Current Affairs

Celebrate Earth Day!

Each year on April 22, we join people around the world in celebrating Earth Day—a time to reflect on the importance of protecting our planet for future generations. Earth Day is not only a call to environmental action, but also an opportunity to explore the science, history, and policy that shape our relationship with the natural world.

If you’re conducting legal research related to climate change, sustainability, or environmental justice, we invite you to explore our Treatises by Topic research guides. These treatises offer in-depth explanations of the general principles and specific areas of environmental law, along with extensive commentary on statutes, regulations, cases, and other primary materials. They’re excellent resources for background research and for locating authoritative legal citations.

We also encourage you to visit EarthDay.org to learn more about this year’s theme: “Our Power, Our Planet.”

Happy Earth Day—today and every day

Remembering President Jimmy Carter

NYLS joins the nation in mourning the loss of President Jimmy Carter.

In October 1985, President Carter delivered the inaugural Mario Biaggi Lecture on Human Rights at New York Law School. He was then awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

For more details about President Carter’s remarks and to view photos from the event, see the Winter 1985 issue of New York Law School In Brief. Additional photos are available here and here.

A student review of the lecture can also be found in the New York Law School Reporter.

Presidential Impeachment Library

Through our subscription to HeinOnline, you can now access Hein’s Presidential Impeachment Library, an online collection bringing “together a variety of documents both contemporaneous and asynchronous to each president’s impeachment, presenting both a snapshot of the political climate as each impeachment played out and the long view history has taken of each proceeding.” The collection will continue to grow as the current impeachment process plays out.

Tracking the Impeachment Inquiry

GovTrack.us offers the impeachment.guide, an online guide tracking the impeachment inquiry of President Trump.  It contains a complete chronology, beginning in 2018 and ending with last week’s public hearings.  It also provides links to key documents, identifies possible charges the President may face and offers background on how the impeachment and removal process works. The guide will be updated on an ongoing basis.

Meet Peggy!

March is Women’s History Month. So introduce yourself to Peggy, the Women and the Law database available on HeinOnline.  It brings together books, biographies and periodicals dedicated to the role of women in society and the law.  You can access it from the HeinOnline home page.  In addition, the Library of Congress has a dedicated web page for Women’s History Month, including information about events, ceremonies, and celebrations.

The Green Book

The Green Book: Travel is Fatal to Prejudice

Green Book, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, was loosely based on the true story of a friendship between an African-American concert pianist, Dr. Don Shirley, and his Italian-American driver and bodyguard, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga—a friendship that developed on the road during a concert tour through the “Deep South” in the 1960s.

While the story is moving and the acting superb, the movie and its audiences might have been better served if its eponymous inspiration had been given a more prominent role.  Few people recognize the film’s title as a cinematic nod to the Negro Motorist Green Book—an indispensable ready reference source that many African-American travelers and motorists relied upon during the Jim Crow era.

The film is set in 1962—more than a quarter of a century after the “Green Book” was first published by Victor Hugo Green, a New Jersey mail carrier living in Harlem.  The Green Book, which was updated annually, contained travel tips, articles, and listings of hotels and other lodging, restaurants, nightclubs, gas stations, garages, salons, barbershops, and other businesses and establishments where African-Americans were known to be welcomed and served.

The Green Book provided a measure of protective reassurance and was designed to avoid or mitigate “embarrassing situations,” as Green himself put it, while also affording subtle commentary on the racial and social injustices of the time.  For example, the same 1949 cover that cautions its readers to “Carry your Green Book with you—You may need it” also displays “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice,” a quote from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad.

 

You can access digital versions of one of the largest collections of Green Books here, courtesy of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King Day

Legislation signed in 1983 marked the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a federal holiday, celebrated on the third Monday of each January. In 1994, Congress designated the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday as a national day of service, now led by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

This year, the NYLS community is honoring Dr. King’s legacy by expanding its traditional day of service to a week of volunteering, trainings, and discussions. The “Week of Action” is being organized by NYLS’s Impact Center for Public Interest Law, one of its six academic centers. Click here for more information.

 

First Monday in October 2018

The new Supreme Court term is set to begin this year on Monday October 1, 2018.

For previews of arguments scheduled for this term, visit the SCOTUSblog. Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII) offers a comprehensive preview of the upcoming term. You can also find summaries of and links to all cases scheduled thus far for argument at Oyez. The First Mondays podcast, hosted by law professors Dan Epps and Ian Samuel, is a self-described “entertaining podcast about the Supreme Court.” The most recent episode (recorded September 24, 2018) provides a birds-eye view of the coming term. You can listen to oral arguments at the Supreme Court’s Oral Arguments link, where the audio is posted at the end of each argument week. You can access the parties’ briefs at the Supreme Court’s web site. (Under Case Documents click the link for Docket Search.)

Celebrating Women’s History Month

In 1869, Myra Bradwell, who had passed the Illinois bar exam, was denied admission to the bar, on the grounds that a married woman couldn’t enter into contracts because of the common law doctrine of coverture and also because of her gender.  In the Illinois Supreme Court’s view, women weren’t entitled to practice law. Voting 8-1, the United States Supreme Court, 83 U.S. 130, affirmed that decision in 1872.  Undeterred, Bradwell continued advocating for women’s rights and continued to publish the Chicago Legal News, which she had founded in 1868 and which had become the most widely circulated legal newspaper of the time.

 

 

In 1890, the Illinois Supreme Court reconsidered Bradwell’s 1869 application and granted it nunc pro tunc, retroactively making her the first woman lawyer in Illinois.

Resources on Moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel

On December 6, 2017, President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and instructed the State Department to develop a plan to relocate the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. On December 21, 2017, two weeks later, the United Nations voted 128-9 (with 35 abstentions) to demand that the US rescind the declared move.

Oxford University Press has made available a number of free resources explaining the legal and historical background of the issue and providing an account of the governing law.