The Library will be closed Saturday, December 23rd, 2017 through Monday, January 1st, 2018 for Winter Break.
Winter Session hours are:
Tuesday, January 2 – Saturday, January 6: 9:00am – 10:00pm
Sunday, January 7: 10:00am – 10:00pm
Monday, January 8 – Saturday, January 13: 9:00am – 10:00pm
Sunday, January 14: 10:00am – 10:00pm
Monday, January 15: 9:00am – 10:00pm (Martin Luther King Jr. Day)
The authors of the blog, Above the Law, have published their annual Best Holiday Gifts For Lawyers. The suggested gifts range from the practical, like a subscription to the meal service, Blue Apron, to the fanciful, like the Disappearing Civil Liberties coffee mug.
Happy Shopping!
Network neutrality is in danger. Yet it is not what those of us who care about democracy and a free marketplace of ideas seek. We need to be fighting to wrest access to the internet out of the hands of large corporations who currently dominate it. The debate makes clear that it is time to start treating the internet like a utility. Most regions of the US are dominated by only one or two major internet service providers. A marketplace with so few choices is not a free market. The net neutrality debate makes clear that it is time to start treating internet like a utility rather than pretending that monopolistic internet service providers operate in a free market.
Current FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, voted against those rules when he was a commissioner. He has supported “light-touch” regulations that instead require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to disclose any blocking or prioritization of their own content or from their partners. Now more than twenty Internet experts, including the “father of the internet” Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, say in a letter that they are concerned that rules written to replace the current ones are based “on a flawed and factually inaccurate understanding of Internet technology”. They mentioned “major problems” the FCC had with its online comment system. The FCC received 23 million comments on the issue of net neutrality, but millions of them were fake submissions. Nearly a half-million comments came from Russian email addresses. Last week, the agency’s general counsel rejected an open letter by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s (D) request for information about comments filed in the agency’s net neutrality records and whether some were filed under stolen identities.
The FCC is expected to pass the new regulations, with the three Republicans on the commission saying they support the measure. The FCC, the letter noted, has also not “held a single open public meeting to hear from citizens and experts about the proposed Order” ― a break from “established practice.” Congress should cancel the agency’s vote, the experts say, because the FCC’s “rushed and technically incorrect proposed Order to abolish net neutrality protections without any replacement is an imminent threat to the Internet we worked so hard to create.” Democratic lawmakers have consistently opposed the repeal and are continuing their quest to keep the net neutrality rules in place. A letter by thirty-nine senators urged Pai to “abandon this radical and reckless plan to turn the FCC’s back on consumers and the future of the free and open Internet.” On December 7, Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) introduced H.R. 4585 to prohibit the FCC from relying on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the matter of restoring internet freedom to adopt, amend, revoke, or otherwise modify any rule of the Commission. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) announced that he will introduce legislation to reverse the repeal if the FCC votes on it.
It is unlikely that the three Republican commissioners will switch sides. The FCC is an independent agency. The courts have generally allowed the FCC to classify services as it wishes. One issue is whether the FCC has the authority to make a U-turn and reduce broadband ISPs to an information service. A court could challenge the FCC’s reversal ruling that the agency is behaving in an arbitrary or unreasonable manner. It will be hard to convince a court that broadband service is no longer a utility subject to regulation. Courts will serve as the real check on an FCC trying to create a closed off and more expensive web. See Brooklyn Law Library’s online version of Regulating the Web: Network Neutrality and the Fate of the Open Internet which brings together a diverse collection of scholars who examine the net neutrality policy and surrounding debates. The book contributes to discourse about net neutrality so we may continue toward preserving a truly open Internet structure in the US.
Now that we are in the reading period at BLS (aka Hell Week at some institutions) and exams are just around the corner, stress levels are running high. Throughout the library, anxious faces are buried in casebooks and class notes, an ample caffeine supply on hand to fuel the late night cram sessions. Sadly, the stress doesn’t end upon graduation. Being a lawyer requires you to deal with conflict, unreasonable client demands, tight deadlines, and long hours. These can be especially unforgiving for someone newly entering the profession, and can lead to unhealthy habits — there’s a reason why some state bar associations require members to take continuing legal education classes on substance abuse.
So what is a stressed out law student or lawyer to do?
Law students and attorneys will relate to the many examples drawn from the authors’ experiences from law practice, and how they personally benefited from meditation. For example, in the chapter on mindfulness, Cho and Gifford discuss mindful client interviews, and the importance of setting boundaries with clients. They broach topics such as working with difficult opposing counsel, and the challenges of “toxic mentoring.”
Cho and Gifford don’t sugarcoat the fact that it may not be easy for lawyers to start or to stick with a meditation practice. Our perspectives on our lives and profession get ossified and habits are hard to break. The authors’ approach provides a road map to get started with meditation and mindfulness, with plenty of room for the individual to adapt what best works for him- or herself. In addition to the guidance provided in The Anxious Lawyer, Jeena Cho’s podcasts cover related topics and are worth checking out.
For members of the BLS community who wish to engage in meditation, BLS Library has a Contemplation Room, Room 105M on the first floor mezzanine. This space is provided for students, staff and faculty to engage in contemplation, meditation, or quiet spiritual awareness. If you have any questions about the Contemplation Room, stop by the reference desk and we would be happy to help.
The Brooklyn Law School Library New Books List for December 1, 2017 has 49 print titles and 28 e-book titles. Subjects range from criminal justice and judicial error; same-sex marriage; writing skills of US Presidents; history of New York, NY; impeachment of US Presidents; prisons and privatization; and mourning customs, to name a few. Cheating: Ethics and Law in Everyday Life by Stanford Law School Professor Deborah L. Rhode, is one e-book worth reading as it deals with law and ethics and cheating. Cheating, a phenomenon so entrenched in everyday American life, costs close to a trillion dollars annually. Why it remains a serious problem is that it is often excused by the statement that “Everyone does it”. The more that individuals believe that cheating is widespread, the easier it is to justify. If Americans are cheating more, they appear to be worrying about it less. Rhode, rejects the “everybody does it” rationale and sees the ubiquity in deceit as uncomfortably close to a universal human truth. She offers the only recent comprehensive account of cheating in everyday life and the strategies necessary to address it. Because cheating is highly situational, Rhode drills down on its most common forms in sports, organizations, taxes, academia, copyright infringement, marriage, and insurance and mortgages.
The book reviews needed strategies to address the pervasiveness of cheating. Efforts need to begin early, with education by parents, teachers, and other role models who can display and reinforce moral behaviors. Organizations need to create ethical cultures, in which informal norms, formal policies, and reward structures all promote integrity. People need more moral triggers to remind them of their own values. Also important are more effective enforcement structures, including additional resources and stiffer sanctions. Rhode, the founding president of the International Association of Legal Ethics, former president of the Association of American Law Schools, and former founding director of Stanford’s Center on Ethics, notes that cheating has evolved with time. Technology has transformed some forms of cheating with filesharing, downloading of music on the internet, or plagiarism, lifting stuff off the internet, whole sites on the internet that enable people to just cut and paste their term papers and have somebody else even write their paper on plagiarism. She states in an interview with Tavis Smiley that over half of taxpayers admit to cheating sometimes on their forms. 80% of high school students will admit that they’ve cheated in class. The pervasiveness and the persistence of it is what should give us pause because there’s a price tag to it.
Plaut reports on the tradition of Jewish volunteering, the Christmas mitzvah — something to do when the rest of the world has the day off. Jews feed the hungry, fill in for Christians at work, donate toys, play Santa. These are activities that allow “Jews the opportunity to participate in Christmas, but in a way that does not detract from their Jewish identity; in fact, their volunteerism reinforces their Jewishness.”
The introduction to “A Kosher Christmas” says: “We encounter in the following chapters a multitude of distinctive strategies that portray how Jews survive and thrive in American society and how they transform Christmastime into a holiday season belonging to all Americans. The concluding chapter “Menorahs Next to Madonnas” tells the story from 1993 when Myrna Holzman, a retired public-school teacher in New York and an avid stamp collector, started a crusade to convince the U.S. Postal Service to produce a Hanukkah stamp. Her Hanukkah stamp campaign finally resulted in the U.S. Postal Service’s release of a Hanukkah stamp in 1996. The postal service invited her to the launching ceremony for the new Hanukkah stamp, the first stamp to be a joint-issue between the United States and Israel. To Myrna’s surprise, the symbol chosen to represent Hanukkah was a modern rendition of the menorah, consisting of playful, colorful shapes, The choice was ironic because the post office committee had previously rejected the menorah as a religious symbol. In 2004, the postal service released another Hanukkah stamp, this time featuring a dreidel, as Myrna had originally suggested. At 173 pages plus notes, this book is recommended for readers interested in an academic study of American Jewish cultural traditions and the “December Dilemma” of Christmas v. Chanukah as the inevitable duel that confronts many American Jews each December.
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