Podcast: The Low of the Land

In the Spring of 2019, the CULR Online Team took on a new podcast initiative, “Low of the Land”, to better engage and converse with leading faculty and legal experts both on and off campus. Our podcasts aim to discover and contribute to the discourse surrounding complex legal issues. Tune in, share, and subscribe to listen to staff contributors Pagona Paige Kytzidis, Mark Gyourko, Daniela Apodaca, Tiffany Jing, and Jake Gray explore contemporary issues ranging from the future of death row prosecutions to the legal personhood of immigrants to the evolution of the seemingly capricious Supreme Court. More episodes to come in the fall!

Ep. 01: Immigration and Personhood
by Pagona Kytzidis

In this episode of "Low of the Land," Pagona Kytzidis wields a definitional and legal analysis of immigrant personhood to explore which rights, exactly, are lost at America's peripheries. Tune in for Pagona's insights on the modern police state, which is using Supreme Court precedent to assert the 'power of the border' over migrant persons themselves.

Ep. 02: Dissecting the Death Penalty
by Jake Gray and Tiffany Jing

In this episode of "Low of the Land," Jake Gray and Tiffany Jing analyze the justifications and impacts of the death penalty, assessing rationales such as retributivism, deterrence theory, and consequentialist readings of the law. The CULR podcasters are joined by Robert Dunham, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, who addresses the arguments of death penalty advocates before evaluating the ways that the most harmful cases make their way up to the highest Court today. Tune in to hear more about the rates of wrongful convictions, Scalia counterfactuals, and more.

Ep. 03: Considering the Court
by Daniella Apodaca and Mark Gyourko

In this episode of "Low of the Land," Daniella Apodaca and Mark Gyourko trace the guiding legal history and theory of the Supreme Court from the latter half of the 20th century to the present. The CULR podcasters are joined by Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, and Professor Michael Shumsky, a Columbia Law Lecturer and active Supreme Court litigator at Kirkland & Ellis. Daniella and Mark assess the role of originalism, textualism, and judicial activism in Court history, questioning whether the institution can neatly fit into either a conservative or liberal tradition. Tune in to learn more about Court's recent historical transformations, aberrations, and lessons, concluding with a consideration of how the Roberts Court deals with Trumpism today.

Know Your Rights: How To Avoid The Copyright Cost of Being a Black Creator (Part 1)

by Madison Brianna Garrett and Saiya Palmer

In this inaugural episode of the "Low of the Land" Know Your Rights edition, Madison Brianna Garrett interviews Jasmine Johnson Parker, an Adjunct Professor at the Emory University School of Law teaching Entertainment and Social Media Law, concerning the modern implications of intellectual property law for Black creators on social media platforms. Tune in to the first part of this two-part series to learn more about the extent to which intellectual property law has been shaped by the power of social media content creation as well as to hear Professor Parker’s advice on how Black creators can best protect their online content.

Copyright vs. Creativity: The Musician’s Unsung Battle

by Ashley Pelham, Julie Song, and Inna Yuan

In this episode of "Low of the Land," Ashley Pelham and Julie Song interview Professor Audrey Amsellem, a core lecturer for the Music Humanities department at Columbia University who teaches the specialized course: “Music, Sound, and the Law,” concerning the tensions inherent in the intersection between music copyright, contract, and intellectual property law and the creative freedoms of music artists. Tune in to this episode to learn more about how these areas of the law influence relations between artists and their record labels as well as artists’ sounds, the complexities of music royalties, cases of purported copyright infringement, and music plagiarism litigation.