BLS Library Blog

The right of same-sex couples to marry triggered decades of intense conflict before the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in the 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges. Some of the most divisive contests shaping the quest for marriage equality occurred within the ranks of LGBTQ advocates. In the Brooklyn Law School Library copy of the encyclopedia-like 441-page book Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America (Harvard University Press, April 2017), author Nathaniel Frank, internationally recognized authority on LGBTQ equality and public policy, tells the dramatic story of how an idea that once seemed unfathomable became a legal and moral right in just half a century.

Awakening begins in the 1950s, when millions of gays and lesbians were afraid to come out, let alone fight for equality. Across the social upheavals of the next two decades, a gay rights movement emerged with the rising awareness of the equal dignity of same-sex love. A corps of  lawyers soon began to focus on legal recognition for same-sex couples, if not yet on marriage itself. It was only after being pushed by a small set of committed lawyers and grassroots activists that established movement groups created a successful strategy to win marriage in the courts. Marriage equality proponents then had to win over members of their own LGBTQ community who declined to make marriage a priority, while seeking to rein in others who charged ahead heedless of their carefully laid plans. All the while, they had to fight against virulent anti-gay opponents and capture the American center by spreading the simple message that love is love, ultimately propelling the LGBTQ community immeasurably closer to justice.

See the YouTube video about the book.

BLS students, faculty, and staff now have access to the Thomson Reuters Proview eBook Reader.  Proview makes traditional books in the Library’s collection available on a desktop through Westlaw, or on a laptop or tablet after downloading the Thomson Reuters ProView app., giving users the flexibility to work wherever they are, whenever they want.

After logging on to Westlaw, follow these steps:

• Click or tap on “Practice Ready”
• Scroll to “Law eBook Access”
• Click on “Access Now”

You will then get an alphabetical listing of the covers of the titles that are available through the BLS Library.  Then go to the title you are interested in; on the left you will see an icon to access the table of contents to aid in your research.  There is also a search icon that allows you to search within the book.  Additional features that make for ease of use are:

• Create bookmarks, highlight text, and write annotations
• Create PDFs and share sections of a text or links to specific sections
• Tap or click on a case, statute or regulation to link to the full text of a document in your Westlaw account
• Content automatically updates on your browser or via prompts on downloaded content in a digital device

You can also access a ProView eBook from SARA, the library catalog, by entering a title and then clicking on the link to the ProView version.  You may also do a keyword search using the phrase “proview ebook” to obtain a list of all titles available at BLS as a ProView eBook.

According to a Congressional Research Service Report entitled Federal Funding Gaps: A Brief Overview by James V. Saturn, there have been 18 funding gaps since fiscal year 1971. Almost all of the funding gaps occurred between fiscal years 1977 and 1995. During this 19-fiscal-year period, 15 funding gaps occurred. Multiple funding gaps occurred during a single fiscal year in four instances: (1) three gaps covering a total of 28 days in fiscal year 1978, (2) two gaps covering a total of four days in fiscal year 1983, (3) two gaps covering a total of three days in fiscal year 1985, and (4) two gaps covering a total of 26 days in fiscal year 1996.

Brooklyn Law School Library has in its electronic collection The Government Shutdown of 2013: Perspective and Analysis by Rosanne C. Lundy. According to the description “When federal agencies and programs lack appropriated funding, they experience a funding gap. Under the Anti-Deficiency Act, they must cease operations, except in certain emergency situations or when law authorizes continued activity. Failure of the President and Congress to reach agreement on interim or full-year funding measures occasionally has caused government shutdowns. Government shutdowns have necessitated furloughs of several hundred thousand federal employees, required cessation or reduction of many government activities, and affected numerous sectors of the economy. This book discusses the causes, processes, and effects of federal government shutdowns; economic activity during the government shutdown and debt limit brinkmanship; impacts and costs of the October 2013 federal government shutdown; a brief overview of federal funding gaps; and operations of the Department of Defense during a lapse in appropriations.”

If you want a tale of a bank charged with falsifying loan-application documents by inflating borrower assets, incomes, and job titles, and “fraudulent mortgages” being sold to Fannie Mae, the federally backed mortgage company, see the documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. It is a 2016 American documentary by Steve James that centers on Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a family-owned community bank situated in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It was deemed “small enough to jail” rather than “too big to fail” and became the only financial institution to face criminal charges following the subprime mortgage crisis when District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. announced a 184-count indictment against the bank and 19 of its current and former employees accusing them of conspiracy, grand larceny, falsifying business records, and residential mortgage fraud.  Ten Abacus employees accepted plea deals in exchange for testifying against the bank, and Ken Yu became the star witness. The film debuted at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival winning first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award in the documentary category.

The principal behind Abacus is Thomas Sung (Brooklyn Law School, Class of 1964). Born in Shanghai, he emigrated at age 16 to New York in 1952. His family was processed through Ellis Island and detained for three months before they could settle in New York. That left Sung determined to learn the law and help other immigrants. After earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of Florida in agricultural economics, he worked as an analyst for several New York companies while attending Brooklyn Law School at night. He began practicing law in 1964 and worked pro bono for the Chinese community. Sung founded Abacus in 1984 to serve the immigrant population, which had grown in New York. “We take people from illegal immigrant status, to legal status, to prosperous business people and homeowners,” said Sung.

Whether the government was giving a pass to big banks and picking on a small one, perhaps with a tinge of racism in its motives, is a question. Vance called the accusations of cultural bias “entirely misplaced and entirely wrong” adding “I felt that our handling of the bank was consistent with how we would have handled the bank if we were investigating a bank that serviced a South American community or the Indian community.” The movie shows its affection for the Sung family, which was equipped professionally, if not financially, for an expensive legal battle. Three daughters were trained as lawyers, including Jill Sung, the bank’s chief executive, Vera Sung, a director of the bank, who worked for the Brooklyn DA’s office for two-and-a-half years, and Chantarelle Sung, who worked in the Manhattan DA’s office for seven years leaving when Vance took over and started prosecuting her family’s bank. The NY Times criticized the filing as a dubious mortgage fraud case against Abacus, which was tatally exonerated at trial. Local newspapers put the news of the bank’s acquittal on their front pages. There was criticism from Bennett L. Gershman, a former prosecutor at the Manhattan D.A.’s office now a professor at Pace Law School, who said “This case just involved a terrible example of poor judgment by the prosecutor.” He characterized it as a “David and Goliath situation,” echoing a widespread view that it was convenient to make an example of a small bank like Abacus.

The rhetoric which Donald Trump practices works partly because Trump is employing many of the same rhetorical strategies used by one of the greatest orators in history: Cicero. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) was born on January 3, 106 BC in the hill town of Arpinum, about 60 miles southeast of Rome. He won his share of elections and moved up the ranks of the Roman republic until he became consul, the highest office in the land, at a younger age than anyone ever had without coming from a politically connected family. He was the Kennedy or the Obama of first-century-B.C. Rome. He was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. But he sounded a lot like Trump when it came to rhetoric. And he knew how to use it.

When Cicero was attacking the corrupt governor Gaius Verres (see Brooklyn Law School Library’s 2011 e-book Cicero, Against Verres, 2.1.53-86), he used the rhetorical device of preterition, an unfamiliar word whose concept has become familiar this year. Preterition is when a speaker says he will not mention something, usually something unsavory. By naming the thing he will not mention, of course he has already planted the idea in his listeners’ minds. “Nothing shall be said of his drunken nocturnal revels; no mention shall be made of his pimps and dicers,” Cicero said about Verres. The list went on. Cicero rounded it out by saying, “The rest of his life has been such that I can well afford to put up with the loss of not mentioning those enormities.” If listeners didn’t know before about Verres’ liking for alcohol and prostitutes, they did now.

Then there Cicero’s tactic of asking the audience a leading question – stirring up their enthusiasm as participants, and suggesting an answer that he cannot state himself. That sort of question is formally called anachinosis. Defending his friend Rabirius, who had a role in the death of a populist political figure, Cicero laid out the chaotic situation and asked, “What would you do in such a crisis? …. While the consuls were summoning you to uphold the safety and liberty of your country, which authority, which invitation, which party would you prefer to follow, whose command would you select to obey?” Cicero led his listeners to believe that, amid the tumult that led to the death, any one of them might well have acted just like Rabirius.

Then there is ecphonesis which we see in the exclamation at the end of Trump’s tweets. “O tempora! O mores!” (“The times! The customs!”) Cicero wrote in one of his most famous expressions, evocatively proclaiming his distress about society in just a few punctuated words. Trump deploys ecphonesis effectively and memorably when he ends his tweets, “Sad!”

For more, see Brooklyn Law School Library’s 2002 e-book Brill’s Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric intended as a companion to the study of Cicero’s oratory and rhetoric for both students and experts in the field: for the neophyte, it provides a starting point; for the veteran Ciceronian scholar, a place for renewing the dialogue about issues concerning Ciceronian oratory and rhetoric; for all, a site of engagement at various levels with Ciceronian scholarship and bibliography. The book is arranged chronologically and covers most aspects of Cicero’s oratory and rhetoric.