Malcolm Feeley Says Criminal Trials Delayed by Poor Preparation

SF Weekly, November 10, 2010 by Peter Jamison
http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-11-10/news/obstruction-of-justice/

Malcolm Feeley, a professor at the UC Berkeley Law School, says there’s another, less obvious reason for delays: inadequate preparation by prosecutors…. “It’s a very passive process, where everybody is waiting to see what everybody else wants to do,” he says. “If prosecutors could spend more time investigating their cases, or if they’d just read the file ahead of time, they could move them along.”

John Yoo Rejects New Start Treaty

The New York Times, November 9, 2010 by John R. Bolton and John Yoo
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10bolton.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=Berkeley&st=nyt

To prevent New Start from gravely impairing America’s nuclear capacity, the Senate must ignore the resolution of ratification and demand changes to the treaty itself. These should include deleting the preamble’s language linking nuclear arsenals to defense systems, and inserting new language distinguishing conventional strike capacities from nuclear launching systems or deleting limits on launchers entirely.

Stanley Lubman Thinks Chinese Nobel Prize Winner Inspires Reformers

The Wall Street Journal, China Real Time Report, November 9, 2010 by Stanley Lubman
http://on.wsj.com/c7I6SH

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo prompted furious denunciations of the Nobel Committee by the Chinese party-state, which most recently has pressed European governments to boycott the award ceremony. However, other reactions, via the Internet and Twitter, suggest that there is resonance in Chinese society for Liu’s call for gradual political reform.

Jonathan Simon Says Mass Incarceration a Failure

The Boston Globe, November 8, 2010 by James Carroll
http://bit.ly/bIFtIp

Just as irrational assumptions of “risk assessment” prompted mortgage brokers to understate the risks of home ownership, they led prosecutors, in a parallel noted by Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon, to grossly overstate the risks to society of huge numbers of defendants. The housing bubble, Simon shows, devastated neighborhoods by littering them with abandoned properties. The prison bubble devastated neighborhoods by depriving them of fathers and husbands.

Alan Auerbach Expects Obama to Face Chilly Reception Overseas

The Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2010 by Jonathan Weisman
http://on.wsj.com/afmB4m

Two years ago in London, Mr. Obama and his economic team were greeted at the G-20 summit as something akin to rock stars. At the G-20 in Seoul next week, “they’re not going to have a lot of allies,” said Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has close ties to the White House.

Eric Talley Examines Alleged Hurd Leak

San Jose Mercury News, November 5, 2010 by Pete Carey
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16538210

Hurd may have breached his duty not to disclose confidential corporate information, said Eric Talley…. But if she didn’t tell anyone else who traded on the information, HP was probably under no obligation to disclose it…. “If the board had reason to believe this person was not going be trading on inside information, or tipping others, it’s hard to cobble together a story the board should be doing anything more,” he said.

Ty Alper and Elisabeth Semel Discuss Award-Winning Paper on Executions

The Daily Californian, November 4, 2010 by Katie Bender
http://bit.ly/dcA2yj

Ty Alper will be receiving an award for writing the best article of the year within the Journal of Medical Regulation…. “What interested me in this issue is that courts were saying without any basis that doctors cannot participate,” said Alper…. “If the presence of doctors is necessary to ensure that the execution is not excruciatingly painful, then I would support the presence of doctors to make sure that the execution is humane and constitutional,” he said.

Death Penalty Clinic Director Elisabeth Semel said … Alper’s study shows “how often the three-drug execution procedure can go wrong and result in an execution that violates the Eighth Amendment” as well as “how and why the frequency of botched executions is far greater than the public and the courts understood.”

Robert MacCoun Expects More Marijuana Ballot Initiatives

San Francisco Chronicle, November 3, 2010 by Pete Young and Mark Tannenbaum
http://bit.ly/cPRh7m

“The issue is not going to go away,” said Robert MacCoun…. “The next time around, we’ll see a proposal that’s more incremental and less radical—for example, legalizing home cultivation or setting up restricted access, like buyer’s clubs, rather than full-scale retail sales.”