In a Sept. 15 Roanoke Times article about a law firm's decision to reduce its insurance practice and cut its staffing, Kenneth Abraham noted that insurance companies trying to lower costs have pressured their outside law firms to reduce legal fees. "Insurance companies pay hourly rates below what . . . many firms need to be able to economically represent the policyholder for the insurance companies," he said.

Richard Bonnie was quoted in a Sept. 15 New York Times article about a proposal that election officials supervise voting in nursing homes and give brief mental tests to determine whether residents with dementia are competent to vote. He said that some states bar voting by people labeled "insane," although those laws would most likely be found unconstitutional if tested. "There is an amazing shortage of direct law on the subject," he noted. In an Oct. 13 Harrisonburg Daily News-Record article about the Supreme Court's juvenile death penalty case, Bonnie said it was inevitable that the question had been raised again. "It's not a surprise that these issues are going back in front of the court," he said. "It certainly would not be surprising if they said the Constitution does not support executing someone who was 16 or 17 at the time of the offense."

Anne Coughlin was quoted in a Sept. 9 Washington Post story about news reports that the judge in the Fairfax County capital murder trial of sniper John Allen Muhammad was conducting his own investigation of the case. She called his actions "really very unusual. It seems to me that the reading of documents is not that problematic. But with the question of the judge's own probing of a witness, the worry would be that the judge had formed an impression of the witness outside of the courtroom." In the Oct. 2 Virginian-Pilot, Coughlin discussed the dismissal on limitations grounds of a lawsuit accusing a Catholic priest of child sexual abuse decades ago. The plaintiff contended that he was unable to understand the cause of his psychological injuries until recently because he had suppressed memories of the abuse. "This is an issue that all the states have had to reckon with, and there's robust debate over whether repressed memory claims are accurate," she said. In an Oct. 12 Roanoke Times article about the repeated prosecution of former National D-Day Memorial Foundation president Richard Burrow, Coughlin said that the cost is something prosecutors bear in mind before proceeding with a case. "If they try one case, that means they're not trying another," she said. "They're diverting prosecutors', agents', judges' and jurors' time from other presumably very important cases."

In a Sept. 11 Roanoke Times story about the fraud indictments of two former executives of a Lynchburg wood products company, Michael Dooley noted that the case demonstrates increased efforts to prosecute allegations of corporate malfeasance in the wake of Enron and WorldCom. He said that Congress has significantly increased fraud penalties since those corporate scandals, and that "prosecutors have made increasing use of mail and wire fraud in recent years because it casts a very wide net. Basically, all you need is proof that the defendant either committed fraud or... acted disloyally to a corporation" and used the mail, a fax machine, the phone or an e-mail to do it.

In an Oct. 29 Salem, OR Statesman Journal article comparing the same-sex marriage amendment on the Oregon ballot to earlier bans on interracial marriage, Kim Forde-Mazrui said that arguments against the two prohibitions are similar: "If religious, scientific, moral opposition to interracial relationships were wrong—notwithstanding the sincerity and good faith of those who believed in the opposition—then are those same arguments any more justified when they are used to oppose same-sex relationships?"

John Harrison was quoted in an Oct. 1 Associated Press story about the reversal of a child-pornography conviction on the grounds that a shipment of blank computer disks across state lines failed to satisfy the interstate-commerce requirement of federal law. Because the ruling adds to a split among appellate courts on this issue, Harrison said he thought there was "a substantial chance" that the Supreme Court would review one of  the cases to resolve the differences.

In an Aug. 30 National Law Journal article about Liberty University's new law school, A. E. Dick Howard expressed concern about whether the school will be tightly controlled by its religious affiliation or will have the independence that promotes academic freedom. "They don't just plan to talk about the relationship between law and religion. They plan to show how law flows from Christian principles," he said. "That's kind of blending law and theology and I don't know of any law school that's quite that explicit." In a Sept. 27 Bloomberg News Service story on how changes in the Supreme Court would impact business, Howard noted that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas often vote against companies on such issues as punitive damages and job discrimination. "A potential nominee's views on business cases wouldn't be the first thing the administration would think about," he said. "Politics would lead them to name justices because of the social issues—privacy, church and state, abortion—rather than the business docket." The Oct. 10 Richmond Times-Dispatch noted that Howard was presented the World Affairs Council of Greater Richmond's George C. Marshall Award for International Law and Diplomacy in recognition of his efforts in shaping the constitutions of numerous countries, including nations of the former Soviet bloc as they moved from communism to democracy.

Michael Klarman was quoted in a Sept. 3 Washington Blade story about a Virginia judge's ruling asserting jurisdiction over a lesbian couple's custody battle, overlooking a Vermont court order predicated on the couple's civil union. He explained that the Full Faith and Credit Clause, which requires states to honor the laws and judicial proceedings of other states, has always contained an implicit exception allowing a state not to recognize other state laws that conflict with its own public policy. "Moreover, Congress has explicit power to enforce this clause, and the Defense of Marriage Act purports to allow states not to grant full faith and credit to state laws allowing same-sex marriage," he said. In the Oct. 4 Fargo, N.D., Forum, Klarman compared the proposed state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to prohibition amendments that later "became an embarrassment." He explained that older people generally oppose same-sex marriage, while younger people are fine with it. "As those people become older and the older generation dies off, public opinion on this is going to change," he said, predicting that any constitutional bans would have to be repealed in a decade or two.

A story in the Sept. 22 National Post, a Canadian newspaper, about the Securities and Exchange Commission's role in the supremacy of U.S. financial markets included Paul Mahoney's comments that "after World War I and well before the federal legislation of the 1930s, New York assumed leadership of the world's capital markets." He explained that stock exchanges already had their own, private rules long before the SEC was created in 1934.

David Martin was quoted in a Sept. 13 Denver Post article about striking discrepancies in how federal immigration judges deal with asylum petitions. "It would be better if we had a system in which everybody approached it in precisely the same way," he said. "But it's not appropriate for anybody to feed judges a packaged assessment of what conditions are like in a country. They are supposed to make a judgment." In the Sept. 18 Oregonian, he commented on the pending Supreme Court case on the fate of criminal Mariel Cubans detainees, the most well-known and largest group of detained immigrants in the United States. The parole status assigned to Mariel Cubans, Martin said, is a "legal fiction, where the person gets to be in the country but they have not officially been admitted to the country. In the eyes of the law, it's as though you have never entered and you are still at the border."

John Monahan was quoted in an Oct. 10 Orange County Register story about the University of California Irvine's law and psychology program, which has broken new ground in challenging the reliability of eyewitness testimony, confessions, and other criminal evidence. Noting that "UCI has leaped to the national forefront," he called it one of the two or three best programs of its kind in the nation.

John Norton Moore was featured in stories about two of his former students. A Sept. 19 New York Times Magazine article about slain international activist Fern Holland noted that she had been working with Moore on establishing an African Institute for Democracy. In a Sept. 26 Associated Press story about the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University, Moore said that the center fills a void shaped by the Sept. 11 attacks and praised his former student Jeffrey Addicott as the right choice for its director. He cited a 1980s program Addicott devised for the Peruvian military, then in the midst of a protracted fight against the Shining Path guerrillas. "In my judgment, it was one of the most effective programs on rule of law and humanitarian training ever run by the U.S. government," said Moore. "It really turned around the very bad practices of the Peruvian government."

Robert O'Neil wrote an article for the Sept. 17 National Catholic Reporter about the denial of a U.S. visa to prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, who had planned to teach at the University of Notre Dame. He noted that Ramadan was a "scholar of world renown, recently named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people," and went on: "In the absence of any evidence of terrorist activity or of material support for terrorism, the conclusion is inescapable that a distinguished international scholar is unwelcome here on grounds that go to the heart of academic and intellectual freedom." O'Neil was quoted in an Oct. 4 National Law Journal story about a case deciding that the use of tobacco industry taxes to fund anti-smoking ads was government-funded, protected speech. "The only question is," he said, "can they take a specially earmarked fund paid for by those producers and take the gun out of their hands and turn around and shoot them with it?" O'Neil was also quoted in an Oct. 11 Roanoke Times column about the confiscation of student newspapers by an administrator at Lynchburg College. Asked if student publishers could simply bulk-mail their paper to every box address on the Lynchburg campus, he said "I'm certain there's a federal statute that protects mail at least until it's in the hands of the addressee."

George Rutherglen was quoted in a column about the U.S. election campaign by U.Va. professor Philippe Roger in the Sept. 19 French newspaper Libération. Noting that Virginia was not a battleground state that would decide the presidential election, he said, "L'élection va se jouer dans quatre Etats au maximum. Imaginez que la présidentielle, en France, se décide dans un demi-département pyrénéen."

Elizabeth Scott's work with Laurence Steinberg was discussed in an Oct. 13 New York Law Journal article on the juvenile death penalty. The article quotes their American Psychologist article maintaining that the scientific evidence argues for a legal approach "under which most youths are dealt with in a separate justice system and none are eligible for capital punishment."