Notable Quotes, Mar.-Apr. 2007

Richard Bonnie was quoted in several news stories about the deadly Virginia Tech shooting rampage. On Anderson Cooper's Apr. 19 CNN program, he commented on the difficulties in balancing protection and individual rights. "The university, of course, is a free society. It doesn't have the authority of a court to coerce people into treatment," he said. "And it would be a violation of the student's rights and dignity to discriminate against people because of their illness by expelling them. But what a university wants to do is to help people get the treatment that they need when they need it, in order to try to prevent things from spiraling out of control." In the Apr. 21 New York Times, Bonnie said that federal laws should have prohibited Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho from buying a gun after a Virginia court ordered him to seek outpatient treatment, but the form that Virginia courts use to notify state police about mental health disqualifications does not cover such orders. "It's clear we have an imperfect connection between state law and the application of the federal prohibition," he said. In the 4/22 Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Bonnie noted that protecting the privacy of psychiatric records might actually save lives, because otherwise people might not seek treatment voluntarily and their problems could grow beyond control before anyone else notices and intervenes. "We have to be careful not to erode the protection so much that, overall, we create a greater danger to public safety," he said.

Anne Coughlin was quoted in an Apr. 14 Cape Cod Times article about why a doctor was free on bail after being arraigned for shooting her husband. She noted that the system of bail may be weighted in favor of people with money, adding that wealthy people "have the resources to protect themselves from incarceration." In the Apr. 23 Daily Progress, Coughlin commented on a clerical error by the Charlottesville planning staff that led to a historic property losing its special protection status. "It's a frightening and unspeakable precedent to take property interest by typo," she said.

Kim Forde-Mazrui was quoted in an Apr. 10 Dow Jones story about proposed federal legislation that would grant domestic partners who receive company-sponsored health-care benefits the same tax breaks allowed married couples. He responded to critics' claims that gay couples are asking for "special rights" with legislation such as the proposed act. "I've never heard of gay people advocating for affirmative action," he said. "They are simply advocating for the same rights that heterosexual people have." For people without the economic benefits that heterosexuals have, he added, "life is more of a struggle, and in some cases with quite tragic circumstances."

In a Mar. 5 Daily Progress article about a study finding that older adults make less reliable eyewitnesses, Thomas Hafemeister pointed out that there are already checks on witness reliability within the legal system, and cautioned against drawing conclusions about an entire group. "There is a certain amount of ageism in society," he said. "We tend to make conclusions about individuals just based on their age."

A. E. Dick Howard was quoted in an Apr. 19 Bloomberg News Service article about the Supreme Court's 5-4 vote upholding the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The ruling "represents one step to the right," he said. "Justice O'Connor's replacement by Justice Alito clearly mattered." In the 4/20 Washington Post, Howard saw in the decision "an emerging conservative majority clearly willing to reconsider precedent and doctrine," and "an example of how the court is going to move to the right step by step" rather than by declaring bold breaks with the past. In the 4/20 Richmond Times Dispatch, Howard discussed possible liability actions against Virginia Tech for failure to warn its students. "I think Virginia Tech, indeed any university, faces a real conundrum," he said. "If it fails to take quick action, they are subject to criticism, but on the other hand they are restricted by the statutory rights of students" that prohibit disclosure of mental health information.

Jody Kraus was quoted in a Mar. 21 Slate column about the Bush Administration's position that the power to do something substantial includes the power to do something less so, such as the argument that it is unreasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don't have an absolute prohibition on killing. The greater-than-lesser-than argument is nothing more than a "debater's point," he said, noting that you can similarly claim that since the state has the greater power to execute a criminal, it also has the "lesser" power to "stick him in oil, just for a minute or so."

David Martin was quoted in a Mar. 4 Arizona Republic article about recent increases in the number of immigration detainees being deported. "Clearly the president decided sometime last year that if he was going to get his comprehensive immigration package moving, he would have to show more activity in the enforcement realm," he said.

Daniel Meador was quoted in a Mar. 23 U.S. News & World Report article about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his job's seemingly contradictory requirements to aggressively pursue the priorities of the president and objectively prosecute lawbreakers without regard for their political ideology. "It's a very delicate situation," he said. "The attorney general is operating always at an intersection of law and politics."

John Monahan was quoted in several stories about violence prediction and mental health issues in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. "I think it's been known for a very long time that psychologists and psychiatrists are not very good at predicting violence," he said on NPR's Apr. 18 Talk of the Nation. "There's now a variety of tools available to help psychiatrists and psychologists make more accurate predictions, tools that are based on research into what the risk factors for violence really are. But still our crystal balls are very murky, and we have a long way to go to really understand what makes anyone act violently, let alone act violently on such a horrific scale." Monahan also coauthored a commentary for the April 22 Guardian, explaining that the challenge of preventing violence is not just an American problem. "As the science of violence risk assessment improves, and clinical interventions to reduce that risk become demonstrably effective, there will be no avoiding trade-offs among cherished Anglo-American values of autonomy, social responsibility, privacy, and security," he wrote. "In the process of defining the rights and responsibilities of those among us with mental illness, we define ourselves."

In a Mar. 3 Roanoke Times article about a Virginia Supreme Court decision that Blacksburg would not be required to extend sewer service to a residential development, Richard Schragger said that the case was a small flash point in a much larger debate going on in communities across Virginia. The central question -- whether government is obligated to invest taxpayer money in infrastructure to serve new development -- will be fought not in the courts, "but in the political process between people who want the development and those who don't," he said.

Stephen Smith was quoted in a March ABA Journal article about Supreme Court law clerks recommending denial of certiorari petitions in order to avoid responsibility for a case being dismissed as improvidently granted. "You're really putting your neck out on the line," he said. "And what if the court disagrees with you? The incentive in the cert pool is to deny."

Christopher Sprigman was quoted in a Mar. 2 Christian Science Monitor article about a proposed federal bill that would apply copyright principles to the fashion industry. "People don't understand that it would make unlawful anything that is substantially similar to a preceding thing," he said. "What copyright would do is blow up the entire fashion industry as we know it."

In a Mar. 19 Daily Deal article about efforts by U.S. regulators and antitrust lawyers to promote competition in other countries' antitrust regimes, Paul Stephan argued that the best way to make legal systems more effective is to focus on local cultural and legal perspectives. "There tends to be too much focus on enacting a statute, when what would really help are efficient courts and bureaucracies free from political influence," he said.

Robert Turner was quoted in an Apr. 17 Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder on conflicts between Congress and the White House over war powers. He said that President Bush's decision to "surge" twenty-two thousand troops into Iraq was well within his powers, adding that Congress "can say you can't have money, but what they can't do is say you can have money only if you fight a certain way." He continued, though, that in the end Bush does need congressional support for a continuing robust troop presence in Iraq. "Ultimately if the president doesn't have the money he's not going to be able to prosecute the war," he said. In the Apr. 24 Austin American-Statesman, Turner discussed the federalization of state-controlled National Guard units in case of natural disaster, disease or "other condition." "I'm not greatly troubled by the change," he said. "The Katrina situation showed us the old system didn't work really well."

In an Apr. 5 Washington Post article about Alger Hiss's stepson's claims that Hiss was not a Soviet spy, G. Edward White said he believed that Hiss's stepson and son had become "dupes" in asserting his innocence. "That is to say," he explained, "they have such strong reasons to want to believe in their father's innocence, that their father essentially duped them at an early age into participating in this campaign."

For more information on faculty in the news,
see Archived Faculty in the News or the Media Guide

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

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