Business & Entrepreneurship

Albert Pujols, the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman and Major League Baseball’s most coveted free agent, is clearly the best player in the game. But whichever team signs him this offseason will be overpaying, says an expert on pay-for-performance at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Occupy protests present a classic First Amendment problem: balancing political dissent against government control of property. “In theory, the government has very limited authority to curb expressive activity in what the law calls ‘public forums,’” says Gregory P. Magarian, JD, constitutional law expert and professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.

Fannie Mae, the biggest source of money for United States home loans, said last week it will need another $7.8 billion in federal aid following a third-quarter loss of more than $5 billion. As long as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are receiving subsidies, say banking experts at Washington University in St. Louis, there exists potential for another economic meltdown.

The U.S. remains on track to spend twice as much for health care as for food, yet millions are without insurance or uninsured. “Health insurance premiums also continue to rise – on average another 9 percent in 2011,” says Merton Bernstein, JD, leading health insurance expert and the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “Medical care costs can change direction if policy makers stop whistling past a significant contributor – non-benefit costs.”

A field of 18 teams was narrowed to just eight finalists during the annual Olin Cup “elevator pitch” competition Nov. 10. Forty teams began the competition in September, vying for $70,000 in seed money to start a new company, but 12 were eliminated in an earlier round of judging.

Kent D. Syverud, JD, law dean and the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University, presented the Dean’s Medal to alumnus Mel F. Brown, JD, Nov. 9 at the annual Scholars in Law dinner. The Dean’s Medal is the highest honor a dean can bestow upon a graduate of the law school.

Crowd funding, in which a group of investors pools money to fund a project or startup business — often online through social media and sites such as Kickstarter.com — has gained attention recently as a possible source for stimulating economic growth. But an expert on entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis says crowd funding may not be all its cracked up to be.

With Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on the way out of power, Italian debt has risen to record levels with few solutions in sight. An economist at Washington University in St. Louis who was born and raised in Italy warns that the Italian troubles may foreshadow what’s at stake for the United States as well, no matter how much more reliable its public debt may appear today.

Olin Business School aggressively seeks and recruits students with military backgrounds like Tod Stephens, who is in the joint MBA/JD program. Olin recently become a full partner in the Yellow Ribbon Program, in which tuition costs are covered jointly by Olin and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And it has for years provided scholarship opportunities for many former junior military officers and non-commissioned officers through Olin Veterans Association Scholarships. 

On Nov. 8, Mississippi voters will cast their ballots on Initiative 26, which would make every “fertilized egg” a “person” as a matter of law. “Many have rightly condemned this so-called ‘personhood’ initiative as an attack not only on abortion rights, but also on the ability to practice widely used methods of birth control, to attempt in vitro fertilization, and to grieve a miscarriage in private, without a criminal investigation by the state,” says Susan Appleton, JD, family law expert and the Lemma Barkeloo and Phoebe Couzins Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. “But these criticisms fail to identify another flaw in the reasoning of the initiative’s proponents,” she says. “The proponents assume that attaching the label of ‘person’ to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses necessarily establishes a legal basis for criminalizing abortion, or even for requiring its criminalization.”