“As with racial justice, as with climate change, when it comes to public health crises, cities tend to be on the frontlines,” said Nestor Davidson, the Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law and faculty director at the Urban Law Center.

Davidson said that one set of questions the Urban Law Center looks at, particularly in times of crisis like this, are those of authority and power.

“Who can act? Who is prevented from acting? What levels of government take responsibility for what kinds of things?” he said. “Even though it’s still early, one of the emerging lessons from the pandemic is that we have a system of federalism that isn’t necessarily as well-suited as it could be to responding to this kind of a crisis. We’ve had an incredibly fragmented response.”

Even though cities are often the first to grapple with “an issue like a pandemic, and it’s often where the effects of crises like this are felt most deeply,” Davidson said city leaders are sometimes challenged when it comes to their authority to act.

“We’ve had conflicts where cities have wanted to take more aggressive steps to protect public health, and you’ve had some states preventing that, and some states reversing course now,” he said.

Overcrowding vs. Density

Annika Hinze, Ph.D., director of Urban Studies at Fordham, said that while there’s no question New York City in particular was dramatically impacted by the pandemic, neighborhoods with overcrowding, or a high number of people per household, bore the brunt of the crisis more than those that are simply considered densely populated areas, containing high-rise, residential buildings.

Using data collected by the Furman Center at New York University, Hinze was able to analyze how different neighborhoods were impacted by the pandemic as well as the impact on certain demographic groups, such as those determined by race and economic status. She found that those in overcrowded situations, likemultiple people living in tight quarters, had higher rates of infection than those living in densely populated areas where overcrowding is not as common.

“The neighborhoods with the highest density in New York City had almost half of the infection rate of those with lower densities, meaning that Manhattan, which is the densest borough in the city, had the lowest infection rates of all five boroughs, and that the outer boroughs, especially Queens and the Bronx, had severely higher infection rates than Manhattan,” she said. “So housing density seems to not be the culprit with COVID-19 infection rates; it was overcrowding.”

Hinze has been working to analyze how overcrowding has contributed to the virus’s spread in other areas of the country. She’s been collecting data from Finney and Ford counties in Kansas, which are home to meatpacking plants, as well as data from Tulare and Kern counties in California, which are home to many agricultural workers. While she’s still collecting the Kansas data, the California data has shown that areas where workers live in tight quarters also have higher rates of infection.

“There was definitely a correlation between overcrowding in the census data and COVID-19 infection rates. Tulare and Kern counties, they’re among the most rural counties in California, yet they were as of June, number 8 and 11 respectively in the state for COVID-19 infections,” she said.

Social Distancing: ‘A Luxury Good’

One of the reasons why parts of cities with overcrowding have seen higher rates, according to Hinze, is because some of the best measures to combat COVID-19, including social distancing and easy access to hand washing, hand sanitizer, and other cleaning products, aren’t possible.

“I think social distancing in many ways is a luxury good, and maybe we’ve been talking about this too little as a country,” she said. “If we look at the numbers for New York City, [the highest number of cases]are in many poor and immigrant neighborhoods in Queens and in the Bronx where people don’t have, essentially, the luxury of social distancing.”

By contrast, some of the wealthiest city dwellers were able to take social distancing measures a step further and move out of the urban areas, at least temporarily, Davidson pointed out.

“Cities are great engines of growth and innovation and economic power and that’s become increasingly true as our society has kind of shifted in a post-industrial way,” he said. “At the same time, they’re places of great inequality, and again, something like a pandemic shines a very bright light on pre-existing inequality … certainly in a time when statistics show that, over time, more than 400,000 New Yorkers have left the city.”

The Cost of Leaving

Hugh Kelly, Ph.D., CRE, the chair of the Fordham Real Estate Institute, cautioned against people seeking “long-term” solutions, like moving, to “short-term” problems.

“If it made sense pre-COVID, then why wouldn’t you have done it pre-COVID?” he said.

While Kelly said that he expected the real estate market, particularly in cities, to take a hit in the near future due to social distancing and other public health guidance, he didn’t expect those trends to continue long-term.

“In the near-term, it’s clear that things like density, mass transit dependence, high-rise building forms are disadvantageous in the midst of the height of the pandemic,” he said. “For the short-term, metropolitan areas that are more sprawling, more low-rise, automobile-dependent, and have the ability to have the built-in equivalent of social distancing have the advantage and that’s probably the case for the next 12 months or so.”

Premature Predictions of the “Death of Cities”

But Kelly said that he believes that after we’ve adjusted to living with social distancing measures, or once effective treatments and vaccinations are available, the characteristics of cities that made them appealing in the first place will still be thee.

“The elements that have made for the most vibrant and the most successful cities … are going to reassert themselves,” he said. ‘The vibrancy that comes with businesses and people interacting with each other—that’s what promotes innovation. Innovation produces productivity and productivity produces profits and that’s what attracts businesses and people to places to work.”

Both Davidson and Kelly said they’ve seen the predictions that this will be the “death of cities” before, including after the 9/11 terrorists attacks at the World Trade Center.

This same round of articles was written after 9/11, Davidson said, noting that after the city rebounded, there were also conversations about too many people wanting to live there. And those are really problems as well. We have to think about housing affordability, and we have to think about unequal access to opportunity, and all the real challenges in cities that are successful.”

Looking Toward a Better Future

Cities won’t look exactly the same as they did before the pandemic, the professors said, as they tend to take something from each of the crises they endured.

Hinze said she hopes that policy makers see how crowded dwellings and other symptoms of inequality have been exacerbated by the pandemic, and that they look to address them in the future.

“It’s most important,” she said, to “make sure that people do not live in these conditions and to sort of provide them with enough of a social safety net so they can live in conditions that are safe,” she said.

Other aspects of life in the city will also likely see some major changes. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, announced on Aug. 3 that the Open Restaurants initiative, which allows restaurants to take over certain streets and sidewalks for outdoor dining, will return next summer.

“You think about ways in which cities are repurposing public space, and taking advantage of a moment where cars haven’t been as dominant a part of the landscape at the local level. Maybe that means we’re going to have more walkable cities, maybe that means we’re going to have a greater embrace of the importance of public space,” Davidson said.

Kelly said from a real estate perspective, he could see offices refitting themselves to allow more space per employee, as well as apartments getting reconfigured to allow for some type of work-from-home model.

“There’s a sea change in that the square footage per employee, which has been going down for about 25 years, begins to reverse itself and becomes a larger space allocation,” he said.

He added that shared office spaces like WeWork will probably no longer appeal to people because social distancing would be too complicated.

Kelly pointed to one major sign he’s looking for to know that New York City has fully re-emerged—food trucks.

“When the food trucks are back on the street, people are coming back,” he said. “It means two things. That there are enough people coming into the central areas to support those food trucks and, even more, the food truck operators feel that they can do so safely.”

Photo by Frances FynanBehind the Book, a series of discussions presented by Fordham Law School’s Maloney Library, brought together on October 23 two authors whose recent books tackle gentrification, the role of public art in cities, and who, ultimately, has a right to stake a claim in a booming metropolis like New York City.

The discussion, which was held at Fordham School of Law, featured David Goodwin, author of Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street, (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Patrick Verel, author of Graffiti Murals: Exploring the Impacts of Street Art. (Schiffer Press, 2015) Geeta Tewari LAW ’05, associate director of the Urban Law Center, who served as moderator for the event.

Read the full story at Fordham Law News.

Seeking to recover the inmates’ humanity and share it with the world, acclaimed journalist Bill Moyers led a creative team in filming the documentary Rikers: An American Jail. The documentary, along with the conditions at and the future of the prison complex, were the topics discussed during an event at Fordham Law on Feb. 20.

The event, which followed New York City officials’ public considerations of the prison’s fate and the possibility of its closure in advance of an originally planned ten-year timetable, came at an opportune moment in city politics.

“We are beginning to see glimmers of light near the end of this dark tunnel,” said Matthew Diller, dean of Fordham Law, during his welcome address. “We here at Fordham Law are dedicated to shedding additional light on all of these issues.”

Bill Moyers delivered an introductory speech at the event, which was co-sponsored by the National Center for Access to Justice; the Center on Race, Law & Justice; the Urban Law Center; and the Fordham Urban Law Journal.

“I wanted to put a human face on the culture of human cruelty that flourished at Rikers,” said Moyers, who served as executive editor of the film. “There is no more powerful production value than the human face.”

The documentary gives former inmates a platform to share their personal experiences at Rikers and to inform the world that the institution is inhumane and antithetical to the democratic ethos of the country.

“Our city’s largest jail is a microcosm of so much that is wrong with mass incarceration today,” said Moyers, who before his journalism career worked as press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson. “Mass incarceration is the sharpest edge of American racism today.”

A panel discussion followed Moyer’s introductory remarks. The panelists’ conversation, which was interspersed with clips from the documentary, was moderated by Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes.

“The event could hardly be more timely with the mayor’s press conference last week, identifying four new jail sites in four of the boroughs to replace Rikers Island, and then the state coming in on the same day saying that the mayor’s plan to do this in ten years was woefully inadequate,” said Pelley.

Jonathan Lippman, former chief judge of New York and chair of the Independent Commission on NYC Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, lauded the documentary.

“It’s a haunting film, and it tells us all what we should know by now: that Rikers is an accelerator of human misery,” said Lippman, who stressed the importance of reducing the prison population and who recommended, after the prison’s eventual closure, building a monument on the island to remind our nation what the criminal justice system should not be.

Eric Gonzalez, district attorney for Kings County, addressed his office’s initiatives on bail reform—a critical task, considering that 75 percent of New York City inmates are imprisoned because they cannot afford bail.

“We are working in my office very carefully and daily on bail reform,” said Gonzalez. “When a prosecutor asks for bail, they must write to me and my executives the cases they’ve asked for bail on and they must justify why they’re asking for bail.”

Lippman and Gonzalez were joined by panelists Elizabeth Crowley, former New York City council member for the 30th district; Michael P. Jacobson, executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance; Tracey L. Meares, Walton Hale Professor of Law and founding director of The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and Bacon-Kilkenny Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Fordham Law; and Stanley Richards, senior vice president of The Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization committed to assisting previously incarcerated individuals readjust to society.

Formerly incarcerated himself, Richards shared his experience of the dismal prison conditions.

“The way you survive is through violence, and you learn that from day one,” he said. He added that, if not given proper assistance immediately after their release, former inmates often end up back in prison.

“It’s deforming for everybody,” said Meares, noting a collective tolerance for aggressive treatment. “It’s deforming to our democracy.”

The culture of violence at Rikers affects both detainees and correction officers, who are ten times more likely to experience assault at Rikers than any other facility. The panelists discussed how, going forward, the city must work to reduce population size, to create healthier facilities, to rethink the definition of a correction officer, and to address mental health issues.

The city is currently working to open smaller jails in each borough, with the exception of Staten Island. The initiative would reduce inmate population size and allow inmates to be closer to their families.

“I believe that we could achieve borough-based jails within five years,” Crowley, adding that Staten Island, too, should host a jail.

Above all, panelists agreed on the need for a cultural shift, stressing that citizens of this country need to think of prison not as a place of punishment but as a locus for reform.

“The overwhelming goal of these systems, especially jail systems, should be to treat people in them with the sanctity and respect of human dignity,” said Jacobson.

The event is part of the Law School’s A2J Initiative, which focuses the collective public service energy of the School to ensure greater access to justice through teaching; direct service; and scholarship, research, and advocacy.

—Lindsey Pelucacci

Good evening.

Thank you, Dean Mast, for the kind words. I would also like to thank you, Provost Freedman and Rose McSween for inviting me here tonight for this exciting milestone event for Fordham College.

This year marks the 30th year of my graduation from Fordham College of Arts and Sciences. Since that moment on I have been dabbling, exploring, and toiling in the field of real estate. During my undergraduate studies I had no understanding of the industry, no sense of its deep dimension, and certainly no inkling it could be the most exhilarating, challenging, and rewarding career path for me.

My serendipitous foray into real estate can be traced back to this fine institution and the political science department, where Dr. Bruce Berg suggested I apply for an NYC Urban Fellowship where between undergraduate and graduate work, a group of 20 would be chosen to experiment and experience public service. This highly competitive scholarship program was launched by then Mayor Koch as a recruitment tool to draw young and eager talent into public service before graduates flocked to the private sector.

With a wide, ambitious, and curious lens (compliments of Fordham), I opted for economic development. This is essentially real estate with public purpose. And so began my professional love affair with real estate. It has been in my veins ever since.

Today, this F.I.R.E. initiative is as important to our profession as it is to the school’s students. We are a country of cities, where for the first time ever in the history of the world, more people live in cities than not. The 21st century definition of livable cities is being crafted, honed, debated, and drawn up. In every city across the globe, with every large-scale development plan; every rezoning initiative; every new building design; every new infrastructure undertaking; every new commercial lending program; every bull run and every bear market, the business of real estate is at play.

What makes our field so captivating, so impactful and so meaningful is that real estate thrives at the intersection of so many subject matter experts–to launch a single project, the business will tap into every Zip Code from architects, engineers, planners, lenders, and insurers.

Real estate has critical relevance to both the public and private sectors–forging deeply complex partnerships that have the power to transform and improve the human condition in ways that are concrete, tangible, and impacted.

I think about how fortunate I was, thanks to Dr. Berg, to let real estate find me. I think often about how many young minds would be drawn to the field if they only knew… F.I.R.E.will ignite passion and purpose into the minds and hearts of Fordham students; it will tap into and unleash its formidable alumni base, and finally it will, in the true Jesuit tradition, bring enlightenment and understanding, ensuring that the level of play in our business is held to the highest possible standard.

Thank you again for allowing me to be a part of this exciting moment.

— MaryAnne Gilmartin

The annual Bronx Summit on Technology Innovation and Start Ups explores the opportunities and challenges underlying the Bronx’s potential for technology-based innovation and startup activity. Sponsored by the Center for Digital Transformation, the summit—which is now in its fourth year—focuses on leveraging existing resources in the borough to promote economic development.

“Through these conferences, we want to build up the skills and the knowledge base we already have here to promote economic and technological development… and make it attractive for entrepreneurial and business activities.”

The summit is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required.

This year’s theme, “Opportunistic Growth for the Bronx in Technology: Next Step—Is the Bronx Up to the Challenge?”, pays special attention to health care technology. Speakers and panelists will discuss innovative solutions such as hosting health hackathons in which students and other programmers collaborate on building mobile applications.

Examples of what could arise from a health hackathon are remote monitoring for diabetics and “telemedicine” web conferencing for doctors and patients, Raghupathi said. But first the borough must tap into the brainpower within its borders.

“We have all these institutions, colleges, and this support from the borough president’s office as well as private entities,” he said, referencing Bronx Community College, St. Barnabas and Montefiore hospitals, the Bronx Science Consortium, and the South Bronx Development Corporation, among others. “We felt that we needed to act as an interface among these various stakeholders.”

Fordham presenters include Rosemary Wakeman, PhD, director of the urban studies program; Nisha Mistry, director of the Urban Law Center; and Carey Weiss, sustainability initiatives coordinator for the Social Innovation Collaboratory.

The summit is co-sponsored by Fordham’s urban studies program, the Urban Law Center, and the Bronx Technology Innovation Coalition (BITC).

For more information, contact Raghupathi or Center for Digital Transformation senior fellow Teresita Abay-Krueger.

Lady Pink, who illegally tagged subway cars in the 1970s and 80s and successfully segued into life as a professional artist, was the keynote speaker at a daylong academic symposium, “Law, Urban Space and the Future of Urban Expression.”

After years of doing graffiti illegally, today she only exhibits in galleries, museums, and other “respectable places,” she said.

Yet when the New York City Police Department’s vandalism squad determined in 2013 that she had involvement in the Underbelly Project—in which artists painted an abandoned subway station in Brooklyn—they raided her apartment and confiscated her paint, computers, and photos, she said. It was the second time that the police confiscated her property.

“I had to sit on my sofa and watch them rob me again,” she said.

“The vandal squad told me…‘You don’t have to come out into the streets to inspire people,’” she said. “[But] the whole point of street art is to inspire everyone.”

Street artists are being persecuted, said Lady Pink, because events like the Underbelly Project—in which artists created large-scale works in an abandoned subway station—revealed a gap in the city’s security.

But when you attack artists, you attack free speech, she said.

“Rebellion is necessary so that our society doesn’t get stagnant and the art world doesn’t get stagnant,” she said.

Even though cleaning graffiti is “a kind of price we have to pay for living in New York City,” Lady Pink says that cities have to make more opportunities to allow visual artists to express themselves.

The symposium was sponsored by the Urban Law Center, the Urban Studies Program at Fordham and the Fordham Art Law Society.

One panel, titled Urban Expression, Cultural Property, and Intellectual Property, discussed the controversial use of the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA).

VARA allows artists to preserve their artworks in the way they were created; it is why one can’t purchase an Alexander Calder sculpture and legally paint it a different color, for instance.

Christopher J. Robinson, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP, said he was able to use VARA to help an artist win damages from the city after it destroyed her mural at Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical Center.

Street artists also used VARA to challenge the 2013 whitewashing and demolition of the Queens graffiti mecca 5 Pointz and other street sites of original art.

Jeannine Chanes, LAW ’96, who represented the 5 Pointz artists, said a key qualification for preservation under VARA is acknowledgement of the art’s importance to a cross-section of society. She said she was offended by the judge’s interpretation of VARA as simply a way to provide monetary relief to artists whose works have been destroyed.

“For the 5 Pointz hearings, we brought in art experts, but I really think a better judge, especially for street art, is … the people who look at it every day and want it there.”

“He really thought that money would solve the problem. [He] said there’s no irreparable harm, because paintings were meant to be sold, and plaintiffs would be hard pressed to contend that no amount of money would compensate them,” she said.

“But art is not dollars and cents. Art is art.”

By David McKay Wilson

Karla Sanchez faces down scam artists and fraudsters every day. It could be an Internet schemer trying to bilk people with promises of riches. It could be a training center convincing customers to pay $400 for a worthless class. Or it could be a mortgage broker luring buyers with low rates but selling loans that actually cost consumers more.

As New York’s executive deputy attorney general for economic justice, she oversees almost 200 employees in five bureaus of the attorney general’s office: antitrust, Internet, investor protection, consumer fraud, and real estate finance.

“Oftentimes, the victims of the scams we see are our society’s most vulnerable,” says Sanchez, who joined the attorney general’s office in 2011. “We work to right the wrongs suffered when one individual takes advantage of another.”

Sanchez says she had her eye on a career in public service when she graduated from Fordham Law School cum laude in 1995. She figured she’d work a few years in a private firm before moving to the public sector.

Instead, she spent 13 years at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, including seven years as the firm’s first Hispanic equity partner.

Each August, Sanchez returns to Fordham to talk with incoming first-year law students about the value of perseverance.

She explains that her initial application to Patterson Belknap was unsuccessful. As a prop, she shows students the rejection letter she received as a first-year Fordham Law student, after applying for a summer internship at the firm.

Several years later, while serving as a law clerk to U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts, Sanchez was impressed by the Patterson Belknap attorneys who came before the court.

“I put the rejection aside and tried again,” she says. “Those lawyers were the best, and I wanted to be with the best.”

Sanchez’s annual talk to incoming students is just one part of her ongoing commitment to Fordham Law, which she says welcomed her into its family as a student and has continued to provide her with an engaged, valuable network since her graduation.

“If you call up Fordham alumni and ask for something, nine out of ten times, you’ll get it,” says Sanchez, who has been giving back to Fordham in various ways since her graduation.

In 2014, for example, she spoke in Professor Clare Huntington’s class on Legislation and Regulation, sharing with students her experiences implementing regulatory oversight within the attorney general’s office. This April, she plans to serve as a panelist at the Urban Law Center’s conference “Shared Economy, Shared City: Urban Law and the New Economy.”

She also remains dedicated to supporting minority students at Fordham through the Law School’s Minority Mentorship Program.

For the past year, she has mentored Mital Patel, a second-year Fordham Law student who says Sanchez has been a valued mentor: accessible and willing to connect her with her vast legal network.

“She keeps me grounded,” says Patel. “She wants to make sure that what I’m doing in law school is truly something that I want, and that I’m not a lemming, just following the crowd.”

Born in New York, Sanchez, who attended high school in the Dominican Republic, also has helped build a network of Latina lawyers in New York City by co-founding an organization called Cafecitos, which brings together attorneys and judges in informal monthly morning meetings with coffee and occasional speakers.

Founded in 2006 with 40 participants, the group has since grown to more than 700.

“It’s a place where women come together to understand that they are not alone,” Sanchez says. “They meet successful women in all areas of law who are just like them.”

Following decades of population shifts, today more people live in urban environments than outside of them. That’s a lot of humanity to supervise, and Nestor Davidson is deeply involved in how the law keeps them in harmony.

“There are some really interesting legal questions that you can filter through place and filter through what is unique about cities,” said Davidson, a professor of law at Fordham Law School. “What does it mean to think of the city as a place where areas of law such as land use, policing, or public health interact, and do so with all the questions of legal authority?”

In addition to his own research, which focuses primarily on housing, Davidson runs the Fordham Urban Law Center, which opened in 2012. In March, the center helped organize a symposium celebrating the 40th anniversary of the student-run Urban Law Journal. Davidson said that the existence of the journal—the only one of its kind in the nation—factored into his decision to come to Fordham three years ago.

“If you do civil procedure, everyone knows within a broad range what you’re doing,” he said. “[But] in urban law, there are no clear red lines.”

“Here at Fordham we have this incredible faculty that are probably the best in the country at thinking across silos…about the interaction between law and cities.”

Smart Law for Smart Cities: Regulation and the Transformation of Urban Technology, a conference the center is sponsoring in February 2014 with the Law School’s Center on Law and Information Policy, the Schools of Business’ Center for Digital Tranformation, and the University’s Urban Studies Program, is a good example of the interdisciplinary nature of the center. The conference will examine the roles of law and regulation with regard to technological advances affecting cities.

The fact that the MTA can give you real-time information about subway availability on your iPhone, for example, represents a radical change in the way government interacts with the public and collects the public’s data. Some cities even allow residents to report a pothole by texting a photo of it to their buildings department— where the geo-location data reveals its whereabouts.

“There are a lot of really creative, interesting things that are happening, some of which could be even more transformative if we could figure out the right regulatory structure,” he said.

“There are also some genuine concerns that have been raised about privacy and security with the embedding of technology,” said Davidson.

Based upon his research, Davidson has advocated for a conversation about affordable housing that is not limited to understanding housing as just a poverty policy, income transfer, or land use policy, but also as a real estate transaction. Affordable housing in New York is currently created through partnerships between private developers and government agencies. In an arena that is both highly regulated and highly subsidized that brings together such disparate entities, lawyers have a unique opportunity to be a bridge, he said.

“Lawyers can talk to officials about legal requirements and read complex parts of the tax code, and they can also talk to the finance people and the developers and the people doing the construction,” he said.

“I think that’s underappreciated and it raises some real challenges, but is also really interesting if you think about how the institutional design of most of our delivery systems for affordable housing is this public/private partnership.”

The internal structures of local governments are another research area for Davidson. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed capping the size of soda sold in New York City, for instance, Davidson was surprised that New York state’s courts struck the caps down, because, he said, courts normally show deference to the expertise of government regulatory agencies.

“Thinking about the portion cap, how do we think about the administrative agency involved? How do we understand the relationship between mayors and city councils? Is it the same as the presidency and Congress, or is it different?” he said.

“I think there are some very interesting questions that you can ask when you start to unpack what are sometimes very complex, very large governmental organizations that happen to exist on the local level.”

Considering the recent paralysis of the federal government, Davidson said it is a great time to give cities their due. He noted that there are municipal governments effectively tackling issues such as climate change, economic development, and public health.

“Mayors are really taking the lead on areas of public policy that we might once have thought you really needed to get some big federal agency to do. All of these questions of policy implicate the law,” he said.

Timed for the 50th anniversary of the Gideon v. Wainright ruling, the conference will convene leading scholars as well as national and local leaders in the access to justice movement.

November 1, 2013
9 a.m.–4:30 p.m
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus

In Gideon v. Wainright, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state courts are required under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to provide counsel in criminal cases to represent defendants who are unable to afford to pay their own attorneys.

The conference will explore emerging issues and innovations that can promote access to justice in civil proceedings in the absence of a right to counsel.

Keynote speakers will include the Honorable Earl Johnson, Jr., former Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, and Justice Fern A. Fisher, director of the New York State Access to Justice Program.

For more information, visit http://law.fordham.edu/urban-law-center/30231.htm

An overarching theme, members of his administration suggested on Nov. 27, will be helping New Yorkers live longer, more enjoyable lives.

“He thinks that if we have extended the lives of New Yorkers, giving them an opportunity for a long and healthy life, then he’s done a good job as mayor,” said the Hon. Thomas Farley, New York City commissioner of health and mental health.

Farley was one of five experts from the fields of law, public health, and policy to weigh in on the mayor’s legacy at “The Bloomberg Administration’s Legal Legacy,” a two-night symposium co-sponsored by Fordham Law School and the New York City Bar Association. Panels on safety and public health were part of the symposium, the inaugural event of the new Fordham Urban Law Center. (story continued below)

Farley discussed the range of high-profile public health initiatives the administration has implemented, including bans on smoking and trans fats, calorie labeling requirements, and the recent prohibition on the sale of large sugary drinks. Referencing changes in health and social norms particularly with regard to smoking, Farley said the policies have been both socially and economically beneficial for the city.

“This is the perfect example of how policy can be effective, but also cost effective,” he said.

But Peter Zimroth, partner at Arnold & Porter LLP, who represented the restaurant industry in its battle against New York City’s calorie count requirement, challenged Farley on the efficacy of the Bloomberg health initiatives related to obesity.

“There’s a serious cost to be paid with initiatives like calorie labeling if, in the long run, they don’t work. There’s a limited amount of capital that government has to engage in coercive measures,” Zimroth said.

While the use of policy to affect public health is nothing new, Farley said that the mayor has been particularly innovative in using it to address obesity.

“The biggest legacy of the Bloomberg administration is the use of laws and policies to promote health in a modern era when … our biggest killers are things that can be seen as specific behavioral choices,” Farley said.

Nestor Davidson, professor of law and director of the newly launched center at
Fordham Law, said the school created it to coalesce the already strong urban law
resources in place at Fordham.

“It is our hope that the center will help foster conversation about the role of law across a range of policy questions that cities are grappling with,” Davidson said.

The symposium continues on Dec. 4 with panels focusing on education and land use and sustainability.

– Jennifer Spencer