Craig Gurian

Craig Gurian is the editor of Remapping Debate.  He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia College, his law degree from Columbia Law School, and a master's degree in United States history from the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Craig's published work includes Let Them Rent Cake: George Pataki, Market Ideology, and the Attempt to Dismantle Rent Regulation in New York.

He is also Executive Director of the Anti-Discrimination Center and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham Law School.

cg@remappingdebate.org
New tactic on affirmative action could blunt Supreme Court rollback
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Civil rights, Education, Law, Race
As the Supreme Court looks ready to restrict or eliminate race-based affirmative action in its 2012-13 session, supporters of such preferences have a tool they have (puzzlingly) not yet deployed: race-based affirmative action as a means to compensate for the disproportionately negative impact of current-day "legacy admissions" policies on minority applicants. More
A culture that celebrates cheating
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Cultural values
Do all cultures celebrate cheating as much as we do? Has "getting away with it" always thrilled us to the extent it does now? I’ll concede in advance the danger of falling into the this-is-the-worst-it-has-ever-been trap, and even acknowledge, on a moment’s reflection, that our time and place has no patent on pretense, disingenuousness, and deceit. But we are still in staggeringly bad shape. More
Why are taxpayers helping companies pay for all their litigation?
Original Reporting | By Craig Gurian | Corporate influence, Taxes
For all the talk of "civil justice reform" and the need to curb rampant litigiousness in the U.S., there hasn’t been a peep about an important benefit to one class of litigants that is deeply baked into the current system. Unlike individuals who have to bear their own litigation costs in all cases where they lose and in almost all categories of cases even where they win, the tax code provides that businesses may deduct all of their legal expenses (for lawyer and expert fees, and for discovery costs) in all cases — win or lose, meritorious or non-meritorious, plaintiff or defendant. More
NYT/CBS survey sticks with worst poll question in history
Press Criticism | By Craig Gurian | Politics
Apparently enamored of the virtues of "compromise" regardless of circumstance, the poll might just have well have asked: “Should officials in the two parties act like adults in order to get the country’s business accomplished, or should they insist on all their silly ‘positions’ — like kindergarteners throwing tantrums — as we watch effective governance grind to a halt?” More
Let them eat iPhones
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Economy, Labor
Apple's lack of any sense of obligation to support American workers — indeed, the lack of any national loyalty at all — is appalling. Yet that’s not even the truly frightening part of the recent New York Times story. Most troubling is the broader, underlying narrative conveyed and ultimately encouraged by the story: there is nothing that America as a nation can or should do to alter the trajectory of events. More
Cheap labor not the way for U.S. to attract investment
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Alternative models, Labor
Our article on German automakers in the U.S. (lower wages, non-union) versus the same automakers in Germany (higher wages, fully unionized) generated a series of questions and criticisms, including some from readers who couldn't believe that there is an alternative to companies outdoing one another in reducing wages and benefits for workers. We do, of course, have choices. BMW workers don't earn more in Germany because the nice managers work in Germany and the mean managers work in the U.S. What has happened is that the U.S. has become remarkably anti-union and remarkably laissez faire — a real outlier among advanced democracies — at the same time that Germany has continued to allow workers to be valued. More
Cuomo to the 1 percent: here's a tax cut for Christmas
Original Reporting | By Craig Gurian | Taxes
If you have an adjusted gross income of $1.8 million, for example, and file a joint tax return, New York's Andrew Cuomo has engineered annual tax savings for you of $27,280 in future years. More
RD to immigration advocates: are there any limits?
Original Reporting | By Craig Gurian | Immigration
Offered the opportunity to describe in extended interviews how immigration to the United States should ideally be regulated, representatives of three prominent pro-immigration organizations painted a broad picture of a much-liberalized ongoing system (above and beyond a "road to legalization"), but did not set forth any concrete limitations to apply. More

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