Preface: One Hundred Twenty-Five Years of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit: A Brief Project Overview

An important part of that 125th anniversary examination is found in the pages that follow: essays by prominent lawyers of the Second Circuit about some of the vital areas of law emanating from our court. Much gratitude is due to the editors of the Fordham Law Review; Michael Cardozo and Bettina Plevan, who painstakingly oversaw the issue; and to the lawyers who contributed their thinking and writings. Six articles have been specially drafted on: First Amendment/civil liberties, by Floyd Abrams; white collar crime, by Robert J. Anello and Miriam L. Glaser; antitrust, by Saul P. Morgenstern, Jennifer B. Patterson, and Terri A. Mazur; intellectual property, by Kenneth A. Plevan; national security, by David Raskin; and financial and securities regulation, by Karen Patton Seymour. Mr. Cardozo and Ms. Plevan have been the principal editors along with Yale Law School Professor John F. Witt, who himself provides an exceptional overview of the development of Second Circuit law. In addition, Fordham University School of Law Dean Matthew Diller and Benajmin N. Cardozo School of Law Professor Alexander A. Reinert have contributed an article on our court and administrative law. This issue also includes four notes on Second Circuit issues, written by students on the Fordham Law Review

Study Group on Immigrant Representation: The First Decade

All of us here have a common goal: ensuring adequate legal representation of the immigrant poor. A courtroom has multiple players with different roles, but all would agree that adequate legal representation of the parties is essential to the fair and effective administration of justice. Deficient representation frustrates the work of courts and ill serves litigants. All too often, and throughout the country, courts that address immigration matters must contend with such a breakdown in legal representation, a crisis of massive proportions with severe, tragic costs to immigrants and their families. For our nation’s immigrants, the urgent need for competent counsel in deportation proceedings has never been more critical. This nation’s immigrant representation problem is twofold: (1) there is a profound lack of representation, indicated by the fact that 63 percent of noncitizens in deportation proceedings do not have representation nationwide;1 and (2) in far too many deportation cases, the quality of counsel is substandard.2 Immigrants are easy prey for unscrupulous lawyers, who gouge their clients out of scarce resources and provide shoddy legal services

Frank Coffin and Enlightened Governance

I have often thought that Judge Frank M. Coffin is one of a handful of statesmen of recent times I could easily imagine in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 (indeed, as a central figure in a David McCollough biography). If he had been, as competing factions struggled to find solutions to thorny issues, Madison’s Notes would inevitably and often have recorded: “With negotiations on the verge of collapse, all eyes turned to Frank Coffin, who found not only the key to compromise, but also the better way.

Columbia Human Rights Law Review Fiftieth Anniversary Issue: Foreword

With this issue, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review—the first law school publication dedicated to human rights—completes its fiftieth volume. When its first volume went to print during the 1967–68 term, the academic study of international human rights was in its early years, the movement itself only a few decades old. In the years since, and under the watchful eye of the late great Louis Henkin, the father of the field, the Review has established itself as a distinguished journal in the legal academy, devoted to studying human rights and promoting human rights throughout the world

ESCRT ubiquitin-binding domains function cooperatively during MVB cargo sorting

Ubiquitin (Ub) sorting receptors facilitate the targeting of ubiquitinated membrane proteins into multivesicular bodies (MVBs). Ub-binding domains (UBDs) have been described in several endosomal sorting complexes required for transport (ESCRT). Using available structural information, we have investigated the role of the multiple UBDs within ESCRTs during MVB cargo selection. We found a novel UBD within ESCRT-I and show that it contributes to MVB sorting in concert with the known UBDs within the ESCRT complexes. These experiments reveal an unexpected level of coordination among the ESCRT UBDs, suggesting that they collectively recognize a diverse set of cargo rather than act sequentially at discrete steps