UC to pay settlement in Davis pepper spray case

Christopher Edley cited in Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2012

In May, a separate draft report about campus responses to civil disobedience across UC urged administrators to use mediation instead of confrontation in most cases, although it said pepper spray might remain a necessary tool of last resort. A final version of that report, by UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley and UC general counsel Charles Robinson, was released Thursday with no major policy changes.

A similar story appeared in The Davis Enterprise

In SEC enforcement, size matters

Stavros Gadinis quoted in Thomson Reuters, September 13, 2012

“Big firms get different treatment,” Gadinis said in a phone interview Thursday. “That could be for many reasons (but) it’s not a nice result for the SEC, which is supposed to be an unbiased regulator of markets. Whatever the motivation, the results are not good.”

New law Ph.D. meets national scrutiny

Lauren Edelman and Robert Berring quoted in Yale Daily News, September 13, 2012

“The point that Robert Post makes about the possibility of there being a study of law that is independent of other disciplines, I think, is a hard point to make,” said Lauren Edelman…. “It’s somewhat unclear to me what it means to say that [the new Ph.D.] is wholly about law, given that law itself is a field very much populated by Ph.D.s in other disciplines, and much of the legal scholarship takes into account many of the fundamentals and methods represented.”

Bob Berring, a former interim dean of Berkeley Law, said the brand of legal education taught at Yale is already so academic that many in the profession consider it impractical. “I’ve been to five law schools in my time, and, of course, graduates of Yale dominate the legal academy,” Berring said. “But whenever someone from Yale comes up in conversation, someone always makes the joke, ‘But they didn’t go to law school, they went to Yale.'”

Split in San Mateo on how to ease crowded jails

Barry Krisberg quoted in The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2012 (registration required)

Law professor Barry Krisberg, a criminal-justice expert, comments on the varying approaches California counties are taking toward easing overcrowding in jails. “The counties have distinct cultures,” he says.

Re-examining re-education through labor

Stanley Lubman writes for The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2012

Public debate is growing in China over the country’s decades-old practice of sending alleged troublemakers to labor camps for years at a time without formal arrest or trial. The fact that the system, known as “re-education through labor” (laojiao, or RETL), is being debated openly in China has been portrayed in some quarters as evidence of the increasing power of public opinion to bolster rule of law in the country. But is there any evidence of substantive reform?

My onshore obsession with ‘Made in the USA’

Jennifer Granholm writes for POLITICO, September 11, 2012

We have evidence that some American companies are starting to onshore their manufacturing. Back in February, the Boston Consulting Group surveyed 106 companies and found that 37 percent planned to bring jobs back. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these companies are reshoring after discovering that they need hands-on quality control; that shorter lead times are essential for changing consumer tastes and managing inventory; that wages are rising in so-called “low wage” countries and that transportation costs are too volatile.

If Barack Obama had been president on 9/11

John Yoo writes for The Washington Times, September 10, 2012

Mr. Obama expanded Mr. Bush’s policies, but with a myopic twist. Mr. Obama realized the usefulness of the drone program but forgot the major drawback: Without capturing the terrorists, the United States receives no new intelligence information.

Travel site built on wiki ethos now bedevils its owner

Lila Bailey quoted in The New York Times, September 9, 2012

Ms. Bailey, a teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, [School of Law], read both complaints and said Internet Brands faced “a community management problem” and had few options because the people involved were volunteers…. Wikitravel is likely to lose its volunteers, she said, simply because Wikipedia is a “warm and fuzzy brand that is free with no ads.”

New study recommends mass adoption of electric vehicles

Ethan Elkind and Steven Weissman quoted in The Daily Californian, September 9, 2012

“Electric vehicles are important to our environmental concerns, public health, quality of life and national security,” said Ethan Elkind…. “They are important to the economy because you would have a domestic source of fuel instead of having to import foreign oil.”

The magnitude of environmental benefits is not the same in all states because it depends on which energy source is used to generate electricity. In states like West Virginia, electricity is produced by coal as opposed to cleaner energies used in California, said Weissman.