Anne Joseph O’Connell quoted in ProPublica, February 27, 2013
“I think President Obama bears some responsibility and the Senate bears some responsibility,” said Anne Joseph O’Connell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research shows that Obama filled fewer positions in departments and executive agencies in his first year in the White House than any of the last four presidents.
Bertrall Ross writes for Alliance for Justice, February 27, 2013
If the conservative argument is allowed to carry the day, it will represent a critical step backwards not only for voter equality, but for racial equality, congressional authority, and the institutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Any federal statute advancing the protection of racial and other minorities will be subject to close scrutiny with a presumption that it is simply the perpetuation of a group entitlement, driven by those minorities’ supposed political power.
Eric Talley interviewed by KPCC AirTalk, February 25, 2013
“One of the degrees of the heterogeneous nature of a shareholder is the extent to which they care—or are willing to trade off—maybe the quarterly bottom line against investments in carbon efficiency, or other sorts of social goals. There is a sense that in California, many shareholders—particularly within the institutional community, pension funds, and so forth—have greater degrees of weight that they place on some of those other social goals alongside profitability.”
David Gamage cited in Tax Jotwell, February 22, 2013
Gamage supports the ACA, but argues that it presents lower-income workers and their employers with a catch-22. If employers provide health insurance, workers will overpay for it. But if employers do not provide health insurance, workers cannot access traditional full-time-with-benefits jobs.
Christopher Edley, Jr. interviewed by National Public Radio, February 22, 2013
“The schools with high concentrations of poverty also tend to be the schools that have higher costs because of special-needs students, because of English language learners. But they, as well, tend to be the schools that have a disproportionate number of weakly trained teachers. The bottom line, though, is that only about one in five American students is performing at the average level of the handful of leading countries.”
Andrew Guzman interviewed by KQED-FM, Forum with Michael Krasny, February 21, 2013
“It struck me that being an international law professor and not working on this particular international problem is a little bit like being a European military expert in 1939 and not being interested in Nazi Germany; this seems very central. It soon became clear to me that the main hurdle to further progress on climate change was that the public didn’t have a complete sense of how severe the problem was.”
Stephen Sugarman quoted in The Baltimore Sun, February 21, 2013
Stephen D. Sugarman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said he doesn’t consider circumstances like those in the Levy case to be candidates for class action because experiences may vary among plaintiffs. Similar cases have rarely been class actions in recent years, he said.
Jennifer Urban writes for Wired, February 21, 2013
I propose (with Jason Schultz) that innovators should—even must—opt back in to the patent system if they wish to protect themselves from the growing threats patents pose…. Why? Because if all innovators obtain patents that they commit to keeping for defensive purposes only—linking them together into a defensive network—we can take the patent system as it exists today and use it to create a bulwark against its own worst features.
Franklin Zimring quoted in San Jose Mercury News, February 20, 2013
Police unions have argued the cuts were directly tied to the crime increases, but experts are less confident. Franklin E. Zimring, a crime expert and professor at UC Berkeley Law School, said it’s not clear if those increases are troubling trends or “just variation that can come down as easily as it goes up.”
Christopher Edley Jr. quoted in McClatchy Newspapers, February 19, 2013
Commission co-Chairman Christopher Edley Jr., the dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, said the group’s work was a long-term project. Even if nothing happens immediately, he said, it was important to “kick-start a stronger movement” to promote the idea of education equity across the country.