Kenneth S. Abraham was quoted in a March 25 Chicago Daily Law Bulletin article about the impact of the growing use of arbitration on legal standards and the development of precedent. Noting that binding arbitration, which provides little opportunity for judicial review and gives virtually unlimited authority to arbitrators, may result in unfair application of rules, he added:  "Where there are legal issues that have not been definitively decided by the courts, the parties to an arbitration are legally vulnerable." The article cited a working paper by Abraham and a coauthor discussing the disadvantages of using mandatory, binding arbitration to resolve cases that involve emerging issues in the insurance field.

Vincent Blasi's work as chair of a Columbia University committee considering the boundaries between academic expression and political activism was discussed in the April 19 New York Sun. Blasi explained that the committee is seeking ways to ensure that students and professors are able to "express their political opinions in a free and inquisitive way," while making sure that students "have an appropriate opportunity to register complaints when their classes are being taught in a politically charged way they think is inappropriate."

Richard Bonnie was quoted in a April 16 Reuters News about progress toward banning executions for juveniles in the United States. He said that there had been considerable debate in several state legislatures about whether to impose a minimum age of 18 in capital punishment statutes. "Clearly there is momentum building towards excluding this type of executions, but this issue is still very much contested in many parts of the country," he added.

Jon Cannon was quoted in a March 8 Virginian-Pilot story about a proposed Navy airfield in North Carolina now being challenged in federal court. He noted that the delay caused by litigation could help the airfield's opponents. "In some cases," he said, "those delays have enabled opponents to defeat projects in political or administrative forums."

Excerpts from George Cohen's testimony before a House subcommittee in support of the SEC's proposed "noisy withdrawal" rule were quoted in the March 15 Legal Times. He said, "I think that it is important to go beyond . . . fixing the SEC rules to think about other ways to deal with some of the problems of lawyers assisting in corporate wrongdoing, the most important of which, in my view, is to restore private lawsuits, private damage suits for aiding and abetting liability." In a March 17 Associated Press story about a prosecutor's decision to step down from a rape and murder investigation because he once represented someone who is now a suspect in the case, Cohen said the prosecutor "made the right choice" in stepping down. "Politically, this looks a little fishy." In a April 2 Associated Press story about singer/sausagemaker Jimmy Dean's lawsuit against Sara Lee Corp. for dropping him as a spokesman and thereby ruining his image, Cohen said that Sara Lee may well consider settling to avoid negative publicity. "If you're Sara Lee, you don't want your name dragged around by someone who's a popular figure," he said.

A March 6 Richmond Times-Dispatch article on a judge who had posted racist comments on an Internet message board included Anne Coughlin's comments that the information would not lead to successful challenges of his past rulings "absent some factual argument that you and I can't anticipate." The issues are troubling, nonetheless, she said. "Race is a very explosive issue, race and racism, in the criminal justice system. It definitely raises concerns, not just about the integrity of the judge's decision but about the integrity of the entire system." Coughlin wrote an op-ed piece in the March 28 Washington Post on a Supreme Court case involving police requests for identification, saying "The big deal is not the scope of police investigatory authority, but rather how to constrain the police when they are exercising the authority that they properly are given. History suggests that the police will rely heavily, and sometimes exclusively, on race. The police will invade the privacy of people who are young, male and black (or, perhaps, these days, men who look Middle Eastern) and they will leave the rest of us alone. And, at least as construed by the current court, neither the Fourth nor the Fifth Amendment has much, if anything, to say about that."

A. E. Dick Howard was quoted in several stories on the Virginia budget crisis and other issues. In the March 7 Virginian-Pilot, for example, he remarked that the state constitution provided little guidance about how to proceed in the absence of a budget. "Foreign constitutions often talk about emergencies, but American constitutions don't," he said. "They're written under the assumption that we don't have emergencies." In the March 17 Washington Post, he noted that Virginia political fights have become coarser over the past several years. "A generation ago, Virginia was more parochial, and for conservatives, the question over taxes was a pragmatic one," he said. "Today, we have in the legislature people whose political instincts are driven by national politics, and the result is much more partisan." In the March 22 National Law Journal, he noted the Rehnquist Court's two distinct lines of establishment clause decisions, striking down symbolic practices while permitting the use of money to fund religious exercises; and in the April 5 Fulton County Daily Report, he questioned Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decision to permit the National Organization for Women to name a lecture series in her honor, saying that she should be worried that this identifies her with the point of view of an advocacy group.

An article on the expansion of federal criminal law in the April issue of Reason quoted from "a delightfully (and disturbingly) frank article" coauthored by John Jeffries in the Hastings Law Journal. "If federal prosecutors had been asked to create the sentencing regime that would place the maximum permissible pressure on criminal defendants to cooperate with the government," according to the article, "they could hardly have done better than the Sentencing Commission." In an article on the U.S. News & World Report rankings in the April 2 Roanoke Times & World News, Jeffries compared the rankings to exam grades, noting that "very small—indeed, insignificant—differences in performance are translated into very large differences in rank. In short, rankings are good for publicity but not for decisions." In the April 24 Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jeffries discussed the prospects for changes in the Supreme Court during the next presidential term, explaining that any retirements are unlikely before next summer. "No one wants to retire in an election year," he said. "The entanglement of a Supreme Court vacancy in election politics is something all justices wish to avoid." He noted, however, that vacancies next year are "overwhelmingly likely."

Several articles in the March 22 U.S. News & World Report discussed Michael Klarman's book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, and his view that the spectacle of violent confrontation, rather than the Supreme Court's desegregation decision, transformed many Americans' views about race. Brown was effective almost in spite of itself, he explained: An activist court ordered a change that most people weren't yet pressing for, creating a backlash against desegregation, and the ensuing violence created an ugly spectacle that Americans watched unfold on TV and mobilized a counterbacklash.

Jody Kraus was quoted in an April 5 New York Times obituary of philosopher Joel Feinberg. Discussing Feinberg's four-volume work, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Kraus said that he "had a unique and unsurpassed ability to identify conceptual distinctions that organized and illuminated previously obscure questions. He changed the way people thought about things."

David Martin was quoted in an article on President Bush's proposed temporary-worker program in the March issue of CFO Magazine. He said that the proposal left out important details, including wage and benefit guidelines, but noted that payroll costs would probably climb. "I would think companies would at least have to offer prevailing wages," he said. An April 16 Associated Press story on a court decision denying asylum to an immigrant who had been convicted of theft and drug possession included Martin's comment that the case was "intriguing because of the chutzpah of the plaintiff."

John Monahan was quoted in a March 31 Los Angeles Times story about a Texas Defender Service study challenging expert witness predictions of future violent behavior. "This is a very solid and thoughtful piece of empirical research," he said, noting that the study was the first large-scale examination of prison violence among death row inmates.

A March 31 Lloyd's List story on the potential U.S. ratification of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention noted that John Norton Moore provided "some of the most compelling testimony" in hearings last fall before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Moore argued that ratification is "strongly in the national interest of the United States," and that it "will restore U.S. ocean leadership, protect U.S. ocean interests and enhance U.S. foreign policy." He said the United States had already suffered for its lack of adherence to the treaty through its enforced absence from negotiations on a number of key maritime issues, and that the original U.S. negotiating team would have been incredulous at the long delay in ratification.

Jeffrey O'Connell cowrote an article in the March 15 National Law Journal arguing for a proposal that would limit excessive contingency fees, saying "The proposal would create an incentive for settlement offers that would net claimants what they would receive under the current system, or even more, while saving defense litigation costs. Some critics charge that the proposed rule will create situations that benefit everyone except the lawyers. Just so: The reform is designed to benefit injured parties and American consumers."

Robert O'Neil was quoted in the March 5 Chronicle of Higher Education on recent government attempts to subpoena a student group's records at Drake University and to identify participants in a conference about Islam at the University of Texas at Austin. "The focus on who had attended a conference and what was being discussed, without any clear or obvious reason—you have a climate that's clearly cause for anxiety," he said. "We haven't seen anything like this in 35 or possibly 40 years." In a March 20 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on the use of race as a criterion for admission at the University of Georgia, O'Neil said that it may be the only way to significantly increase their African-American student enrollment, noting that other measures have done little to attract more black students. "The challenge is particularly great in nonurban communities like Charlottesville or Athens," he said.

George Rutherglen was quoted in a March 9 Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the Virginia judge who had posted racist comments on an Internet message board. Rutherglen noted that the comments violated the state's Canons of Judicial Conduct, which say a judge's conduct, even when off the bench, cannot cast reasonable doubt on his capacity to act impartially. "The point of the canons is fairly simple to say, which is to assure not just the fact of judicial impartiality but the appearance of impartiality," he said. "The comments by this judge violated both."

Robert Scott's lecture at the University of Toronto was covered in the March 12 issue of the Canadian newspaper The Lawyers Weekly. Scott defended the old bargain-theory of contract, but said that "contract law is dying from hubris—from the belief that more contract law is better than less." He said people have a choice of whether to be regulated by the courts or by other means, and they are choosing less costly methods. To guard against uncertain interpretation and the high cost of enforcement, contracting parties are relying on private enforcement systems such as binding arbitration and mediation. This evolution, however, brings with it a loss of social benefits that derived from the common-law process. Without new judicial decisions to provide standards by which people form new contracts, bargainers will be operating in a vacuum. He said the fact that commercial arbitration decisions are unpublished is "the equivalent of approving new drug therapy without clinical trials."

The March 4 Daily Progress reported on a session of John Setear's "Rules" seminar in which an amateur chess champion defeated 11 law students in simultaneous games. Students in the course explore both legal rules, such as those that govern trials, and nonlegal ones like social etiquette. "They look at legal rules all the time," Setear said. "This is a chance to let them look at rules in a nonlegal context."

Stephen Smith was quoted in a March 11 Roanoke Times & World News story on the effect on a capital murder trial of a Supreme Court ruling that makes it harder for prosecutors to introduce evidence from witnesses that cannot be cross-examined. In this instance, he noted, "the right course of the judge would be to grant a mistrial."

Paul Stephan was quoted in a March 29 National Law Journal article about a case before the Supreme Court on the scope of the Alien Tort Statute of 1789, which under recent decisions has permitted aliens to sue for damages in U.S. courts for injuries that violate international law. The open-ended nature of a tort based on the law of nations has disturbing implications, he said. "The benign story is you trust the common law power of judges to figure this out. The less benign story is opportunistic attorneys can exploit this not really for human rights work but for old-fashioned holding up of corporations."

J. H. Verkerke was quoted in the March 1 Christian Science Monitor on the refusal of employers to provide informative references about former employees for fear of defamation lawsuits. He noted that about 70 to 80 percent of American companies forbid employees from giving out extensive references, but that laws differ from state to state. In New York, for instance, a court ruling suggests that employers can get away with flat-out lies. "It says you owe no duty to the person you're giving reference information to," he said. "If you give a positive reference when in fact the person is horrible, the victim should not look to [the courts]."

G. Edward White's recent book Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy was reviewed in several sources, including the March 15 New York Sun, which called it "a significant contribution to a subject that continues to fascinate Americans," and the April issue of Commentary, which called it a "remarkable account" of the creation of the myth of Hiss's innocence. White discussed Justice Antonin Scalia's refusal to recuse himself in a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney on the March 18 NPR All Things Considered and in the March 21 New York Times. In the Times story, he said "Only the individual justice is capable of knowing if he or she is capable of rendering an impartial decision. On balance, I think that it was appropriate for Scalia to decide not to recuse himself."

Timothy Wu was quoted extensively in the March 17 issue of Salon magazine on the proposed Comcast-Disney merger. He compared the market that might come about in a world without regulation to today's software industry, asking "Have you ever noticed that Microsoft applications just seem to work better than other companies' software on Windows?" Wu's idea of the perfect network, one that's completely neutral as a development platform, is the electricity grid. "It's a wonderful, wonderful platform for innovation on a number of electric devices—toasters, cellphones, computers." The secret of its success, he said, is "disinterested carriers," meaning that the companies that run the electricity grid are divorced from the ones that make electric devices. The April 1 issue of The Register reported on Wu's comments at a Washington meeting on how proposed revisions to telecommunications laws could make a complete mess of the Internet. Wu, who cited examples of industry abuse worth regulating against, gave what the journal called "the best speech" at the meeting.