Pace Now

Professor Nicholas Robinson speaks to Times Union about the Green Amendment case over massive landfill being under appeal and its potential broader impact.

“It’s going to be watched very closely,” said Nicholas Robinson, a law professor at Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law. “It will be persuasive to any other cases that are pending.”

Pace University School of Law has tracked Green Amendment claims that have sprung up in several other cases around the state, including the People of the State of New York v. Norlite (PDF).

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Professor and staff attorney for the Food & Farm Business Law Clinic Jack Hornickel speaks with The Examiner News about a local organic farm being forced to relocate.

“The trend in the last few years of greater land unaffordability was fueled by COVID,” said Jack Hornickel, a staff attorney for the Food & Farm Business Law Clinic at Pace University in Pleasantville who has been advising Deacon. “It was an outward urban migration and because land values are driven by a free market, there are higher more profitable uses for the land than farming.”

But there are few tools available to hold the justice accountable, says Pace University Law Prof. Bennett Gershman. Thomas' willingness to receive such benefits, including trips and vacations which total in the millions of dollars, is almost “certainly unlawful and ethically reprehensible,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “We have never seen a situation like this before,” Gershman said. “Thomas could be removed from the Supreme Court for his misconduct but won’t be. He won’t leave voluntarily even if he doesn’t like the pay. He has lifetime tenure. His position appears to be to stonewall his detractors and continue to serve on the Court, serving without much distinction, but with considerable power.”

“​The state court ruling sets a historic precedent which other states may follow,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “It is a landmark ruling. I can’t think of an application of this provision in modern times.”