Newsroom Stories

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.

International Business Times HK 64 percent of elderly black Americans face risk of poverty 12/14/2010 As many as 50 percent of Americans between the ages of 60 and 90 will face at least one year of poverty or near poverty going forward and that poverty will not be evenly distributed across the population, according to […]

The ruling by Judge Henry E. Hudson of the Federal District Court in Richmond, Va., finding the individual mandate provision of the new health-care law unconstitutional is an important ruling, but it does not settle the question, says Timothy D. McBride, PhD, health economist and associate dean for public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. McBride says that the individual mandate, while just a small piece of the health reform structure, is very important to making all of the parts of health reform work. “It is more or less like pulling on the thread of a garment, and having the whole garment come apart if this disappears,” he says.

For many, mid-December means hanging lights, decorating the Christmas tree and going to holiday parties. For college students, mid-December means another thing: final papers and exams. But it doesn’t have to be so stressful. WUSTL staff psychologist Brent Beam, PhD, says self-care and skillful studying are essential, along with tips on how to stay stress-free this week.

“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. 

Asian News International Media may face legal issues for publishing Wikileaks cables 12/11/2010 The controversy created after the release of hundreds of US secret diplomatic cables have raised many important legal issues about national security and freedom of the press under U.S. law, according to Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in […]

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.”

Sports updates for the week of Dec. 13, 2010.

A team of scientists a team, including William B. McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, propose an explanation for the bizarre ridge belting Saturn’s outermost moon Iapetus. At one time Iapetus itself may have had a satellite, created by a giant impact with another body. The satellite’s orbit would have decayed because of tidal interactions with Iapetus, and at some point it would have been ripped apart, forming a ring of debris around Iapetus that would eventually slam into the moon near its equator,

Nutritional information has popped up on the front of food packages using a wide range of different symbols and rating systems. But without a common form or standards, there’s a risk that consumers could be confused by the new information, says Matthew Kreuter, PhD, a public health expert and professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.