News Center

This Week's Experts – November 13, 2007

Overview

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

World

  • Pakistan
  • Darfur
  • Turkey/Iraq Border Conflict
  • Iraq Security Plan

Nation

  • US Business
    • Yahoo Settles China Lawsuit
    • Home Mortgage Crisis
    • Screenwriter Strike
    • Wall St. CEO Turnover
    • Securities Fraud
  • Congress
    • Spending Bill Veto
    • Military Funding
    • Anti-Predatory Lending Bill
    • Farm Bill
  • Supreme Court
    • DC Gun Control Case
    • Lethal Injection
  • Crack Cocaine Sentencing Reduction
  • Guantanamo Detainees
  • Immigration
    • Workplace Enforcement
    • New DHS Rules
    • E-Verify System
  • AG Mukasey

California

  • Calif. Lawsuit Against the EPA
  • State Prisons & Criminal Sentencing Reform
    • California Sentencing Legislation
    • Prison Funding
    • Assembly Appropriations Report
    • Proposed Sentencing Commission, Little Hoover Commission Report
    • Prison Overcrowding

World

Pakistan

Helen Stacy
Senior Lecturer in Law
650 725.9608
Expertise: International Human Rights, International Jurisprudence, International Law, Legal and Social Theory
Allen S. Weiner
Senior Lecturer in Law 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

Darfur

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

Turkey/Iraq Border Conflict

Allen S. Weiner
Senior Lecturer in Law 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
Senior Lecturer in Law 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

Nation

US Business-Yahoo Settles China Lawsuit

Allen S. Weiner
Senior Lecturer in Law 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
Jonathan Zittrain
Visiting Professor of Law
650 725.1519
Expertise: Cyberlaw, Internet Filtering by National Governments, Digital Property, Privacy, and Speech, Net Neutrality

US Business-Home 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 Business-Screenwriter Strike

William B. Gould IV
Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus
650 723.2111
Expertise: Comparative Law, Labor and Employment Law, Sports and Entertainment Law

US Business-Wall St. CEO Turnover

Joseph A. Grundfest
W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, Co-director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance
650 723.0458
Expertise: Corporate Law, Securities Regulation, Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture Capital

US Business-Securities Fraud

Joseph A. Grundfest
W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, Co-director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance
650 723.0458
Expertise: Corporate Law, Securities Regulation, Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture Capital

Congress-Spending Bill Veto

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

Congress- Military Funding

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

Congress-Anti-Predatory Lending Bill

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

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

Supreme Court-DC Gun Control Case

Robert Weisberg
Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law
650 723.0612
Expertise: Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, Criminal Procedure

Supreme Court-Lethal Injection

Robert Weisberg
Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law
650 723.0612
Expertise: Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, Criminal Procedure

Crack Cocaine Sentencing Reform

Kara Dansky
Executive Director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center
650 724.5786
Expertise: Criminal Law, Criminal Sentencing Policy, Member of California's Little Hoover Commission

Guantanamo Detainees

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

Immigration: Workplace Enforcement

Dan Siciliano
Lecturer in Law and Executive Director, Program in Law, Economics and Business
650 725.9045
Expertise: Immigration and the Economy, Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance

Immigration: New DHS Rules

Dan Siciliano
Lecturer in Law and Executive Director, Program in Law, Economics and Business
650 725.9045
Expertise: Immigration and the Economy, Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance

Immigration: E-Verify System

Dan Siciliano
Lecturer in Law and Executive Director, Program in Law, Economics and Business
650 725.9045
Expertise: Immigration and the Economy, Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance

AG Mukasey

Deborah L. Rhode
Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law
650 723.0319
Expertise: Antidiscrimination Law, Ethics and Professional Responsibility, Sex and the Law
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

California

Calif. Lawsuit Against the EPA

Deborah A. "Debbie" Sivas
Director, Environmental Law Clinic and Lecturer in Law
650 723.0325
Expertise: Environmental Law, Climate Change / Global Warming, litigates environmental protection cases in federal courts

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

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 an 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.

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.

Dan Siciliano

In addition to serving as executive director of the Program in Law, Economics, and Business, and co-director of Stanford's Directors' College, Siciliano is a senior research fellow with the Immigration Policy Center and a frequent commentator on the long-term economic impact of immigration policy and reform. His work has included expert testimony in front of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. Prior to his position at the law school, he co-founded the Immigration Outreach Center in Phoenix, Arizona and served as executive director for five years.

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.

Helen Stacy

Helen Stacy has produced works analyzing the efficacy of regional courts in promoting human rights, differences in the legal systems of neighboring countries, and the impact of postmodernism on legal thinking. Her recent scholarship has focused on the efforts of Romania, Mexico, and Thailand to improve their court systems and their policing. In addition to her role at the law school, Professor Stacy is a senior research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford UniversityÕs Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She is also a researcher with the European Forum at the Freeman Spogli Institute, a member of the Committee in Charge of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature, and is associated with the Center for African Studies.

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 schoolÕs 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.

Jonathan Zittrain

SLS Visiting Professor of Law Jonathan Zittrain is professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, where he cofounded the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Zittrain is also a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, a comprehensive effort to track Internet filtering worldwide. His scholarship focuses on digital property, privacy, and speech, and battles over Internet architecture.