Not long ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal received praise for a speech after the Republican defeat warning fellow Republicans that, if they want to win again, “We’ve got to stop being the stupid party.” He seems to have forgotten that particular reform in comments this week supporting the teaching of both creationism and intelligent design in public schools as part of teaching “the best science.”
Continue reading “Gov. Bobby Jindal Supports Teaching Creationism As “Science” In Public Schools”
Below is my column this week in USA Today (the print version will run Wednesday while the web-version ran today). We have been following the increasingly draconian copyright and trademark laws used against citizens and companies — laws secured by an army of lobbyists, lawyers, and an obedient Congress and White House. The impetus of the piece is the Myriad case to be heard on Monday, where the Supreme Court will have to decide whether a company can patent human genes. The company argues that it took considerable research to isolate the genes associated with breast cancer and that patent protection gives companies like Myriad to do such extensive research and development. For many others, the patent claim represents a virtual franchising of the human body – giving companies claim to something that exists in nature. It also gives these companies a critical gatekeeper control on research into key components of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, and other health threats. While this column deals with statutory expansions of private property claims over genes, common phrases and images, there is an equal expansion occurring in the common law, including the “misappropriation of name or likeness.” Perhaps the most infamous such authority can be found in the case of White v. Samsung. In this case, Vanna White sued Samsung over a commercial that showed a robot with a blonde wig turning cards in a game show. It was an obvious parody but the federal court found the image of a blonde who did nothing but smile and turn large cards belongs exclusively to White.
This column is meant to show that there is a broader problem in the rush to claim common material, images, and terms. Perhaps it was inevitable that with the ever expanding patent, copyright, and trademark laws, mankind itself would become a form of property: the ultimate evolution from creator to object.
Continue reading “From Creator To Object: The Supreme Court To Consider Patent Claim To Human Genes”
Louisiana State Representative Katrina R. Jackson has a curious take on the religion clauses. Despite contrary Supreme Court precedent under the First Amendment, Jackson is pushing legislation to require students to learn the Lord’s prayer every morning in public schools. Jackson insists that requiring the Lord’s prayer (though students cannot be punished for failing to recite it) is simply a way to get them to appreciate . . . you guessed it . . . religious freedom.
By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Watching the unfolding meltdown at Rutgers University this week you had to be struck by the full array of human weakness on display. Prompted in large measure by a disgruntled former employee (all truth seems to come out that way), the school was rocked when a compilation video surfaced showing three years of verbal, physical and mental abuse heaped on student athletes whose crime was winning a basketball scholarship and having the misfortune to play for Head Coach Mike Rice and Assistant Coach Jimmy “Baby Rice” Martelli.
University of Rochester economics professor Steven Landsburg is under fire this week for his discussion of rape in a blog post. UR students have demanded his censure and are planning protests while UR has correctly refused to discipline Landsburg for an exercise of academic freedom. Indeed, these students (like the French students discussed earlier on the subject of free speech) have lost their bearings in demanding punishment for the expression ideas or opinions by a faculty members in my view.
Continue reading “University of Rochester Professor Under Fire For Blog Post”
Like many law professors, I am in the process of handing out evaluations this week and this posting on Reddit from a fellow law professor’s class caught my eye. Before leaving the classroom for the completion of evaluations, the professor apparently put up on the screen his favorite ding on evaluations with a student who wrote: “I don’t wear my seatbelt driving to school because I want to die before I make it to this class.”
Continue reading “More Art Than Science: Evaluating the Evaluations”
Many of us have opposed voucher systems as thinly veiled efforts to publicly fund religious schools in addition to a system that undermines our public school system. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee seem intent on confirming the religious motivations behind the system this week in opposing vouchers because it has occurred to them that Muslim schools might be able to receive funding with Christian schools. They are threatening to block Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s school voucher bill unless they can find a way to deny it to Muslim schools — a suggestion that brings sectarian prejudices to the forefront of the debate.
There is an interesting contracts controversy brewing over at the Smithsonian. Yes, it is possible to have an interesting contracts controversy. In this case, the contract was signed in 1948 between the estate of Orville Wright and the Smithsonian. The contract required that, in exchange for the famed Wright flyer, the Smithsonian would never recognize that anyone else was first in flight. That does not sit well with historians who believe that the first in flight was actually German immigrant Gustav Whitehead. Putting aside the historical debate, a contract requiring the museum legally to deny historical claims is plainly unethical. Is it an unenforceable unconscionable contract?
Continue reading “Wrong With Wright: Smithsonian Under Fire For Wright Brothers Contract”
For years, I have been struck by the trend in schools for recognizing everyone or no one in awards ceremonies. Last year, I watched an award ceremony where everyone not given any award for academic excellence was given an award at our public school. The same logic appears to be motivating Principal David Fabrizio of Ipswich Middle School in Massachusetts. Fabrizio has ended a long standing tradition of “Honors Night” because the failure to be part of it could be “devastating” to the students not receiving honors. He noted that some children do not have parents who are supportive at night and do not make honors due to poor home conditions.
We have another story showing the moral decline of pandas. Chinese officials are showing five-year-old Ke Lin and her partner Yongyong long panda pornography movies to try to get them in the amorous mood. Ke Lin had been shunning her mater. However, in a direct clinical confirmation of the impact of porn on the young mind, Ke Lin watched the movies now she is a character right out of the movie “Boogie Nights.”
Continue reading “Panda Porn: Chinese Researchers Produce Bear “Boogie Nights” For Timid Couples”
By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
My representative, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, has been doing a lot of talking recently about public schools. Criticized for “softening” his tough stand on social issues, Cantor has taken to the lectern to buff up his right-wing street cred. And what better whipping boy than public education?
Take for instance this little dittie in February while speaking to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) about budget priorities even as he diverted attention from the impending sequestration mess that he helped bring about. Lamenting the lack of progress on curing diseases such as brain cancer, Cantor remarked, “There is an appropriate and necessary role for the federal government to ensure funding for basic medical research. Doing all we can to facilitate medical breakthroughs for people … should be a priority. We can and must do better …. Funds currently spent by the government on social science – including on politics of all things – would be better spent helping find cures to diseases.” As if one must exclude the other, you know.
Continue reading “Eric Cantor And The GOP’s Assault On Public Schools”
Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In a 2010 New York Times article titled Charter Schools’ New Cheerleaders: Financiers, reporters Tripp Gabriel and Jennifer Medina wrote the following about what was going on in the state of New York:
Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm…
Although the April 9 breakfast with Mr. Cuomo was not a formal fund-raiser, the hedge fund managers have been wielding their money to influence educational policy in Albany, particularly among Democrats, who control both the Senate and the Assembly but have historically been aligned with the teachers unions.
They[hedge fund managers] have been contributing generously to lawmakers in hopes of creating a friendlier climate for charter schools. More immediately, they have raised a multimillion-dollar war chest to lobby this month for a bill to raise the maximum number of charter schools statewide to 460 from 200.
That same year—2010—Juan Gonzalez believed that he had uncovered one of the reasons why hedge fund managers, some wealthy Americans, and the executives of some Wall Street banks had become such big proponents of charter schools and had gotten involved in their development. Gonzalez said the banks and other wealthy investors had been making “windfall profits” by taking advantage of “a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction.” That little know tax break, the New Markets Tax Credit, can be so lucrative, Gonzalez said, “that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.” He added that the tax break “gives an enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities, and it’s been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools.”
The City University community college system released a shocking statistic last week that roughly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates fall below proficient levels of reading, writing, and math and must take remedial courses before starting any classes.
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty(rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
If you have had any medical procedures lately, you may already be aware of the enormous prices being charged by hospitals. What you may not be aware of is just how expensive this medical treatment is and how relying on private health care may just be reducing our lifespans. I apologize in advance on the length of the following examples, but they are necessary to understand the enormity of the issue.
“Brill’s article begins with the story of a 42-year-old Ohio man named Sean Recchi, who traveled to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for treatment of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He and his wife Stephanie had paid $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, for insurance that covered $2,000 per day of hospital costs. His financial troubles started when MD Anderson told him, “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance.” But he had to go to the hospital. His wife recalled that he was “sweating and shaking with chills and pains. He had a large mass in his chest that was..growing. He was panicked.”
Stephanie asked her mother to write a check for $48,900. Sean waited for 90 minutes while the hospital confirmed that the check had cleared. He was also required to advance MD Anderson $7,500 from his credit card. The total cost for the initial treatment and chemotherapy was $83,900, including a $15,000 charge for lab tests for which a Medicare patient would have paid a few hundred dollars, $283 for an x-ray that Medicare categorizes as a $20 charge, and $1.50 for a generic version of a Tylenol pill.” CommonDreams Continue reading “Is Private Health Care Squeezing the Life Out of Us?”
By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
In Maryland, a seven-year-old boy is suspended from his school under its “zero tolerance” policy because he nibbles a pastry into the shape of a handgun and says “Bang!” “Bang!” (Here). In California, a high school principal refuses to let an ambulance come onto a football filed to tend to a seriously injured player citing school board rules. (Here). A nurse at a home for the aged ignores the furtive pleas of a 911 dispatcher and refuses to perform CPR on a woman dying of cardiac arrest because she says its policy not to do it. (Here). She won’t even get someone else to do it.