News Center

This Week's Experts – September 4, 2007

Overview

Stanford Law School faculty are available to offer legal analysis/commentary on the following news topics this week:

World

  • North Korea- Terrorism List
  • Iraq Security Plan
  • Noriega Extradition to France
  • Israeli Court Order to Move West Bank Barrier
  • Darfur
    • Economic Sanctions
    • Refugee Crisis
    • International Crimes

Nation

  • US Congress
    • Iraq War Hearings/Gao, Petraeus, Crocker Reports
    • Subprime Mortgage Crisis
    • No Child Left Behind
    • Farm Bill
  • US Business
    • Chinese Import Safety and Regulation
    • Hedge Fund & Private Equity Tax
  • Gonzales Legacy and Resignation
  • Guantanamo

California

  • State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform
    • California Sentencing Legislation
    • Prison Funding
    • Assembly Appropriations Report
    • Proposed Sentencing Commission, Little Hoover Commission Report
    • Prison Overcrowding

World

North Korea- Terrorism List

Allen S. Weiner
Associate Professor of Law (Teaching), Warren Christopher Professor of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, and Co-director of the Center on International Conflict and Resolution
650 724.5892 or 650 724.4818
Expertise: Contemporary Security Threats, International Security, Nuclear Proliferation, International Law, Laws of War, Human Rights

Iraq Security Plan

Allen S. Weiner
Associate Professor of Law (Teaching), Warren Christopher Professor of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, and Co-director of the Center on International Conflict and Resolution
650 724.5892 or 650 724.4818
Expertise: Contemporary Security Threats, International Security, Nuclear Proliferation, International Law, Laws of War, Human Rights

Noriega Extradition to France

Allen S. Weiner
Associate Professor of Law (Teaching), Warren Christopher Professor of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, and Co-director of the Center on International Conflict and Resolution
650 724.5892 or 650 724.4818
Expertise: Contemporary Security Threats, International Security, Nuclear Proliferation, International Law, Laws of War, Human Rights

Israeli Court Order to Move West Bank Barrier

Yifat Holzman-Gazit
Visiting Professor of Law
650 725.9845
Expertise: Property Law, the Israeli-Palestinian land conflict, Courts and Media Coverage

Darfur: Economic Sanctions

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar
650 723.9216
Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers

Darfur: Refugee Crisis

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar
650 723.9216
Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers

Darfur: International Crimes

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar
650 723.9216
Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers

Nation

US Congress- Iraq War Hearings/ Gao, Petraeus, Crocker Reports

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar
650 723.9216
Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers

US Congress- Subprime Mortgage Crisis

G. Marcus Cole
Professor of Law, The Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, and Associate Dean for Curriculum
650 723.9216
Expertise: Bankruptcy, Commercial Law, Contracts, Venture Capital

US Congress- No Child Left Behind

William Koski
Eric and Nancy Wright Professor of Clinical Education
650 724.3718
Expertise: Children and the Law, Education Law, Educational Politics, Policy Analysis

US Congress- Farm Bill

Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson, Jr
Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law and Director, Woods Institute for the Environment
650 723.2518
Expertise: Natural Resources Law, Water Law, Environmental Law, Property
Woods Institute Farm Bill website: http://woods.stanford.edu/ideas/farmbill/results.html

US Business-Chinese Import Safety and Regulation

Alan O. Sykes
Professor of Law
650 723.0178
Expertise: Antitrust, Contracts, Insurance, International Law, International Trade, Law and Economics, Torts

US Business-Hedge Fund & Private Equity Tax

Joseph Bankman
Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business
650 725.3825
Expertise: Business and Corporate Law, Law and Economics, Taxation

Gonzales Legacy and Resignation

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar
650 723.9216
Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers
Jenny S. Martinez
Associate Professor of Law
650 725.2749
Expertise: Separation of Powers, Civil Procedure and Litigation, Comparative Law, Constitutional Law, Human Rights, International Law, Detention related to Terrorism / GTMO
Deborah L. Rhode
Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law
650 723.0319
Expertise:Antidiscrimination Law, Ethics and Professional Responsibility, Sex and the Law (Attorney Dismissals)

Guantanamo

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar
650 723.9216
Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers
Jenny S. Martinez
Associate Professor of Law
650 725.2749
Expertise: Separation of Powers, Civil Procedure and Litigation, Comparative Law, Constitutional Law, Human Rights, International Law, Detention related to Terrorism / GTMO
Barbara Olshansky
Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights
650 736.2312
Expertise: International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, Detention related to Terrorism / GTMO, Immigrants' Rights, Prisoners' Rights, Native American Rights, Environmental Law, Public Health, Race Discrimination in Employment and Education.

California

State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform: California Sentencing Legislation

Kara Dansky
Executive Director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center
650 724.5786
Expertise: Criminal Law, Criminal Sentencing Policy, Member of California's Little Hoover Commission
Robert Weisberg
Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law
650 723.0612
Expertise: Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, Criminal Procedure

State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform: Prison Funding

Kara Dansky
Executive Director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center
650 724.5786
Expertise: Criminal Law, Criminal Sentencing Policy, Member of California's Little Hoover Commission
Robert Weisberg
Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law
650 723.0612
Expertise: Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, Criminal Procedure

State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform: Assembly Appropriations Report

Kara Dansky
Executive Director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center
650 724.5786
Expertise: Criminal Law, Criminal Sentencing Policy, Member of California's Little Hoover Commission
Robert Weisberg
Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law
650 723.0612
Expertise: Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, Criminal Procedure

State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform: Proposed Sentencing Commission, Little Hoover Commission Report

Kara Dansky
Executive Director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center
650 724.5786
Expertise: Criminal Law, Criminal Sentencing Policy, Member of California's Little Hoover Commission
Robert Weisberg
Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law
650 723.0612
Expertise: Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, Criminal Procedure

State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform: Prison Overcrowding

Kara Dansky
Executive Director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center
650 724.5786
Expertise: Criminal Law, Criminal Sentencing Policy, Member of California's Little Hoover Commission
Robert Weisberg
Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law
650 723.0612
Expertise: Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, Criminal Procedure

Bios

Joseph Bankman

A leading scholar in the field of tax law, Bankman is the author of two widely used casebooks on the subject. His writings on tax policy cover topics such as progressivity, consumption tax, and the role of tax in the structure of Silicon Valley start-ups. He has testified before Congress and other legislative bodies on tax compliance problems posed by the cash economy and worked with the State of California, coauthoring a bill that helps to simplify tax filing by giving low-income taxpayers the option of receiving a ReadyReturn--a completed tax return prepared by the state.

G. Marcus Cole

Cole takes an empirical law and economics approach to research questions such as why corporate bankruptcies increasingly are adjudicated in Delaware, and what drives the financial structure of companies backed by venture capital. He has been a national fellow at the Hoover Institution, and has scholarly interests that range from classical liberal political theory to natural law and the history of commercial law. In November 2006, Cole was part of a group of regulatory experts, who, represented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, filed a amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to uphold federal preemption in Watters v. Wachovia Bank.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar

Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member with the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation and served as senior advisor to the U.S. Treasury Department's Under Secretary for Enforcement. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates.

Kara Dansky

Dansky is an expert on California sentencing policy and a member of the Little Hoover Commission Advisory Committee on Sentencing Reform. Previously, she was a staff attorney, with the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and a staff attorney for the Society of Counsel Representing Accused Persons.

Yifat Holzman-Gazit

Holzman-Gazit is teaching Comparative Constitutional Property Rights and Minority Rights in Israel at Stanford Law School this year. A faculty member at the College of Management Law School in Israel, Holzman-Gazit's scholarship focuses on property law, the Israeli-Palestinian land conflict, and courts and media coverage. Her book, Land Expropriation in Israel: Law, Culture and Society, is due to be published later this year. Holzman-Gazit was an adviser to the Israeli Inter-ministerial Committee on Reform of Land Expropriation Law from 2003 to 2004.

William Koski

Koski's scholarly work focuses on the related issues of educational accountability, equity, and adequacy; the politics of educational policy reform; and judicial decision-making in educational policy reform litigation. An accomplished clinical teacher and litigator, he is also the founder and director of the law school's Youth and Education Law Project. Koski's current research concentrates on the normative case for and policy implications of ensuring equality of educational opportunity in the current context of educational standards, adequacy, and accountability. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, Koski was a lecturer in law at Stanford and a supervising attorney at the law school's East Palo Alto Community Law Project.

Jenny S. Martinez

Martinez argued the 2004 case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla in the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to clarify the constitutional protections available to post-9/11 "enemy combatants" who are U.S. citizens. Martinez performed the rare feat of a clerkship triple crown, clerking on a federal appellate court, the United States Supreme Court (with Justice Stephen Breyer), and the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (with Judge Patricia Wald). Martinez's scholarship makes the first major attempt to synthesize and analyze the important new phenomenon of an increasing number of international tribunals operating in a globalized environment, but without any supervening sovereign authority to which they are all bound.

Barbara Olshansky

Known for her groundbreaking work on the 2004 Rasul v. Bush case, in which the Supreme Court of the United States overruled a lower court ruling and found that American courts have jurisdiction over claims brought by Guantanamo detainees who are foreign nationals, Olshansky is a leading voice in international human rights and humanitarian law. Prior to her appointment at Stanford Law, she led the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights and served as CCR's deputy legal director litigating civil and human rights cases and supervising new lawyers. She has also served as a union-side labor and plaintiff's employment discrimination lawyer and argued cases for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Deborah L. Rhode

Rhode, one of the nation's leading scholars in the fields of legal ethics and professional responsibility, is a prolific author of articles and books on the regulation and reform of the legal profession. She is the founding director of Stanford University's Center on Ethics and she has headed Stanford Law School's Keck Center on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession. A former president of the Association of American Law Schools, Professor Rhode is also a regular columnist for the National Law Journal.

Alan O. Sykes

A leading expert on the application of economics to legal problems, Sykes has focused his research on international economic relations. His writing and teaching have encompassed international trade, torts, contracts, insurance, antitrust, and economic analysis of law. He has been a member of the executive committee and the board of the American Law and Economics Association, and currently serves as reporter for the American Law Institute Project on Principles of Trade Law: The World Trade Organization. Sykes is associate editor of the Journal of International Economic Law, and a member of the board of editors of the World Trade Review.

Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson, Jr.

Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson has contributed a large body of scholarship on environmental issues ranging from the future of endangered species and fisheries to the use of economic techniques for regulating the environment. He is the founding director of the law school's Environmental and Natural Resources Program, director of and a senior scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior scholar at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. Thompson is chairman of the Natural Heritage Institute and a board member of the the Nature Conservancy of California, the American Farmland Trust, the Resources Legacy Fund, and the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation.

Allen S. Weiner

Weiner is the co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Resolution. For more than a decade, he served at the United States Department of State, first as Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser, and then as Attaché and Counselor for Legal Affairs in the United States Embassy in The Hague. He is an expert on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including in North Korea and Iran.

Robert Weisberg

Weisberg is director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. A frequent commentator and expert on white-collar crime, criminal law and procedure, sentencing, and criminal justice reform, he has served as a consulting attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the California Appellate Project, working on death penalty litigation in the federal courts. He is also versed in commercial law and secured transactions.