Dan Farber interviewed by Politico Magazine, Feb. 14, 2016
Scalia’s prose can make for entertaining and sometimes invigorating reading. But Scalia’s tone was always calculated to deny any legitimacy to the opposing side.
UC Berkeley’s tuition break is nearly erased
Susan Gluss quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, February 13, 2016
“In previous decades, the state heavily subsidized the cost of an education for California’s public university students — thus, California students were able to pay substantially less than out-of-state students who weren’t subsidized,” said Susan Gluss.
Google Book Search helps, not hurts, authors
Pamela Samuelson writes for The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 13, 2016
The Authors Alliance represents authors who want their books to be discoverable and reach new generations of readers. Book Search helps to achieve this goal. It consists largely of nonfiction books written by scholars in the hope that the books would be read by others and contribute to the ongoing progress of knowledge creation and dissemination, in keeping with the constitutional purpose of copyright.
“Mom, is it illegal for a woman to be president?”
Alexa Koenig writes for The Huffington Post: HuffPost Politics, Feb. 12, 2016
My daughter isn’t saying she wants to be president because of the issues. She’s saying she wants to be president because she wants to break a barrier—and the only way to break that barrier is to capitalize on her identity to rectify the fact that women have been absent from our highest levels of leadership for far too long.
Delaware court’s disapproval of disclosure-only settlements causing plaintiffs pause
Steven Davidoff Solomon and Matthew D. Cain study cited in Daily Journal, Feb. 11, 2016
According to a recent study, stockholder suits in Delaware were filed in 87 percent of all transactions last year, a decline from 95 percent in 2014. But the plaintiffs’ bar hit the brakes hard in the fourth quarter of 2015 – filing lawsuits on just 21.4 percent of the deals involving Delaware-incorporated companies.
Trump and Sanders: The Founders’ worst nightmare
John Yoo writes for The Weekly Standard, Feb. 10, 2016
The men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a new constitution designed it to prevent someone like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. One of their great fears was of a populist demagogue who would promise the people everything and respect nothing.
Trump on torture
John Yoo interviewed by The Wall Street Journal: Opinion Journal, Feb. 9, 2016
“The whole point of this very limited, narrow program is to gather intelligence, to stop future attacks. It has nothing to do with punishment or revenge, but that seems to be what Mr. Trump thinks is the whole point.”
Corporate inversions aren’t the half of it
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2016
If you thought there was a problem with inversions — deals that allow American companies to relocate their headquarters to lower their tax bills — wait until you hear about the real secret to avoiding corporate taxes. It’s called earnings stripping, and it is a technique that the Obama administration has so far failed to stop.
Is down market making it hard for activist investors?
Steven Davidoff Solomon interviewed on Bloomberg, Feb. 8, 2016
Activism’s been a great strategy for the past few years. Because it’s a rising market, you come in, you split the company, normally there’s a pop right there, or you sell the company, and there’s a pop right there. But in a down market, it’s much harder to do–much harder to sell the company, much harder to arrange a split. CEOs are scared, they don’t want to engage in risky transactions. So it just becomes a much harder strategy.
Defense lawyers begin summing up in Hissène Habré war crimes trial
Kim Thuy Seelinger quoted in The Guardian, Feb. 8, 2016
“We are glad at least that it seems our submission will influence the court’s work indirectly,” said Kim Thuy Seelinger, director of the sexual violence programme at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the team that drew up the brief.