Friday, March 2, 2012

Weekly Round-Up for March 2nd

Be sure to check in on Monday, when I'll explain why George Clooney wants you to read this blog.
Here are some of the best and most-interesting law related stories from the last week:

Hollywood-FBI crossover? You got it: Gordon Gekko is doing white-collar crime PSAs. The Wall Street actor helps the FBI fight crime with publicity.

Something involving The Alien Tort Statute could easily be a little too "law" and not enough "society" for my tastes, but here Stephen Wermiel does a great job looking at a new SCOTUS case and the way that international norms wiggle their way into our laws and courts.

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick takes her angle on the same case. 

Also at Slate, Richard Thompson Ford argues that the Court should never have taken Fisher... or Grutter, or Bakke... in fact, it should stay out of affirmative action altogether. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a new paper suggests law school deans may be liable for mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and making false and misleading statements in US News and World Report. Here's a link to the paper's abstract at SSRN. 

Is Obama's Department of Justice intentionally letting the Voting Rights Act wither on the vine? Will Oremus thinks so. 

Don't be fooled by the changes to the Virginia ultrasound bill, says Dahlia Lithwick: it's still well beyond the pale. 

At Salon, Justin Elliot suggests the NYPD has broken state and federal law in spying on mosques. 

Robert Andrew Powell wanted to write a book about soccer. In this interview with Steve Almond, he explains why the book is about Ciudad Juarez and the proliferation of violence in a city with weak formal institutions, and strong, warring informal ones. 

Professor Thomas Schaller writes at Salon that formal law and politics haven't kept up with social change over the last decade. 




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