Hillary Clinton getting boost from liberal PAC

Maria Echaveste and Jennifer Granholm cited in San Francisco Chronicle, January 23, 2014
Jennifer Granholm, a former Michigan governor … will co-chair the Priorities Action USA political action committee…. law Professor Maria Echaveste, White House deputy chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, was also named Thursday to the PAC’s 14-member board.

“I want to elect a president who will appoint a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Citizens United so there is no necessity or no legality for this unfettered flow of money,” said Granholm.

American elections need help. Here’s how to make them better.

Taeku Lee cited in the Washington Post, January 22, 2014
The appendix also features more than 2,000 pages of testimony and political science research on election administration issues. Scholars such as … Taeku Lee (Berkeley) … testified before the commission. Their research, as well as the testimony of an even greater number of election administrators, was critical in focusing the commission on the facts of election administration as we know them.

The overlooked victims of violent crime

Stephen Sugarman writes for The New York Times, January 20, 2014
“Otherwise, as tragic as it is for the victims and close survivors of mass violence, their situation in the end is no different from the terrible situations in which the victims and survivors of everyday individual deadly violence find themselves. Ordinarily, therefore, it would seem unjust to single out mass violence events for publicly funded compensation.”

Audrie Pott: Boys admit sexually assaulting Saratoga teen who committed suicide

Barry Krisberg quoted in San Jose Mercury News, January 14, 2014
“It’s what I call justice by geography. The juvenile court has wide disparities in the amount of penalties it connects to specific behaviors,” said Barry Krisberg …. “On average, Santa Clara (County) has lower sentences than other places. They’ve embraced the treatment and rehabilitation strategy”—a mission of California’s welfare and institutions code—”so this doesn’t completely surprise me.”

Ian Haney López on dog whistle politics

Ian Haney López interviewed on MSNBC, January 13, 2014
“In order for people to have a path out of poverty, and in order for the middle class to thrive, we need a government that’s geared towards helping the middle class, not a government geared towards helping the rich. But in order to have that, we need to stop being divided by race. And how are we being divided by race? We’re being divided by race by a new sort of racial rhetoric that operates in code.”

Are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft living up to their promises in China?

Deirdre Mulligan quoted in TIME Technology & Media, January 8, 2014
Deirdre Mulligan, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley who focuses on technology and who is a G.N.I. member, said that she hoped more companies would eventually join the program beyond the three that took part in the assessment…. “You have to start somewhere,” she said. “While it’s only three companies, they have an inordinate reach across the globe.”

Is Sacramento the world’s capital of Internet privacy regulation?

Paul Schwartz, Deirdre Mulligan, Chris Hoofnagle quoted in Forbes TECH blog, January 6, 2014
Paul [Schwartz] explained that the state-federal dialogue has broken down because the current Congress is gridlocked. Meanwhile, California continues enacting “a tidal wave of California privacy laws.” He cautioned against waiting for a “federal Godot,” i.e., expecting Congress to reengage productively on privacy regulation.

Deirdre Mulligan … praised California’s long reputation for privacy leadership. She said regulators outside California look to California as a laboratory of experimentation, and those experiments have ripple effects across the globe.

Chris Hoofnagle … said notice-and-choice is based on rational choice theory, but consumers don’t always act rationally…. He believes consumers see the words “privacy policies” as seals, i.e., certifications of minimum protections. He favors correcting this by establishing minimum substantive legal standards for anyone who uses the term “privacy policy.”

A question of bias in jury selection

Elisabeth Semel quoted in the Sacramento Bee, January 5, 2014
Semel says the [clinic] brief urges the court “to ultimately decide that when a trial court rejects a Batson objection, the court must explain on the record that it has evaluated all the circumstances related to the issue of discrimination. If a trial judge fails to do so, a reviewing court should not accept the trial court’s unexplained ruling.”

Calif. toxin law warns consumers, but can burden businesses

Eric Biber interviewed on NPR, January 5, 2014
Eric Biber … says no one realized how common carcinogens are. Today, the list of potentially toxic chemicals is so long that it’s confusing to businesses that are trying to comply with the law, and that’s only half the problem. “The law uses a citizen-suit provision in which anyone can sue a company for violating the law,” Biber says. “The problem is it does create an incentive for more and more people to sue.”