Faculty in the News by Date | By Name

Notable Faculty Quotes, Jan.-Feb. 2008

Richard Bonnie was featured in a Jan. 6 Daily Progress interview about mental health reform in Virginia. "Everyone recognizes that over time there has been a disturbing trend of criminalization of mental illness," he said. "Now there are probably more people with serious mental illness that are in jail than are in the hospitals. We need to reverse this trend. The overall objective is to get people the treatment they need before they go into crisis."  The Feb. 5 C-Ville Weekly reported on an Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy panel, "Reflections Upon the Virginia Tech Tragedy," at which Bonnie argued that the complexity of privacy laws has led to institutional paralysis in colleges and universities. "I do think the law is at fault here," he said. "Universities don't think about what the right thing to do is. They look at the law to say what they can do."

George Cohen was quoted in a Jan. 22 New York Times article about lawyers' duty of loyalty to their clients in the Vioxx settlement, under which participating lawyers promise to sever relationships with clients who refuse to settle. In an informal complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, Cohen said that the deal amounts to an antitrust conspiracy in which plaintiffs' lawyers have ganged up "to coerce claimants into joining the settlement even if they don't want to do so by depriving them of the ability to be represented by the best qualified lawyers."

Anne Coughlin was quoted in a WVIR-TV story about Raelyn Balfour, the Greene County mother charged with criminal negligence when her infant son died after being left in the back seat of her car. "Juries are going to be inclined to convict if they think the parent was acting for bad purposes," she said. "In other words, there are some cases where a parent will leave a child in a car, not because they forget but because they're doing an errand."

Brandon Garrett was quoted in a Jan. 30 Washington Post article about Michael Mukasey's candidacy, before his Attorney General nomination, for a position monitoring the operations of a company with which government prosecutors had reached a deferred prosecution agreement on corporate fraud charges. Independent monitors have authority to interview employees, review business contracts and uncover legal violations, and fees are not made publicly available in most cases. "The public should know more about these agreements," said Garrett. "We can't tell whether the companies are getting away with murder or whether the prosecutors are overreaching." In a Feb. 24 Columbus Dispatch article about proposed reforms designed to prevent wrongful convictions in Ohio, Garrett noted that several other states had recently passed laws imposing outside oversight of government crime labs, either creating oversight boards or requiring professional accreditation. "Both are important," he said.

Charles Goetz and a coauthor wrote a Jan. 27 Richmond Times-Dispatch commentary on the subprime mortgage crisis. Rather than bailouts, interest reductions, and government guarantees, they suggested that it would be better to address the root cause: payment levels. "The simplest, most direct remedy is to limit increases in monthly payments, perhaps to the inflation rate," they wrote, and as a result, "homeowners who meet more affordable payment schedules would not be kicked out."  Faced with a heavier interest burden, some homeowners might choose to sell and "trade down" voluntarily, which, the authors concluded, "would be a more gradual, orderly market adjustment."

Michael Klarman was quoted in a Jan. 17 U.S. News & World Report article about the tumultuous events of 1968. After years of rosy military analyses about the war in Vietnam, the January 1968 Tet offensive made many Americans believe the war had no end in sight. "Americans had been assured the war was going well," he said. "Then the Communists are in the U.S. Embassy." Klarman was also featured in a Jan. 21 WVIR-TV report about his comments on the state of race relations at a Miller Center event honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. "I think the important point to make is that we've made extraordinary progress, more than anybody could have dreamed of fifty years ago," he said, "but then we've also made less progress than people at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement would have aspired to."

David Martin was quoted in a Feb. 4 Miami Herald article about a Haitian national acquitted by a federal jury of terrorism but fighting deportation on the same charges before an administrative judge in immigration court. "I certainly don't know of a case quite like this one," he said, noting that the government's efforts to deport the man raise serious questions of fairness.

John Monahan was quoted in a Feb. 10 North Andover, MA Eagle-Tribune article about a psychotherapist who was stabbed to death by a patient. He said trying to determine whether a patient is going to be a risk is extremely difficult. "The research indicates that clinicians, using only their professional judgment, are not much better than chance," he added, at predicting whether clients will commit violence. Monahan's scholarship was discussed in a 2/25 Boston Globe commentary on the unfounded connection between mental illness and violence. The article quoted his conclusion in a recent journal article, that "there is no reason to anticipate" that mentally ill people who do not abuse alcohol and drugs "present greater risk than their neighbors."

John Norton Moore was quoted in a February 2008 ABA Journal article about the prospects for Senate ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. "It will go through; we will win it, but it's a tough fight," he said. "This is one of the clearest and strongest victories for the United States in the history of multilateral negotiations." Moore added that the opposition to ratification "is a serious isolationist attack on reasoned U.S. foreign policy."

Robert O'Neil wrote a commentary on the state of academic freedom for the Feb. 7 Chronicle of Higher Education. "Federal and state courts have seemed surprisingly receptive to an emerging and deeply disturbing view of academic interests," he noted, and concluded that academic freedom "matters to those who are not professors as much as to those who are. The sooner citizens at large appreciate that reality, the better for them as well as for those of us within higher education."  In a Feb. 17 Los Angeles Times article about recent controversies over the role of religion in public institutions, O'Neil said that events suggest a new era of ideological controversy fueled in part by the Internet. "Things have become much more contentious," he said. "There's more stridency on campus. And with the new media, tensions can be hyped like never before."

Daniel Ortiz was quoted in a Feb. 15 New York Sun article about a lawsuit to block limits on individual contributions to political action committees, which could unleash a surge of advertisements by independent groups attacking and promoting candidates. Ortiz said the promises such groups make about not coordinating with candidates are often illusory. "They actually tend to be run by people who are pretty much doppelgangers of the candidates or the parties," he said.

James Ryan wrote a commentary for the Jan. 23 Education Week arguing that "college presidents have become intensely focused on what happens at their own institutions, often to the exclusion of broader issues affecting education." He urged college and university presidents to focus on issues in K-12 education like the emphasis on standardized testing and diversity in public schools. "After all, high schools are in a sense their farm teams," he wrote. "Instead of just taking the supply of well-prepared students as a given, they ought to be working harder to increase that supply. They should see their task not only as improving already strong institutions, but as improving education more generally."

Stephen Smith was quoted in a Feb. 21 Harrisonburg Daily News Record article about a plea agreement by a Manassas man accused of owning and operating a cockfighting ring. In a recorded conversation with an undercover agent, the man discussed "donations" to a public official to prevent police interference. "The plea agreement could be that they are working on building a case against the public official," Smith said. "The federal government puts a high premium on investigations of corruption of public officials." He noted that it is unlikely that the federal government would offer a plea agreement to an illegal activity's top man. "The typical approach would be to go after the little fish and get them to plead against the higher-ups," he said. "It seems they might be trading off the cockfighting ring for the corruption."

Robert Turner wrote a Feb. 24 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review commentary about whether the Bush administration had violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by authorizing warrantless electronic surveillance of communications by known or suspected foreign terrorists with individuals within the United States. He argued instead that it was Congress that had violated the law by encroaching on the president's constitutional power to control foreign affairs. "Sadly, Congress seems to have forgotten that it, too, is constrained by the rule of law as expressed in the Constitution," he wrote. "And by making details of our foreign intelligence programs public, Congress is endangering the security of our nation." Turner was quoted in a Feb. 26 C-Ville Weekly article on the same topic. "We ought to be more concerned if Bin Laden is calling someone in Peoria than if he's calling someone in Pakistan," he said. "The idea that it's unreasonable to listen to a telephone conversation with an entity that Congress has authorized a use of force against just to me is asinine."

J. H. Verkerke was quoted in a Feb. 27 Newport News Daily Press about the steady decline in union membership in Virginia, from a high of 9.3 percent of the state's workforce in 1992 to 3.7 percent in 2007. "That's quite a drop," he said. "But that's the story of the past three decades or so with organized labor." Traditional industries where unions were strong have moved overseas, he noted, and many of those jobs have shifted to the less-organized service industry.

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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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