Brooklyn Law School faculty members are engaged in scholarly work on critical issues in the law and policy. Their nationally recognized scholarship is published in top law reviews and has a substantial influence in the legal community and beyond. Their work has been cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, shapes law and policy across the country, and fuels the dynamic intellectual life of the Law School.
2023 Faculty Scholarship
Miriam Baer
Vice Dean and Centennial Professor of Law
Myths and Misunderstandings in White-Collar Crime (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Using real-world examples to explore the pathologies that hamper our ability to understand and redress white-collar crime, Baer’s book provides a step-by-step framework for reorienting the ways in which we prohibit, enforce, and discuss white-collar crime.
Bradley Borden
Professor of Law
Dialogue Debunking the Section 1031 Holding Period Myth, Tax Notes Federal, V. 179, p. 43, (April 3, 2023)
Using a hypothetical dialogue between a tax adviser and an exchanger, Borden shows that the section 1031 qualified use requirement does not impose a holding period requirement, and that suggestions otherwise appear based solely on perceptions of the likelihood of audit or the issue being raised on audit, which factors are prohibited in giving tax advice.
James Fanto
Gerald Baylin Professor of Law
Broker-Dealer Compliance: A Case-based Guide to Compliance Program Elements and Practices (Edward Elgar, 2023)
A comprehensive guide that reviews the state of broker-dealer compliance, both from general and practical perspectives, Fanto’s book makes use of legal scholarship and behavioral and organizational literature on compliance, which has grown exponentially in recent years.
Marsha Garrison
1901 Distinguished Research Professor of Law
Family Life, Family Law, and Family Justice: Tying the Knot (Routledge, 2023)
Combining history, social science, and legal analysis, Garrison charts the evolution and interdependence of family life and family law, portrays current trends in family life, explains the pressing policy challenges these trends have produced, and analyzes the essential family law changes needed to meet these challenges.
Andrew Gold
Professor of Law
The American Law Institute: A Centennial History (Oxford Academic, 2023)
In honor of the American Law Institute’s Centennial, the book features a series of original essays authored by leading experts in their fields, including contract, tort, property, and criminal law, often including current and former Restatement Reporters, and is edited by Gold and Stanford Law School Professor Robert W. Gordon.
Susan Herman
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law
An Advanced Introduction to US Civil Liberties (Edward Elgar, 2023)
Herman provides a kaleidoscopic overview of key U.S. civil liberties, including freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion, limitations on search and seizure, due process in criminal proceedings, autonomy rights, rights of equality, and democratic participation.
Alexis Hoag-Fordjour
Dean’s Research Scholar, Assistant Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the Center for Criminal Justice
White Is Right: The Racial Construction of Effective Assistance of Counsel, 98 New York University Law Review 770 (2023)
Examining the race-constructing role the ineffective assistance of counsel standard plays in determining whether a defendant received effective representation, Hoag-Fordjour outlines a structural framework for understanding right to counsel jurisprudence.
Joy Kanwar
Professor of Law
Stories from the Negative Spaces: United States v. Thind and the Narratives of (Non)Whiteness, 74 Mercer Law Review 801 (2023)
The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind turned a century old in February 2023. Other than for scholars who have examined its impact on American immigration history, it remains a relatively unknown case to the general public. But its impact is monumental when it comes to the history of Asians—and in particular, South Asians—in America. The case captures its own historical moment and provides lessons for the ways in which we understand race, citizenship, and what it means to be an American today.
Christina Mulligan
Professor of Law
Data Property, 72 American University Law Review 829 (2023) (with James Grimmelmann)
From family photos to Google's Search Index, data has become one of society’s most important resources. But there is a gaping hole in the law’s treatment of data. Property law does not recognize the intangible data itself as a thing that can be impaired or converted, even though it is the data that you care about, and not the medium on which it is stored. The authors write that it's time to fix that.
Dana Brakman Reiser
Centennial Professor of Law
For-Profit Philanthropy: Elite Power and the Threat of Limited Liability Companies, Donor-Advised Funds, and Strategic Corporate Giving, (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Exposing a migration of business practices, players, and norms into philanthropy, Brakman Reiser, with co-author Steven A. Dean, explains how this shift strains the regulatory regime sustaining public trust in elite generosity through accountability and transparency. They propose legal reforms and private solutions to restore that trust.
Anna Roberts
Professor of Law
Criminal Terms, 107 Minnesota Law Review 1495 (2023)
While recent legal scholarship has identified other subtle ways in which we send pro-carceral messages, vocabulary change has not been part of it, but it should be, in recognition of the harm that such messages can do, Roberts writes.
Faiza Sayed
Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the Safe Harbor Project
The Immigration Shadow Docket, 117 Northwestern University Law Review 893 (2023)
Each year, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which reviews decisions of immigration judges and decides the fate of thousands of noncitizens, publicly issues 20 to 30 published, precedential decisions. But most of the BIA’s decision-making happens on its unpublished “immigration shadow docket,” whose harms include the creation of “secret law” that is largely inaccessible to the public.
Jocelyn Simonson
Professor of Law & Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship
Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2023)
The answer to mass incarceration lies not with experts and pundits, but with ordinary people taking extraordinary actions together, Simonson writes in her new book, which examines the many ways people unite to reconceive ideas of justice and safety.
Irene Ten Cate
Associate Director of the Block Center for International Business Law and Associate Professor of Legal Writing
Splitting the Baby, 61 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 338 (2023)
Compromise Awards in international commercial arbitration are widely condemned, but it is hard to articulate what is wrong with such awards if tribunal members genuinely disagree about the law or the facts. This article argues that the primary harm of compromise lies in its effects on the quality of individual and collective deliberation. These flaws, in turn, taint the award by turning reason-giving into an exercise in justification rather than an opportunity for continued assessment.
William Araiza
Stanley A. August Professor of Law
Regents: Resurrecting Animus/Renewing Intent, 51 Seton Hall Law Review 983 (2021)
Julian Arato
Professor of Law
The Elastic Corporate Form in International Law, 62 Virginia Journal of International Law __ (forthcoming 2021)
Jodi Balsam
Associate Professor of Clinical Law
Criminalizing Match-Fixing as America Legalizes Sports Gambling, 31 Marquette Sports Law Review 1 (2020)
Anita Bernstein
Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law
Three Cohorts’ Vulnerabilities on the Issue of Sexual Consent, 73 Oklahoma Law Review 1 (2020)
Heidi K. Brown
Director of Legal Writing
and Professor of Law
The Flourishing Lawyer, (ABA Book Publishing, May 2022)
Wilfred Codrington III
Assistant Professor of Law
The People’s Constitution: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union (with John Kowal) (The New Press 2021)
Steven Dean
Professor of Law
Filing While Black: The Casual Racism of the Tax Law, Utah Law Review __ 801 (2022)
The tax law’s race-blind approach produces bad tax policy. The racial bias long tolerated—and sometimes exploited—by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax deductions that others in similar situations enjoyed. In 2000, Liberia was threatened with sanctions for being a tax haven, but Switzerland was not. In 2014, Eric Garner died in police custody after being suspected of evading a tax. In each instance, anti-Blackness played a role in ways the tax law either ignores or actively leverages.
Robin Effron
Professor of Law
Forum Selection Clauses, Non-Signatories, and Personal Jurisdiction, __ Notre Dame Law Review __ (forthcoming 2021) (with John Coyle)
Heidi Gilchrist
Assistant Professor of Legal Writing
“Act Normal or Leave”: When Law and Culture Collide, 26 Columbia Journal of European Law 54 (2021)
Cynthia Godsoe
Professor of Law
The Place of the Prosecutor in Abolitionist Praxis, 69 U.C.L.A. Law Review (2022)
Progressive prosecutors have been widely hailed as the solution to mass incarceration, but Godsoe argues they are not the magic bullet. Prosecutors' institutional power and ethical mandate to "do justice" can be repurposed to start reversing decades of building the carceral state, but transforming the system entails ceding power to communities, divesting criminal system resources, and investing in societal supports that keep people safe.
Roberta Karmel
Centennial Professor of Law
Little Power Struggles Everywhere: Attacks on the Administrative State at the Securities and Exchange Commission, 72 Administrative Law Review 207 (2020)
Catherine Y. Kim
Professor of Law
Rights Retrenchment in Immigration Law, 55 U.C. Davis L. Review 1283 (2022)
The Modern Court’s stance toward immigrants tells a story of rights retrenchment, a scaling back from even the modest gains of the 20th century. In areas including the right to habeas corpus, procedural due process, discrimination, free speech, and detention, noncitizens today enjoy even fewer constitutional protections than they did at the end of the last century.
Minna J. Kotkin
Professor of Law
Reconsidering Confidential Settlements in the #MeToo Era, 54 University of San Francisco Law Review 517 (2020)
Sarah Lorr
Assistant Professor of Clinical Law & Co-Director of the Disability and Civil Rights Clinic
Unaccommodated: How the ADA Fails Parents, 110 California Law Review 1315 (2022)
Thirty years after Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), discrimination and ingrained prejudices against individuals with intellectual disabilities—especially poor Black and brown parents with disabilities—continue. Despite promising federal intervention with the promulgation of the new technical assistance in 2015, both family and federal courts still fail to vindicate the rights of parents with disabilities, by sidestepping responsibility for parents’ claims under the ADA. For the ADA to fulfill its promise, parents with intellectual disabilities must have a viable legal avenue to enforce it.
James A. Macleod
Assistant Professor of Law
Finding Original Public Meaning, 56 Georgia Law Review __ (forthcoming 2021)
Kate Mogulescu
Associate Professor of Clinical Law
Your Cervix is Showing: Loitering for Prostitution Policing as Gendered Stop & Frisk, 74 University of Miami Law Review Caveat 68 (2020)
Frank Pasquale
Professor of Law
New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI, (Harvard University Press 2020)
Vijay Raghavan
Assistant Professor of Law
Shifting Burdens at the Fringe, 102 Boston University Law Review 1301 (2022)
Raghavan offers a new descriptive account of consumer financial regulation. Leveraging insights from the recent literature on the legal design of money, he suggests that consumer financial regulation is best understood as a way to shift the incidence of financing the creation of new money and not as an intervention in private exchange. He considers how this framing can change the way we justify consumer law and regulate consumer credit markets.
Vijay Raghavan
Assistant Professor of Law
Consumer Law's Equity Gap, 3 Utah Law Review __ (forthcoming 2022)
K. Sabeel Rahman
Associate Professor of Law
Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis (with Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski), 129 Yale Law Journal 1784 (2020)
Jayne Ressler
Associate Professor of Law
Anonymous Plaintiffs and Sexual Misconduct, 50 Seton Hall Law Review 955 (2020)
Alice Ristroph
Dean’s Research Scholar and Fagen Professor of Law
The Curriculum of the Carceral State, 120 Columbia Law Review 1631 (2020)
Lawrence M. Solan
Don Forchelli Professor of Law
Revisiting a Classic Problem in Statutory Interpretation: Is a Minister a Laborer? (with Tammy Gales), 36 Georgia State University Law Review 491 (2020)
Aaron Twerski
Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law
An Essay on the Quieting of Products Liability Law, 105 Cornell Law Review 101 (2020)