DOCSLIB.ORG

1.3.2021 – Alan Dershowitz QA

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
1.3.2021 – Alan Dershowitz QA Cancel Culture, Female Bias at Work, Mortgages, Corporate Credit, and Chinese Deflation - What Happens Next – 1.3.2021 – Alan Dershowitz QA Larry Bernstein: Thank you, Alan, that was terrific. Rick Banks: Thanks for that, there's a lot there. Let me start off with one question that is at the top of mind, which is Alan, I'm trying to understand how do we explain the emergence of cancel culture? It's easy to look back and understand the emergence of McCarthyism, right?... We might be opposed to McCarthyism, but we can understand where it came from, why it came about in the midst of the communist threat. But how do we explain where cancel culture came from now? How is it that we find ourselves in this? Alan Dershowitz: It's a great question. I think it comes from the deep divisions that we have in our country. Today, there's no nuance, there's no middle ground, there's no center approach. Today, you pick sides, Red Sox or Yankees. You can't be in between, you can't say, "I like the Red Sox, sometimes they do some good. The Yankees, Hey, they've had some great hitters." You're either a Red Sox fan or a Yankee fan. Today, the choice between the hard left and hard right is driving people to basically choose sides, and when you choose sides you know the truth, capital T. And if you know the truth, why do you need dissenting opinions? And there's now, for the first time in my lifetime, an actual academic discipline that is developing for arguing against the first amendment, arguing against freedom of speech, saying free speech is a patriarchal colonialist capitalist imposition by the right on the left. And we know the truth, why do we need dissenting views? We know that when a woman accuses a man, she's telling the truth and he's lying. Why do we need trials? Why do we need due process? So it's a manifestation at the growing intolerance of nuance, the growing intolerance of opposing points of view, and of course the growing influence of social media. Rick Banks: How disappointed should we be in the university leadership or institutions more generally, and how they support the cancel culture? Alan Dershowitz: Never disappointed by university leaderships because I never expected anything of them, so I can't be disappointed. The university leadership is exactly as behaving as I expected they would, in a cowardly fashion, the way they reacted mostly to McCarthyism, they're interested in keeping things together. Take for example, what happened at Harvard. A very distinguished professor named Ron Sullivan, friend of mine, taught at the law school, teaches at the law school. The first African-American, along with his wife, used to be called master, now Dean of Winthrop House, one of the great colleges, and old colleges, Harvard, very distinguished, dean, but he dared to represent for only a month. Harvey Weinstein, as a result of that, some radical women in his house said that they didn't feel safe with him present. First of all, it was a lie. They were just lying. Of course, they felt safe. Alan Dershowitz: He had previously, a year earlier, represented a New England Patriot player who had in cold blood, murdered two people, a gangland style killings. Nobody felt unsafe when he represented them. But when he represented Harvey Weinstein, they claimed to feel unsafe, they were lying, and I use my language carefully. I don't treat students as young kids, I treat them as adults. And when 19 to 20 year old says, "I am afraid, I don't feel safe." I look at them in the eye and I say, "You're not telling the truth, you do feel safe. But you learned that the words, I don't feel safe, have now become a mechanism for imposing your will and censoring." And what happened? There was a petition to remove him, not to rehire him as dean. And what did the administration do? It caved, and it didn't rehire him as dean. Now people like Noah Feldman, my colleague at Harvard said, "Hey, Alan, what are you saying? He wasn't fired, he just wasn't rehired." And I wrote back to Noah and said, what if they had discovered he was gay or Muslim, or in the 1930s discovered he was a Jew, and didn't rehire him? Would you make a distinction between not rehiring, of course not. Alan Dershowitz: So administrators, faculty, cowards all have refused to stand up to the crowd, the bullying crowd of 19 and 20 year olds, egged on by bullying professors, many of whom have been very radical over the years and use the classroom as a podium for not teaching students how to think, but propagandizing them about what to think. And so it's a deeper problem at universities, but I never could be disappointed by university administrators because for 65 years in the college and university business, I've never expected anything much from university administrators. Occasionally when you get a university administrator who has courage, like Larry Summers, he too gets fired and canceled. Rick Banks: Right. But even if we don't expect the university administrators to take a stand, why don't the faculty, if for no reason other than self-interest and the recognition that they might be next, why don't they take a we should stand for as a university? Why don't they do that? Alan Dershowitz: You put your finger on it. Again, 65 years of being in the adult world, I'd never met a less courageous group of people than tenured faculty. Tenure just doesn't work. Faculty members want to be loved by their students, they want to get high teaching ratings from their students, and you know how you get high ratings from your students, the way Elizabeth Warren got high ratings from her students, never ever say anything controversial, telling the students exactly what they want to hear, confirming their preexisting views, teaching the same every year, telling you the same jokes every year, never getting involved in controversy, and you get the highest ratings. I used to get the highest ratings at Harvard Law School until I started taking controversial positions, and mostly out of class not in the class, in the classroom I was always the devil's advocate, but when my pro-Israel advocacy outside of class became well known, groups of students started giving me zero evaluations. I mean zero knowledge of the subject, zero ability to articulate my views, zero in availability outside of the classroom. Alan Dershowitz: The dean called me in one day and said, "This is ridiculous, there's no professor at Harvard that's more available to students. You take every student that you have to lunch, you invite them over to your house for dinner, your door is always open, and you get zero for availability out of class?." And I said, "Don't you understand? They have a group that has said, 'Give Dershowitz all zeros, and that will knock his student evaluations from perfect five down to 3.8 because he'll have 10 or 15 zeros.'" And so students use teacher evaluations as weapons against the faculty and the faculty, who for the most part lack any courage or any willingness to stand up to students, simply go along at the faculty dining room they talk about it and they rail against it, but when it comes to making public statements, forget about it. You cannot count on tenured faculty members to show courage. Rick Banks: Let me just insert there though, as a faculty member who has tenure, we know that teacher ratings or student ratings don't really affect one's life. If you have tenure, the ratings don't really affect your life in any material way, so it doesn't... That's not feeling like the real answer. Alan Dershowitz: I fundamentally disagree. If you have tenure at Harvard, it may not affect your life. But if you have tenure at Minnesota and want to go to Harvard, it affects your life- Rick Banks: Right, but we're talking about- Alan Dershowitz: How did Elizabeth Warren get her job at Harvard? She had not published any significant scholarship, she got her job at Harvard because she was the most highly ranked teacher. So teacher evaluations do matter, teacher awards do matter, teacher awards matter in terms of getting into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and other evaluations. And it's not only teacher evaluations, it's your general approval. As a teacher, I've gotten many teachers who've told me, law school teachers, that they haven't been overtly punished, but they just subtly were told, "You no longer teaching first year students, because you're too controversial and the students feel unsafe when you talk about certain subjects." Alan Dershowitz: Let me give you an example. Professor, friend of mine, taught criminal law for years, he spent the whole summer a few years ago finding any casebook, criminal law casebook that never mentioned the word rape, because he didn't want to teach it because he knew that as a white male, there's no way he was going to be able to teach rape without getting completely attacked for expressing any views that were in any way out of the political mainstream, and he didn't want to skip it.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • When the Truth and the Story Collide: What Legal Writers Can Learn from the Experience of Non- Fiction Writers About the Limits of Legal Storytelling Jeanne M
    Western New England University School of Law Digital Commons @ Western New England University School of Law Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2010 When the Truth and the Story Collide: What Legal Writers Can Learn From the Experience of Non- Fiction Writers About the Limits of Legal Storytelling Jeanne M. Kaiser Western New England University School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/facschol Part of the Legal Writing and Research Commons Recommended Citation 16 J. Legal Writing Inst. 163 (2010) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Digital Commons @ Western New England University School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Western New England University School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WHEN THE TRUTH AND THE STORY COLLIDE: WHAT LEGAL WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF NON-FICTION WRITERS ABOUT THE LIMITS OF LEGAL STORYTELLING Jeanne M. Kaiser• In Chechovian drama, chest pains are followed by heart at­ tacks, coughs by consumption, life insurance policies by murders, telephone rings by dramatic messages. In real life, most chest pains are indigestion, coughs are colds, insurance policies are followed by years of premium payments, and tel­ ephone calls are from marketing services. 1 With these words, the never-reticent Alan Dershowitz throws cold water on the legal storytelling movement. According to Der­ showitz, "life is not a dramatic narrative."2 Indeed, such was the title of his article criticizing legal storytelling.3 And the problem with lawyers, he thinks, is not that they do not make a sufficient effort to tell a legal story.
    [Show full text]
  • Jeffrey Toobin Staff Writer, the New Yorker; Chief Legal Analyst, CNN
    Jeffrey Toobin Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Chief Legal Analyst, CNN September 26, 2019 House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet “The Federal Judiciary in the 21st Century: Ensuring the Public’s Right of Access to the Courts” Thank you for the opportunity to testify, Mr. Chairman. My name is Jeffrey Toobin. I am a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the chief legal analyst at CNN. My views today are my own. I graduated from law school in 1986. After a judicial clerkship, I had the honor of being a federal prosecutor for six years – first with the Office of Independent Counsel and then as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. There is no greater privilege for a lawyer than to appear in a courtroom representing the United States. I joined the New Yorker in 1993 and CNN in 2002. I am working on my eighth book, about the Mueller investigation. Two of my books – The Nine and The Oath – have been about the United States Supreme Court, which I have covered as a journalist for more than twenty years. I’ve also had the opportunity to cover many high-profile trials – including those of O.J. Simpson, Timothy McVeigh, Martha Stewart, and Michael Skakel. Some were televised. Some were not. I should note that in the course of my work in the federal courts, I have had occasion to try to rely on the PACER system many times. Frankly, PACER is a disaster, and I’d like to express my appreciation in particular to Congressman Collins, who has been such a leader in the effort to improve PACER.
    [Show full text]
  • New York Law Journal
    Originally published in New York Law Journal August 28, 2020 Book Review: 'True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump' By Joel Cohen and Dale J. Degenshein If you’re looking for a book that discloses dirty little secrets, this isn’t it. I doubt, by the way, that such a book without the baggage of a Trump hater or lover will come along anyway. “True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump,” Jeffrey Toobin, Doubleday, 2020, 456 pages ooking back, as outsiders, both the criminal investigation and impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump were foreordained and doomed from the start, weren’t L they? Think about it. Still, what about the principals? What and when did they know? Didn’t Special Counsel Robert Mueller know the minute his “law man”—former deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben— told him, early in the game, that official Justice Department policy unambiguously forbade the Justice Department (Mueller was indeed “employed” by the Justice Department) from indicting a sitting president? Wasn’t Mueller, after all, all but fastidious in following the department’s rules of engagement? And didn’t the adroit politico that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is know right away that a McConnell- led Senate would never, especially with the strong economy going for him at the time, convict a president who was then the very lifeblood of the Republican Party—a figure, consistent with his own braggadocio, who could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose voters”? After all, wasn’t just about everything that Trump had done been done in plain sight? And if it wasn’t, he seemed almost delighted to admit what he did to the world.
    [Show full text]
  • SCOTUS Ethics in the Wake of NFIB V. Sebelius
    Valparaiso University Law Review Volume 47 Number 4 Summer 2013 pp.1-23 Summer 2013 Stonewalling, Leaks, and Counter-Leaks: SCOTUS Ethics in the Wake of NFIB v. Sebelius Steven Lubet Clare Diegel Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Steven Lubet and Clare Diegel, Stonewalling, Leaks, and Counter-Leaks: SCOTUS Ethics in the Wake of NFIB v. Sebelius, 47 Val. U. L. Rev. 1 (2013). Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol47/iss4/1 This Tabor Lecture is brought to you for free and open access by the Valparaiso University Law School at ValpoScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Valparaiso University Law Review by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staff member at [email protected]. Lubet and Diegel: Stonewalling, Leaks, and Counter-Leaks: SCOTUS Ethics in the Wak Tabor Lecture STONEWALLING, LEAKS, AND COUNTER- LEAKS: SCOTUS ETHICS IN THE WAKE OF NFIB V. SEBELIUS Steven Lubet∗ Clare Diegel∗∗ I. INTRODUCTION The Supreme Court litigation over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) came to a conclusion in the first half of 2012, characterized by a series of surprises. The first surprise occurred when the Court scheduled the case for six hours of oral argument, spread over three days. Such an expanded argument was unprecedented in modern times, leading to much speculation that the issues would be more troublesome for the Court than many observers had previously assumed. Still, even veteran court watchers were further shocked by the combative tone of the oral argument itself, when Justices Scalia, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts seemed to gang up on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who defended the PPACA on behalf of the government.
    [Show full text]
  • Toobin Justice.L2.Indd
    the most cosmopolitan, and controver- ANNALS OF LAW sial, trends in constitutional law: using foreign and international law as an aid to interpreting the United States Constitu- SWING SHIFT tion. Kennedy’s embrace of foreign law may be among the most significant How Anthony Kennedy’s passion for foreign law could change the Supreme Court. developments on the Court in recent years—the single biggest factor behind BY JEFFREY TOOBIN his evolution from a reliable conservative into the likely successor to Sandra Day ew Justices in recent history have Circuit, in the late nineteen-seventies, O’Connor as the Court’s swing vote. arrived at the Supreme Court from he accepted an appointment from Chief Kennedy continues to oppose racial pref- aF more provincial background than Justice Warren Burger as supervisor of erences and to argue for expansive Presi- Anthony Kennedy. Before he moved the territorial courts in the South Pacific, dential powers. He was a principal author to Washington, seventeen years ago, which entailed travelling to Guam, Palau, of the unsigned majority opinion in Bush his professional life had been spent al- Saipan, American Samoa, Australia, New v. Gore. But he also wrote the two most most entirely in Sacramento. He was Zealand, and Japan. important pro-gay-rights decisions in born there in 1936, and when his fa- In fact, Kennedy has a passion for for- the Court’s history and has at least ten- ther, a lawyer who had his own practice, eign cultures and ideas, and, as a Justice, tatively affirmed his support for Roe v.
    [Show full text]
  • True Crimes and Misdemeanors: the Investigation of Donald Trump by Jeffrey Toobin: a Review and a Bit More
    True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump by Jeffrey Toobin: A Review and a bit more. When I chose this book for review, I was confident that it might well be the standard, almost definitive account of the drama we have recently been through, particularly the Robert Mueller investigations of the possible cooperation of the Trump presidential campaign with the Russian efforts to influence that election in his favor and of Trump’s possible obstruction of the FBI investigation into Russia’s and the campaign’s activities—also of the impeachment investigation that followed. I was mistaken. The book is a valuable one and a very reliable reporting, perhaps the best so far, of those events. But like so much else in our current public life, succeeding events (some people call them scandals and outrages) and revelations have demanded our attention and drastically altered our understanding of events. Valuable and complete as it is, Toobin’s book must now be understood in the context of the revelations in Michael S. Schmidt’s Donald Trump v. The United States:Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, published on September 1. So, first Toobin’s book. This is Jeffrey Toobin’s ninth book. We also know him as the knowledgeable, judicious legal analyst for CNN. Toobin reports the efforts of Mueller and his team in full and also the efforts of President Trump’s shifting legal team. His conclusion is a surprising one—that Rudy Giuliani, comical as his antics may have been, was the most effective, because he treated Trump’s problems as political rather than legal.
    [Show full text]
  • Reforming the Law of Reputation
    Brooklyn Law School BrooklynWorks Faculty Scholarship Winter 2015 Reforming the Law of Reputation Frank Pasquale Follow this and additional works at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/faculty Part of the Other Law Commons, and the Science and Technology Law Commons 16_PASQUALE FINAL .DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 12/9/2015 7:06 PM Reforming the Law of Reputation Frank Pasquale* I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 515 II. DISPUTES OVER SALIENCE IN SEARCH RESULTS .............................. 517 III. FIRST AMENDMENT OPPORTUNISM ................................................. 524 IV. A REFORM AGENDA FOR REPUTATION LAW ................................... 527 A. Toward a Medical Right to be Forgotten in the United States ....................................................................................... 528 B. Revitalizing FCRA.................................................................... 530 C. Realizing the Aims of Expungement and Sealed Juvenile Records in a Digital Age ......................................................... 534 IV. CONCLUSION .................................................................................. 537 I. INTRODUCTION Search engines can democratize the Internet by empowering users and enabling websites to reach users around the world. Search engines can also become kingmakers online, dominating the impressions that users develop of fellow citizens.1 Search engine results associated with one’s name may influence future employers, creditors, insurers,
    [Show full text]
  • The US Supreme Court's Use of Foreign
    Maurer School of Law: Indiana University Digital Repository @ Maurer Law Articles by Maurer Faculty Faculty Scholarship 2007 Storm in a Teacup: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Use of Foreign Law Austen L. Parrish Indiana University Maurer School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, and the Constitutional Law Commons Recommended Citation Parrish, Austen L., "Storm in a Teacup: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Use of Foreign Law" (2007). Articles by Maurer Faculty. 885. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/885 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by Maurer Faculty by an authorized administrator of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STORM IN A TEACUP: THE U.S. SUPREME COURT'S USE OF FOREIGN LAW Austen L. Parrish* In this article, Professor Parrish explores the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court's use of foreign law in constitutional adjudica- tion. In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has used foreign law as persuasive authority in a number of highly contentious cases. The backlash has been spirited, with calls for foreign law to be categori- cally barredfrom constitutionaladjudication, and even for justices to be impeached if they cite to foreign sources. The condemnation of comparative constitutionalism recently reached its high watermark, as a barrage of scholarship decried the practice as illegitimate and a threat to our nationalsovereignty.
    [Show full text]
  • Right of Reagan How the Extremism of Today’S Republican Presidential Candidates Sets Them Apart from Their Conservative Idol
    AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN PHOTO/DAVID AP Right of Reagan How the Extremism of Today’s Republican Presidential Candidates Sets Them Apart from Their Conservative Idol By Charles Posner, Molly Cain, and Anna Chu September 2015 WWW.AMERICANPROGRESSACTION.ORG Right of Reagan How the Extremism of Today’s Republican Presidential Candidates Sets Them Apart from Their Conservative Idol By Charles Posner, Molly Cain, and Anna Chu September 2015 Contents 1 Introduction and summary 6 Provided a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants 8 Stood up to the NRA to establish background checks 10 Signed a multilateral international treaty to reduce pollution 12 Negotiated to reduce nuclear proliferation 14 Grew the federal government 16 Closed tax loopholes favoring the wealthy and raised taxes 18 Conclusion 20 Endnotes Introduction and summary On September 16, the Republican presidential candidates will gather at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, for the second debate in the 2016 Republican primary process. It will be an opportunity for the candidates to pay homage to President Reagan, who to this day remains an idol and a paragon of conservatism to Republicans even though he left the Oval Office in 1989—nearly three decades ago. A 2012 Gallup poll showed that 90 percent of Republicans viewed Reagan as an outstanding or above average president, more favorably than any other recent president.1 And this year, 30 Republican governors signed procla- mations recognizing February 6 as Ronald Reagan Day.2 As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley explained, Reagan has “become a folklore president.”3 Clearly, part of the Reagan mystique is tied to the fact that he found a way to achieve something elusive to subsequent conservatives on the national stage: the ability to appeal to independents and Democrats and win the popular vote in presidential elections.
    [Show full text]
  • Programs and Events at HCNY
    Programs and Events at HCNY Here is just a sampling of our speakers Business Leaders/CEOs Legal Roger Ferguson, CEO, TIAA-CREF Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern Hank Greenberg, former CEO, AIG District of New York Jim Cramer, CNBC Professor Cass Sunstein, legal policy expert, Robin Hayes, CEO, JetBlue social engineer Dave MacLennan, CEO, Cargill NYC Prominent Figures Education Raymond Kelly, NYC Police Commissioner Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, Finland’s Minister Robert Tierney, NYC Landmarks of Education Preservation Chair Dennis Walcott, NYC Schools Chancellor Chief Robert Boyce, Chief of Detectives, NYPD Edward Cardinal Egan, American Cardinal of the Environment Roman Catholic Church Mark Tercek, CEO, The Nature Conservancy Musical Events Economics St. John the Divine Choir Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor Simone Dinnerstein, pianist Aletheia Piano Trio Fashion Designers The Leipzig String Quartet Donna Karan Yoonie Han, pianist Tommy Hilfiger The Alexander String Quartet International Affairs/Foreign Policy Nobel Laureates Prince Turki Al Faisal, former Ambassador to the Martti Ahtisaar, Nobel Laureate for Peace US and member of the Saudi royal family Martin Chalfie, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Mohammad Javad Zarif, Foreign Minister of Iran Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s flagship foreign affairs show Performing Arts/Arts Ambassador Zahir Tanin, representative from Misty Copeland, principal dancer with the Afghanistan to the UN American Ballet Theatre Oh Joon, South Korean Ambassador to the UN Leah Dickerman, MOMA Curator Annie Leibovitz, American portrait photographer Journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn, United States Government Officials The New York Times David Gergen, Presidential Advisor Jeffrey Toobin, CNN Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense We also feature wine tastings, museum tours, family events and young alumni events such as the monthly Stein Club.
    [Show full text]
  • The Yates Memo: DOJ Public Relations Move Or Meaningful Reform That Will End Impunity for Corporate Criminals?, 58 B.C.L
    Boston College Law Review Volume 58 | Issue 2 Article 8 4-3-2017 The aY tes Memo: DOJ Public Relations Move or Meaningful Reform That Will End Impunity for Corporate Criminals? Christopher Modlish Boston College Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr Part of the Administrative Law Commons, Business Organizations Law Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, and the Land Use Law Commons Recommended Citation Christopher Modlish, The Yates Memo: DOJ Public Relations Move or Meaningful Reform That Will End Impunity for Corporate Criminals?, 58 B.C.L. Rev. 743 (2017), http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr/vol58/iss2/8 This Notes is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Boston College Law Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE YATES MEMO: DOJ PUBLIC RELATIONS MOVE OR MEANINGFUL REFORM THAT WILL END IMPUNITY FOR CORPORATE CRIMINALS? Abstract: On September 9, 2015, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates issued a memorandum (the “Yates Memo”) in an attempt to address the Department of Justice’s (“DOJ”) seeming inability to prosecute the individu- als responsible for corporate crime and misconduct. The memo announced new DOJ policy regarding individual accountability for corporate fraud, wrongdoing, and other misconduct. Specifically, it identified six key policies meant to enable DOJ prosecutors to more effectively prosecute the individuals responsible for corporate misconduct. The memo, however, did not address the biggest obstacle to holding individuals accountable for criminal corporate conduct—the DOJ’s overuse of deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements.
    [Show full text]
  • Sotomayor's Empathy Moves the Court a Step Closer to Equitable Adjudication Veronica Couzo
    Notre Dame Law Review Volume 89 | Issue 1 Article 9 11-2013 Sotomayor's Empathy Moves the Court a Step Closer to Equitable Adjudication Veronica Couzo Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, Courts Commons, Judges Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, and the Women Commons Recommended Citation 89 Notre Dame L. Rev. 403 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Notre Dame Law Review by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. \\jciprod01\productn\N\NDL\89-1\NDL108.txt unknown Seq: 1 14-NOV-13 11:54 NOTES SOTOMAYOR’S EMPATHY MOVES THE COURT A STEP CLOSER TO EQUITABLE ADJUDICATION Veronica Couzo* INTRODUCTION On August 6, 2009, then-Judge, now-Justice, Sonia Sotomayor was con- firmed as the nation’s first Latina Supreme Court Justice.1 While many Lati- nos embraced the idea of having “Sonia from the Bronx”2 on the bench, others were fearful that her jurisprudence, combined with her background, would result in “reverse racism.”3 These fears, while arguably unfounded at the time, have been completely dispelled. Just as Justice Thurgood Marshall transformed the adjudications of the Supreme Court through experiential discourse, so too, to a lesser extent, has Justice Sotomayor. In both oral argu- ments and written opinions, Justice Sonia Sotomayor has demonstrated edu- cative leadership—enlightening her colleagues to other perspectives—while utilizing empathy shaped by her experiences to facilitate her decisionmaking. This empathy has allowed her to give a voice to the habitually unheard, which inevitably generates fairer decisions.
    [Show full text]