Business & Entrepreneurship

Washington University’s business, engineering, and law schools are collaborating on a new course in 2013 that will embed students in the center of the thriving entrepreneur community in downtown St. Louis. Students will trade their campus classroom for working space at T-REx, a new St. Louis tech incubator that offers startup companies affordable offices in the historic Railway Exchange Building.

Corporations’ religious freedom claims against the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate miss a “basic fact of health economics: health insurance, like wages, is compensation that belongs to the employee,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. Sepper’s scholarship explores the interaction of morality, professional ethics, and law in medicine.

The Hon. Randall R. Rader, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, will present “A View From the Federal Circuit: A Conversation With Chief Judge Randall R. Rader,” including a panel discussion with members of local bar associations, from 3-4:15 p.m. Friday, Jan.18. The event will be in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom (Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 310); a reception will follow in the Janite Lee Reading Room. To RSVP for the event, visit http://law.wustl.edu/faculty/forms/rsvpform.asp?BookingID=234714.

Steven J. Malter, PhD, has been named associate dean and director of the undergraduate program at Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School.

Robert Bork was a major figure in the history of American law, and of the Supreme Court, says Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and former law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. “There is a great irony to Bork’s death this week, a day after the House of Representatives voted to relax the privacy protections in the so-called “Bork Bill,” the federal law that protects the privacy of our video records.”

On Dec. 7, President Barack Obama signed legislation to delay implementation of the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act, which would require Internet posting of the annual financial interest forms for 28,000 executive branch employees. A law, WUSTL Congressional ethics expert Kathleen Clark says, that will not prevent Congressional insider trading.

You try doing homework in the dark. For school-aged children across the developing world, access to electrical lighting remains precarious. Enter the Little Sun, a solar-powered lamp designed by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Now Little Sun is at the center of two projects involving WUSTL students and faculty, which stretch from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum to the villages of Madagascar.

Coming up with creative, fresh ideas does not necessarily imply that theywill ultimately be put into practice. However, the odds of one’s ideas making it into practice are better when people are driven to push their ideas through the organization and are savvy networkers, finds new research from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Alum Robbie Garrison (left), of MMBiosensing, LLC, talks with Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, following the selection of Garrison’s firm as one of seven finalists for the 2012 Olin Cup during a ceremony Nov. 8 in Simon Hall.

Everyone knows someone who overshares on social media, from constant updates about daily minutiae to an automatically generated stream of songs listened to, articles read, games played and other matters blast-broadcast through various applications. Intentional over-sharers may be a necessary nuisance in our wired world, but the days of the auto-generated social media stream may be numbered, says Neil Richards, JD, privacy law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.