Feature Channels: Government and Law

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Ronald M. Levin, JD, administrative law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, recently testified on the REINS Act before the House Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law. “Under the REINS Act, the dysfunction that now afflicts Congress in the enactment of laws would spread to the implementation of the laws,” he says.

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Poll shows large majority of Texans support background checks for all gun purchases, but they are not eager to change existing gun laws.

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Beginning in fall 2013, Washington University School of Law will offer the Semester-in-Practice Externship, an innovative program that empowers second- and third-year law students to gain hands-on professional experience anywhere in the country. Through the externship program, students will earn academic credit by spending a semester working full time for a nonprofit, government, or in-house corporate law office in the location of their choice.

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Unless Congress acts by this Friday, “a series of automatic cuts – called the sequester – will take effect that threaten hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs, and cut vital services for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and women in uniform,” according to a White House report issued Sunday. Many Republican lawmakers, on the other hand, say President Obama and the Democrats are overstating the likely impact of the sequester.

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The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates recently adopted a resolution recommending that the federal government expand its protections against conflicts of interest among government contractors. The resolution was based in part on a report Kathleen Clark, JD, ethics expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS).“In recent decades, the federal government has greatly expanded its use of contractors to perform services, and spends hundreds of billions on services every year,” Clark writes. “While an extensive array of ethics statutes and rules regulate government employees to ensure that they make decisions in the interest of the government rather than a private interest, only a few of these restrictions apply to contractor personnel.”

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Low-income city residents learn to use broadband through public programs, but they will not get home broadband until it costs less -- and government must help make that happen, says a UIC professor to the Federal Communications Commission.

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The majority of Americans support a broad array of policies to reduce gun violence, according to a new national public opinion survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Many gun rights advocates have asserted that the Second Amendment – which protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms – serves a collective interest in deterring and, if necessary, violently deposing a tyrannical federal government. “The strength of this assertion is significantly weakened by the power of the First Amendment,” says Gregory P. Magarian, JD, constitutional law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Sixty percent of high school and college students consider gun ownership in the future. Key findings revealed in poll based on personality traits, video games, gender, race, and political affiliation.

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Corporations’ religious freedom claims against the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate miss a “basic fact of health economics: health insurance, like wages, is compensation that belongs to the employee,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. Sepper is featured in the current Harvard Law Bill of Health blog.

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Under the law, whistle-blowers are supposed to be protected from direct reprisals on the job, including discrimination. But what if they and their actions becomes the subject of a widely distributed email? Is that a form of retaliation? Two professors at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business set out to answer that question and determine when public disclosure of the whistle-blower's identity -- like in an email -- is sufficient to support such a claim, in a paper that has been accepted for publication in North Carolina Law Review.

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IISD's reaction to the revived tax incentive for biodiesel production as part of the U.S. year-end fiscal package.

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A University of Iowa law professor is proposing the International Monetary Fund as a model for a global structure to govern geoengineering efforts to reduce the harm caused by climate change.

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Raising the minimum wage to a living wage begins the cycle of lifting single mothers out of poverty, according to a policy report released by the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis (IUPRA) at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Law requiring Internet posting of feds’ finances will not prevent Congressional insider trading, Kathleen Clark says.

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Research by Indiana University Kelley School of Business Professor Tim Lemper was published in two legal journals and became the basis for legislation by Congress to correct a serious problem in an existing federal trademark law.

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A new national survey finds that a very large majority of Americans support a Do Not Mail initiative, similar to the popular Do Not Call registry.

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The upcoming holiday season brings with it the annual gaze upon religious displays – and the legal issues that come with them. “The Supreme Court’s approach to public religious displays under the Establishment Clause has been less than clear,” says John Inazu, JD, expert on religion and the constitution and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.“Some commentators have described it as the ‘three plastic animals rule’ –a Christian nativity scene on public property passes muster if it is accompanied by a sufficient combination of Rudolph, Frosty, and their friends.” Inazu says that future litigation will likely press against this line-drawing, but even apparent victories for religious liberty may come at a significant cost.

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The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) released a new official Position Statement on the Public Disclosure of Clinically Relevant Genome Variants. This important new statement addresses the problems resulting from gene patent monopolies that have allowed some to develop proprietary databases of the clinical meaning of the variants in particular genes.

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Critical data for more than 2,300 federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) cases are now available online (http://eeoclitigation.wustl.edu) thanks to a multi-year effort of researchers at Washington University School of Law’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL). The EEOC Litigation Project, which spans the period between 1997 and 2006, makes readily available detailed information about the EEOC’s enforcement litigation to legal scholars, social scientists, and policy-makers.

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Advances in medicine allow doctors to keep patients alive longer, tackle fertility problems and extend the viability of premature babies. They also lead to a growing number of moral questions for both the medical provider and patient. “Across the country, so-called conscience legislation allows doctors and nurses to refuse to provide abortions, contraception, sterilizations, and end-of-life care,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “But legislators have totally overlooked the consciences of providers who have made the conscientious judgment to deliver care and of the patients who seek these treatments.” She says that laws should negotiate conflict between individual and institutional belief without losing sight of the patient. Sepper will discuss this issue during a 10/26 webcast.

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A new criminal justice initiative today released a study showing that 200 or more wrongful convictions have been thrown out since 1989 in California, costing those convicted more than 1,300 years of freedom and taxpayers $129 million.

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The last few months leading up to an election can be a critical, political game changer. One right or one wrong move can quickly change a candidate’s standing at the polls. New UC Berkeley research suggests that judges who are elected, rather than appointed, respond to this political pressure by handing down more severe criminal sentences – as much as 10 percent longer –in the last three months before an election compared with the beginning of their terms.

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In a recently completed study, the authors of several widely-recognized articles on politics and security returns challenge conventional wisdom regarding the association between security returns and political election results.

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Contrary to what police, politicians and the public believe, research by a University of California, Riverside criminologist has found that the state's three-strikes law has done nothing to reduce the crime rate.

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Judith’s Reading Room partners with Lafayette College, Villanova University and USC to observe 30th anniversary of Banned Book Week--and students, faculty & staff to launch flash mobs and public readouts of top banned books.

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Scientists examined voter data from a dozen recent elections around the world and found statistical evidence for election fraud in two of them.