St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Janai Nelson has authored The Cost of America’s First Black President on Reuters’s Great Debate blog.  The essay discusses Tuesday’s  decision by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder which struck down Section 4b of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  It considers the decision in the context of the myth of post-racialism that Obama’s election ushered in and what Congress’s obligation is in response.  Here’s an excerpt:

What do we lose with Tuesday’s decision? Without the federal oversight formula intact, the Voting Rights Act has lost both its muscular force to prevent states and municipalities from enforcing discriminatory election laws and its subtler deterrent effect. States with a proven record of seeking to disenfranchise eligible voters will no longer confront the obstacle of a watchful Justice Department. Jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination, many with recent records of election law violations, can regulate elections unleashed with no expectations that they will maintain the hard-fought racial progress that the Voting Rights Act’s anti-retrogression standard enforced.

Professor Mark Movsesian’s chapter on Justice Samuel Alito appears in the recently-released, revised edition of Justices of the Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions (2013), edited by Leon Friedman and Fred Israel.  In this book, Movsesian discusses Alito’s famous Third Circuit opinion in the Newark Police Department “beard case”, Fraternal Order of Police v. City of Newark (3d Cir. 1999), as well Alito’s Supreme Court majority opinion in the “Seven Aphorisms” case, Pleasant Grove City. Utah v. Summum(2009), his dissent in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), and other cases.  Movsesian is the Frederick A. Whitney Professor of Contract Law and the Director of the Center for Law and Religion.  Congratulations, Mark!

Mark Movsesian

To commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the passage of Glass-Steagall, which historians conventionally designate as the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first one hundred days in office, Professor Michael Perino has written What FDR Hated About Glass-Steagall for Bloomberg’s Dispatches From Economic History series.  The piece chronicles how FDR originally opposed one of that act’s key reforms—federal deposit insurance.

Professor Jeff Sovern’s article, Law Student Laptop Use During Class for Non-Class Purposes: Temptation v. Incentives, has now been published by the University of Louisville Law Review in volume 51 at page 483.  Here is the abstract:

This article reports on how law students use laptops, based on observations of 1072 laptop users (though there was considerable overlap among those users from one class to another) during 60 sessions of six law school courses. Some findings: More than half the upper-year students seen using laptops employed them for non-class purposes more than half the time, raising serious questions about how much they learned from class. By contrast, first-semester Civil Procedure students used laptops for non-class purposes far less: only 4% used laptops for non-class purposes more than half the time while 44% were never distracted by laptops. Students in exam courses were more likely to tune out when classmates asked and professors responded to questions and less likely to tune out when a rule was discussed or textual material read in class. For first-semester students, policy discussions generated the highest level of distraction while displaying a PowerPoint slide which was not later posted on the web elicited the lowest level. With some exceptions, what was happening in the class did not affect whether upper-year students tuned out or paid attention. The format used to convey information – lecture, calling on students, or class discussion – seemed to make little difference to the level of attention. Student attentiveness to the facts of cases is comparable to their overall attention levels.
The article speculates that student decisions on whether to pay attention are responses to the tension between incentives and temptation. While the temptation to tune out probably remains constant, ebbs and flows in incentives may cause students to resist or yield to that temptation. Because first-semester grades have more of an impact on job prospects, first-semester students have a greater incentive than upper-year students to attend to classes. Similarly, because students probably anticipate that rules are more likely to be tested on exams, students perceive that they have more of an incentive to pay attention when rules are discussed. Conversely, students may suspect that matters asked about by classmates are less likely to be tested on and so their grades are unlikely to be affected if they miss the question and answer, reducing the incentive to pay attention.

Because of methodological limits to the study, the article notes that its conclusions cannot be considered definitive, and so it urges others to conduct similar studies.

Professor Sovern’s article has attracted both popular media and academic interest.

On June 11, Professor Jennifer Baum will address a multidisciplinary group of child welfare professionals in New York during a daylong conference titled, “The Impact of Trauma on Children and Families: Moving Toward Resilience through Trauma-Informed Care.”   Sponsored by the NYS Court Improvement Project and New York City Children’s Services, the conference will take place at the New York City’s Children’s Center.  Professor Baum’s workshop, “Do No Harm? Engaging the Traumatized Child in Court Proceedings” will present current legal developments in children’s testimony and other aspects of litigation involving children as parties or subjects.

In a letter to the New Times Times editor published in the paper’s online edition earlier today, Professor Jeff Sovern responded to Natasha Swinger’s May 26 article on consumer data access, If My Data Is an Open Book, Why Can’t I Read It?.  Swinger explained that while some companies sell information about consumers to marketers, the companies won’t share that same information with consumers about their own activities.

Professor Sovern noted that “[t]his situation exists because laws do not specify what a privacy policy must contain — so companies that don’t compete on the basis of privacy are free to provide as little to consumers as they wish. A downside of self-regulation is that companies that don’t want to provide consumer protections can avoid doing so.”

Professor Sovern is a coordinator of the Consumer Law and Policy blog.