Urban Consortium Research

Healing Gotham
9781421415994
Johns Hopkins University Press
March 12, 2015

Should New York City reconsider term limits?

from city and state new york “Ask the Experts”: Does allowing former members to run again after a hiatus contradict the purpose of term limits?

Bruce Berg, professor of political science at Fordham University: The primary goals of New York City’s term limits law were to bring fresh faces and ideas to the City Council and to decrease the role of professional politicians in local policy making. Allowing former council members to run again, even after a break, does appear to contradict the goals of term limits. Looking at recent City Council elections, however, many of the newly elected council members replacing the term limited council members have been former council staff, family members, or individuals who have already served in elective office at the state level. They are just as much professional politicians as those whom they replaced. So the goals of term limits have not been well served by its current iteration. Professional politicians are still being elected to the council, even if they are not incumbent council members. As a result, allowing former council members to run again, after a break, would not change, or harm, the workings of the council in any significant way.

Read the full “Ask the Experts” at cityandstateny.com.

Law And The New Urban Agenda
9780367188733
Routledge
May 15, 2020

The New Preemption Reader
9781642425604
West Academic Publishing
January 3, 2019

Global Perspectives in Urban Law
9780815372271
Routledge
December 4, 2018

The Law of the Sharing Economy
9781108255882
Cambridge University Press
November 22, 2018

Law Between Buildings
9781472474063
Routledge
October 14, 2016

How California is Redefining Rent Control

from fordham newsroom: 

In a video for the Wall Street Journal, Professor Nestor Davidson shares his expert opinion on California’s new rent control law (03:27) — aimed at solving housing issues statewide — and what it could mean for national policy.

From Davidson (04:51):

“So if the question is, what’s the trajectory of this policy? I don’t think we’ve seen it play out fully. I think there’s a lot of energy from local government officials and tenants themselves, and I think that energy is actually going to increase. We’re in a housing crisis across the country. Although rent regulation and tenant protection isn’t the only solution to that crisis I think there’s a growing recognition that this is a policy area that’s garnering increasing support.”

Law And The New Urban Agenda

from Nestor M. Davidson & Geeta Tewari —

Dear Colleagues,

The Urban Law Center's newest volume, Law and the New Urban Agenda, will be available on May 15, 2020 as an e-book and you can pre-order the hard copy now.

Given COVID-19’s impact on cities globally, it is more important than ever to highlight the significance of urban law and policy for students. This new book offers a constructive and critical valuation of the legal dimensions of the U.N.’s New Urban Agenda (NUA), adopted at the 2016 United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development to foster a globally shared understanding of the vital link between urbanization and a sustainable future. A myriad of legal challenges – and opportunities – stand between the NUA and its goals. Examining case studies from natural disasters and resulting urban migration in Honshu and Tacloban, to innovative collaborative governance in Barcelona and Turin, to the accessibility of public space for informal workers in New Delhi and Accra, and power scales among Brazil’s metropolitan regions, the contributions in this new book frame an important academic dialogue about the legal dimensions of the NUA, all of which will be of interest to scholars across the range of urban studies.

Law and the New Urban Agenda underscores the value of urban law as a discipline in supporting the healthy development of inclusive cities for all. This timely volume sheds light on the many complex challenges that urban growth poses for legal systems around the globe, and I commend this eclectic group of scholars for their engagement with the New Urban Agenda. – Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Executive Director, UN-Habitat

Pre-order Law And The New Urban Agenda.

Culture shifts in gun control preemption laws

A recent Florida ruling could mark a change in the political landscape around city gun control, said Nestor M. Davidson, Fordham Professor of Law. More than 40 states have passed “preemption laws” to keep from becoming a “patchwork of competing gun laws,” wrote Tricia L. Nadolny in USA Today. But mayors in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Dayton, and Tucson are frustrated by their inability to enact solutions to local violence.

“If the larger political culture shifts,” said Davidson, “I won’t be surprised to see if – as in Florida – the pushback does materialize in a way where, whether it’s through litigation or legislation, you are going to see the balance shift.”

Read the full article at USA Today : “Frustrated Philadelphia mayor calls for gun control. Here's why it hasn't happened in his city”.

The Confederate Statues’ Ruling

from fordham news: Law Professor Nestor Davidson joined host Craig Williams and fellow commentator, Professor Richard Schragger, on Lawyer 2 Lawyer to discuss the ruling and controversy over the removal of Confederate statues and what is next in this legal fight.

“There are important statutory issues. I think the equal protection question is an important one, and whether this ends at the Virginia Supreme Court or ultimately goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court will largely turn on whether this case is decided as a matter of Virginia law both under the statute and questions of legislative immunity which we typically decided as a question of state law. I think if the case is resolved in a way that rests on those Virginia grounds, we’ll see it end at the Virginia Supreme Court, if it goes that far, and I tend to suspect that it will given how Judge Moore has ruled. I don’t think the city is going to let that ruling stand, or at least they are going to I assume pursue an appeal but the federal constitutional question such as the equal protection defense, which really goes in many ways to the heart of the conflict about what these statues mean and who gets to speak for the community, raises important federal constitutional questions.”

Listen to the podcast on the Legal Talk Network's Lawyer 2 Lawyer :

The Dilemma of Localism in an Era of Polarization

abstract. Localism, the discourse of local legal power and state-local relations, has returned to the center of national attention, driven by gridlock at the federal level and sharply rising political and cultural conflicts between cities and their states. In recent years, states have aggressively sought to constrain, eliminate, and even criminalize local policy discretion across an array of policy domains. Cities and their advocates have just as aggressively fought back—in litigation, in the political arena, and in popular discourse.

Read the paper at the Yale Law Journal

Canaries in the Data Mine
9789811572883
Palgrave Macmillan
October 22, 2020

Mapping Conference Tackles Justice Issues from a Geographic Perspective

from fordham news: 

In a three-day symposium titled “Mapping (In)Justice,” dozens of scholars came to Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus from Nov. 7 to Nov. 9 to examine how digital mapping is being used by academics as a methodology to study justice and injustice, particularly when researching underserved communities.

Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and co-founder of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium, organized the conference with department chair Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D.

“Spatial media have politics, these are not neutral things,” said Donovan, who teaches a course of the same name as the conference for the Masters in Public Media. “We need to look at how our subjects are using digital mapping in their own lives and not just use this technology to study them from afar, like a scientist with a clipboard.”

Read the full article by Tom Stoelker at Fordham News.

View Digital Maps Project Gallery

Mitzvah Girls
9780691139173
Princeton University Press
August 2, 2009

New Anthropology Workshop Aims to Turn Academic Text Into Simple Prose

from fordham news: 

This past October, a team of Fordham scholars was awarded $20,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research to create a workshop where Fordham undergraduates, local high school students, and scholars work together to make academic articles easier to understand.

“Academic writing is often inaccessible to the people whom the findings most affect, especially young people of color in public high schools,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., project collaborator and professor of anthropology at Fordham. “We hope that this workshop gives students access to scholarship on language and inequality and the ability to reflect on how these subjects affect their own lives, while showing them what college life and careers in linguistic anthropology look like.”

This new writing initiative, the Demystifying Language Project (DLP), began with a three-week pilot class in 2019. In collaboration with Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, two non-Fordham graduate students taught high school students a class on linguistic anthropology, which included simplified academic readings. But at the end of the pilot session, the DLP team realized the teaching material was still too dense and incomprehensible for the students.

“This is tragic because high school students are losing the potential to better understand the ways that language, culture, and power work in the world,” said Fader, a linguistic anthropologist who studies the relationship between language, culture, and inequality. “During the pandemic, the DLP team decided to focus on creating a set of readings that are accessible to all high school students.”

Read the full article by Taylor Ha at Fordham News.

Digital Social Work
9780190871116
Oxford University Press
November 28, 2018

Suburban Sweatshops
9780674024045
Harvard University Press
April 30, 2007

Why a Ghent-like system is needed in the US

from the center for american progress.org: 

The Ghent system—an arrangement whereby trade unions help deliver government-supported unemployment insurance—exists in its truest form only in a handful of countries, including Sweden, Belgium, and Denmark. However, the United States has a number of Ghent-like policies where unions deliver or help people access governmental benefits—including workforce training, retirement benefits, and enforcement of workplace laws. Expanding upon these models would increase union membership and improve the quality of public programs in the United States.

In "Strengthening Labor Standards Enforcement Through Partnerships with Workers' Organizations" (Politics & Society, 2010), Fordham Professor of Law Jennifer Gordon and Janice Fine of Rutgers University argue that there is a mismatch between the enforcement strategies of most federal and state labor inspectorates and the industries in which noncompliance continues to be a problem. The authors propose augmenting labor inspectorates by giving public interest groups like unions and worker centers a formal, ongoing role in enforcement in low-wage sectors.

Under a Ghent-like co-enforcement model, government could complement its traditional enforcement activity by partnering with unions and worker organizations, Fine and Gordon have explained.

Read the full report at americanprogress.org.

Black Ethnics
9780199989317
Oxford University Press
June 6, 2013

Bloomberg as Candidate

from youtube:

Fordham University Associated Professor of Political Science Christina Greer talks about Mike Bloomberg as presidential candidate with Pat Kiernan of NY1.

New Queens challengers

from the city: 

“A long roster of progressive political newcomers is targeting Queens incumbents in local and national races — setting off primaries next year for some elected officials who’ve run unopposed for years.”

“Given gentrification and “shifting patterns of migration,” it’s natural that a crop of challengers are springing up in Queens, said Christina Greer, a Fordham University political science professor.

Gentrifiers are in a “higher economic class, tend to vote more and tend to demand things that community members have gotten used to not having,” she said.”

Read the full article at thecity.nyc.

City Politics, 11th
9781138055223
Routledge
July 12, 2022

Gentrification in New York

If you go out the door and are surrounded by smoothies and coffee roasters and the Craft Beer is served in jars for a great deal of money, you know this area has been thoroughly gentrified. This can be seen in Berlin as well as in New York at a glance.

New York is becoming more and more expensive, many can hardly afford the rent in the city and are repressed - and the protest against gentrification and repression has little chance. But how do the New Yorkers actually perceive it, when once rundown neighborhoods are upgraded and everything is getting more and more expensive?

Listen to the podcast with Associate Professor of Political Science Annika M. Hinze on Radiobrücke USA:

What Makes a Great City Tick?

Director of Urban Studies, and Professor of Political Science, Annika Hinze, is researching the best practices for making cities just, fair, and equitable for all.

If you go into communities and interview people who live in what we call gentrifying communities, a lot of them welcome the changes in the neighborhood. Everybody wants to live in a nice neighborhood, with good infrastructure, and good schools that come with gentrification. It’s just that the residents want to stay in the neighborhood once it turns.

Because cities are growing in importance around the globe, Hinze said she’s eager to continue partnerships with institutions in Pretoria, Berlin, and Amsterdam, and recruit more international students to study in New York. Closer to home, courses like The Urban Lab, which is being co-taught this semester by former urban studies director Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., professor of history, and Fordham Law’s Sheila Foster, exemplify the way the urban studies degree is truly interdisciplinary.

Read the full story by Patrick Verel at Fordham News.

Failure To Flourish
9780190658793
Oxford University Press
September 1, 2016

Empirical Evidence in the Administration of Family Law

from the regulatory review :

"Each year, reports of alleged abuse and neglect of nearly 7.5 million children reach local child welfare agencies across the United States. With so many reports, agencies need to determine which require an urgent response. Many child welfare agencies are turning to empirical evidence to help triage these cases.

"In a recent paper, Clare Huntington, a law professor at Fordham University, acknowledges that empirical evidence—especially the use of predictive analytics—can improve child welfare policies and practices. But she argues that empirical data must be used with great caution."

To guide this nuance, this Essay’s framework calls for more effective gatekeeping mechanisms across the institutions of family law. It warns decisionmakers to be attentive to the potential for empirical evidence to reflect and refract the legal salience of intersecting identities, including race, gender, and class. And the framework encour­ages a robust role for legal scholars to make empirical evidence accessible and comprehensible for those crafting legal rules and policies.

• Huntington, "The Empirical Turn in Family Law," Columbia Law Review 118, no. 1 (2018).

Read the full report by Meghan Downey at Penn Law's The Regulatory Review.

Adventure Capital
9780520304413
Univ Of California Press
December 3, 2019

Prof. Kimani Paul-Emile Appointed Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University

from fordham law news: 

Professor Kimani Paul-Emile has been named a 2020–2021 fellow in Princeton University’s  Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA). Paul-Emile is Associate Director and Head of Domestic Programs and Initiatives at Fordham Law School’s Center on Race, Law & Justice and Faculty Co-Director of the Stein Center for Law & Ethics. She specializes in the areas of law and biomedical ethics, health law, anti-discrimination law, and race and the law. Paul-Emile will spend her LAPA fellowship working on a book project, tentatively titled Americans on Drugs: Six Drugs, Three Regimes, and the Making of the American Drug User.

Read the full article by Erin DeGregorio at Fordham Law News.

Anti-discrimination and health law

from the american medical association: 

Incidents of identity-based patient bias are disturbing for all health professionals, but they can present especially intense challenges for physicians in training due to the number of patient interactions they experience. Kimani Paul-Emile, PhD, professor at Fordham University School of Law, recommends an approach to helping colleagues during a real-time discrimination incident and addressing discrimination organization-wide.

“Despite the startling statistics regarding patients’ treatment of trainees, data and overwhelming anecdotal evidence show that organizations are not adequately supporting their trainees in dealing with these abusive patient encounters. Indeed, 50% of surveyed residents who experienced or witnessed patient discrimination didn’t know how to respond, while 25% believed that nothing would be done if hospital leadership were notified.”

• Kimani Paul-Emile, "How Should Organizations Support Trainees in the Face of Patient Bias?" (AMA Journal of Ethics, 2019)

Read "5 ways to support medical residents facing patient discrimination" at ama-assn.org.

The Broken Table
9780871547170
Russell Sage Foundation
April 13, 2013

California charts New Course with Fast-Food Law

from the los angeles times: 

When you pass a McDonald’s you might assume it’s operated by the global mega-corporation. But in many cases, it’s a franchise owned and run as a small business.

This model has been a pathway for entrepreneurs — many of whom are women, immigrants and minorities — to build wealth and become upwardly mobile. But it has also left workers in one of America’s largest industries with little formal recourse for poor wages or unsafe work conditions.

AB 257 was among a slate of bills tackling employment law this past legislative season.

Chris Rhomberg, a professor of sociology at Fordham University who researches labor history, said a trend toward increasingly layered arrangements between workers and employers — including franchising, outsourcing to subcontractors and reliance on independent contractors — insulates employers from having to comply with labor laws.

“Because it’s hard to get into a workplace to establish a union, workers and unions are exploring other venues to try to get some control over their work and find other ways of regulating health and safety,” Rhomberg said.

Read the full article by Suhauna Hussain at the Los Angeles Times.

Reconstructing Beirut
9780292728813
Univ Of Texas Press
January, 2010

Talking Section 230 with Olivier Sylvain

Janet Sassi | Fordham News

from galley: 

Matthew Ingram:

“In a nutshell, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects digital platforms and services from legal liability for what is posted on their networks by users.”

Olivier Sylvain:

“Congress wrote the statute in the mid-1990s to faciliate innovation among early web and application developers. Legislators were most interested in promoting applications that facilitated user-generated content especially—like newsgroups or open online markets like Craigslist.

Things are far different over 20 years later. Today, the most effective online companies administer sophisticated services that, on the one hand, collect user information for the purposes of secondary markets for user data (think advertisers and data brokers) and, on the other hand, engineer so much of the user experience (think News Feeds, Trends, etc). Online intermediaries are the architects of our online experiences.”

Read the full conversation with Mathew Ingram and Olivier Sylvain at Galley by CJR.

Civil Liberties in Cyberspace

from fordham law news: 

On October 23, 2019, Fordham Law School hosted a packed room of students to hear University of California, Berkeley Law Professor Pam Samuelson, the Distinguished Bacon-Kilkenny Visiting Professor of Law at Fordham, talk about “Challenges to Civil Liberties in Cyberspace.” Professor Olivier Sylvain moderated the discussion in which Professor Samuelson explored a wide range of information law issues, including the evolution of digital copyright law, privacy issues, and the First Amendment.

Both professors also spoke about privacy and data protection. The subject is particularly timely given recent congressional hearings involving Facebook and other social media companies.

Professors Samuelson and Sylvain noted the major differences between the U.S. and the European Union’s approach to privacy protections.

“The U.S. also has a relatively recent and long tradition of systematic privacy invasion,” said Sylvain. Unlike Europe, however, “laws here were in the service of racial subordination through slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. Civil rights groups like the NAACP and the ACLU brought free speech and freedom of association cases on behalf of activists who had been surveilled by the Department of Justice, as well as state and local police,” Sylvain said.

Read the full article by Anni Irish at Fordham Law News.

Fordham law professor argues for corporate social media responsibility

Olivier Sylvain, Fordham Professor of Law, and Director of the McGannon Center for Communications Research, argues that the broad protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act should be curtailed. Speaking to The Hill in light of tensions between President Trump and Silicon Valley, Sylvain states that the current law shields social media companies from consequences when their technology is weaponized against their users:

“My argument is that the very people that civil rights statutes are written for, the very people for whom consumer protection statutes are written for, are exposed to greater threat and harm under the current broad immunity under Section 230.

“The way in which courts have read the statute, Section 230 now effectively enables the further degradation of communities that are supposed to be protected under law," he added. "The principle problem is that, free from having to attend to constitutional regulations of speech, too many companies have not heeded their social responsibility. That’s the real problem.”

Read the full article on thehill.com : “Trump seeks powers to rein in alleged tech bias”.

Helping Harlem Stay Connected

How will a new technological endeavor that brings affordable Web devices into residents’ homes through a community-based broadband network benefit residents of Harlem? Olivier Sylvain, associate professor of law at Fordham, and a team of lawyers, engineers, and entrepreneurs intend to find out.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Sylvain and his colleagues a $1 million grant over three years. The award is part of the NSF’s program for Smart and Connected Communities. The project aims to remedy the relatively low rates of broadband adoption and the deficit of advanced networked devices among Harlem residents.

Read more about Helping Harlem Stay Connected

New York City Settlement Houses

Nancy Wackstein, the Graduate School of Social Service’s Director of Community Engagement & Partnerships, takes part in a documentary on Settlement Houses on WNET’s Treasures of New York program.

Read more at WLIW21: Treasures of New York: Settlement Houses.

A Modern History Of European Cities
9781350017665
Bloomsbury
January 23, 2020

Built Heritage: Shanghai
No. 3 Vol. 3
Tongji University Press
September 25, 2019

Practicing Utopia
9781421415994
Univ Of Chicago Press
April 5, 2016

The Heroic City
9780226870236
Univ Of Chicago Press
November 15, 2009

Modernizing The Provincial City
9780674437029
Harvard University Press
June 15, 1998

Built Heritage special issue on Shanghai

A new special issue of Built Heritage, “Shanghai: Heritage at the Crossroads of Culture,” is edited by Fordham Professor of History Rosemary Wakeman. The journal is published by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai.

from wakeman's introduction: 

Shanghai is among the most dynamic global cities of both the 20th and 21st centuries. The city is China’s gateway to the world and its aspirations for the future. With more than 24 million people, 40 percent of whom are migrants, it is a global crossroads and one of the most multicultural cities in the world. It has more skyscrapers than New York and a public transport system that overtakes most global cities. Shanghai is a trading city, an entrepot of commodities. It exports electronic information products, automobiles, petrochemicals, fine steel, equipment, and biomedicine. It has the highest GDP of any city in China’s mainland and has become one of the leading financial sectors in East Asia, with major Western banks flocking to its new financial centre. With well over 500 multinational companies, the city attracts more foreign investment flows than most developing countries. Along with them has come a highly-skilled workforce from all over the world. Shanghai’s urban middle-class has fuelled China’s consumer revolution and a property boom. Sleek skyscrapers and glamorous malls, its brilliant skyline, dominate the global image of Shanghai and beckon tourists to its shores.

• Rosemary Wakeman, “Shanghai and New York: Mid-Century Urban Avant-Gardes”

Read more of “Shanghai: Heritage at the Crossroads of Culture” at built-heritage.net.

Rosemary Wakeman's Practicing Utopia

Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement
University of Chicago Press (April, 2016)
9780226346038

In Practicing Utopia, Professor of History Rosemary Wakeman gives a sweeping view of the new town movement as a global phenomenon. From Tapiola in Finland to Islamabad in Pakistan, Cergy-Pontoise in France to Irvine in California, Wakeman unspools a masterly account of the golden age of new towns, exploring their utopian qualities and investigating what these towns can tell us about contemporary modernization and urban planning.

Fordham News: Professor Calls for Return to Regional Planning’s Utopian Age

Read more about Practicing Utopia at The University of Chicago Press Books.

Professor Calls for Return to Regional Planning’s Utopian Age

from fordham news :

The “Urban Question” is Now at the Center of Intellectual Life

In a new interview with Global Urban History.com, Rosemary Wakeman, Coordinator of Urban Initiatives and Professor of History at Fordham, discusses the intersection between global history and urban history.

The city is the locus for a wide range of philosophies and ideas, policy innovation, models, architectural and design concepts, and heritage narratives. All of it indicates the degree to which the vast, complex urban fabric in which we live has become THE arena of the imagination. This is all fantastic, but where does this abundance of interest leave urban history as an intellectual endeavor?

Read the full interview at GlobalUrbanHistory.com