Faculty in the News by Date | By Name

In a Feb. 23 Financial Times article discussing the lack of investors' rights under Nevada law, Michal Barzuza described the state as a "no-liability corporate safe haven" and said that it "allows officer and directors to avoid liabilities that are almost axiomatic in corporate law."

In a Jan. 16 NBC29 story about a Greene County stabbing for which a 5-year-old child was in custody, Andrew Block said that there was no minimum age for a child has to be charged with a crime, but that prosecution would be unlikely. "Even if the commonwealth attorney were to file charges and try to proceed against a 5-year-old," he said, "the law also requires everyone facing a criminal charge be competent to stand trial."

Richard Bonnie was quoted in a Jan. 29 NBC29 story on access to mental health services by Virginia college students. "Having the capability in the community college to help implement mental health awareness and crisis identification responses in suicide prevention is a very important task," he said, "and right now they are not in the position to do this." Bonnie discussed the prevalence of severe mental illness among prison inmates in a February 3 MSNBC story. "Many us involved in this field are convinced that diversion from the criminal justice system into mental health services . . . can alleviate the problem without compromising public safety," he said.

Darryl Brown was quoted in a Feb. 20 Charlottesville Daily Progress article about the possible effects of the three-day break between closing arguments and the beginning of jury deliberations in the George Huguely murder trial. "I don't think even the social scientists who are experts in jury decision making have any sense of what a three-day break could do to affect a jury verdict," he said. In the Feb. 21 Baltimore Sun, Brown noted that the intense media attention made it difficult, if not impossible, to select a jury that hadn't heard about the case. "A lot of people in the jury pool knew something about the case," he said, "and the judge just tried to make sure they weren't so fixed in their preconceived notions that they couldn't give an impartial verdict."

In a Feb. 29 Annandale Patch article about a pending Supreme Court case on race as a factor in college admissions, Tomiko Brown-Nagin said that the elimination of affirmative action would likely result in whiter college campuses. "After the passage of one of the propositions in California that banned the use of race in admissions," she said, "the number of blacks and Hispanics admitted to the flagship schools did decrease significantly." She added that she thought Justice Anthony Kennedy might swing the Court's decision in favor of the policy. "He always has an interesting take on the use of race by educational institutions," she said. "That could mean the outcome is not so certain as some people seem to think it is."

Anne Coughlin said in a Feb. 9 Charlottesville Daily Progress article that newly announced rules on women in the military don't go far enough. "Under the new policy, many military occupations and assignments will continue to remain off limits to women merely because they are women," she said. "As far as we can tell, the Pentagon also will continue to defend this exclusion on the basis of outdated stereotypes about women's capacities and character." Coughlin was also quoted in several articles on the Huguely trial. In the Feb. 11 Daily Progress, she said that a first-degree murder conviction would be a tall task for the prosecution. "Barring capital murder, it's the most heinous crime in our penal code," she said. "You surely would want it to be a difficult burden of proof and you'd want the jury to pause long and hard." In the Feb. 13 Daily Progress, Coughlin discussed media complaints about not seeing evidence presented to the jury."If for some reason, Mr. Huguely has to be retried," she explained, "the wide publication of these materials could prejudice his right to be tried by an impartial jury the second time around."

Matthew Engle was quoted in a Feb. 5 Richmond Times-Dispatch article about Virginia's handling of DNA evidence in old felony cases. When an exonerated person "is excluded on the basis of a DNA test in June of 2010, but doesn't find out about it until 2012, there is a serious problem with the notification process," he said. "It's hard to imagine any legitimate justification for keeping this information secret. Not only these individual convicts but also their families and the general public have a strong interest in knowing when the criminal justice system fails."

Doug Ford was quoted in a Jan. 9 Charlottesville Daily Progress article about the work of the Law School's immigration clinic. "A lot of our work is with the undocumented, unauthorized community," he said. "If you're a working-class person, you can't afford the thousands of dollars in legal fees. The students are giving people a chance who wouldn't have it."

In a Jan. 11 New York Times article about a Supreme Court decision refusing to create heightened standards for evaluating eyewitness evidence, Brandon Garrett said the Court had overestimated jurors' ability to judge eyewitness testimony. "We know that jurors place undue weight, for example, on the seeming confidence of an eyewitness," he said. In a Jan. 12 NPR story, Garrett argued that prosecutors should open their files before a trial. "Forget about suing prosecutors later or overturning convictions based on this conduct," he said. "We want there to be full exchange of information from the beginning so that errors never happen in the first place." Garrett wrote a Feb. 29 guest column for Jurist about proposals to expand DNA databanks to include all people arrested for felonies, not just convicted felons. "To solve crimes and protect the innocent," he wrote, "it would be far better to dedicate resources to improve other types of evidence, fix quality control at crime labs and do more DNA tests in actual criminal cases."

Thomas Hafemeister was quoted in a Feb. 3 MSNBC story about health care for mentally ill inmates. "The Supreme Court has established that you have a constitutional right to a basic level of adequate health care, which now includes mental health care," he said. "They've recognized that there tend to be limited resources in this setting. As long as a qualified professional has examined the inmate and exercised his or her judgment as to what needs to be done, that's all that is required."

Toby Heytens was quoted in a Feb. 5 Lynchburg News & Advance article about the effects of a Supreme Court decision requiring a search warrant for use of GPS tracking devices on vehicles. He said that the ruling would be retroactive and would apply to pending cases, but added that "there are circumstances in which a change of law or a change in judicial precedent can itself form a good-faith exception."

Leslie Kendrick was quoted in a Feb. 20 First Amendment Center story about a Supreme Court case involving the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime falsely to claim having won a military honor. Critics say the law would allow the government to punish free speech, but Kendrick said that Supreme Court precedents would not allow the government to regulate speech just because it is unpopular. She added that Court has developed its test for protected speech since 1974, "and in that amount of time, I don't think we've seen the floodgates open."

Douglas Laycock was quoted in a Jan. 5 Los Angeles Times article about President Obama's recess appointments of officials whose nominations had been blocked by Senate Republicans. "There is a sort of clean-hands argument here," he said. "Those who have so abused the confirmation power are in a poor position to argue that the president has abused the recess appointment power." On a Jan. 8 NPR program, Laycock said that the culture wars have become a zero-sum game. "The conservative religious groups want to take away all the liberty of the pro-choice and gay-rights people, and the pro-choice and gay-rights people want to take away all the liberty of the conservative religious groups," he said, "and neither side seems interested in the American tradition of live and let live and protect the liberty of both sides." Laycock was also quoted in a Feb. 12 Norfolk Virginian-Pilot article about a bill that would ban the use of foreign law in Virginia courts. "The idea that there can be no reliance on foreign law in a Virginia court is utterly impractical," he said. "You cannot be a state with commercial enterprises in a global economy and not deal with foreign law."

David Martin was quoted in a Jan. 29 Richmond Times-Dispatch feature on on the desperate conditions in Civil War camps of African-Americans seeking freedom with Union troops. He said the situation in these contraband camps "sounds like a lot of refugee crises." Particularly during the initial influx of refugees, he said, host governments "are reluctant to build more permanent habitation, sometimes reluctant to make it very comfortable or even very livable in the camps for fear it will attract a lot more. Issues of sanitation and basic arrangements for food and shelter are significant." In a Feb. 29 Reuters article about Alabama's controversial immigration policy, Martin explained that federal immigration law is designed to balance limited resources, not to maximize enforcement and ferret out every person unlawfully present in the United States. "Turning loose every sheriff to enforce immigration laws could lead to mistakes and run counter to federal policy," he said.

Daniel Ortiz was quoted in a Feb. 28 Associated Press article about law school Supreme Court clinics such as the one offered at UVA Law. "There's no other place in the legal curriculum where students are put up against the best people in the country on the most cutting-edge issues of law," he said.

Saikrishna Prakash was quoted in a Jan. 5 Virginia Statehouse News article about legislative efforts in Virginia to avoid the federal ban on incadenscent lightbulbs. "If the federal government does not want these bulbs built," he said, "they can ban interstate and foreign trade and, to make the ban more effective, they can ban intrastate trade to prevent the bulbs from trickling into the market." He noted, however, that unconstitutionality did not necessarily mean that the business would be stopped. "That doesn't mean it's legal, it just means the federal government does not have the resources to shut down the activity."

James Ryan was quoted in a Jan. 25 Education Week article about the Supreme Court's refusal to hear appeals involving school discipline of student speech on the Internet. "I think I'm not the only one scratching my head," he said."What you can take away is that the Court has decided for some reason that now is not the time to step in. My sense is that the Court will eventually take a case that presents these issues."

Frederick Schauer was quoted in a Jan. 5 Charlottesville Hook story about a convicted felon's attempts to have details of his case removed from the newspaper's website. "Here we are dealing not with defamation, and not with falsity, but with invasion of privacy by disclosure of (true) embarrassing facts," he said. "It is a basic premise of the First Amendment that publication of the truth is to be valued, and thus the scope of possible liability for publications that publish true facts is very, very narrow." In a Jan. 20 Charlottesville Daily Progress article about complaints by Occupy Charlottesville protestors that the city's permit process for Lee Park did not provide clear guidelines, Schauer said that content neutrality is the key in many First Amendment cases. "As a general proposition, the big issue in a lot of these kinds of cases is not so much vagueness as it is evenhandedness," he said. "Officials cannot selectively grant or deny permits for using public facilities."

Molly Bishop Shadel wrote a column for the Jan. 23 National Law Journal urging that law firms make their jobs more family-friendly. She wrote that the typical law firm system of rewarding the quantity of hours billed "does not demonstrably serve clients better and does not reveal who is the best lawyer. It tests who is able to stay at the office the longest . . . Many young women become keenly aware of the price they pay when they put in those long hours – the missed hours with young children, or the fear that, because they are always in the office, they might not be able to start a family at all." She went on to say: "It is past time to examine what is required to make partner. We must also challenge the assumption that the part-time positions that many women opt into must necessarily come with lower pro-rata compensation and limited upward mobility.  . . . Without change in the legal workplace, women will continue to be poorly represented at the top of law firms and among the nation's leaders, and we all will be weaker for it."

In a January Ars Technica article about the copyright-infringement indictment against Megaupload, Christopher Sprigman expressed concern that the case would stifle the development of legitimate file-transfer services. "Tons of people and corporations are uploading files to share with colleagues," he said. Sprigman was also quoted in a Feb. 21 Reuters story about a infringement claim by the heirs of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, based on English trademark law because protection had expired under U.S. copyright law. "What they're trying to do is bootstrap their way into perpetual copyright by using trademark law," he said.

In a Jan. 5 CNSnews story about President Obama's recess appointments, Robert Turner noted that both the executive and legislative branches have historically exceeded their roles in the appointment process. "This controversy is a consequence of constitutional impropriety on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue," he said. "Rather than limiting their review to assuring that ‘no unfit person' be appointed – blocking the appointment of unqualified relatives, college roommates, big financial contributors, and the like – the Senate too often perceives its role as preventing the president from having advisers and subordinates who share his political views."

J. Hoult Verkerke was quoted in a Jan. 6 Norfolk Virginian-Pilot article about the settlement of a suit by the families of Blackwater guards killed in Iraq in 2004, after the company had argued that the lawsuit was barred by the victims' employment contracts specifying that disputes be resolved by binding arbitration. He noted that the settlement may reflect a decision not to risk a finding by the appeals court that the cost of arbitration was prohibitive and an obstacle to justice for the families. "It's a very strange case," he said.

Mila Versteeg's research on the waning international influence of the U.S. Constitution was discussed in several sources, including a Feb. 7 New York Times article. On the Feb. 28 WAMU Kojo Nnamdi Show, Versteeg said that her research "meant spending one year in the Oxford Bodleian Library reading every constitution that has ever been written since 1946. . . . I coded something like 237 variables for each constitutional document that has been written since the end of the Second World War." She pointed out that "constitutions around the world tend to be much longer" than the U.S. Constitution, meaning that "most of what there is to constitutional law is in the constitution itself, which is obviously not true in the case of the U.S."

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Faculty in the News is compiled by Kent Olson, Law Library Director of Reference,
Research and Instruction; and the Law School Communications department.

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