Elisabeth Haub School of Law News

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University has announced that the 2022 Elisabeth Haub Award for Environmental Law and Diplomacy will be awarded to Professor Paulo de Bessa Antunes, an environmental scholar and leading professor of environmental law at Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and head of the Environmental Practice of Campos Mello Advogados (Brazil). Professor de Bessa Antunes was also a Haub Visiting Scholar at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law in the spring of 2019.

That application of honest services wire fraud has drawn some skepticism. Pace Law School professor Bennett Gershman told Law360 that this theory of honest services wire fraud by the government is seriously problematic. "I don't think we can say [Percoco] was the alter ego of Cuomo, he certainly wielded considerable influence, but now if you're going to start drawing lines, how much influence do you have to be sort of a surrogate public official, who has some type of obligation to the public?" Gershman said.

He and Pace University professor Gershman point to a provision of the Tennessee Rules of Professional Conduct that says a lawyer has a conflict of interest when there is a “significant risk’’ that his or her representation of a client is materially limited by a personal interest. In this case, Weirch’s personal interest involves “getting elected,’’ said Gershman, who teaches prosecutorial ethics. “Clearly, to me, this would be a conflict of interest,’’ he said.

Donald Trump and his family were ordered to testify in the New York Attorney General’s investigation into allegations of fraudulent financial conduct by Trump and the Trump Organization. Although Trump and his children will appear for their depositions, don’t expect them to say anything. The smart money is that they will assert the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer any substantive questions.

In the ninth episode of “Groundtruth,” Associate Hilary Jacobs (Washington, DC), speaks with Professor Achinthi Vithanage, the Associate Director of Environmental Law Programs at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, and Jesse Glickstein, Environmental & Human Rights Counsel for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Global Social and Environmental Responsibility Team. They discuss environmental justice (EJ) on a global scale and what companies can do to advance EJ, climate justice, and human rights goals worldwide. "Does international environmental law use the language of environmental justice? Sometimes it does. It's not often and it's not consistent. So when international environmental law does use environmental language, justice language, do they use the same definition as the U.S.? No, but there are similarities." — Professor Achinthi Vithanage

Professor Alexander K.A. Greenawalt is Stevens Family Faculty Scholar at Elizabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University.

“It’s messy. It’s a headache. And it’s a huge undertaking,” said Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman, an expert on discovery practices. “It seems to me if you’re going through the Trump stuff or [Rudy] Giuliani stuff [and you find something potentially useful to defendants] you’ve got to turn it over,” Gershman added. “They would have to turn over information to them that is colorably favorable or would be something a defense attorney would want to see.”