Berkeley Law Plans to Address Needs of Deferred Law Graduates

The Daily Journal, April 17, 2009 by Amanda Becker
http://www.dailyjournal.com/law/index.cfm (requires registration; go to G:\Law School in the News\News Clips for article)

The efforts address concerns – health insuranceֽ student loan debt and dwindling professional opportunities – that weigh heavily on students’ minds as they figure out what to do during the year before they join their firm. Law schoolsֽ including UCLA and Northwesternֽ have responded by developing specialized master’s degrees in professional development, extending health insurance coverage or postponing the onset of student loan repayment. Representatives at USC Gould School of Law and UC Berkeley School of Law say less formalized efforts are also under way at their institutions.

Stephen Sugarman Proposes a Way to End Steroid Abuse in Professional Baseball

San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 2009 by Jasper Rine and Stephen D. Sugarman
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/17/ED4K173OSA.DTL&hw=Berkeley+University+UC&sn=005&sc=168

Here’s how: Require that a substantial share of baseball salaries—say two-thirds of earnings above the league minimum guaranteed by the collective bargaining agreement—go into a trust for the duration of the player’s career…. If a player’s stored samples are clean, he would get everything in his trust and remove any suspicion about his honesty. If the samples prove he cheatedֽ after appropriate retesting and inevitable challengesֽ his share would be forfeited.

Elisabeth Semel Interprets Supreme Court Ruling on Lethal Injection

Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2009 by James Oliphant
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/17/nation/na-stevens17

Elisabeth Semelֽ a law professor and director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley who helped bring the challenge to Kentucky’s lethal-injection proceduresֽ said the court’s opinion made it clear that states can be forced to institute alternative lethal-injection procedures if they can be proven to alleviate a substantial risk of severe pain to the inmate.

Ann O’Leary Advises Maria Shriver on the Status of Women

Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2009 by Tina Daunt
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-cause16-2009apr16,0,5879875.story

This new project aims to produce a “Shriver Report” that also will assess the status of women in government, business, faith institutions and healthcare…. Shriver plans to take a hands-on role in the effortֽ but has enlisted a couple of pretty high-powered co-editorsֽ Center for American Progress senior economist Heather Boushey and Ann O’Learyֽ executive director of the Center on Healthֽ Economic & Family Security at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Pamela Samuelson and Tara Wheatland Propose Statutory Damage Reforms

ArsTechnica.com, April 12, 2009 by Nate Anderson
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/profs-protest-massive-p2p-damage-awards.ars

The authors aren’t opposed to the idea of statutory damages, which were designed to provide relief in cases where it was quite difficult to quantify the actual losses suffered by the copyright holder…. But ending up on the hook for up to $150,000 just for swapping a single song on a file-sharing network? Craziness—and far too likely to be used against regular people. “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,” says the paper, “the dangers posed by the lack of meaningful constraints on statutory damage awards are particularly acute.”

Eric Biber Wants Obama to Restore Endangered Species Act Protections

San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 2009 by Eric Biber
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/15/ED0M172996.DTL&type=printable

Unfortunately, the Bush administration undermined the consultation process by introducing loopholes in the implementing regulations. These loopholes potentially exempt a wide range of development projects from consultation…. Congress has given the Obama administration authority to undo these regulatory changes. The Obama administration should use its authority to restore the role of high-quality information in endangered species protection.

Jacob Hacker Lists Top Three Reasons for a Public Health Plan

Politico.com, April 14, 2009 by Carrie Budoff Brown
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=A1326EE8-18FE-70B2-A854B64621F83AFE

The first and most obvious reason to have the public plan is to have a check on private insurers, a benchmark with which they have to compete…. The second most important area is cost control. Private insurers have been very passive in the face of rising prices. The third area I would emphasize is security. People in all parts of the country need to have the security of knowing they will have access to a backup plan that is available to them in the same terms in all parts of the country.

Franklin Zimring Believes Oakland Mass Shooting Atypical

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 13, 2009 by Mark Roth
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09103/962453-53.stm

An incident March 21 in which a man killed four Oakland, Calif., police officers and then was shot to death himself also does not fit the usual mass killing pattern, Dr. Zimring said. The suspect in that case was facing a return to prison when he was pulled over at a traffic stop and probably shot the first officer in a state of panic, “and all the other killings followed from that first one.”

Ian Haney Lopez Says Immigration Reform Should Be a National Priority

CNN.com, April 10, 2009 by Kristi Keck
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/10/obama.immigration/

“We are a country of immigrants, and immigrants have always been essential to who we are culturally and socially. So it’s simply a mistake to see these people as somehow interlopers,” he said…. If immigrants were given amnesty and the opportunity to work for minimum wage, Americans wouldn’t see themselves as in competition with the undocumented workers, he said. “The way to reduce the attractiveness of immigrant labor is to legalize immigrant labor,” he said.