School of Law

Many gun rights advocates have asserted that the Second Amendment – which protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms – serves a collective interest in deterring and, if necessary, violently deposing a tyrannical federal government. “The strength of this assertion is significantly weakened by the power of the First Amendment,” says Gregory P. Magarian, JD, constitutional law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “We have spent almost a century developing the First Amendment as the main vehicle for dynamic political change. Debate and political expression is preferable to insurrection as a means of political change and our legal culture’s attention to the First and Second Amendments reflects a long-settled choice of debate over violent uprising.”

Kathleen Clark, JD, government ethics expert and John S. Lehmann Research Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, recently provided testimony to the District of Columbia’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability on government ethics best practices. Clark identified three key next steps for the District.

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.

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.”

Leila Nadya Sadat, JD, the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, added another international honor to her resumé recently when she was appointed special adviser on Crimes Against Humanity by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.

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.

If Congress and President Obama don’t reach a compromise before the end of the year to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” it will have major consequences on Washington University in St. Louis as well as other universities and colleges across the country, say WUSTL administrators​​.

Today, a group of the nation’s leading universities announced plans to launch a new, innovative program that transforms the model of online education. The new online education program, Semester Online, will be the first of its kind to offer undergraduate students the opportunity to take rigorous, online courses for credit from a consortium of universities. The program is delivered through a virtual classroom environment and interactive platform developed by 2U, formerly known as 2tor.