Our Faculty in the Media

February 7, 2012
ABC News
A federal appeals court in California today struck down Proposition 8, the controversial ballot measure passed in 2008 that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. “The court said it didn’t need to rule on whether there is a fundamental right to marry of same sex couples, nor did they need to address the question of whether a state could ever outlaw a marriage between same-sex couples,” Margaret Russell of the Santa Clara University School of Law said. “Instead, the court said that same-sex couples already had the right to marry before Proposition 8, as well as the protections of the 2003 domestic partner law and therefore could not be denied.”

January 31, 2012
Market Watch
The impending initial public offering of Facebook, the world's largest social network, is the talk of Silicon Valley. Some even believe that the deal—which even with reports of a scaled-back valuation of below $100 billion—would be one of the largest tech IPOs to date and could rival the 1995 offering of Netscape in importance. “This is clearly the most important moment in the Valley’s history since the Netscape IPO,” said Stephen Diamond, associate professor of law at Santa Clara University. “The Netscape IPO put the Valley on the map in a different sort of way. Post-Netscape, it was not just a silicon, hardware world.” The IPO of the first Internet browser ushered in the Internet era and fueled the ensuing dot-com boom.

January 23, 2012
San Jose Mercury News
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday limited law enforcement’s ability to track suspects with GPS devices, but it left the door wide open for legal wrangling in California and elsewhere over how far the government can go with new technologies to snoop on the whereabouts of its targets. But because Scalia and four other justices took a narrow approach to the case, the decision leaves broader unresolved questions about the trade-off between law enforcement and citizens’ privacy rights. In particular, the court did not determine whether police can track citizens using location devices they already possess, such as cellphones or in-car GPS systems. Kyle Graham, a Santa Clara University law professor, said courts will now have to sort out the limits on “reasonable” police use of GPS tracking to ensure that even with a warrant it doesn't allow “unfettered monitoring of suspects’ movements.”

January 21, 2012
Washington Post
The FBI’s action (shutdown of the popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com) raises many questions about who oversees copyright on the Web and how far the government can go. Web organizations questioned whether the government has the right to shut sites down for hosting pirated content, as it did in the case of Megaupload, without allowing companies to defend themselves in court first. “They will wonder if they have done anything different from Megaupload, and does that mean the Feds will come through their door,” said Eric Goldman, a professor of intellectual property law at Santa Clara University. “Keep in mind the DOJ's indictment is actually a sales document; it is their interpretation of things, and they are throwing spaghetti on the wall with their claims and seeing what will stick,” Goldman said.

January 18, 2012
Los Angeles Times
Until this week, entertainment industry executives thought they had the votes for new fed-eral legislation cracking down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies and music and cost them billions. Then Silicon Valley struck back and appears to have outflanked Hollywood. The result was on full display Tuesday night as Wikipedia, Craigslist and other popular sites shut down for a threatened 12- to 24-hour strike, said to be the Internet’s first such stop-page. As many as 10,000 others had also threatened to go dark. “It was assumed by everyone that the content owners were going to get what they asked for,” said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. “What’s happened is that the opposition campaign has gone viral. It’s not just Silicon Valley speaking up, it’s the public at large.”

January 1, 2012
Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a blue-ribbon panel created to study problems in the criminal justice system, called in 2006 for taping interrogations of felony suspects in custody. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger twice vetoed legislation that would have required it. In his 2007 veto, he said it would “deny law enforcement the flexibility necessary to interrogate suspects.” But Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University law professor who was the commission’s executive director, said in an email that he didn't think cost was the chief obstacle. “There is just strong police resistance to anyone, including legislators, telling them how to do their job,” he said. “They are also concerned that malfunctioning equipment will create credibility problems for them.”

December 26, 2011
Los Angeles Times
In her first year on the state high court, (California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani) Cantil-Sakauye has more often sided with its conservative justices than its more moderate jurists, said Santa Clara University law professor Gerald Uelmen, an expert on the court. He said her early track record shows her as more conservative than (retired Chief Justice Ronald M.) George, who was a key swing vote on the seven-member court. Uelmen called the chief justice’s comments on the death penalty “powerful” and said they confirmed what he has been hearing privately – that even the conservatives on the California Supreme Court have grown disillusioned with the state’s capital punishment system.

December 8, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Silicon Valley is making one of its biggest lobbying pushes ever, as it fights a proposed law championed by Hollywood called the Stop Online Piracy Act. But whether the tech outcry will be enough to derail the law is far from clear. The entertainment industry says the anti-piracy bill is needed to stem the theft of content it creates. But the Internet industry says it would squelch the innovation that sparked companies such as YouTube and Facebook, while saddling existing companies with repressive rules. “The stakes are extremely high with this legislation. If we get this wrong, we could jeopardize the Internet's entire content ecosystem,” said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, who is not affiliated with either of the warring camps.

November 30, 2011
New York Times
Accusing Facebook of engaging in “unfair and deceptive” practices, the federal government on Tuesday announced a broad settlement that requires the company to respect the privacy wishes of its users and subjects it to regular privacy audits for the next 20 years. “We’ve all known that Facebook repeatedly cuts corners when it comes to its privacy promises,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, wrote in an e-mail after the announcement. “Like most Internet companies, they thought they could get away with it. They didn't.”

November 20, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Beth Van Schaack wrote an op-ed entitled “Guantánamo hearing shows stark deficiencies of military justice”. Read more...

November 17, 2011
Los Angeles Times
Legal experts said the California Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday giving Proposition 8 sponsors the right to defend the anti-same-sex-marriage initiative was so strong that it would likely persuade a federal appeals court and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court. “It’s a gangbusters opinion,” said Santa Clara University law professor Gerald Uelmen, an expert on the state high court. “This makes such a strong case that the sponsors represent the state and can represent the state’s interests that it pretty much seals the deal.”

November 15, 2011
U.S.A. Today
A ruling (by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Obama-sponsored health care law)could determine the federal government’s power to address the most pressing social problems, specifically how to ensure medical coverage nationwide. Last week, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman in Washington found the mandate a valid use of con-gressional power and said judges should presume Congress acted constitutionally. Silberman, an appointee of President Reagan, echoed U.S. Appeals Court Judge Jeffrey Sutton, an appointee of President George W. Bush on the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit, who last summer upheld the insurance requirement. “They are well-respected jurists whose conservative bona fides are unquestioned who believe the mandate is constitutional,” says Bradley Joondeph, a Santa Clara University law professor. “There is no way that that doesn't affect, at some level, how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy think about this.”

November 7, 2011
Los Angeles Times
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will take up a hot-button 4th Amendment issue: whether GPS surveillance without a warrant constitutes an unreasonable search. The case, United States vs. Jones, will decide the law on GPS tracking across the country. The courts’ redefinition of what can be considered private has been brought on by both technology and youthful communities willingly sharing thoughts, photos and intimate details with strangers on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, said Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University professor of criminal law. “They’ve created a culture of exposing everything on the Internet, including their private parts,” said Uelmen. “We’re seeing a whole generation for whom privacy is not important.”

October 31, 2011
Washington Post
Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, said the court's decision in Connick v. Thompson made it clear that civil remedies are not a viable option for those trying to stop prosecutorial misconduct. He was part of a group of “innocence advocates” who last week proposed a national dialogue with prosecutors to try to find other ways to investigate and sanction prosecutors who break the rules. Santa Clara University law professor Kathleen Ridolfi said the group needs to find a way around “a system where the Supreme Court refuses to hold prosecutors accountable, even for repeated, deliberate misconduct.”

October 23, 2011
politico.com
If the Supreme Court decides to review President Barack Obama’s health reform law, it will also have to choose which issues it wants to hear. There are four lawsuits pending before the court, and the Obama administration and five opponents of the law have all filed competing petitions asking the court to take their cases and their issues. All six certiorari petitions ask the court to review a key question: Is it constitutional for Congress to require nearly all Americans to buy health insurance? But several of them also ask the court to review other pieces of the law, too, such as the Medicaid expansion and requirements for employers. “The one clear issue they will grant [review] on is whether the individual mandate is within Congress’s enumerated powers. That’s the big one I don’t think they can avoid granting,” said Bradley Joondeph, a professor at the Santa Clara University law school and author of the aca litigation blog, which tracks the lawsuits. “After that, it gets a little more complicated.”

October 14, 2011
Christian Science Monitor
...controversial aspects of Alabama’s stringent new immigration law were temporarily blocked Friday by the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals. For now, public schools are no longer required to check the immigration status of students enrolling for the first time in the state. State education officials and local organizations have tried to spread the word that the school provision applies only to new students and exists simply to report the numbers of undocumented students to the state. Still, the school portion of the law is “standing on the shakiest constitutional grounds,” says Prof. Deep Gulasekaram, an assistant professor at Santa Clara University School of Law in California.

September 25, 2011
Chicago Sun Times
One of Meg Whitman’s most pressing concerns as the new CEO of Hewlett Packard: what to do with the world’s biggest personal computer business, which supplies a third of HP’s revenue but is its least profitable division. Last month, (former CEO Leo) Apotheker said that business would go up for sale in a badly blundered announcement that hastened his demise. His disclosure likely devalued the business in the eyes of potential buyers. Many analysts now speculate that HP has no choice but to keep the business and work on repairing strained relationships with customers. “This idea of a spinoff is very complicated,” said Steve Diamond, an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Tearing apart a business unit of that size is like taking out organs...It’s very, very difficult to do and you don't know how it’s going to come out.”

September 24, 2011
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Now-defunct Green Vehicles has filed for federal bankruptcy protection. Included among Green Vehicles’ top creditors are company leaders themselves, who say they are owed nearly $500,000 loaned to the company, an amount comprising about half the company’s debt. One bankruptcy expert said there is not necessarily anything unusual about startup owners being listed as creditors. “It certainly would not be abnormal for executives to be creditors is they lent the company money,” said Gary Neustadter, a professor at Santa Clara University’s law school. Neustadter said it wouldn’t be unusual for a bankruptcy attorney to list assets that the company has no hope of re-couping, such as the state grant. Concealing assets is potentially a crime in bankruptcy cases, and a good lawyer will cover all their bases by listing even speculative assets.

September 1, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
A federal judge has thrown out a record $1.3 billion damage award that business software giant Oracle ( ORCL ) won against archrival SAP in a bitter copyright dispute that captivated the tech industry when it went before a jury last year. Saying the jury’s award was “grossly excessive” and unsupported by evidence, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton on Thursday offered Oracle a choice between accepting $272 million, based on what she ruled was an expert's reasonable estimate of damages, or arguing the case all over again in a new trial. It's not unheard-of for a judge to reject a jury’s award, said Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who said Hamilton was fulfilling her duty to review and evaluate the evidence. “It’s a setback for Oracle, in that the judge just wiped a billion dollars off their judgment. But $272 million is still a big number,” said Goldman. “This is a big number for any copyright case.”

August 16, 2011
New York Times
...patent battles are no longer waged between just two competitors, like the chip makers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Platforms like Android and Windows Phone 7 are built upon a handful of device makers, adding more players with different stakes at risk. That has changed the calculus of settling, as product makers have become increasingly willing to sue rather than reach peaceful settlements. “Now you’re seeing more suits being brought by product companies willing to step up and say we will defend our patents” said Colleen Chien, an assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law in California.

August 13, 2011
Washington Post
A federal appeals court struck down a central provision of the 2010 health-care law Friday, ruling that Congress overstepped its authority by requiring virtually all Americans to obtain health insurance. Bradley Joondeph, a law professor at Santa Clara University who has closely followed the litigation over the act, said the decision is “a bit of a double-edged sword for the White House.” A Supreme Court ruling validating the law before the election could energize the Republican base to elect a Congress and president that promise to repeal it, he said. And a loss “looks like a huge defeat, the gutting of the centerpiece of the administration’s domestic agenda.” Said Joondeph: “There are just too many variables here to have a good sense which way all of this points.”

August 7, 2011
San Bernardino County Sun
San Bernardino and Alameda counties may be statistically similar in terms of crime rate, but officials in San Bernardino send twice as many to prison and the county uses more state corrections money than its Bay Area counterpart, according to a new policy report. W. David Ball, a criminal law professor at Santa Clara University and the author of the study, says the situation isn't fair. Ball spent the past decade comparing imprisonment statistics from all the state’s 58 counties and found that 18 of them, including San Bernardino County, fell into a category of high state-prison usage. “The state is paying for San Bernardino’s decision to treat crime with prison, but Alameda—indeed any California citizen who does not live in San Bernardino—has no say in electing the people who design San Bernardino’s criminal-justice policies,” Ball said in the report released last week.

July 15, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Colleen Chien, a patent-law professor at Santa Clara University Law School, said Microsoft has become much more aggressive about intellectual property. Microsoft and Google, along with other companies, recently bid against each other for a set of Nortel mobile-technology patents. Microsoft’s consortium won. “They’re fighting over patents in the courtroom, and in the auction house, and for the customer in the marketplace,” Chien said.

July 11, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University law professor, said the 5-month-old (California) Supreme Court vacancy has started to take its toll on the court’s productivity, as appeals court justices must be assigned to temporarily fill the court’s seventh seat in the meantime. And the Supreme Court in the fall is expected to hear the latest legal wrangling over Proposition 8, the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. “I think it’s having a severe impact,” Uelmen said. “Now that (the budget) has been put to bed, I’d hope the governor would turn his attention to filling this appointment.”

June 11, 2011
San Francisco Chronicle
The first draft of California’s once-a-decade redrawing of its political map ignited a chaotic game of musical chairs Friday, with analysts saying the shifting boundary lines could give Democrats at least three more members of Congress and two more state legislators. This is the first time that a citizens’ commission, rather than lawmakers or the courts, have drawn the maps. The commission will prepare a second draft by July 7, with a final redraw Aug. 15. Until then, Commissioner Angelo Ancheta, a Santa Clara University law professor, invited Californians to tell them “where we went wrong.” Changes are coming, even after the commission held 23 hearings across the state and received testimony from 1,533 people.

June 10, 2011
Los Angeles Times
...the California investigation (of AT&T Inc.’s proposed $39-billion purchase of T-Mobile USA) will have a bigger mission, said (California Public Utilities Commission) Commissioner Catherine Sandoval, a Santa Clara University law professor and former FCC staff attorney. The state Legislature gave the PUC power to regulate intrastate phone service, including the land lines that provide much of the backbone that carries cellphone calls between wireless communications towers, Sandoval said. “Only this body can determine how this measure affects California consumers,” she said. “Our analysis will give the public an opportunity to determine if this serves competition and the public interest.”

May 20, 2011
The Union Leader (Manchester, NH)
Michelle Oberman, a law professor at Santa Clara University in California, has co-authored two books about maternal filicide and interviewed dozens of women who have taken the lives of their children. She spoke to the issue of maternal homicide in general, not this case (the case of Julianne McCrery, who killed her son Camden Pierce Hughes) in particular. “The nutshell is that it is a combination of mental illness and isolation,” Oberman said. Oberman said her and co-author Cheryl Meyer found that in many cases, when women tried to hide their mental illness, some managed just fine, some ended up neglecting their children and sometimes, that neglect turned into a fatal disaster.

Oberman said she truly believes that mental illness is only part of the story. “There are mentally ill mothers in every corner of the world, but the rate in which that crime appears in this country is the fact that we live at too much of a distance from people who would be naturally inclined to help,” Oberman said.  “That combination of isolation and mental illness makes the situation volatile as opposed to being managed within a community.” She said fluke interventions of someone reaching out to help can make all the difference.

May 15, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Because tweets are so short, it can be hard to compose them in a way that earns them full copyright protection, said Eric Goldman, a professor of Internet and intellectual property law at Santa Clara Law School. “Copyright protects the ways in which we express ourselves,” Goldman said. “It doesn’t protect the underlying facts or ideas we are expressing.”

May 12, 2011
New York Times
In an unfolding tale of Silicon Valley skulduggery, Facebook on Thursday fessed up to hiring a top-drawer PR firm to bash rival Google by planting negative stories in newspapers and across the blogosphere. “It’s on like Donkey Kong between Facebook and Google, seeking victory by any means,” said Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman. “But I’m a little perplexed about why Facebook decided to try and stir the pot through a PR agency. If they wanted to call out Google, then call them out publicly.”

May 6, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
In a move that sends a clear message about reining in overzealous prosecutors, District Attorney Jeff Rosen has yanked an attorney off a complex gang murder case for improperly withholding crucial evidence from the defendants until the brink of trial. “That’s precisely what the DA should have done and hopefully the message he sent is a clear one: This isn’t how we do business,” said Gerald Uelmen, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at the Santa Clara University School of Law and was executive director of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. “You have a prosecutor gaming the system. I applaud the DA’s response.”

May 3, 2011
New York Times
Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law, said reposting published material online could qualify as “fair use” if it didn’t diminish the market value of the original. “Many of the defendants are ill-informed about copyright law,” Mr. Goldman said. “They’re not trying to compete with a newspaper. They just don’t know the rules.” Mr. Goldman informally advised a company that was sued by Righthaven and settled out of court.

April 17, 2011
Virginian-Pilot
And some say our reluctance as a society to believe mothers would be capable of killing their offspring is hindering our ability to recognize warning signs and to intervene and prevent more tragedies. It’s also a phenomenon that defies neat patterns: It cuts across boundaries of class, race and socio-economic status. Meyer and co-author Michelle Oberman came up with five categories: filicide related to an ignored pregnancy; abuse-related; neglect-related; assisted or coerced filicide (such as when a partner forces the killing); and purposeful filicide with the mother acting alone. Oberman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, says cases are not always so obvious – sometimes, depression is enough to send a woman over the edge. “Almost all these women are not in their right minds (when they commit these acts),” she said.

April 13, 2011
Boston Globe
Herbert Hoover was sworn in as the 31st president on March 4, 1929. By the time his term ended four years later, federal outlays had climbed more than 50 percent in dollar terms; they had almost doubled when measured in purchasing power; and they had tripled as a fraction of national income. “If stimulus is the solution to high unemployment,” remarks Santa Clara University economist and law professor David Friedman, “the Great Depression should have ended almost before it began.”

April 12, 2011
New York Times
A three-judge panel of a federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Winklevoss brothers cannot back out of a settlement they signed with Facebook in 2008. “By refusing to nullify the settlement, the appeals court kept the Winklevosses from potentially throwing away many tens of millions of dollars each,” Eric Goldman a professor at Santa Clara University Law School and the director of its High Tech Law Institute. “It’s hard to complain too much about a loss like that.”

April 13, 2011
Los Angeles Times
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss say Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg swindled them out of millions by not disclosing the true value of Facebook shares when they negotiated a settlement in 2008 in cash and stock. With the value of the privately held company’s shares soaring, that settlement is now worth as much as $200 million. “All forms of successful endeavors including successful companies are going to have people come out of the woodwork. Sometimes they have valid claims, many times they have nothing,” said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Either outcome is plausible here.”

March 29, 2011
Contra Costa Times
The California Citizens Redistricting Commission is withholding final signature on a contract with its newly hired federal voting rights lawyers after staff members discovered undisclosed political activities. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher failed to inform the commission during mid-March interviews that the firm is a registered federal lobbyist with a federal political action committee, or that several of the attorneys assigned to the redistricting project team have contributed individually to presidential candidates. “The fact that the firm is a registered federal lobbying firm and that it gave more than $2,000 to campaigns should have been disclosed,” said Commissioner Angelo Ancheta, a Democrat and Santa Clara University law professor. “I have made it very clear that if it was intentional or willful nondisclosure, then I would recommend terminating our contract.”

March 23, 2011
U.S. News and World Report
Currently, students at ABA accredited law programs can only take up to 12 hours in a distance or online setting that counts toward their J.D. Donald Polden, dean of the Santa Clara University School of Law and chair of the ABA’s Accreditation Standards Review Committee, says he anticipates that the ABA could expand the current 12-hour threshold, though he can’t foresee a future where the classroom setting is marginalized at ABA accredited schools. “There’s growing comfort with [online education] as a useful and meaningful method of offering a part of the law school curriculum,” he says. “[But], for a high quality program, you have to have students together because so much of learning happens in that interaction in the classroom space.”

March 2, 2011
Sacramento Bee
California Attorney General Kamala Harris requested that a federal appeals court lift a stay on a judge’s decision declaring a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Having a statewide elected official take such a stand sends an important signal to supporters of same-sex marriage, said Santa Clara University School of Law assistant professor Pratheepan Gulasekaram. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brown both declined to defend Proposition 8, which won 52 percent of voters’ support in 2008. “It suggests the state of California is not going to just be neutral in this case but will take a position,” Gulasekaram said.

February 20, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Against the backdrop of a moribund market for initial public stock offerings and a venture capital industry hobbled by a recession, the half-dozen social-networking companies expected to go public in the coming year—likely candidates include Groupon, Twitter, LinkedIn and, the granddaddy IPO of all, Facebook—could be silver-winged angels. Some venture capital investors stand to make a killing from these IPOs...Santa Clara University law professor Stephen Diamond said “the big payoffs will be for guys like (angel investor and PayPal co-founder) Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook.”

February 14, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
After nearly a dozen workers committed suicide at a contract manufacturing facility in China last year, Apple sent then-chief operating officer Tim Cook, now its acting CEO, to visit Foxconn International Holdings and press the company to improve working conditions there, Apple said in a report Monday. “It’s very unusual for someone at that high level” said Anna Han, a Santa Clara University law professor who has advised U.S. companies on doing business in China. “It allows Foxconn to know that Apple is taking this very seriously.” Although labor abuses and poor working conditions are not uncommon in China, Han said U.S. companies can help improve those conditions by putting pressure on their contractors. “But you have to back it up, and say ‘If you don’t do this, we’re not going to use you any more.’ ”

January 30, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Facebook disclosed that a recent $1.5 billion investment led by Goldman Sachs was in “Facebook Class A common stock,” suggesting that like Google’s founders in 2004, Facebook would create “Class B” stock that would have additional voting rights per share, allowing Zuckerberg and other insiders to retain more control, said Stephen Diamond, a securities law expert at the Santa Clara University School of Law. The Goldman investment pegged Facebook at an eye-popping valuation of $50 billion, but trading of its private shares on secondary markets suggest a valuation above $70 billion, analysts say.

January 24, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Currently federal judges across the country are hearing challenges to the Obama Administration’s health care law from 28 states and private parties. “Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to decide the case” says Bradley Joondeph of Santa Clara University who has not taken a position on the constitutionality of the law. “The lower court decisions matter” he says “because they can affect the political discourse surrounding the law and can also affect the perceived legitimacy of the constitutional arguments. The more judges that strike down the individual mandate, the more likely that argument is to gain traction ultimately at the Supreme Court.”

January 20, 2011
San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times
Hewlett-Packard is planning to hire outside lawyers to review its handling of last summer’s controversial ouster of then-Chief Executive Mark Hurd, including the board’s decision to grant Hurd millions of dollars in severance benefits that have drawn some shareholders’ ire. Such an investigation would not be an unusual response for a company in HP’s position, said Santa Clara University law professor Stephen Diamond, an expert in corporate governance. But even if the review upholds the company’s actions, it serves to underscore the ongoing controversy over Hurd’s departure, which has sparked a flurry of shareholder lawsuits and a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

January 20, 2011
San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times
Hewlett-Packard named five new members to its Board of Directors today in an unusual shake-up aimed at moving the world’s largest tech company into a new chapter after months of corporate drama surrounding its former CEO. But corporate governance experts said it’s highly unusual for a company to name so many new board members at once. “It suggests that this is still an unsettled business,” said Stephen Diamond, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “It will take time for the board to get to know each other,” he added. “My concern is it will extend the time frame in which (new CEO Léo) Apotheker is attempting to establish clear leadership.”

January 16, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
The overarching economic dispute between the the U.S. and China is the value of the Chinese currency, the yuan, which U.S. officials say is kept artificially low, making Chinese exports to the United States cheap and U.S. exports to China expensive. That helped push the U.S. trade deficit with China to $252 billion in the first 11 months of 2010, experts say. China’s currency policy also makes its labor cheaper, which encourages U.S. companies to ship jobs overseas. “With this huge trade imbalance, it’s clear they are not buying as many of our products as they could be. This is particularly true with computer equipment,” said Anna Han, a Santa Clara University business law professor who advises U.S. companies operating in China.

January 7, 2011
Los Angeles Times
The decision by Justice Carlos R. Moreno to retire from the California Supreme Court has created an opportunity for Gov. Jerry Brown to put his stamp on the state’s highest court. Justice Moreno described himself as a “moderate-to-liberal centrist“ and said that he did not favor big leaps in the law. During one 15-month period examined by Santa Clara law professor Gerald Uelmen Moreno agreed with the conservatives as often as with the more liberal members. Uelmen said Wednesday that Moreno was just slightly left of George, considered the swing vote between liberals and conservatives. One of Moreno’s greatest opinions, Uelmen said, was one that permitted demonstrators to protest at a private shopping mall, “preserving free speech under the California Constitution. I think he is leaving with an excellent reputation as a very thoughtful and very fair judge,” Uelmen said.

January 6, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Facebook has indicated that it could be on track for an initial public offering by April 2012, or at a minimum will have to disclose its closely guarded financial information. “In this social-networking space, there is the possibility of revived IPO activity,” said Stephen Diamond, a securities law expert at the Santa Clara University School of Law. “This means, as it did in 1997, 1998 and 1999, and as it did in 2004, a flood of money coming into the valley. And, once again, an opening question is whether it’s too much money chasing too few good projects.” Diamond said he is skeptical that Facebook will have the same long-term economic impact on the valley that Intel, Apple or Google have had but that it will make a few people very rich in the short term. “I imagine there are any number of real estate agents who are sharpening their contact list for buyers of real estate in Atherton,” he said, “because there will be some Facebook billionaires from this.”

January 6, 2011
San Francisco Chronicle
A proposal that some professors fear could weaken tenure protection at law schools provoked vigorous debate here Thursday during the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. The committee reviewing the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards for law schools is considering removing all references to tenure from those standards.

Sitting in the hot seat before a largely skeptical crowd of legal educators was Donald J. Polden, dean of Santa Clara University School of Law. He chairs the Standards Review Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which came up with the proposal to delete tenure references from the standards. That position prompted a friend to jokingly refer to him as “the Voldemort of legal education,” he said, referring to a villain of the Harry Potter series.

But the committee isn’t out to kill tenure, Mr. Polden said. It is committed to finding ways to ensure that law schools protect academic freedom, recruit and retain top faculty members, and maintain an effective system of faculty governance, he said.

“Tenure is an important way, but not the only way of getting there,” Mr. Polden said. Multiyear contracts that spell out those protections might be another, some participants noted.

Mr. Polden said the current ABA standards don’t require law schools to offer tenure. They simply require them to have a policy regarding tenure and academic freedom. Others say if nothing else, the existing policy implies that tenure is a requirement for accreditation, which nearly every law school now has. More...

January 3, 2011
San Jose Mercury News
Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last-minute commutation of a manslaughter sentence for a former Assembly speaker’s son might have a solid legal basis, but it clearly raises questions of special access for the politically well-connected, legal experts said Monday. Kathleen Ridolfi, a Santa Clara University law professor who directs the Northern California Innocence Project, said executive clemency powers were put in place by the founding fathers as a safety net when the courts fail to provide justice.