Brooklyn Law School Professors Brad Borden and David Reiss have launched REFinblog, a cooperative effort between the two faculty members and Brooklyn Law School students. The new blog focuses on tracking the latest law and practice developments in the field of real estate finance with insight, analysis and commentary on the latest news and cases in the real estate finance arena, with an emphasis on securitization. Currently focused on litigation arising from the 2008 financial crisis, it offers information about “upstream” litigation (lawsuits against underwriters, promoters, and other market actors), “downstream” litigation (bankruptcy and foreclosure cases brought by and against homeowners) as well as other timely information about related tax and regulatory actions.

Professors Borden and Reiss serve as editors and main contributors to the blog. Their most recent post is title Borden and Reiss on Dearth of Prosecutions for Mortgage Misrepresentations where they cite their recently published article Cleaning up the Financial Crisis of 2008: Prosecutorial Discretion or Prosecutorial Abdication? See 92 BNA Criminal Law Reporter 765. They also work with students at Brooklyn Law School and other blog authors to provide timely commentary on some of the most important real estate finance issue of the day. Student contributors include Abigail Pugliese, Gloria Liu, Jeffrey Lederman, Joseph Kelly, Justin Rothman, Karl Dowden, Max Feder, Michael Liptrot, Rachel Sherman, Rafe Serouya, and Robert Huberman.

Having students contribute to a profession industry publication is an example of how Brooklyn Law School is equipping students with real-world lawyering and business skills that they can use in practice after graduation. Professor Reiss, an expert on mortgage markets, ratings agencies, and housing issues, said “Our student authors have really risen to the occasion. They have taken their legal training and have applied it to this difficult area of law and public policy. As law schools seek to reinvent themselves for the 21st Century, it is exciting to be part of an effort that is clearly Law School 2.0.”

Professor Borden, an authority on taxation of real property transactions, said “Our target audience is professionals who want more in-depth information than they can find in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Financial Times – those who want truly expert commentary, with links to the source documents.” REFinblog provides a well-needed service, sorting daily for relevant new cases, regulations, articles, and reports about real estate finance.

The New York Law Journal’s recent article Challenge to Stop-and-Frisk Policy Begins before Scheindlin reported on the March 18th start of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York trial in Floyd v. City of New York. Judge Shira Scheindlin is being asked to determine whether the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has a pattern or practice of unconstitutional stops directed from the top down. The complaint alleges that the more than five million stops conducted by the NYPD violate the 4th and 14th Amendment rights of those targeted. On May 16, 2012, Judge Scheindlin issued an Order granting Plaintiffs’ Class Certification Motion in the lawsuit filed against the NYPD and the City of New York. A 2012 NYCLU report provided a detailed picture of the NYPD’s stop and frisk program, including insights on the program’s stark racial disparities and its ineffectiveness in recovering illegal firearms.

On the first day of trial, four young men testified about being wrongly stopped by police. Opponents of the stop and frisk practices say they have left NYC neighborhoods suspicious of police. A key figure in the lawsuit is Senator Eric Adams, D-Brooklyn, a former officer and co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement. The article reports him asking Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly why the numbers of stop-and-frisks were so high for minority men to be told “because we want to instill in them” that they could be stopped at any time and they should “leave their guns at home.”

On the second day of the trial, an eight-year veteran of the NYPD described a police officer’s job that ranges beyond just making arrests to doing stop and frisks and writing summonses in service of quotas saying that his supervisors wanted numbers, he testified. “They only care about one thing–arrests, summonses and stop and frisks.” The lawyer for the NYPD responded that the quota claims area “sideshow” and that the NYPD has performance standards, not quotas with the number of stops reflecting police responding to high areas of criminal activity saying “Simply put, crime drives where police officers go, not race.”

The Brooklyn Law School Library has in its collection the 4th edition of Search and Seizure (Call # KF9630 .H35 2012) a two-volume set by John Wesley Hall, a practicing trial lawyer who offers expert insight on issues such as reasonable expectation of privacy, consent, and probable cause, as well as guidelines governing search and seizure in vehicles, professional offices, and airports. Chapter 15 covers Stop and Frisk.

The US Supreme Court issued its decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons that the first sale doctrine applies to copyrighted works, such as textbooks, made and sold abroad and re-sold online and in discount stores. In a 6-3 opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer reversed a judgment entered in the Southern District of New York in favor of the publisher against the plaintiff graduate student which the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. Kirtsaeng, 654 F. 3d 210 (2011). The student had subsidized the cost of his education by using eBay to resell copies of the publisher’s copyrighted books that his relatives first bought abroad at cut-rate prices. Citing the brief of the American Library Association, Justice Breyer wrote that to rule otherwise would create financial chaos, citing public libraries as an example and asking are “libraries to obtain permission to distribute these millions of books? How can they find, say, the copyright owner of a foreign book, perhaps written decades ago? . . . . Are the libraries to stop circulating or distributing or displaying the millions of books in their collections that were printed abroad?”

The decision discusses 17 U. S. C. §106(3) and the limitations set out in §§107 through 122, including §109(a)’s “first sale” doctrine which dates back over a century. See Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U. S. 339 (1908) which dealt with the sale of a copyrighted novel. The doctrine, which limits copyright holders to profits only from the original sale thereby allowing a person to sell the copyrighted work in the United States without punishment and without having to compensate the original copyright holder, ensures a distribution chain of retail items, library lending, gift giving and rentals for a range of intellectual property. The ruling is the first time the Court ruled on whether that first sale doctrine applies to material both manufactured and first purchased outside the United States. Breyer said it does: “The upshot is that copyright-related consequences, along with language, context, and interpretative canons, argue strongly against a geographical interpretation.”

The Brooklyn Law School Library has a number of items in its collection on copyright and the first sale doctrine. See the third edition of Examples & Explanations: Copyright (Call # KF2995 .M35 2012) by Stephen M. McJohn which is on reserve at the circulation desk. Chapter 12 deals with the First Sale (including the Distribution Right and Importation). The remaining content is: An overview of copyright — Works of authorship — Originality — Fixation — Ideas are not subject to copyright — More excluded subject matter : functional aspects, infringing material, government works — Initial ownership of copyright — Formalities : copyright notice, registration, and deposit — Duration of copyright – Copyright transactions — The Section 106 exclusive rights — First sale — Some other limits on the exclusive rights — Fair use — Moral rights in works of visual art — Protections for technological measures and copyright management information — Jurisdiction, standing, and the elements of an infringement action — Contributory infringement and vicarious liability — Remedies — State law theories and federal preemption.

The Brooklyn Law School Library has added 67 new titles to its print collection with a wide range of subject areas including Arbitration, Civil Rights Law, Constitutional Law, Intellectual Property, International Commercial Arbitration, and Women’s Rights and more. To see the New Books List for March 14, 2013 click here.

In addition to the New Books List, the BLS Library continually adds internet material to SARA, the library catalogue. There are newly added electronic versions of reports from the Congressional Research Service on a wide range of subjects that are in news headlines of the day. See for example the March 1, 2013 reports: Gun Control Proposals in the 113th Congress: Universal Background Checks, Gun Trafficking, and Military Style Firearms by William J. Krouse; The 2013 Cybersecurity Executive Order: Overview and Considerations for Congress by Eric A. Fischer et al.; and the February 2013 reports: Unauthorized Aliens: Policy Options for Providing Targeted Immigration Relief by Andorra Bruno; and Abortion and Family Planning-Related Provisions in U.S. Foreign Assistance Law and Policy by Luisa Blanchfield. The library adds other agency reports such as the Of­fice of Management and Budget March 1, 2013 OMB Report to the Congress on the Joint Committee Sequestration for Fiscal Year 2013.

On March 18, 1963, Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that the states must provide an attorney to an indigent criminal defendant who cannot afford one. Before Gideon, the Court had held that such a requirement applied only to the federal government. With the fiftieth anniversary of that landmark decision, the NY Times reports in an article Rightto Lawyer Can Be Empty Promise for Poor that many legal officials say that the promise inherent in the Gideon ruling remains unfulfilled because so many legal needs still go unmet.

The Brooklyn Law School Library recently acquired the DVD version of Gideon’sTrumpet (KF9646 .G53 2000) for its audio-visual collection. Starring Henry Fonda as Clarence Earl Gideon and José Ferrer as Abe Fortas who argued the case before the Supreme Court, the film tells the true story of Gideon’s fight to be appointed counsel at the expense of the state that led to the Supreme Court’s decision extending this right to all criminal defendants. The film was based on Anthony Lewis’ book by Gideon’sTrumpet: How One Man, a Poor Prisoner, Took His Case to the Supreme Court – andChanged the Law of the United States (Call # KF9646 .L428) which is part of the BLS Library Main Collection.

Starting in 2015, Civil Procedure will be added to the Multistate Bar Exam. The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) has added it as a subject to the multi-state portion of the bar exam, the first change in more than 40 years. The number of core legal subjects is now seven including the current six subjects: Contracts, Criminal Law and Procedure, Constitutional Law, Evidence, Real Property and Torts. Athough new to the MBE portion of the bar exam, applicants for the New York State bar have always had to contend with New York Civil Procedure as a subject matter.

The BLS Library has an extensive collection of items on the subject of civil procedure including the 3d edition of Principles of Civil Procedure (Call # KF8840.C54 2012) by Kevin M. Clermont. It focuses on the material covered in a typical law school course on civil procedure and breaks down the subject of civil procedure along the standard lines: a brief orientation and a lengthier overview of the stages of litigation, followed by a close inspection of the major procedural problems (governing law, authority to adjudicate, former adjudication, and complex litigation), and then some reflections in conclusion. It discusses specific problems and illustrations, with the aid of generously sprinkled diagrams and special text boxes. Special attention was given to fitting the civil procedure course’s main points together to form the big picture, with each topic ending in a section on the big idea the student is supposed to take from the topic.

Recently, the Library changed its circulation rules for students and staff, and instituted a new recall procedure.  Students and staff are now able to charge out regularly circulating materials for the entire semester.  Items will be due at the end of the current semester.  Items will no longer have a 30 day due date. 

To accommodate another patron’s need for information, the library has instituted a new procedure for recalling items on loan.  If a title is checked out, another patron can ask that the title be recalled.  The library will email the user who has the title and explain that it is recalled.  Recalled items must be returned to the library within 14 days of the notice.  The recall notice will include the new due date.  Items not returned by the new due date will be considered overdue, and fines will be assessed.  When the book is returned, the library will notify the requesting patron by email and hold the book for 10 days.   Circulating materials not requested by another borrower may be renewed for another semester.  Requests to recall or renew a checked-out item can be made in person, at the circulation desk, or by emailing or calling the circulation desk ((718)780-7973; circdesk@brooklaw.edu). 

*These new rules and procedures do not apply to material on reserve in the library.

**The photograph, which appears in this post, is courtesy of Providence Public Library’s Flickr Stream.