St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Writing for the Wall Street Journal’s personal finance blog, Total Return, Jason Zweig quoted Professor Michael A. Perino, Dean George W. Matheson Professor of Law, on the prospect of reforming Wall Street.  Professor Perino is the author of the award-winning text, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (Penguin Press 2010).

Here’s the relevant portion of the post:

In the wake of the 1929 crash, Ferdinand Pecora, who led the investigative Pecora Commission in the U.S. Senate, humiliated one banking titan after another with revelations of self-dealing and other shady behavior. Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, ended up being thrown into the slammer at Sing Sing for embezzlement. The ensuing outrage and revulsion led to the series of reforms that overhauled Wall Street’s practices in the 1930s.

More than a half-century later, prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani went after insider trading with similar zeal, even having some alleged perpetrators hauled off the trading floor in handcuffs. Some of the cases fell apart, but the public’s sense of a level playing field was restored.

However, as Michael Perino, author of a riveting biography of Pecora, The Hellhound of Wall Street, told me in a conversation last year, “It’s only when things get really bad that [the U.S. can] overcome the normal political forces that are at play and we can achieve significant reforms. At this point, it might take another crisis to do something.”

 

The link to the full blogpost is here: http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2013/05/28/there-aint-no-justice-on-wall-street/.

On Wednesday, Professor Edward Cavanagh participated in a CLE on attorneys’ fees in federal litigation sponsored by the Federal Bar Council.  The event was held at the federal district court in Central Islip and featured United States District Judge Joanna Seybert ’71 and United States Magistrate Judge Kathleen Tomlinson ’87, in addition to Professor Cavanagh.  Anton Borovina ’75 was the program coordinator.

On Law Day (May 1), Professor Jennifer Baum, together with faculty from La Universidad de Puerto Rico and the University of Colorado, led a multi-national group of clinical law professors in an immersion experience at the local courts in San Juan, Puerto Rico during the annual AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education.

Professor Baum and her colleagues escorted two dozen clinical law professors from the continental United States and abroad through San Juan criminal, civil, and family court, and observed Spanish-language court cases using simultaneous translation through headsets.  The visit culminated in a discussion on the role of court observation in graduating practice-ready law students.

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Professor Jeremy Sheff’s article, Self-Replicating Technologies, gets a mention in an IPKat post on the Supreme Court’s recent decision on patent rights in Bowman v. Monsanto.  Here’s an excerpt from the post:

In an interesting paper entitled ‘Self Replicating Technologies’, Professor J. Sheff highlighted that ‘not all self-replicating technologies are identical, and a categorical rule exempting them from exhaustion doctrine is unwarranted’. Although the Supreme Court did not go as far as identifying a criterium [sic] for modulating the patent exhaustion doctrine, as suggested in the paper (according to which, ‘the application of the exhaustion doctrine should depend on the patentee’s ability to charge supracompetitive prices in its primary market where consumers are able to substitute secondary-market embodiments’), its final clarification appears to be a step in the right direction.

 

Professor Janai Nelson was named to the Lawyers of Color’s 50 Under 50 list of minority professors making an impact in legal education.  The list is published in LOC’s “The Law School Diversity Issue”  which was released today.