IRS considers taxing work perks like food, gym membership

David Gamage interviewed on Fox News, April 16, 2014

David Gamage … said it would really boil down to who benefits from these perks. “To what extent is this intended as a perk, a form of compensation, for the benefit of the employee, or to what extent is this just another way the employer gets the employee to work harder and longer and do things for the benefit of the employer?”

Secret drugs, agonizing deaths

Megan McCracken and Jennifer Moreno write for The New York Times, April 13, 2014

Facing a critical shortage of lethal injection drugs, prison officials in a number of states have recently engaged in an unseemly scramble to obtain new execution drugs, often from unreliable and even illegal sources. Not only does this trend raise serious questions about the constitutionality of executions, it also undermines the foundations of our democratic process.

Law schools gearing up to look closer at how well they teach

Charles Weisselberg quoted in Daily Journal, April 11, 2014 (Registration required)

At UC Berkeley School of Law, Charles D. Weisselberg has crafted some outcomes this semester for his criminal procedure class…. Weisselberg is Berkeley’s associate dean for curriculum and teaching and a former clinician. But he is new to using outcomes. “This is the first time I’ve set them out in my syllabus,” he said. “It really helps the students … and it helps me focus the teaching I do.”

Supreme Court protects free speech selectively

Jesse Choper and Kenneth Bamberger quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, April 11, 2014

Jesse Choper, a constitutional law professor at UC Berkeley and a self-described moderate, said the court’s free-speech priorities seem skewed. “Protecting dissidents is more central to the First Amendment’s free-speech clause than simply offensive speech,” because a diversity of opinions promotes democracy, he said.

Another Berkeley law professor, Kenneth Bamberger, said the court has been unsympathetic to free speech “where the government is acting as the authority.”

High cost, young age: sentencing youth to a life of debt

Kate Weisburd writes for the Huffington Post, Politics blog, April 9, 2014

When young people graduate from the juvenile justice system, they have, by any reasonable measure, repaid their debt to society. But one debt is not easily repaid: the hundreds and even thousands of dollars in fines, fees and restitution that young people and their families owe as a result of their cases.

Do death row inmates have the right to know origins of lethal injection drugs?

Megan McCracken interviewed on PBS NewsHour, April 9, 2014

“Questions of the purity, the potency, the pH balance, whether or not a product is contaminated, that all comes into play. And if the states are able to hide that information and refuse to turn it over, the courts are prevented from carrying out a constitutional analysis of the procedures, and they are prevented from determining if the procedures comport with the law.”

Why China can’t clean up corruption

Stanley Lubman writes for The Wall Street Journal, China Real Time blog April 9, 2014

China’s current campaign against corruption, which has targeted very high-level officials, demonstrates both the extent of the corruption in China and the Party-state’s failure to prevent its spread. The Party has tough choices ahead: It clearly recognizes the danger corruption poses to its own mandate to rule, but meaningful reform would weaken the very power that the Party seeks to strengthen.