School of Law

Social Security recipients will receive a cost of living adjustment (COLA) of 3.6 percent beginning in 2012, the first increase since 2009. “COLA is welcome but will not fully maintain beneficiary purchasing power,” says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security and the Walter D. Coles Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “The formula setting that rate does not meet fully the needs of Social Security recipients, especially when considering medical costs.”

Law students have a new opportunity to learn firsthand about the practice of business associations and regulation in the nation’s largest city through Washington University in St. Louis School of Law’s New York City Regulatory & Business Externship. Offered for the first time this fall, the semester-long clinical experience includes a variety of legal externship opportunities, including those with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, New York City Department of Finance, Standard & Poor’s/McGraw Hill, Securities and Exchange Commission, New York Attorney General’s Office, Anheuser-Busch’s New York headquarters and the New York City Law Department. 

Andreas Schloenhardt, PhD, associate dean and associate professor of law at the University of Queensland (UQ) TC Beirne School of Law, presents “Be Careful What You Pay For: Trafficking in Persons in Australia,” on Oct. 7, in Anheuser-Busch Hall. Schloenhardt’s lecture was part of a visit to the law school by a delegation from UQ’s TC Beirne School of Law.

Stephen H. Legomsky, JD, DPhil, the John S. Lehmann University Professor at the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed chief counsel for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), effective Oct. 24, 2011, announced Ivan Fong, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.

Privacy lawsuits in the United States usually seek damages for revealing embarrassing but true facts by the media— the so-called “disclosure tort” — but this is a “poor vehicle for grappling with the problems of privacy and reputation in the digital age,” says Neil M. Richards, JD, privacy law expert and professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “The disclosure tort has never really worked successfully,” he says. “It’s largely unconstitutional.” Richards notes that there are two existing privacy law concepts that may be good supplements or even replacements to the disclosure tort.

Maxine Lipeles, JD, co-director of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic, participates in “speed mentoring” sessions with law students at Washington University School of Law during Women’s Law Day Sept. 21 in Crowder Courtyard of Anheuser-Busch Hall.

Fatou Bensouda, deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), will discuss the current issues facing the ICC at noon Thursday, Sept. 22, in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall. She also will receive the 2011 World Peace Through Law Award from the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “Ponzi scheme” charge and Florida Sen. Mark Rubio’s assertion that Social Security is unsustainable recycle baseless attacks that go back as far as the 1930s, says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security. “These are attempts to muster political support by appealing to long-held prejudices to satisfy those who never accepted Social Security,” Bernstein says. “To use them as guides to public policy would undermine our country’s most successful family protection program.”

The Administrative Law Section of the American Bar Association (ABA) recently named Ronald Levin, JD, the William R. Orthwein Distinguished Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, the 2011 Volunteer of the Year. Levin has served as the section’s chair and as the ABA’s adviser to the drafting committee to revise the Model State Administrative Procedure Act.

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 on the Danforth Campus biweekly beginning Monday, Sept. 19, through Nov. 28. Presentations will be from noon-1 p.m. in Seigle Hall, Room 348. The series begins with a lecture by Joan C. Williams, JD, the Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law Foundation Chair and director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings on “Why Gender is So Unbending: Gender Pressures on Men.”