Business & Entrepreneurship

Starbucks is dropping its name and the word “coffee” from its logo, leaving the curvy siren as the lone symbol of the Seattle-based company that started the gourmet joe revolution 40 years ago. It’s a natural evolution, say marketing experts at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, but not one without risk.

The record-breaking $380 million Mega Millions multistate lottery jackpot drawing this week had two winners and may inspire more people to take a chance on being a millionaire. But Romel Mostafa, visiting professor of strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, cautions lottery players on the odds of winning in an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, broadcast Jan. 4.

What do beer industry giant Tsingtao and the midwest’s handcrafted Schlafly brewery have in common? Hops, barley and business school.  Schlafly’s brewmaster and Tsingtao’s president are recent graduates of Olin Business School’s Executive MBA program that provides a unique experience for students to network with peers around the globe and share stories from the executive suite over a glass of beer.

Plan your exit before you enter a new business market may sound like strange advice, but it comes from an expert in entrepreneurship with experience to prove it. Olin professor Clifford Holekamp shares his expertise in the December issue of Octane, the award winning magazine of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization.

Do black leather pants qualify as a tax deduction for rock stars? Fans, musicians, journalists, researchers and anyone else interested in music can see how the courts dealt with this question and nearly any other legal issue involving the music industry at The Discography: Legal Encyclopedia of Popular Music accessible through thediscography.org. The site was created by Loren Wells, JD, musician and recent graduate of the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law and is supported by the Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL) at the School of Law. The site’s database — the most elaborate of its kind — covers 2,400 court opinions spanning nearly 200 years of the music industry.

“The recent response of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to the WikiLeaks document dump gives us a peek at the sometimes surreal standards for dealing with classified information and at the fear-mongering in which some government officials are engaging,” says Kathleen Clark, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. Clark teaches and writes about government ethics, national security law, legal ethics and whistleblowing. 

Cheryl Block, JD, federal budget and tax expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, weighs in on tax cut extensions. “We want it all: low tax rates, government spending on the programs we prefer, and — ideally — a balanced budget,” she says. “Perhaps not surprisingly, the desire for prudent budgets increasingly loses out to the first two demands.”

Laura Rosenbury, JD, professor of law, grew up in rural Indiana with two very strong grandmothers but in a church community that did not have much of a track record on women’s rights. “I think it was pretty obvious from a young age that women weren’t given the same opportunities as men and were expected to take on different roles,” she says. “And I didn’t understand why.”

The WikiLeaks controversy raises a number of important legal issues about national security and freedom of the press under U.S. law, says Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. Journalists and government officials have suggested that either WikiLeaks or The New York Times (NYT) might face legal liability for publishing the contents of diplomatic cables and other leaked documents. “In order to find either WikiLeaks/Julian Assange or the NYT liable, the government would need to prove two things — first that a law had been broken, and second that enforcement of the law was constitutional under the First Amendment,” Richards says.

The National Law Review has named Heejung Park, a master of laws student at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, a winner of its student writing contest. Park, who is from Korea, is studying U.S. law.