Author: Neil Schoenherr

In the end, the best argument for eliminating qualified immunity is less about deterrence and more about symbolism. Qualified immunity routinely requires courts to say that there will be no penalty for a police officer who has violated the Constitution. That is the wrong message.

We surely don’t have all of the answers but we have settled on some lessons. We will teach our students to press forward, because there is no real alternative. We will teach them to challenge unjust laws because, as Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without demand.” We will inspire them to harness their outrage and energy into new and better policies.

After a decade of suffering from a still-raging opioid epidemic, after a century in which our advances in the treatment of substance use disorder can be counted on one or two hands, an overreaction to the treatment of addiction—mobile treatment, treatment guided by real-time data, treatment that follows patients back to their community—is very much overdue.

We can hold ourselves and our friends and family accountable for the things we say and do. We can change the narrative so that our children and their children internalize a different story.

In the wake of national protests following the death of George Floyd, some activists are calling on cities to defund their police departments. But what does that mean exactly? Robert Motley, a PhD candidate in the Brown School and manager of the Race & Opportunity Lab at Washington University in St. Louis, explained it’s more of a reallocation of funds for public safety and health.

Suppression of the spread of COVID-19 is an attainable goal, and it can be done through strategies that ease social distancing guidelines, suggests a new model developed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the Brookings Institution.

A $1.5 million grant to the Brown School will provide state-of-the-art training for 18 early-career researchers in Uganda to strengthen the capacity of research institutions in the country to address HIV/AIDS and its burden on child and adolescent mental health.

New research from the Race and Opportunity Lab in the Brown School’s Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis sheds light on youths’ reactions to social media videos showing violence in their communities.

After President Donald Trump made unsubstantiated claims on Twitter about mail-in voting and Twitter responded by attaching a link to his tweets, Trump threatened to close down the social media giant. “The president appears to have no understanding of or concern for free speech,” says a constitutional law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

The childhood obesity rate in the United States may increase by 2.4% if school closures continue into December, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.