Business & Entrepreneurship

Everyone has a good story to tell and Washington University’s Olin Business School has created a new blog platform for its community of students, professors, alumni, deans, and staff to share their favorite stories about life at the business school.

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in a series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars to be held biweekly on the Danforth Campus at Washington University in St. Louis beginning Monday, Jan. 23, through Monday, April 16.The series continues Monday, Jan. 23, with a lecture by Kelly Bishop, PhD, assistant professor of economics at WUSTL, on “Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Estimating Marginal Willingness to Pay for Differentiated Products without Instrumental Variables.”

Wikipedia and other sites plan to go dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act under consideration in Congress. Three law professors from Washington University in St. Louis, Kevin Collins, Gregory Magarian and Neil Richards, signed a letter to Congress in opposition to the PROTECT IP Act. Read Magarian and Richards’ current comments on SOPA and PROTECT IP.

Civil rights law, immigration law, juvenile crime and race are topics that will be discussed during the spring lineup for the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law’s 14th annual Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series.

Napoleon Bonaparte, the notoriously “short” French emperor, may have stood only 5 feet 6, but being a powerful military and political leader probably made him feel much taller, suggests a new study by an organizational behavior expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is an important victory for religious liberty says First Amendment expert John Inazu, JD, associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Hosanna-Tabor is a welcome reminder that the Court has not lost sight of ‘the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.’”

Matthew MacEwan, an MD-PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis, recently started his own nanotechnology company, NanoMed LLC, aimed at revolutionizing the surgical mesh widely used in operating rooms worldwide.

Coors Light has surpassed Budweiser as the No. 2 beer by shipments in the United States, foretelling a downward trend for full-calorie lagers that will continue, says a strategy expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, Texas is contesting a federal court’s redrawing of the state’s electoral district lines for the upcoming primary election. Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Texas must get preclearance from the U.S. Department of Justice before it can institute any voting changes. “This case gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to weaken or even strike down Section 5,” says Gregory Magarian, JD, election law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “If Texas wins, even if the Court stops short of striking down Section 5 altogether, it will mark a major change in the law. The Supreme Court will essentially be saying that racial voting discrimination by state officials is no longer a problem that justifies a federal remedy.”

Most people would rather not have their video viewing habits easily available to the public — no need for co-workers to know about your love of reality TV. The Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA) protects these records, but the House of Representatives — at the urging of Netflix and Facebook — recently voted to amend the VPPA, allowing companies to share movie watching habits much more easily. “What’s at stake is intellectual privacy — the idea that records of our reading habits, movie watching habits and private conversations deserve special protection from other kinds of personal information,” says Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.