Family and career: Women in academia lose faith in having it all

Mary Ann Mason cited in LA Times, August 21, 2012

More telling, another survey shows that young women are clearly mindful from the outset of the potentially painful choices that may lie ahead. Mary Ann Mason, a law professor at UC Berkeley, surveyed 8,000 doctoral students in the UC system in 2008. She found that more than half of all female candidates felt that having children would hinder their careers, and that fear of being held back postponed many academic women’s child-rearing, sometimes permanently.

Viewpoints: Restore public trust to water law

Antonio Rossman writes for The Sacramento Bee, August 19, 2012

Big Water engineered the crash of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem by increasing Delta extractions through secretly negotiated contract amendments. When challenged in the courts, California’s water “leaders” conducted scorched-earth litigation that postponed judgment against them until the damage was done. More recently, the state’s Colorado River water districts have brought the Salton Sea to the edge of disaster, again adopting the courtroom tactics of Big Tobacco, to postpone judgment until the damage is done.

Death penalty sentences waning in East Bay

Elisabeth Semel quoted in San Jose Mercury News, August 18, 2012

“Prosecutors are increasingly willing to use the punishment of life without the possibility of parole and recognize that it is more acceptable to the general public,” said Elisabeth Semel, a professor of law at UC Berkeley Law School. “The decreasing popularity of the death penalty … has an influence in the decision.”

Citizens are better at picking endangered species

Eric Biber quoted in Futurity.org, August 16, 2012

“There are some 100,000 species of plants and animals in North America, and asking one federal agency to stay on top of that is tough,” Biber says. “If there were restrictions on the number of citizen-initiated petitions being reviewed, the government would lose a whole universe of people providing high-quality information about species at risk, and it is likely that many species would be left unprotected.”

Green protests on the rise in China

Alex Wang quoted in Nature Publishing Group, August 14, 2012

Alex Wang, an environmental lawyer at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the lawsuit signals an opportunity for civil-society groups to play a part in environmental enforcement. But “only time will tell whether this turns into precedent or remains a one-time event. Too many promising initiatives like this one have languished once the initial publicity has died down,” he warns.

Now it’s Barack Obama vs. GOP Congress

Jennifer Granholm writes for POLITICO, August 14, 2012

Ryan was, of course, one of the leaders behind Congress’s refusal to compromise with President Barack Obama and the Democrats. He voted against Simpson-Bowles. He publicly trashed the product of the Gang of Six. His House Republican Caucus led us close to the brink of default.

PTSD land

Eric Stover cited in Foreign Policy, August 13, 2012

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007, established that civilians who were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder ―about 74 percent of the Ugandans surveyed by University of California, Berkeley, scholar Eric Stover and his colleagues―were “more likely to favor violent means to end the conflict” than civilians who were not. Trauma begets trauma―and violence.

Employers await guidance on health insurance mandate

David Gamage quoted in Tax Notes Today, August 13, 2012 (subscription required)

“The purpose of the 30-hour workweek is to make it difficult for employers to move full-time employees to part-time status to avoid the employer-mandate penalties,” David Gamage of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law told Tax Analysts.

Prosecutors use of death penalty waning in Alameda County

Elisabeth Semel quoted in Oakland Tribune, August 13, 2012

“Prosecutors are increasingly willing to use the punishment of life without the possibility of parole and recognize that it is more acceptable to the general public,” said Elisabeth Semel, professor of law at Berkeley Law School. “The decreasing popularity of the death penalty … has an influence in the decision.”

Investing in youth of color

Jorge Ruiz de Velasco interviewed on KQED-FM, August 10, 2012

“One of the important things the select committee did was that it held hearings in Oakland, in Los Angeles, in Fresno, out in the Coachella Valley, and it proceeded from two principles: One was, can we engage the people closest to the problem in real communities, both in identifying what the problem is and identifying solutions? And then taking that as an opportunity to identify real innovative practices that are going on in Oakland and Los Angeles that we can talk about today—places that are having results.”