NPR, All Things Considered, June 23, 2009 by Ari Shapiro
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105439966
“In the public debate, it has been a great challenge for the liberal and progressive side to capture this notion in a bumper sticker,” says Goodwin Liu, editor of the new book Keeping Faith with the Constitution. Liu teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, and he chairs the board of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal group.
Time, June 22, 2009 by Kate Pickert
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1906105,00.html
According to Jacob Hacker … rural health cooperatives established after the Great Depression were disbanded, in part, because they were badly managed and were opposed by the physician community…. “The history of cooperatives is that it’s very hard to set these things up, and while we’re trying to set them up, there’s not going to be accountability and pressure [on private insurers],” says Hacker. “They would be weakest when they’re most needed—at the outset.”
The New Yorker, June 22, 2009 by John Seabrook
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/22/090622fa_fact_seabrook
Franklin Zimring … told me that one reason that Ceasefire’s effectiveness is difficult to predict in any given city is that Kennedy’s results have not been subjected to a rigorous independent analysis. “Ceasefire is more a theory of treatment than a proven strategy,” he said, adding, “It’s odd that no one has ever said, ‘O.K., here are the youths who were not part of the Ceasefire program in Boston, let’s compare them to the youths who were.’ And no one has followed up with any long-range studies of the criminal behavior of the group that was in the program, either. We just don’t have the evidence, and until we do we can’t evaluate how effective Ceasefire really is.”
Contra Costa Times, June 22, 2009 by John Simerman
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_12667403?source=rss
UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law professor Jesse Choper, however, said the major Supreme Court decisions have not directly addressed policies that don’t just exclude religious groups, but other activities as well.
National Law Journal, June 22, 2009 by Karen Sloan
http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202431601871&slreturn=1
Officials and students at Berkeley’s law school spent the past academic year adjusting the school’s assistance program in light of the new federal law, said Eric Biber, an assistant professor and member of the financial aid committee. The school can afford to be more generous with its own money because of the infusion of federal assistance…. “Our goal was to provide better coverage for our students in a way we could sustain in the long term,” Biber said.
“I don’t know that the information has really trickled out to students,” Ma said. “The students who are really interested in it are going out and doing their own research.”
-Ars Technica.com, June 21, 2009 by Nate Anderson
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/whats-next-for-jammie-thomas-rasset.ars
University of California law professor Pam Samuelson, an expert on statutory damages and copyright law, also called for reform in a fascinating paper released in April 2009. In reference to the first Thomas-Rasset judgment, Samuelson concluded, “Some jurors in the Thomas case wanted to award $750 per infringed song, while others argued for $150,000 per song; why they compromised on $9250 per song is a mystery. In today’s world where the average person in her day-to-day life interacts with many copyrighted works in a way that may implicate copyright law, the dangers posed by the lack of meaningful constraints on statutory damage awards are particularly acute.”
-Wired.com, June 22, 2009 by David Kravets
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/thomasfollow/
Fellow Tara Wheatland and Berkeley scholar, Pamela Samuelson, argue that juries and judges need more congressional guidance when it comes to their deliberations on damages. “We know of no other area of law in which judges and juries are given such open-ended discretion to award up to $150,000 in damages without any burden of proof on plaintiff to prove the fact or extent of the harms they suffered,” the duo write in Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform.
Daily Journal, June 18, 2009 by Bruce Flushman and Richard Frank
http://www.dailyjournal.com/law/index.cfm (requires registration; go to G:\Law School in the News\News Clips for article)
Those regions in California where land meets water—along the state’s 1,100-mile coastline, in San Francisco Bay and along California’s extensive system of lakes and rivers—constitute some of the state’s most valuable real estate…. It is no surprise that many of California’s most pitched property rights and environmental battles have arisen in these coastal areas. Those battles reflect the fact that land-water boundaries are far from static…. Climate change promises to exacerbate those boundary controversies. But it also will severely test—and likely require changes to—California’s law of water boundaries.
The Daily Californian, June 18, 2009 by Zach E.J. Willaims
http://www.dailycal.org/article/105909/federal_court_lets_civil_suit_against_yoo_move_for
Advances in civil court will not likely affect other efforts from activists to force the U.S. Federal Government to hold Yoo responsible for Bush administration policies, according to Jesse Choper, Earl Warren professor of public law at Boalt Hall. “It’s symbolic (but) it could not have a substantial effect on a criminal proceeding,” he said. He added that although the court denied a motion to dismiss, Padilla still has to prove his case. “He is a long way from there,” Choper said.
Grist.org, June 17, 2009 by Daniel Farber
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-18-cbo-report-waxman-tell-us/
Actually, the CBO report tells us virtually nothing about the economic costs of the bill or how much consumers will lose out of pocket. In fact, the way most people understand the idea of a budget deficit, it doesn’t really say much about that either. CBO’s analysis is based on some very technical accounting that can easily be misinterpreted. In particular, CBO treats the issuance of free carbon allowances quite differently than most people would expect.
CIO.com, June 16, 2009 by Tim Greene
http://www.cio.com/article/495132/Google_Urged_to_Beef_Up_Gmail_Security
The danger, the letter writers say, is “when a user composes email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and calendar plans, this potentially sensitive content is transferred to Google’s servers in the clear, allowing anyone with the right tools to steal that information.” When public Internet connections are used, that creates a risk of data theft and snooping, they say. Among those who signed the letter are … Chris Hoofnagle, director of information privacy programs at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.