Overview
Stanford Law School faculty are available to offer legal analysis/commentary on the following news topics this week:
World
- Iraq Security Plan
- North Korea- Nuclear Disarmament
- Noriega Extradition to France
- West Bank Barrier
- Darfur
- Economic Sanctions
- Refugee Crisis
- International Crimes
Nation
- AG Nominee Michael B. Mukasey
- Climate Change
- Dismissal of Calif. Climate Suit
- VT. Car Emissions Decision
- US Business
- Microsoft Ruling/EU Court Rejects Appeal
- UAW Negotiations With GM, Ford
- Milberg Weiss/Lerach Guilty Plea
- Stock Options Backdating
- Insider Trading
- Chinese Import Safety and Regulation
- Subprime Mortgage Crisis
- Hedge Fund & Private Equity Tax
- US Congress
- Patent Reform Bill
- No Child Left Behind
- Farm Bill
- Guantanamo
California
- Auto Emissions Suit (see "Climate Change" above)
- State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform
- California Sentencing Legislation
- Prison Funding
- Assembly Appropriations Report
- Proposed Sentencing Commission, Little Hoover Commission Report
- Prison Overcrowding
World
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
- aweiner@stanford.edu
- 650 724.5892 or 650 724.4818
- Expertise: Contemporary Security Threats, International Security, Nuclear Proliferation, International Law, Laws of War, Human Rights
North Korea- Nuclear Disarmament
- 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
- aweiner@stanford.edu
- 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
- aweiner@stanford.edu
- 650 724.5892 or 650 724.4818
- Expertise: Contemporary Security Threats, International Security, Nuclear Proliferation, International Law, Laws of War, Human Rights
West Bank Barrier
- Yifat Holzman-Gazit
- Visiting Professor of Law
- yifat@stanford.edu
- 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
- tcuellar@stanford.edu
- 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
- tcuellar@stanford.edu
- 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
- tcuellar@stanford.edu
- 650 723.9216
- Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers
Nation
AG Nominee Michael B. Mukasey
- Deborah L. Rhode
- Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law
- rhode@stanford.edu
- 650 723.0319
- Expertise: Antidiscrimination Law, Ethics and Professional Responsibility, Sex and the Law
Climate Change-Dismissal of Calif. Climate Suit
- Deborah A. "Debbie" Sivas
- Director, Environmental Law Clinic and Lecturer in Law
- dsivas@stanford.edu
- 650 723.0325
- Expertise: Environmental Law, Climate Change / Global Warming, litigates environmental protection cases in federal courts
Climate Change-VT. Car Emissions Decision
- Deborah A. "Debbie" Sivas
- Director, Environmental Law Clinic and Lecturer in Law
- dsivas@stanford.edu
- 650 723.0325
- Expertise: Environmental Law, Climate Change / Global Warming, litigates environmental protection cases in federal courts
US Business- Microsoft Ruling/EU Court Rejects Appeal
- Mark A. Lemley
- William H. Neukom Professor of Law
- mlemley@law.stanford.edu
- 650 723.4605
- Expertise: Antitrust, Intellectual Property (Patents, Trademarks, Copyright), Technology and the Law
US Business- UAW Negotiations With GM, Ford
- William B. Gould IV
- Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus
- wbgould@stanford.edu
- 650 723.2111
- Expertise: Comparative Law, Labor and Employment Law, Sports and Entertainment Law
US Business- Milberg Weiss/Lerach Guilty Plea
- Joseph A. Grundfest
- W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, Co-director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance
- grundfest@stanford.edu
- 650 723.0458
- Expertise: Corporate Law, Securities Regulation, Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture Capital
US Business- Stock Options Backdating
- Joseph A. Grundfest
- W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, Co-director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance
- grundfest@stanford.edu
- 650 723.0458
- Expertise: Corporate Law, Securities Regulation, Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture Capital
US Business- Insider Trading
- Joseph A. Grundfest
- W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, Co-director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance
- grundfest@stanford.edu
- 650 723.0458
- Expertise: Corporate Law, Securities Regulation, Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture Capital
US Business-Chinese Import Safety and Regulation
- Alan O. Sykes
- Professor of Law
- asykes@law.stanford.edu
- 650 723.0178
- Expertise: Antitrust, Contracts, Insurance, International Law, International Trade, Law and Economics, Torts
US Business- Subprime Mortgage Crisis
- G. Marcus Cole
- Professor of Law, The Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, and Associate Dean for Curriculum
- gmcole@stanford.edu
- 650 723.9216
- Expertise: Bankruptcy, Commercial Law, Contracts, Venture Capital
US Business-Hedge Fund & Private Equity Tax
- Joseph Bankman
- Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business
- jbankman@stanford.edu
- 650 725.3825
- Expertise: Business and Corporate Law, Law and Economics, Taxation
US Congress- Patent Reform Bill
- Mark A. Lemley
- William H. Neukom Professor of Law
- mlemley@law.stanford.edu
- 650 723.4605
- Expertise: Antitrust, Intellectual Property (Patents, Trademarks, Copyright), Technology and the Law
US Congress- No Child Left Behind
- William Koski
- Eric and Nancy Wright Professor of Clinical Education
- bkoski@stanford.edu
- 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
- buzzt@stanford.edu
- 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
Guantanamo
- Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
- Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar
- tcuellar@stanford.edu
- 650 723.9216
- Expertise: International Criminal Law, International Security, Separation of Powers
- Jenny S. Martinez
- Associate Professor of Law
- jmartinez@law.stanford.edu
- 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
- bolshansky@law.stanford.edu
- 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
- kdansky@stanford.edu
- 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
- weisberg@stanford.edu
- 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
- kdansky@stanford.edu
- 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
- weisberg@stanford.edu
- 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
- kdansky@stanford.edu
- 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
- weisberg@stanford.edu
- 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
- kdansky@stanford.edu
- 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
- weisberg@stanford.edu
- 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
- kdansky@stanford.edu
- 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
- weisberg@stanford.edu
- 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.
William B. Gould IV
A prolific scholar of labor and discrimination law, William B. Gould IV has been an influential voice on worker-management relations for over forty years and recently served as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. Professor Gould has been a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators since 1970 and has arbitrated and mediated more than 200 labor disputes, including the 1992 and 1993 salary disputes between the Major League Baseball Players Association and the Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee. Professor Gould is the recipient of five honorary doctorates for his significant contributions in the fields of labor law and labor relations.
Joseph A. Grundfest
Grundfest, a former SEC Commissioner, is a nationally prominent expert on capital markets, corporate governance, and securities litigation. He has served on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisors as counsel and senior economist for legal and regulatory matters. Grundfest heads the award-winning Securities Class Action Clearinghouse and co-directs the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford Law School.
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.
Mark A. Lemley
Widely recognized as a preeminent scholar of intellectual property law, Mark Lemley is a prolific writer, having published over 70 articles and six books, and an accomplished litigator, having tried cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and federal district courts. His major contributions to legal scholarship focus on how the economics and technology of the Internet affect patent law, copyright law, and trademark law. Professor Lemley has testified numerous times before Congress and the California legislature on patent, trade secret, antitrust, and constitutional law matters and currently serves as of counsel at Keker & Van Nest in their intellectual property and antitrust divisions.
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.
Deborah A. "Debbie" Sivas
Sivas has been the Director of the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic since 1997. She is a 1987 Stanford Law School graduate, clerked for a federal court, serves as president of the board for two NGOs, and has litigated many significant environmental cases in federal court on behalf of nonprofit organizations.
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.