Call me, pay fee

James Rule writes for The New York Times, June 21, 2012

Ordinary people today confront well-financed, sophisticated organizations capable of carpet-bombing the public with insistent one-way exhortations…. The victims don’t have a chance in a million of reaching the harassing callers to share a piece of their indignant minds. The courts have gone back and forth over history balancing rights of free expression against those of privacy. But ultimately the law does recognize a distinction between communication and harassment.

Conversations: David Gamage

David Gamage interviewed in Tax Analysts, June 21, 2012

“Almost everyone in Washington supports tax reform in theory. Yet I’m not convinced there’s much appetite for real tax reform, which would necessarily create both winners and losers. Tax reform is always supposedly on the agenda, but that doesn’t mean in any particular year that there’s any real likelihood of us seeing meaningful tax reform.”

Asian American immigrants outpace Latinos

Aarti Kohli quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2012

“Cambodians, Hmong, Laotians—are not generally doing as well,” said Aarti Kohli, an immigration policy and law expert who was recently with the Warren Institute at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. “We should be paying attention to the major gaps between people.”

Bay Area sees dramatic drop in violent crime

David Sklansky quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, June 17, 2012

The statistics, though, reveal difficulties in some places. Violent crime went up 6 percent in 2011 in Oakland…. “The city is still struggling to devise a response to the crime problem that the city can unite around,” said David Sklansky, a law professor at UC Berkeley who has written extensively about policing.

China to ask for environmental funding at Rio summit

Alex Wang interviewed on Marketplace, Sustainability, June 15, 2012

“I think sometimes the debate misses how much of the responsibility is also in the U.S. and the developed countries that are after all shipping a lot of industries to China and purchasing the goods that China is producing.”

“Defensive Patent License” created to protect innovators from trolls

Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban quoted in Ars Technica, June 12, 2012

“The idea is this:  If you want to be part of this network of defensive patent people, you are committing that all of your patents, every single thing you’ve done, will be available royalty-free to anyone who wants to take a license, if they commit to only practice defensive patent licensing,” Schultz said today in Boston at the Usenix conference on cyberlaw issues.

Urban notes in her blog post that both Twitter’s pledge and the DPL are “a private response to a broken patent system,” but “unless and until Congress or the courts can improve things, such private solutions may be our best options to stem the rising tide of patent attacks.”
This story appeared in a number of sources including The Verge, BGR, Techdirt, Intellectual Asset Management magazine, and InfoWorld.

University report takes stab at Brown’s lofty renewables goal

Jeffrey Russell and Steven Weissman report cited in Greentech Media, June 11, 2012

The Governor’s office asked CLEE’s Weissman and Jeffrey Russell to expand on the UCLA conference stakeholder input with further research and analysis and build a comprehensive outline of how to overcome the many remaining planning, permitting, financing, construction and interconnection barriers slowing California’s DG.

“There is going to have to be a lot done on the utility level,” Weissman said. “The utilities … tend to look at their resource needs on a service territory-wide basis. But in order to make distributed generation a significant factor and a positive contribution to the grid, there is going to have to be a renewed emphasis on local resource planning.”
This story appeared in a number of sources including ClimateWire, San Francisco Business Times, Daily Democrat, and KQED News.

Patent granted to encourage purchase of digital textbooks

David Hansen quoted in Ars Technica, June 11, 2012

“I’m not all that worried that this is going to do much because this is aged thinking as to how students would access materials for courses,” said David Hansen, the Digital Library Fellow at Berkeley Law. “I can’t envision too many responsible instructors going along with it.”

Latent effects of capital punishment

Franklin Zimring quoted in The Huffington Post Crime Blog, June 11, 2012

Franklin E. Zimring … co-authored the chapter with David T. Johnson…. The professors discussed “four latent impacts of attempts to revive and rationalize the death penalty in the United States.” Their work explained that an enduring legacy of the American resurgence of capital punishment was that it helped to take the focus off of other areas of the criminal justice system, and in the process, eviscerated protections against governmental excess.

Attorney Michael Bamberger wins FTRF Roll of Honor Award

Michael Bamberger quoted in American Libraries, June 11, 2012

First Amendment attorney Michael A. Bamberger has been named the recipient of the 2012 Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) Roll of Honor Award…. Bamberger is perhaps best known for the landmark case Hudnut v. American Booksellers Association, a challenge to an Indianapolis anti-pornography ordinance…. In 1985, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts’ decisions to strike down the ordinance as unconstitutional.