Page 6 - NYLS Magazine • 2016 • Vol 35, No. 1

The Hellhound of Wall Street
The Mecca of Prizefighting
New York Law School alumni have also been responsible at the state level for milestone legislation that continues to shape today’s world. Late-19th-century New York City was a major boxing venue, even though the sport was legally banned. Along with San Francisco, it was “the mecca of prizefighting.” The sport’s watershed moment came in 1920, when James J. Walker, Class of 1906, and then New York State Senate minority leader (and future New York City mayor), shepherded what became the Walker
Act through the Legislature. The Act implemented many rules that protected fighters but most importantly,
it created a permanent regulatory body, the New York State Athletic Commission, to oversee the sport. That Commission continues to exist today. The Act immediately became the model for similar legislation across the country and helped make boxing a respectable sport.
Colby Proclaims Woman Suffrage
As New York was legalizing boxing, the rest of the country was finally embracing the right of women to vote. In June 1919, Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women that
right. A little more than a year later, the necessary number of states ratified the amendment. On August 27, 1920, The New York Times headlines announced, “Colby Proclaims Woman Suffrage.” The “Colby” was Bainbridge Colby, a member of New York Law School’s Class of 1892. Colby was the Secretary of State under President Wilson and in that capacity had just issued the proclamation announcing that the Nineteenth Amendment had become a part of the Constitution.
The Most Celebrated of all Torts Cases and the Palsgraf Players
On August 25, 1924, New York City’s major newspapers reported an explosion that had taken place the preceding day at a Brooklyn train station. Coverage of the incident faded quickly, but one ensuing lawsuit garnered a unique place in legal history and, according to one of the law’s foremost tort scholars, William L. Prosser, the reputation as “perhaps the most celebrated of all torts cases.” New York Law School is inextricably tied to that case—Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.— through no fewer than six alumni.
Ferdinand Pecora
Although less well known, Ferdinand Pecora, who attended New York
Law School between 1903 and 1905 (receiving an honorary degree in 1958), was instrumental in the congressional hearings that led to enactment of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Serving as chief counsel to the Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency, Pecora came to be known as “the hellhound of Wall Street,” exposing years of unsavory conduct and triggering the enactment of significant
financial regulations. Wall Street bankers—dubbed “banksters” by
the media—were shamed and ridiculed when Pecora revealed that National City (known today as Citibank) knowingly offered unsound securities to the public and failed to disclose information relevant to investors’ decisions. His performance created the political climate necessary for the Roosevelt administration to enact federal legislation regulating the banks. Pecora’s conduct of the committee’s hearings
and the results he achieved had a profound and lasting impact on the regulation of Wall Street and government protection of investors. His work resonates still in Washington’s efforts over the ensuing decades and into the 21st century to oversee and police the conduct of the financial services industry. Pecora went on to become one of the first SEC Commissioners, as well as a New York State Supreme Court Justice.
The Beginnings of the Federal War on Drugs
Prior to the economic depression, the country and the world were facing another scourge in the form of opium. In 1913, Representative (and later Governor General of the Philippines) Francis Burton Harrison, Class of 1897, introduced legislation to address what he referred to as “an almost shameless traffic in these drugs,” and the “accompanying moral and economic degradation.” In 1914, Congress enacted the Harrison Act, which obliged those who imported, manufactured, sold, prescribed, or
dispensed opiates to register with a federal agency and comply
with record-keeping requirements. Henceforth, opiates would be lawful for medical purposes only and would be subject to strict regulation (and taxation) from importation to dispensation. The Act’s constitutionality was upheld in 1919, in a decision that deemed it unlawful for doctors to prescribe opiates for their addict patients. From that point forward, addicts no longer had any legal source of opiates; a thriving market for illicit drugs followed.
James J. Walker, Class of 1906, on the cover of Time magazine May 20, 1929
Bainbridge Colby, Class of 1892
Francis Burton Harrison, Class of 1897
4 NEw York Law ScHooL magazINE • 2016 • VOL. 35, NO. 1