Thought Leadership

Professor Roy Gutterman L’00 Writes “Spectacle of O.J. Trial is One Reason We Won’t Get to See Trump’s”

Every generation has a Trial of the Century. The recent death of O.J. Simpson resurrected a courtroom drama that continues to span generations. As the Trial of the Century closes in on its 30-year anniversary, a new legal drama is about to unfold in a New York City courtroom: People of the State of New York vs. Donald J. Trump.

Cable news anchors in front of the courthouse in New York City breathlessly invoked the term “historic” for former president Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial within a week of the death of the protagonist of one of the biggest courtroom dramas the public has seen.

The public should get to see Trump on trial. But we won’t, in part because of the circus the Simpson murder trial became.

The Simpson trial is still a touchstone for a range of socio-political and legal issues, including celebrity, power, race, money, domestic violence, and entertainment. It has also stood as a symbol for the hazards of televising criminal trials.

The fully televised trial captivated audiences. It made bigger celebrities of all the “Dream Team” lawyers involved in the defense, the prosecutors, police, and some witnesses, as well as many of the reporters covering the spectacle. It generated books and movies and even gave the public a first glimpse of both DNA scientific evidence and the Kardashians.

As much as the concept of the “trial of the century” is temporal, it is also geographic. In an era before cable television and digital streaming, trials really were a local spectacle. Nothing illustrates that better than the courtroom scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” where the courtroom was packed with community observers. Here in Syracuse, we have had some high-profile, perhaps even potentially sensationalistic trials over the years. The 2009 trial of Stacey Castor, the anti-freeze “Black Widow” convicted of poisoning her husband, was videotaped for later broadcast. The 2015 murder trial of Robert Neulander, in another era, might have achieved that kind of tabloid-type exposure seen with some recent trials — Casey Anthony in Florida and Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard.

Thirty years on, the legal importance of the O.J. Simpson case seems somewhat irrelevant. The trial yielded its pop culture moments, including catchphrases that live on today — “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” As a primer on legal concepts and the importance of how Americans perform our justice in public, the trial served an important purpose. But it became an out-of-control spectacle from the beginning that blurred the lines between justice and entertainment.

Today, there is no doubt the public would benefit from having a seat in the New York City or federal courtrooms where Trump is being tried. Likewise, the public would also benefit if the United States SupremeCourt televised its oral arguments.

In the post-COVID-19 world, the U.S. Supreme Court now live-streams the audio of oral arguments, a tremendous step forward for legal observers, reporters, and cable news outlets.

But these New York state and federal courtrooms where Trump is being tried will remain off limits to televised coverage, ostensibly to maintain the decorum of the court, to ensure certain elements of privacy and to preserve certain Sixth Amendment rights for a fair trial.

The technology has evolved to the point where the cameras would not be a distraction for those in the courtroom, especially jurors, though the lawyers certainly might be. But once a jury is selected, judges can clamp down the courtroom and try to make sure jurors are only weighing the evidence that is legally admitted. Judges have tremendous power to rein in misbehavior, especially when it is the lawyers who are misbehaving.

But the power to hold someone, particularly a misbehaving lawyer or even an obstreperous defendant, in contempt of court requires some ability to enforce rules. A judge cannot enforce rules with a party who does not believe the rules apply to him. It would be interesting to see how that would play out on TV.

More than 20 years ago, comedian Jon Stewart facetiously coined the phrase, “The Trial of the Century of the Week,” which could easily be applied to Trump’s legal disputes across jurisdictions. Of course, they are a far cry from the televised spectacle of the O.J. Simpson case.

Unlike the Simpson case, nobody in any of the Trump legal dramas was murdered. Even today, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, who were brutally stabbed to death, seem like minor characters or a footnote in a larger story. But with the multitude of Trump cases, the breathless newscasters cry that democracy weighs in the balance of justice. The public ought to be able to watch that.

Professor Roy Gutterman L’00

Director, Tully Center for Free Speech
Professor, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication
Professor of Law, College of Law (by courtesy appointment)

Betty and Michael D. Wohl Veterans Legal Clinic Statement on Johnson v. Grants Pass SCOTUS Case

Syracuse University College of Law’s Betty and Michael D. Wohl Veterans Legal Clinic (VLC) is proud to join 43 other organizations, including the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans and the UCLA Veterans Clinic, by submitting an Amicus Brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass.  The Amicus Brief reinforces the duty to ensure that the voices of our nation’s veterans are heard as part of the discourse surrounding this case.  There are over 35,000 unhoused veterans in our country, and fining or arresting unsheltered veterans unfairly complicates their pathway to stable housing.

As a recipient of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)’s new Legal Services for Homeless Veterans grant, the VLC has a new appreciation for the challenges facing homeless veterans.  We are keenly aware of how difficult it can be for veterans to navigate and secure VA benefits— especially for veterans who are homeless or at risk for homelessness. We’ve seen firsthand the inequities rendered in the lives of homeless veterans when complex legal battles and unjust rulings prevent them from receiving critical benefits. 

As a legal services and outreach organization dedicated to serving the veteran community, we have a particular interest in this case because of the importance of ensuring that criminal enforcement actions do not further complicate access to housing, medical care, and benefits.  This case offers the Supreme Court an ideal vehicle to guide the Ninth Circuit and local governments in how to best address homelessness and promote positive outcomes for our nation’s veterans, which has far-reaching implications, even for our work here in Syracuse.

Professor Elizabeth Kubala

Executive Director, Betty and Michael D. Wohl Veterans Legal Clinic

Professor Shubha Ghosh was Selected for the Japanese Patent Office’s Visiting Scholars Program

Crandall Melvin Professor of Law Shubha Ghosh, director of the Syracuse Intellectual Property Law Institute and Technology Commercialization Law Program, has been selected for the Visiting Scholar Program sponsored by the Institute for Intellectual Property, the research arm of the Japanese Patent Office in Tokyo. He will be conducting research on university technology commercialization in Japanese universities under Japan’s patent laws.

This is Professor Ghosh’s second research project for the Institute for Intellectual Property, having produced the report “Design Protection Law and Policy: A Comparative Perspective Japan and US” in Winter 2017-2018.

University Professor David Driesen Pens Opinion Article: The Supreme Court granted Trump amnesty it has no power to give

University Professor David Driesen recently wrote the opinion article “The Supreme Court granted Trump amnesty it has no power to give” in The Hill in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v Anderson.

Driesen writes: The Supreme Court’s opinion contradicts the 14th Amendment and the clear intent of its drafters. The court expressed concern that allowing states to enforce Section 3 could result in differing views on whether a particular person engaged in insurrection. But that is a less serious constitutional concern than subjecting the Constitution to the dangers that come with the court’s amnesty. The court could have solved that issue by simply ordering Trump off the ballot in all 50 states.

Professor of Law Emeritus William C. Banks Writes an Expert Backgrounder on Federalizing the National Guard for Just Security

Professor of Law Emeritus William C. Banks has contributed an Expert Background article on federalizing the National Guard and the domestic use of the military for Just Security.

In the article, Banks, who authored “Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the Military”, addresses the background and legal architecture for the domestic use of the military, civil disturbances, border security, and other situations of domestic use of the military.

Professor Arlene Kanter publishes “The Role of Human Rights Indicators in Assessing Compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities”  in the Georgia Law Review

Professor Arlene Kanter, Founding Director of the Disability Law and Policy Program, has recently had her article, The Role of Human Rights Indicators in Assessing Compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities” published in the Georgia Law Review.

The article’s abstract:

In recent years, international human rights treaties have come under attack for failing to fulfill their promise. While it may be true that human rights treaties have not realized their full potential in every case, there is little discussion about how to measure the impact of treaties. This Article explores the ways in which we measure compliance with human rights treaties, focusing on the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD). The CRPD entered into force in 2008. Since then, 188 States Parties have ratified it. In addition, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently released a set of indicators designed to measure States Parties’ progress towards implementation of the CRPD. These new “CRPD Indicators” are designed to assist States Parties as well as the CRPD Committee and other UN bodies in assessing compliance with the CRPD. This Article is the first to analyze the benefits as well as the limitations of the new CRPD Indicators.

This Article begins with an analysis of the CRPD, followed by an analysis of the ways in which the CRPD differs from other human rights treaties, including its reporting and monitoring requirements. The Article then discusses recent research on the role of human rights indicators as a tool to measure treaty compliance, followed by a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the new CRPD Indicators, as examined from a Disability Studies perspective. Assessing the role of the CRPD Indicators from a Disability Studies perspective requires a reframing of the essential role of people with disabilities and their organizations in working towards compliance and implementation of the CRPD. The Article concludes with a cautionary note regarding reliance on the CRPD Indicators as the primary tool to assess compliance with the CRPD. Although the CRPD Indicators are a helpful tool in measuring States’ progress towards compliance, they cannot replace ongoing efforts to mobilize and support disabled people in their fight for full implementation of the CRPD.

The article can be found here.

The citation is 58 Georgia Law Review 663 (2024).

College of Law’s Innovation Law Center to Host “Venture to Victory: Pioneer Perspectives in Tech, Venture, and Private Equity” Symposium

(Syracuse, NY – January 24, 2024) Syracuse University College of Law’s Innovation Law Center (ILC) is hosting the “Venture to Victory: Pioneer Perspectives in Tech, Venture, and Private Equity” Symposium on Tuesday, February 13 from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the Melanie Gray Ceremonial Courtroom. 

The symposium will feature a panel of successful entrepreneurs, financial investors, and legal experts in a discussion on the challenges that high-growth, privately held tech companies face as they take on private equity, venture capital, or other forms of funding. Panelists will cover investment deals they have completed, trends in financing, and their career paths in the technology commercialization space.  

Those interested in the legal, financial, business, and entrepreneurial aspects of high-growth companies are encouraged to attend. The event is free.

Register

Brian Gerling L’99, Professor of Practice and Executive Director of the ILC, will moderate the discussion. 

The event will be streamed live and a recording will be made available for those who cannot attend. CART will be provided.

The symposium is co-sponsored by the New York State Science & Technology Law Center, the College of Law’s Corporate Law Society and Intellectual Property Law Society, and the Blackstone LaunchPad at Syracuse University Libraries. 

The panelists are: 

Peter Alfano L’94, Partner, DLA Piper  

Alfano represents private equity sponsors, corporations, and lenders in a wide variety of domestic and cross-border finance transactions, including leveraged acquisitions, corporate financings, dividend recapitalizations, restructurings, and asset-based lending transactions. He has experience across several tech industries and advises companies in connection with intercompany finance arrangements, corporate restructurings, and general corporate matters, including for private equity-owned portfolio companies.       

Luke Cooper L’01, Founding General Partner and Managing Director, Latimer Ventures 

Cooper is the Founding General Partner and Managing Director at Latimer Ventures. Latimer Ventures is an enterprise-focused Venture Capital firm dedicated to helping Black & Hispanic founders build and exit the next RedHat, Datadog, or Tableau. He spends most of his time fundraising and nurturing a strong pipeline of early-stage enterprise SaaS companies.  
 
Before Latimer, Cooper was a 2x successfully exited enterprise software founder (Cybersecurity & Insurtech) with both exits to Fortune 300 acquirers. In 2020, he sold his company, Fixt, an enterprise-focused third-party administration software, to Assurant (NYSE:AIZ), a Fortune 300 leader in insurance risk management. After raising a $6.5M Series A, he became one of three Black Founders to reach a profitable exit that year. 

James Kelly L’99, Partner and Chair, New York Private Equity, DLA Piper  

Kelly is a strategic advisor to private equity funds and operating companies across many industries. He focuses his practice on representing private equity funds in all aspects of their investment activities, recently acting for Atlas Holdings, Bregal Partners, The Carlyle Group, Oaktree Capital Management, and Stellex Capital Management, among several others.  

He is recognized by The Legal 500 US in Private Equity Buyouts and has been recognized for numerous consecutive years by Chambers in New York M&A, has been featured in Buyouts, including a Buyouts Deal of the Year, The Deal, Bloomberg, and Law360 as well as other leading publications. He has presented for several education providers, including Practicing Law Institute and Strafford, and has received recognition for his pro bono work, including the Pro Bono Publico Award from The Legal Aid Society. Kelly is a member of the Syracuse University College of Law Board of Advisors.                                   

Lon Levin L’80 – President, SkySevenVentures  

Levin is President of SkySevenVentures, which invests in, advises, and provides executive services for space and other technology businesses. He has more than 40 years of experience as an executive and entrepreneur in the telecommunications, media, and aerospace industries. 
 
Recently, from 2017-2023, Levin was an executive for Lockheed Martin Space developing new businesses and markets. He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of GEOshare, an entrepreneurial subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, and as Vice President-New Ventures. 
 
Levin co-founded XM Satellite Radio and played executive leadership roles in the formation and development of other satellite, space, and media companies including Mobile Satellite Ventures, XM Canada, Slacker Radio, American Mobile Satellite Corporation, TerraStar Networks (mobile satellite), GEOshare (condosats), and Parsec (lunar telecommunications). 
 
He served as a U.S. Delegate negotiating technology treaties at many International Telecommunication Union conferences and holds five telecommunication satellite patents. Levin has served as a Special Government Employee on the Defense Department’s Defense Business Board and the NASA Advisory Council. 

Levin is Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors of The Planetary Society and Board Member Emeritus of the Space Foundation, where has was Chairperson from 2014-16.  

Kevin Whittaker L’02, Chief Legal & Compliance Officer, Ripcord   

Whittaker is the Chief Legal & Compliance Officer and Corporate Secretary of Ripcord, a NASA spinoff specializing in the digital optimization of data through robotics and AI. Ripcord is backed by Silicon Valley’s leading investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures.

Whittaker provides counsel on Venture Financing, M&A, Operations, Human Resources, and Governance. As a member of the Executive Leadership Team, he plays a pivotal role in aligning the company’s business strategies with legal and compliance standards, fostering collaboration with stakeholders, customers, and investors.

Whittaker was a speaker at Match-Up 2023, speaking on: “AI Unleashed: Pioneering a New Epoch of Innovation” which explored the profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on diverse industries and its pivotal role in shaping the future. Before becoming an in-house corporate counsel, he was a Partner at Reed Smith, and of counsel to Baker McKenzie and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.   

Professor Andrew Kim Publishes “Immigrant Torts” in the UC Davis Law Review

Professor Andrew Kim’s paper Immigrant Torts has been published in the UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 57, No. 2. (December 2023) at page 1059.

The paper can be found here.

Abstract:

In 2022, the Supreme Court effectively gutted a long-standing constitutional remedy for torts committed by federal officers. In the process, it seemingly immunized even the most serious abuses committed by Border Patrol agents. Such dramatic legal transformation has occurred despite — and perhaps because of — the soaring numbers of migrants at the southern border and the sobering evidence of alleged abuses there. According to one study, since 2010, over 250 persons, including unarmed children, have died due to fatal encounters with Border Patrol agents.

While the Court has historically expressed skepticism toward this remedy since its inception in the landmark case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, its recent expression of outright hostility toward it is relatively new. To justify such casual discarding of an established constitutional precedent, it cast Bivens as an unlawful judicial usurpation of legislative power.

Though scholars have probed the reasons for the remedy’s demise, they have not focused on the important role that immigrants and immigration law have played in it. The Article’s novel contribution is filling that gap by contextualizing the transformation of constitutional torts within immigration law and its animating principles. It frames the Court’s separation-of-powers rationales as incomplete by showing that the remedy’s erosion occurred primarily in cases involving immigrants, or immigration-related matters, and through the Court’s reliance on the following three false narratives about them: (1) immigrant as terrorist, (2) immigrant as danger, and (3) immigrant as foreign. It then exposes constitutional torts’ hidden connections to immigration law by locating the same three false narratives in a foundational immigration law theory that has been used to exclude immigrants from the ambit of constitutional protections for over a century. Finally, it examines the import and implications of the remedy’s demise by exposing harms to both the law and the person.

Professor Shubha Ghosh Receives a 2023-24 Wikimedia Race and Knowledge Equity Fellowship

Shubha Ghosh, Crandall Melvin Professor of Law and Director of the Syracuse Intellectual Property Law Institute, has been awarded a 2023-24 Wikimedia Race and Knowledge Equity (WRKE) Fellowship.

The WRKE Fellowship Program is a one-year fellowship designed to explore the intersection of racial equity, free knowledge, and the intellectual property ecosystem, and to promote sound policy for achieving social justice through these overlapping disciplines.

For his Fellowship grant, Ghosh plans to compile information about existing Intellectual Property (IP), Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), and artistic educational programs, with the goal of creating a map of this landscape, along with an analysis of these programs.

“I selected this focus because educational programs in entrepreneurship and IP at the K-12 level exist but have been understudied. Universities are the major avenues for commercializing technology in conjunction with private industry and government research labs. But by the time students enter college, the issues surrounding entrepreneurship and innovation come across as unfamiliar,” says Ghosh.  “The development of entrepreneurship and IP education programs at the K-12 level was established to educate students about these issues earlier as they develop their own educational and career paths.  My goal is to work, within existing channels of research, to better understand what these programs involve and whether they can be improved.” 

Ghosh will disseminate his research through original writings in journals, book chapters, and law reviews. “My research will also connect me with policymakers at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office who have just started to study these issues in depth and with nonprofit organizations like The Henry Ford in Detroit, which works with the Ford Museum and the Ford Foundation, to design programs on entrepreneurship and intellectual property in the Detroit metro area. The Henry Ford is also designing a comprehensive database of these programs throughout the United States. I will be analyzing this database as well as contributing to it,” he says.

About the Fellowship

The role of the WRKE Fellow is to undertake scholarly and other research, produce scholarly publications and public intellectual writings intended to contribute to the body of free knowledge and racial equity scholarship, and to organize and present policy and community educational programming relevant to the Fellowship’s research and education agenda. The WRKE Fellow will work at the direction of supervising IIPSJ and HUSL personnel (in consultation with Wikimedia Foundation legal and policy staff), and receive support, guidance and mentorship from the WRKE Fellowship Advisory Board, made up of distinguished legal academics in the field of intellectual property social justice. Members of the Board are on hand to provide the Fellow with scholarly insight, policy expertise, and general guidance where needed to achieve Fellowship goals.

Among other things, the research and programming will examine the role of doctrinal elements within the IP law in contributing to traditions of systemic IP racial inequity and related injustice. The resulting research analyses will be put towards constructing free knowledge initiatives to improve the understanding and use of intellectual property in marginalized and underserved communities. The ultimate goal of the research is to improve racial equities through the IP ecosystem and related socio-economic aspects of the political economy, and will be available to the general public, IP law and policy makers, and IP practitioners.

The fellowship is funded through a grant from the Knowledge Equity Fund at the Wikimedia Foundation and is jointly administered by the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ) and the Howard University School of Law (HUSL).

Professor Shubha Ghosh Contributes Chapter on Intellectual Property in the Book Intellectual Property Rights in the Post Pandemic World

Crandall Melvin Professor of Law Shubha Ghosh, director of the Syracuse Intellectual Property Law Institute, has contributed a chapter on how economic rewards and property rights can shape invention and innovation in the new book INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE POST PANDEMIC WORLD, published in December by Edward Elgar Publishing.

In this new work of scholarship titled Crisis, Invention, and Innovation, Ghosh identifies a new impetus for innovation: crisis.  A crisis is an external challenge to society’s economic, social, and legal systems, such as a war or pandemic. Such a challenge stirs innovators and entrepreneurs to devise solutions to address the crisis. Professor Ghosh demonstrates how this theory of crisis and innovation can help to understand the development of the Polio vaccine, HIV vaccines, and Covid vaccines.