Faculty in the News by Date | By Name

Richard Bonnie was quoted in a March 8 Associated Press story about America's cultural divide on the death penalty. "What everybody needs to know is that this is a highly diverse country, and that what happens in one or two or three states is not an indicator of a national trend," he said. "There is virtually no likelihood that in the foreseeable future that southern states will abolish the death penalty." Bonnie was also quoted in a April 19 Roanoke Times story about the decrease in the number of court-ordered outpatient treatment cases under new guidelines put in place last year. "The numbers were always small, so to say there are even fewer is still looking at what has always been an incidental and ancillary part of the system," he said, noting that the intent of revamping outpatient treatment was not to increase its use but to make it more effective.

George Cohen was quoted in a March 16 Bristol Herald-Courier article about an attorney who engaged in consensual sex with his Legal Aid clients. The Virginia State Bar does not currently prohibit sex between attorneys and clients, but Cohen argued that imposing a ban would add clarity to Virginia's standards for attorney conduct. "The advantage of it is that everyone knows where the line is," he said. In cases where clients might be emotionally vulnerable, he added, "there's a real concern that even if you don't realize it, you may be subtly taking advantage of these people."

Brandon Garrett was quoted in a March 16 Richmond Times-Dispatch article about flawed forensic evidence in Virginia trials that led to wrongful convictions. He said that forensic experts overstated the evidence in sixty percent of the cases in which they testified. "Yet few have looked at these records," he said. "Even after these wrongful convictions came to light, crime laboratories rarely conducted audits or investigations to review the forensic evidence presented at the trial."

George Geis was quoted in a March 19 WSJ Deal Journal story about AIG's controversial $165 million bonuses. "If AIG really wanted to get out of the contracts, there are a few hooks they could use," he said. "If a contract is so unbelievably unfair that it shocks the conscience of the court, then the contract can be dissolved. I doubt that's the case here, despite the outrage."  He went on to explain that there may be "a way to excuse performance of these contracts. . . . there may be something that says if the employees are no longer with AIG because they're fired or terminated for cause, then they don't have to be paid."

In a March 20 Associated Press story about the process of judicial selection by the legislature in Virginia, A. E. Howard acknowledged that the issue is ripe for reconsideration. He said that he liked the idea of a nonpartisan commission in theory and would like to see a public debate on whether Virginia's system should be reformed. "At the base level, it's whether judges should be elected by the legislature at all," he said. "After that, it's about the process. People should have trust in the system that brings people to the bench."

Daniel Meador wrote an article for the March 30 Legal Times about the process of selecting Supreme Court nominees. He urged that President Obama "take a close look at the Supreme Court's diversity when he selects future nominees--and not just in the most common sense of the word." Six of the nine current justices are graduates of Harvard Law School, he noted. "Law schools, though similar in some respects, do differ in the socio-economic status and geographical origin of their students and faculties and in their curricula," he wrote. "Students graduate from different schools with varied legal perspectives and acculturating experiences." He also noted that all nine current justices came to the Supreme Court from a U.S. court of appeals. "The problem is the total absence of any justice who has held high elective office, a Cabinet position, or a legislative position," he wrote. "Persons with those experiences would enrich the Court's deliberations and bring insights likely to be otherwise missing."

John Norton Moore was featured in a April 14 NPR stopy about the prosecution options for the Somali pirate captured by U.S. forces. He noted that we have to remember that the person in custody is not the leader of a pirate network. "You're really prosecuting the equivalent of drug mules," he said. "A group of more senior characters that are probably no longer going to sea are simply recruiting the younger ones and hoping that every fourth or fifth will hit pay dirt for them, with many of the others being expendable."

Robert O'Neil was quoted in a April 9 Delaware News Journal article about the First Amendment rights of public university professors who speak out against school policies, criticize administrators, or make controversial statements. A recent series of court decisions have ruled that faculty members were not protected because they were acting in the course of doing their jobs. "If, as a constitutional law teacher, I make some controversial public statement about butterflies or about the local bus system, that's probably protected but ironically I would only be protected because neither of those could remotely be thought to be part of my official duties," O'Neil said. "If I make a public statement in any area where I do have experience and where my advice could be helpful . . . the closer it gets to my job, the less likely there is a claim for protecting it."

Margaret Foster Riley was quoted in a March 9 WCAV-TV story about renewed funding for stem cell research under the Obama administration. "I do want to make it clear that we're not likely to be involved in some of the more contentious areas, which would involve actually deriving the cell lines," she said. "We will be using cell lines that have been derived by other institutions."

Robert Turner was the coauthor of a March 3 Washington Times commentary about the possibility of a "truth commission" to investigate alleged illegal conduct of the Bush administration.  "Were mistakes made during the last administration in the struggle against al Qaeda? Certainly," the authors wrote. "But rather than risking a partisan witch hunt that could weaken our ability to defend America against future terrorist attacks, we believe President Obama was correct when he declared America should focus on the future."  In a March 10 New York Times article about President Obama's use of signing statements, Turner said he was pleased Mr. Obama was willing to use the device if he decided that signing a bill was in the national interest but that obeying part of it would be unconstitutional. Some bills "are unvetoable," he argued, because parts are urgently needed.

Siva Vaidhyanathan was quoted in a March 15 TechRadar article about a panel examining issues of privacy in the digital age. "Just because you or I puts up 100 or 200 aspects of our lives on publicly accessible sites, that doesn't mean that we don't care about the 101st," he said. "It doesn't mean that we're not just as concerned about what we don't share." Oversharing, he noted, "doesn't necessarily undermine or mitigate the general concern for individuals being able to control and influence how they are represented in the world."

Steven Walt was quoted in a March 12 Lynchburg News and Advance about the bankruptcy of Peanut Corporation of America, the company at the root of a nationwide salmonella outbreak. He said that the company or person filing for bankruptcy protection has no way to pay all their debts in more than ninety percent of similar cases. He noted that wrongful death claims are given special protection from interference from bankruptcy proceedings. "What will it get them, though?" he asked. "My guess is not much."

George Yin's testimony before the Senate finance committee was quoted in a March 26 Knight Ridder Washington Bureau story about the scheduled expiration of Bush-era tax cuts. "The Bush tax cuts may or may not have been wise in the past," he said. "But that debate is long past - - we simply cannot afford them in the future." He noted that the U.S. faces a widening gap between spending and revenue, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office. "The projected fiscal gap is both unsustainable and imminent," he said.

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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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