Elisabeth Haub School of Law News

Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer, a law professor at Pace University, said there is a “gray area” between public officials being able to block people and stop harassment and the rights of others to view online posts. She said the legal protection social media companies enjoy under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows the companies to be immune from certain lawsuits over content posted by third parties, should be amended to prevent any online harassment. “If public officials want to stop allowing harassing information, I think they must address it by amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is a difficult, if not impossible task,” Ms. Tenzer said. “I also think as a mother, and a social media scholar, that publishing anti-hate rhetoric or posts that teach others to kill should never be permitted. But as long as section 230 exists, I think it is hard to hold social media companies accountable.”

Such arguments are “nonsensical,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “Every person, including Trump, has the right to engage in ‘forceful political advocacy,’” he said. “But Trump and his co-conspirators went far beyond advocacy. Trump and his cohorts engaged in a criminal conspiracy to subvert the results of a lawful election by illegal means. To endorse this argument would be to sanction any action taken under the guise of political advocacy, including violence and even political assassination.”

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Professor Bennett Gershman speaks with Salon about how former Trump lawyers could face “disbarment” and “possibly be jailed” over court stunts.

“Trump’s lawyers are perilously close to being sanctioned once again and more heavily by Judge Engoron for their misconduct,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “They are behaving in manifest bad faith by intentionally delaying and obstructing the proceedings and deliberately creating a spectacle to promote Trump's fundraising. Lawyers in any legal proceeding foresee an appeal if they lose and try to make a complete and proper record for appellate review.”

Municipalities use local-level land use law for a variety of purposes. The Land Use Law Center at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University (the Center), in 2022, engaged in a project to analyze how municipalities are using their land use powers to advance the various goals of climate resilient development (CRD). The Center produced a set of guidelines for analyzing municipal CRD strategies (PDF) by answering the following questions: 1. What CRD objectives does this strategy achieve, 2. What methods are there to ensure resilience, 3. What methods are there to avoid maladaptation, and 4. What is the feasibility of this strategy? These focus areas are borrowed from the Summary for Policymakers in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, which featured CRD as one of the proposed solutions.

“Knowing this will enable the prosecutors to prepare to counter that defense through witnesses and arguments showing the weakness of that defense, and indeed, that such defense is completely untenable given Trump’s statements and actions that show he himself made all the critical decisions relating to subverting the 2020 election results,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) highlighted the pioneering leadership of Pace Law Dean Emeritus Richard L. Ottinger in a tribute commemorating 40 years of Climate Action.

The Hudson Independent reports Professor John Nolon recently was a guest speaker at the Irvington Green’s monthly Climate Talk to discuss how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes local land use law can be a climate solution.