investment Banking, J.P. Morgan, and three Brooklyn Law alums, Husain Bazzi ’20, Associate, Consumer Wealth Management, Goldman Sachs; Marija Dabovic ’15, Vice President, Legal & Compliance Division, Morgan Stanley; and Diana LaMorie ’10, Vice President, Legal & Regulatory, Two Sigma. The program was sponsored by the NYC Bar Career Advancement and Management Committee and co-sponsored by its Law Students Perspectives Committee. Panelists offered insights on their own career paths and how their law degrees and legal training are utilized in their current position, in areas ranging from wealth management to investment banking to regulatory and compliance. They also provided guidance on the importance of staying current on financial industry news and the language of business, taking advantage of internships to expand a network, and how a law degree and experience (whether that be working for a government regulatory agency, as a corporate attorney, or as a litigator), can be leveraged to enter a Wall Street career. Examined were the skills and qualities that employers in the sector are looking for now, and cutting-edge opportunities, such as crypto and fintech, for the next generation of attorneys. “Law school gives you the training in analytical skills,” said LaMorie, who stressed the importance of that ability on Wall Street. All the panelists emphasized that a first job is simply the beginning, creating a base of knowledge for the varied career road ahead. “The program was very informative for both law students and graduates,” said Tenenhaus. “The featured Brooklyn Law School alumni are a true testament to the caliber of attorneys BLS produces, working at leading investment banks and hedge funds. On a personal note, it was extremely gratifying for me to see Husain Bazzi paying it forward on the panel, as he was a member of my first class of 1L advisees in 2017. Diana LaMorie and Marija Dabovic are leaders in the financial services industry and consistently such good friends to the Career Development Center and the school at large.”  

Professor David Reiss, an expert in Real Estate Finance and Consumer Finance Law and founding director of the Law School’s Community Development Clinic, has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute (ALI), the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.The Institute—composed of 2,900 lawyers, judges, and law professors from across the United States and around the world—drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, model statutes, and principles of law that are influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education. ALI membership is gained only through election by existing ALI members and is limited to 3,000 individuals (excluding life, honorary, and ex-officio members).“I am honored to be elected to the membership of the ALI, and I look forward to participating in their important work of improving the law,” said Reiss.A Fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, Reiss serves as Academic Programs Director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE). He is a frequently quoted expert on legal developments in the real estate finance sector and has written a regular column for The Hill. His popular blog, REFinBlog, offers a roundup of developments in the law and practices related to the real estate finance industry. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Paying for the American Dream: How to Reform the Market for Mortgages (Oxford University Press, 2019). Recently, Reiss was appointed Chair of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board.Other ALI members from the Law School faculty include Dean Michael T. Cahill; Professors William D. Araiza, Miriam H. Baer, Anita Bernstein, Dana Brakman Reiser, I. Bennett Capers, Neil B. Cohen, James A. Fanto, Edward J. Janger, Beryl R. Jones-Woodin, Roberta S. Karmel, Brian A. Lee, Samuel K. Murumba, Alice Ristroph, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Winnie F. Taylor, and Aaron D. Twerski; and Professors Emeriti Marsha Garrison, William E. Hellerstein, Norman S. Poser, and Joan G. Wexler, dean and president emerita.

By Teresa Novellino In 2020, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) replaced the often-criticized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but three years later, has the new treaty achieved its goals of creating a more level playing field among its three signatory nations, fostering innovation, and incorporating stronger labor and environmental standards? Scholars, practitioners, and policy experts who gathered at Brooklyn Law School on Oct. 6 for the Brooklyn Law School Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law symposium sought to answer that question by dissecting the treaty’s impact in four areas: labor; energy and climate policy; gender, race, and trade policy; and dispute resolution. In discussing its impact on labor, the scholars on a morning panel that was moderated by Professor Alberto Rodriguez gave the treaty a mixed review. On the positive side, there was more than $1.5 trillion dollars in trade between the three trading partners last year, said panelist Diego Marroquin Bitar, a senior research analyst in global economy and development at The Brookings Institution. Canadian exports to Mexico and the United States grew 43 percent, Mexican exports to the United States and Canada rose 22 percent, while U.S. exports to Mexico and Canada rose 28 percent, he added. “The three countries together account for almost a third of global GDP, and trade alone supports almost 10 million jobs across the region,” Bitar said. Politically, the treaty garnered bipartisan support, with over 90 percent of Republican and Democrat lawmakers in Congress approving its passage, compared to 53 percent for NAFTA. Unions also approve of the treaty, which “is not something we’ve seen before,” and in Mexico, a new labor center was created with 21 outlets around the country to address labor disputes, Bitar added. Still, there are problems with the treaty, speakers noted. One of them is that it was crafted under the Trump administration when “there was this huge emphasis on trade deficits, and [the motivation was] how do we close our markets to redress what was perceived as unfair trade deficits using the rules of trade to justify that?” said panelist Desirée LeClercq, an assistant professor of law at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Under the Biden administration, trade policy is designed to be worker-centric, but that goal is difficult to achieve in the current way USMCA is being implemented, LeClercq said. “The Biden administration must make a choice: Is it going to help workers in Mexico by for instance, augmenting its technical assistance and training programs, much like we saw in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement? Or does it want to punish workers by leaving them voiceless, opening the door to retaliation, and ultimately failing to give them a meaningful seat at the table?” asked LeClercq, whose research places marginalized workers at the center of global and economic policies. Much discussion centered on the treaty’s “Rapid Response Labor Mechanism,” often referred to as the RRL, which allows the U.S. government to crack down on individual factories in Mexico — by, for example, suspending tariff exemptions for their products – if they violate Mexican labor law. The treaty does not allow similar crackdowns on U.S. manufacturers unless a facility has been subjected to an enforced order of the National Labor Relations Board, which can take years to happen, creating an asymmetric power structure, LeClercq said. Inu Manak, a fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that the treaty was put together quickly and without a lot of transparency during the Trump administration and then was inherited to implement after the Biden administration took over. “Because it was put together really fast, there was a lot of language, that is probably not meant to be the way it is, and there are a lot of lawyers in this room, who know that there could be some additional scrubbing of this that would have made it a little better and given it more clarity, and that just really didn’t happen,” Manak said. One issue that the treaty does not address is Mexico’s employment realities, Bitar said. He explained that there is a formal economic and employment sector, primarily located in the northern part of Mexico, and a larger informal one, based more in the central and southern parts of the country. In the formal sector, Mexican workers can form unions that are subject to minimum wage laws, gain access to pensions, health insurance, and sometimes even housing, Bitar said. Such firms are larger, more productive, more innovative, and have established relationships with North American supply chains, allowing them to benefit from USMCA. But only about 10 percent of Mexico’s workers are in such formal employment. The informal sector, which represents more than half of the nation’s economy, includes the other 90 percent of workers, who are mostly self-employed, or working for family-run businesses. These businesses are much less productive and innovative and offer less job security to workers. There is greater incentive for businesses to be part of the informal economy because workers can be hired and fired more easily, are paid less, and employers don’t have to contribute to social welfare programs. “Without addressing this divide, USMCA won't get us very far,” Bitar said. “This device needs to be addressed through a fiscal reform, to programs to help SMEs (small and midsize enterprises) in southern and central states to fully connect with the supply chains. And that's not something that USMCA can do on its own, so we need to really temper our expectations.” Dean’s Research Scholar and Professor Robin Effron, in introducing the symposium, said its theme was inspired by a desire to shed light on a large yet overlooked area of trade. “Understandably, there's tremendous interest in hosting events, and writing about Asia, in particular, China, and there is huge interest in the growing markets and trade with the continent of Africa, and the usual discussions about Europe,” Effron said. “But I felt like, for whatever reason, we know the least about our trading partners who are right to our north and ourselves and make up just an enormous portion of U.S. trade.”

Prominent legal scholars and practitioners Frank Pasquale, Wilfred U. Codrington III, and Vijay Raghavan bring a wealth of expertise in law and policy Brooklyn Law School welcomed three new full-time faculty members this fall: Professors Frank Pasquale, Wilfred U. Codrington III, and Vijay Raghavan. They join a faculty that is already nationally recognized for scholarly and teaching excellence. “Our new faculty members bring a wealth of expertise, experience, and new ideas to the Law School,” said Dean Michael T. Cahill. “As our curriculum evolves to keep pace with the latest developments in technology, law, and policy, their contributions will be invaluable. We also look forward to their collaboration with our stellar existing group of scholars.” Frank Pasquale Pasquale previously was the Piper & Marbury Professor of Law at the University of Maryland. He is a noted expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. He was a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School in fall 2019. Pasquale is a prolific and nationally regarded scholar, whose work focuses on how information is used across a number of areas, including health law, commerce, and tech. His wide-ranging expertise encompasses the study of the rapidity of technological advances and the unintended consequences of the interaction of privacy law, intellectual property, and antitrust laws, as well as the power of private sector intermediaries to influence healthcare and education finance policy. His book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press 2015), has been recognized internationally as a landmark study on how “Big Data” affects our lives. The Black Box Society develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance, while promoting pragmatic reforms to improve the information economy. His forthcoming book, New Laws of Robotics (Harvard University Press 2020), and a volume on AI he co-edited, The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Oxford University Press 2020), will both be released this year. “Having spent the fall with Brooklyn Law’s outstanding students and faculty, I am thrilled to join a law school with such a strong commitment to research and community service,” said Pasquale. “As AI becomes an increasingly important concern of lawyers, I look forward to being part of the policy conversation in New York City, where some of the leading work is now being done.” Pasquale has advised business and government leaders in the health care, internet, and finance industries, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. House Judiciary and Energy & Commerce Committees, the Senate Banking Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and directorates-general of the European Commission. He also has advised officials in Canada and the United Kingdom on law and technology policy. He presently chairs the Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security, part of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, where he is serving a four-year term. He is one of the leaders of a global movement for “algorithmic accountability.” In media and communication studies, he has developed a comprehensive legal analysis of barriers to, and opportunities for, regulation of internet platforms. In privacy law and surveillance, his work is among the leading research on regulation of algorithmic ranking, scoring, and sorting systems, including credit scoring and threat scoring. Pasquale is an Affiliate Fellow at Yale University's Information Society Project and a member of the American Law Institute. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, and a B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard University. Pasquale’s move was noted by Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports as one of the top 10 lateral moves of the year. It is the fourth year Brooklyn Law School’s lateral hires have been on the list. Wilfred U. Codrington III Codrington comes to Brooklyn Law School from NYU School of Law, where he was the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Fellow and Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. At the Center, he focused on voting and election security, constitutional reform, and the rule of law. He taught graduate and undergraduate courses at NYU Wagner School of Public Service on topics of law, public policy, and politics. He also had served as a Fieldwork Supervisor for the Brennan Center Advocacy Clinic, a clinic devoted to teaching students public policy through real world legal reform campaigns that impact the laws of democracy and the regulation of election contests. At Brooklyn Law School, Codrington teaches Constitutional Law and Election Law. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book, The People’s Constitution: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union (The New Press 2021), that examines the history of constitutional amendments and the tension between the overall progressive arc of constitutional change and the conservative grip on the broader conversation about the Constitution. Among his recent articles are “So Goes the Nation: What the American West is Telling us about How We’ll Choose the President in 2020,” Columbia Law Review Online (forthcoming 2020); and “The Benefits of Equity in the Constitutional Quest for Equality,” 43 N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change 105 (2019). “I felt immediately at home at Brooklyn Law School,” Codrington said. “The faculty are dynamic and intellectually curious people who really want to do good for the world. The student body is a great group of diverse, public-interest-minded individuals. In addition to teaching at the Law School, I hope to continue working with the Brennan Center in some capacity, to influence the public debate on election laws, civil rights, and constitutional matters.” Previously, Codrington was an associate at DLA Piper in the litigation, government investigations, and regulatory practices, where he participated in a variety of pro bono projects on behalf of individual clients, minority communities, and nonprofit organizations. He also clerked for Hon. Deborah Anne Batts, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York, and served as a staffer for U.S. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Codrington holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, an M.P.A. from University of Pennsylvania, and an A.B. with honors from Brown University. Vijay Raghavan Raghavan joined the Law School after a decade in the public sector, recently serving as Deputy Director of the Division of Financial Institutions with the Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation. His scholarship focuses on consumer finance. His current research interests include regulatory design in consumer finance, defending interventions in consumer financial markets on distributional grounds, measuring risk in consumer financial markets, and emerging doctrinal issues in consumer law. He also explores in his work whether large debt write-offs in the emerging recession may be justified on efficiency grounds, in addition to moral grounds. Raghavan previously served as an Assistant Attorney General with the Consumer Fraud Bureau of the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, where he investigated and litigated violations of state and federal consumer protection laws. Before that, he completed a two-year public service fellowship with Prairie State Legal Services, where he created a clinic to provide legal assistance for low-income individuals with tax problems. Raghavan began his career as a tax associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. “I was drawn to Brooklyn Law School by its stellar and kind faculty,” said Raghavan. “I am eager to engage with the faculty and students, and hope to lean on my public sector experience in scholarship as well as in the classroom.” He holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Twenty-two federal judges from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) took part in EDNY Day at Brooklyn Law School on Wednesday, March 6. The judges, who serve as Article III judges, magistrate judges, and bankruptcy judges visited eight classes and several small discussion groups throughout the day, spoke at lunchtime sessions, and participated in an evening town hall meeting and reception. EDNY Day has become an annual tradition at the Law School. Students have the unique opportunity to meet and learn from prominent federal judges, including those who also are alumni of the Law School. That includes the Hon. Ramon E. Reyes Jr. ’92, a member of the Board of Trustees and a key organizer of the event with Law School professors Jodi Balsam, Stacy Caplow, Maryellen Fullerton, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, and Joy Kanwar.  More than 200 students attended the four lunchtime panel discussions with judges on Working in Chambers: Interning and Clerking; Effective Advocacy in the Courtroom; Judicial Decision-making: Sentencing, Pretrial Detention, Diversion; and Well-being in Law School and Law Practice. Among the sessions was one led by EDNY Chief Bankruptcy Judge Alan S. Trust, who provided students with an introduction to bankruptcy law and practice.  The theme for the town hall, which was held in the Moot Court Room, was “Paths to the Bench,” and was moderated by President and Joseph Crea Dean David D. Meyer. Former Chief Judge Dora Irizarry was joined on the panel by fellow judges Lois Bloom, Lee Dunst, Peggy Kuo, Ramon Reyes, and Elizabeth Stong.   Meyer kicked off the town hall with thanks to all the judges who took part. “This day represents just what a deep, multi-dimensional partnership we are so fortunate to have between the Law School and EDNY,” he said. “It extends far beyond this day to having many members of the court who are our adjunct faculty and mentors to our students as externs or law clerks and invite our students to go to the court to see proceedings.”  In answer to Meyer’s question, “When you were in law school, did you have the ambition to become a judge?” the judges were unanimous in saying that it wasn’t a part of their plans when they were starting out. But they all spoke of the importance, inspiration, and encouragement of mentors they had along the way, and of how that led them to pursue a judgeship.   Irizarry and Kuo spoke of being minority women in a then-male-dominated profession, and of the importance of having mentors that believed in them (the longtime DA Robert Morgenthau, in Irizarry’s case) and of taking career risks (for Kuo, leaving the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute war crimes at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague).   Reyes recalled his clerkship with former EDNY judge and Brooklyn Law School dean, the late Hon. David Trager. “Seeing the passion for what he did was when I thought, I want to be that, I want to do that,” he said.  Stong, whose path led from litigation partner and associate at major law firms to becoming a bankruptcy judge for the EDNY, said she found unexpected inspiration in hearing now-retired Judge Robert Gerber, of the Southern District of New York speak.  “He talked of his work on complex problems with companies having financial difficulties, and of helping families save their homes, and of ordinary people who may actually be your neighbors getting a second chance,” Stong said.  For Dunst, what he called his “long and winding road” to a judgeship led from being a litigation partner at Gibson Dunn to serving as A.U.S.A. in the EDNY, where, working with Judge Reena Raggi (now a U.S. Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit), he said, “I was blown away by her as a person and as a jurist and through the way she approached things. I wanted to be her!”  Bloom recalled her “unconventional background,” which included having a SUNY law degree and “working in the trenches” after law school as a staff attorney for the West Side SRO Law project, fighting for the rights of tenants who were indigent, and then as head of the Pro Se Office of the Southern District. “Have meaningful relationships and do meaningful work,” Bloom encouraged the students. “Those are the keys, and nobody gives you the keys. That’s for you to do for yourself.”   The EDNY (consisting of Kings, Queens, Richmond, Nassau, and Suffolk counties) has a diverse population of 8 million people and encompasses major international air and seaports and commercial activity. It is one of the most active federal courts in the country for cases involving national security, complex white-collar crimes, bankruptcy, civil rights, public corruption, and more.   With the court’s main building located just several blocks from the Law School, the EDNY offers students a range of opportunities to enhance their law school experience and interact with federal judges, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys, and court staff.   Many alumni of the Law School over the years have served as law clerks for members of the EDNY bench, including Ramsha Ansari ’20, who clerks for the Hon. Marcia Henry, and joined the judge for the Working in Chambers discussion.  Five of the participating EDNY judges are also among the Law School’s respected adjunct professors: Chief Judge Margo Brodie, and judges James Cho, Marcia Henry, Ramon Reyes, and Elizabeth Stong. Our thanks to them and to their fellow judges who made EDNY Day a great success:  Frederic Block, Lois Bloom, Pamela Chen, Lee Dunst, Nicholas Garaufis, Hector Gonzalez, Dora Irizarry, Rachel Kovner, Peggy Kuo, Robert Levy, Joseph Marutollo, Kiyo Matsumoto, Orelia Merchant, Taryn Merkl, Natasha Merle, Alan S. Trust, and James Wicks.  View pictures of EDNY Day Town Hall: https://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklynlawschool/albums/72177720315275227/ 

Brooklyn Law School professors showcased scholarship and teaching excellence at the 2026 Legal Writing Institute Conference, with Professor Danielle Tully earning a national award.