Business & Entrepreneurship

The Supreme Court appears very likely to strike down the most important provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, says Gregory P. Magarian, JD, constitution law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “This was an unusually revealing oral argument, because two justices asked questions that reflected both fundamental misunderstanding of the law and disturbing indifference to the constitutional grounding of the Voting Rights Act,” he says.

Several new faculty members have joined the Olin Business School. Their expertise covers various areas, such as accounting, communications, finance and marketing.

The ability to access, search, and interact with legal case documents that record the freedom suits of former slaves is now just a browser click away, thanks to a major initiative of the Digital Library Services unit of Washington University Libraries. The Libraries secured funding for the project from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, with the Missouri History Museum as an institutional partner. (VIDEO)

Business professionals looking to take their careers to the next level and sharpen their leadership skills will welcome the arrival of a top-ranked Executive MBA program in Denver that promises a rigorous and relevant deep dive graduate degree in management. Washington University in St. Louis will offer its 20-month Executive MBA program, ranked number two worldwide by The Wall Street Journal, in Denver beginning in September 2013.

Washington University in St. Louis administrators are urging Congress and the White House to reach a compromise to avoid wide-ranging, across-the-board federal spending cuts that would take effect March 1.

Olin Business School’s fourth annual Olin Sustainability Case Competition challenged students to propose plans for developing more than 10,000 vacant properties in St. Louis. From solar panels to community service projects, students came up with creative ideas to combat “Blight, Plight, and Urban-Flight: Stimulating the Sustainable Development of Vacant Land in the City of St. Louis.

The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates recently adopted a resolution recommending that the federal government expand its protections against conflicts of interest among government contractors. The resolution was based in part on a report Kathleen Clark, JD, ethics expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS).“In recent decades, the federal government has greatly expanded its use of contractors to perform services, and spends hundreds of billions on services every year,” Clark writes. “While an extensive array of ethics statutes and rules regulate government employees to ensure that they make decisions in the interest of the government rather than a private interest, only a few of these restrictions apply to contractor personnel.”

In today’s global economy, finance professionals need specialized skills and expertise that go beyond the boundaries of traditional graduate education. The new Global Master of Finance dual degree program offered by Olin Business School and Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University is designed to prepare students for success in a wide variety of finance-related careers worldwide.

Lawyers recently have gained attention by seeking restitution from individuals convicted of viewing or downloading exploitative photos of children. “This ‘pay-per-view’ system further commodifies victims,” says Cortney Lollar, JD, clinical faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. She says that two key changes are in order: move from the current restitution system to the creation of a child pornography crime victims’ compensation fund, and devote more resources to preventing child sexual abuse.

Charlottesville, Va. recently became the first town in the U.S. to pass an anti-drone resolution, calling for a restriction on the use of the unmanned surveillance vehicles. “For drones, I think the problem is that they do have some legitimate law enforcement purposes, but they raise massive problems of invasion of privacy and government surveillance that we need to think through before we deploy drones in vast numbers in our skies,” says Neil Richards, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.