St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

On Thursday, October 25, Professor Kate Klonick presided over and presented at “COMO III: Content Moderation and the Future of Online Speech,” a conference that she organized at St. John’s Manhattan conference.  

The COMO III conference explored how online platforms create policy to moderate and remove user content posted on their sites, how they operationalize those policies, and how these policies affect the culture of online speech for individuals and new media.  Conference panelists included Jack Balkin (Yale Law School), Ben Smith (BuzzFeed), Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo), Steve Freeman (ADL National), Nabiyah Syed (BuzzFeed), Emily Bell (Columbia Journalism School), Casey Newton (The Verge), and others.

Over the past two months, Professor Klonick has participated in numerous other conferences and roundtables.  Some highlights include:  a presentation on content moderation practice to Congressional staffers at Georgetown University Law Center on August, 15; serving as a Google Fellow at the Privacy Policy Roundtable on September 13-14; moderating a panel for Databite No. 114: Mike Ananny and Tarleton Gillespie in Conversation on Content Moderation, at Data & Society on September 27;
speaking on content moderation at the SPEED conference at Cornell Tech on September 28-29; and serving as a panelist discussing censorship in the digital age at the University of Chicago on October 19.

Professor Klonick has published a seminal article, The New Governors:  The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1598 (2018), on these topics.

Professor Larry Cunningham spoke at the Assessment Institute in Indianapolis, IN, on October 23, 2018. He spoke on a panel about assessment in legal education.

His remarks were based on his forthcoming article, Building a Culture of Assessment in Law Schools, which will be published by the Case Western Reserve Law Review.  Here is the abstract:

A new era of legal education is upon us: Law schools are now required to assess learning outcomes across their degrees and programs, not just in individual courses. Programmatic assessment is new to legal education, but it has existed in higher education for decades. To be successful, assessment requires cooperation and buy-in from faculty. Yet establishing a culture of assessment in other disciplines has not been easy, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any different in legal education. A survey of provosts identified faculty buy-in as the single biggest challenge towards implementing assessment efforts. This article surveys the literature on culture of assessment, including conceptual papers and quantitative and qualitative studies. It then draws ten themes from the literature about how to build a culture of assessment: (1) the purpose of assessment, which is a form of scholarship, is improving student learning, not just for satisfying accreditors; (2) assessment must be faculty-driven; (3) messaging and communication around assessment is critical, from the reasons for assessment through celebrating successes; (4) faculty should be provided professional development, including in their own graduate studies; (5) resources are important; (6) successes should be rewarded and recognized; (7) priority should be given to utilizing faculty’s existing assessment devices rather than employing externally developed tests; (8) the unique needs of contingent faculty and other populations should be considered; (9) to accomplish change, stakeholders should draw on theories of leadership, business, motivation, and the social process of innovation; and (10) student affairs should be integrated with faculty and academic assessment activities. These themes, if implemented by law schools, will help programmatic assessment to become an effective addition to legal education and not just something viewed as a regulatory burden.

This past week, Professor Christine Lazaro was inducted as President of the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA) during the association’s annual meeting.

Professor Lazaro also moderated three panels during the four day annual meeting: Robo Advisers: The Duties Behind the Technology; NASAA Report & Roundtable; and Handling Small Cases. Professor Lazaro submitted written materials for the program, “The Regulation of Digital Investment Advice,” which outlined the current state of regulatory oversight of digital investment advisers, also known as robo-advisers.

On September 20th, Professor John Q. Barrett delivered a lecture, Competition: Robert H. Jackson as Assistant Attorney General—Antitrust (January 21, 1937–March 5, 1938), as part of the second Jackson-Nash Address program, hosted by the Antitrust Division, United States Department of Justice, in Washington, D.C.  

The Jackson-Nash Address, established earlier this year, recognizes the contributions of former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson and Nobel Laureate economist John Nash celebrates the role of economics in the mission of the Antitrust Division, which Jackson headed as Assistant Attorney General during 1937.

Assistant Attorney General Makin Delrahim hosted the September 20 program in DOJ’s Great Hall.

Following AAG Delrahim’s welcoming remarks, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein introduced Professor Barrett.

Professor Barrett’s lecture was followed by an address by Dr. George A. Akerlof, 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Professor Kate Levine has presented her paper, Discipline and Policing, forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal, at two faculty workshops this fall.  On September 21, 2018, she presented the paper to the faculty at the University of Colorado Law School, and on October 10, 2018, she presented it to the faculty at Cardozo Law School.

Here is the abstract:

A prime focus of police reform advocates is the transparency of police discipline. Indeed, transparency is one of if not the most popular accountability solutions for a wide swath of policing problems. This Article examines the “transparency cure” as it applies to Police Disciplinary Records (“PDRs”). These records are part of an officer’s personnel file and contain reported wrongdoing from supervisors, Internal Affairs Bureaus, and Citizen Complaint Review Boards.

This Article argues that making PDRs public is worthy of skeptical examination. First, it problematizes the notion that transparency is a worthy end-goal for those who desire to see police reform in general. Transparency is often seen as a solution with no downside, but this Article argues that, in the realm of PDRs, it comes with at least two major tradeoffs: first making PDRs public will not lead to the accountability that advocates seek, and in fact may cause retrenchment from police departments. Second, transparency on an individual level necessarily comes with major privacy tradeoffs.

The problem with individualized transparency is not theoretical. in fact, it has been much critiqued by scholars in a different but comparable realm: the wide dissemination of criminal records. PDRs and criminal records have similar problems: due process issues, inaccuracy, arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement, and permanent reputational harm. Indeed, the rhetoric used by law enforcement to defend their privacy rights sounds almost identical to the critiques scholars make of criminal record transparency.

This Article argues that the comparison of PDRs and Criminal Records is instructive because it allows us to view criminal records through a new lens. As with criminal record publication, forced PDR transparency will likely not solve the problems advocates hope it will. Thus, the Article concludes that a more nuanced regime should be put in place for PDRs, and that advocates should use law enforcement rhetoric to support a more privacy-protective regime for criminal records.

Professor Vincent Di Lorenzo’s article, “Fintech Lending: A Study of Expectations versus Market Outcomes”, will appear in the spring 2019 issue of the Boston University Review of Banking and Financial Law.  

Here is an abstract of the article:

This article documents the expectations for the fintech lending industry, which has emerged in this decade, and compares such expectations to market outcomes. It presents an evidence based analysis for policy making decisions. Part one of the article explores expectations – possible benefits and risks of fintech lending – through large-scale surveys and interviews of industry, consumer and government stakeholders. Part two of the article examines market outcomes – benefits and risks that have been realized or failed to materialize, as documented by studies of substantial data sets of various types of fintech loans. Benefits and risks examined include expanded access to credit, lower costs, predatory terms, fair lending risks, and lack of transparency. After comparing expectations and market outcomes, the article explores policy implications, particularly the implications for chartering of special purpose national banks by the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency.

In addition, Professor Di Lorenzo’s research on fintech lending will be presented at the AALS Annual Meeting at a program sponsored by the Real Estate Transactions Section on “Access + Opportunity + Choice: Housing Capital, Equity, and Market Regulation in the Trump Era.”

On July 25th, Professor John Q. Barrett introduced Chautauqua Institution’s 14th annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States. The lecturer was Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Here is a video that includes part of Professor Barrett’s introduction and then Justice Abella’s lecture remarks concerning Justice Jackson.

Professor Elayne E. Greenberg will be the 2019 AALS Dispute Resolution Chair-Elect.

On September 26, 2018 Professor Elayne Greenberg presented “The Relationship Between the Rules of Professional Responsibility and the Choice of Remedy” at the NYSBA Dispute Resolution Ethics Committee.  The program was held at the offices of Davis Polk.

Finally Professor Elayne E. Greenberg has been selected by her peers as one of the 2019 Best Lawyers in Mediation in New York. She has been honored to receive this annual recognition every year since 2005.