Professor Mark L. Movsesian’s post, “Thomas More, Villain,” was quoted in a Washington Post story by David Gibson,
Mark Movsesian
“Will the PBS Series, Wolf Hall, Tarnish Thomas More’s Halo?“
April 29, 2015
Nelson on Shelby County v. Holder
Professor Janai S. Nelson has published her article, Arc of Injustice: Pre- and Post-Decision Thoughts on Shelby County v. Holder, in a symposium issue on the case and the Voting Rights Act in Touro Law Center’s Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity.
April 21, 2015
Warner Serves as Delegate of International Insolvency Institute
Professor Ray Warner is serving as a delegate of the International Insolvency Institute to
G. Ray Warner
UNCITRAL Working Group VI (Security Interests) during its drafting sessions this week at the UN in New York. Working Group VI is developing a a model international law on secured transactions.
April 21, 2015
Lazaro Quoted in On Wall Street Followup Story
Christine Lazaro
On Wall Street followed up with another article on the DOL fiduciary duty rule proposal, focusing on rollovers and IRAs. The article, Is Your Rollover Business at Risk Under Fiduciary Plan?, written by Suleman Din, included the following quote:
It is important that rollovers and IRAs are included in the fiduciary standard now, says Christine Lazaro, director of the Securities Arbitration Clinic at St. John’s University School of Law.
“As individuals retire and are faced with the decision of what to do with the money in their employer-sponsored plans, they often seek advice from investment professionals, expecting that the advice they receive will be in their best interests,” Lazaro says. “At that point in time, when they are being advised to move their money into IRAs managed by the investment professional, it is essential that the investment professional is held to the highest standards to protect the retirement savings of Americans.
“The standards shouldn’t only apply after the money has been moved,” Lazaro adds. “If it is not in the investor’s best interest to move the money out of the employer-sponsored plan, it should be left alone. The profit motives of firms cannot and should not drive the decision to move an investor’s retirement savings out of the employer-sponsored plans.”
April 17, 2015
Lazaro Quoted in On Wall Street
Christine Lazaro
Professor Lazaro commented on the Department of Labor’s proposed rule to extend a fiduciary standard to those providing investment advice to clients on retirement accounts in an article in On Wall Street, Tougher Rules But Flexible Comp Under New Fiduciary Proposal. The article, written by Andrew Welsch and Suleman Din, states:
Critics should remember that the DOL had initially come out with a fiduciary standard proposal in 2010, then pulled it and spent the next five years seeking additional comment and revising rules, said Christine Lazaro, director of the Securities Arbitration Clinic at St. John’s University School of Law.
“It’s not like they’ve moved forward quickly or haphazardly, or without considering viewpoints that they needed to,” Lazaro said. “They’ve moved forward carefully and I think thoughtfully in the process.”
The DoL proposal will be filed in the Federal register and will again be open for public comment, she added. “So there will be another opportunity for anyone to voice their concerns. The fact that they are moving forward faster than the SEC on a fiduciary standard doesn’t mean they haven’t given full consideration of viewpoints that they should be considering.”
Lazaro found little in the proposal for the industry to be alarmed about.
“It does seem like the general business models will be permitted,” Lazaro noted. “There really isn’t any need to panic. The major concerns raised by the industry regarding commissions and revenue sharing, these would be permitted to continue, so long as the advice given is in the best interest of the investor.”
“There are plenty of situations where advisors are already held to fiduciary duty, such as under state common law standards. It’s not like strict standards haven’t been tested and brokers haven’t been held to these standards already. It’s not a foreign concept when it comes to brokers.”
April 17, 2015
DeGirolami Article on the Waning of Free Exercise
I have a new article up titled, Free Exercise By Moonlight. Here’s the abstract:
How is the current condition of religious free exercise, and religious accommodation in specific, best understood? What is the relationship of the two most important free exercise cases of the past half-century, Employment Division v. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC? This essay explores four possible answers to these questions.
1. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor are the twin suns of religious accommodation under the Constitution. They are distinctively powerful approaches.
2. Hosanna-Tabor’s approach to constitutional free exercise is now more powerful than Smith’s. Smith has been eclipsed.
3. Hosanna-Tabor has shown itself to be feeble. It has been eclipsed by Smith.
4. Smith augured the waning of religious accommodation, which proceeds apace. Hosanna-Tabor does little to change that.
In describing these possibilities, the essay considers the cases themselves, various doctrinal developments (focusing on subsequent Supreme Court cases as well as lower court decisions interpreting Hosanna-Tabor), and the broader political and social context in which claims for religious accommodation are now received. It concludes that though each possibility has persuasive points (perhaps with the exception of the second), the last is most accurate.
Smith’s approach to free exercise continues to control for constitutional purposes and is, for more general political purposes, more entrenched than ever. Its admonition about fabulously remote threats of anarchy in a world where each “conscience is a law unto itself” has ironically become more apt as a warning against the multiplying number of secular interests argued to be legally cognizable than against religious accommodation run amok. There is no clearer manifestation of these developments than the recent emergence of theories maintaining that new dignitary and other third party harms resulting from religious accommodation ought to defeat religious freedom claims. These theories reflect the swollen ambit of state authority and defend surprising understandings of the limits of religious accommodation — understandings that pose grave threats to the American political tradition of providing generous religious exemptions from general laws. The ministerial exception simply represents the refracted glow of constitutional protection in the gathering gloom. It is free exercise by moonlight.
April 15, 2015
Perino Article Cited in Reuters
Professor Michael Perino’s co-authored article on securities class action fee-setting (linked
below), which will be published in the Columbia Law Review, was cited in this Reuters story by Alison Frankel. A bit from the beginning:
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a fee opinion by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan of Manhattan, who decided that a request by class counsel for 13 percent of a $346 million settlement with underwriters of IndyMac mortgage-backed securities was just too much. Even though the 13 percent request was in line with the fee deal plaintiffs’ firms had negotiated in advance of the litigation with the lead plaintiff, a public pension fund, Kaplan cut the fee award to 8 percent, based on his own experience with securities class actions and skepticism about the hours reported by class counsel.
That example is a paradigm of the problems with the current system of awarding fees in securities class actions, at least as those problems have been pinpointed in an upcoming Columbia Law Review article by law professors Lynn Baker and Charles Silver of the University of Texas and Michael Perino of St. John’s University. In “Is the Price Right: An Empirical Study of Fee-Setting in Securities Class Actions,” the professors dipped into the dockets of 434 settlements announced between 2007 and 2012, looking at (among other things) how pre-set fee agreements with counsel factored into lead plaintiff selections; how fee requests and awards varied by the volume of cases handled by different jurisdictions and even individual judges; and why judges in about 15 percent of the settlements cut the requested fees.
Their overall conclusion is that in the vast majority of cases, fees are determined after the fact, based only on the size of settlement and the biases of the court. The professors argue that their findings show one of the goals of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 – to encourage lead plaintiffs to exercise oversight by negotiating fee arrangements with class counsel at the onset of a case – has not been met. They also concluded plaintiffs lawyers may be exploiting market inefficiencies by requesting higher fees from courts with a low volume of securities cases. And judges who slash fee requests without real analysis of benchmarks, they said, create uncertainty that, in the long run, hurts investors because it discourages class action lawyers from investing in cases.
April 15, 2015
Subotnik Article on Copyright and Estate Law To be Published by Harvard Journal of Law and Technology
Professor Eva Subotnik’s article, Copyright and the Living Dead?: An Estates Law View
Eva Subotnik
of the Post-Mortem Term, will be published in the fall by the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. Here is the abstract:
Is there any good reason why the term of copyright, which was once a scant fourteen years long, should now last decades beyond the death of the author? Proponents of copyright as a form of property have generally welcomed this expansion. By contrast, recent scholarship has cast doubt on the soundness of any post-mortem period of protection, citing anti-social behavior by well-known authors’ successors that threatens our cultural heritage. Absent from the literature thus far, however, has been a systematic study of how estates law principles, which govern the general succession of property, bear on the justifications for and scope of copyright’s post-mortem term. Undertaking that task, this article makes two principal points. First, estates law theories and doctrines provide discrete support—beyond what general property principles provide—for a post-mortem term that should be taken into account in any debate over copyright duration. Second, while there are costs associated with the post-mortem term, they should be viewed primarily through the prism not of dead-hand control but of suboptimal stewardship by the living. Together, these points begin to suggest changes that should be implemented, including the shortening of the post-mortem term and the instantiation of better stewardship practices among authors’ successors.
April 13, 2015
Gregory Speaks on Labor Law and Religion Panels, Publishes Chapter on Catholicism and Labor & Employment Law
Professor David Gregory was a featured panelist and speaker at the Syracuse University 
and Le Moyne Labor and Religion conference, “Moral Vision From/For the Grassroots,” on April 10 and 11, 2015. He will moderate a featured panel, “Catholic Colleges and Universities, Collective Bargaining and NLRB Jurisdiction,” at the annual conference of the National Center for the study of collective bargaining in higher education and the professions, CUNY Graduate Center, on April 21, 2015.
His chapter on labor and employment law has been published in “A Clearer Lens: American Law from a Catholic Perspective.”
April 8, 2015
Lazaro’s Article on Regulation of Investment Advice Published
Professor Christine Lazaro’s article, “The Fragmented Regulation of Investment Advice: A
Call for Harmonization,” co-authored with Benjamin P. Edwards, has been published in the Michigan Business and Entrepreneurial Law Review, 4 Mich. Bus. & Entrepreneurial L. Rev. 47.
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