President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is urging that a better approach be used in dealing with current conflicts, without compromising an individual’s core values. President Oaks made the point as part of his speech at the University of Virginia’s 2021 Joseph Smith Lecture on religious liberty on Friday night.
Though he dedicated most of his professional career to the courts, Latter-day Saint apostle Dallin H. Oaks argued Friday that when disputes arise between religious freedom and nondiscrimination, the best remedies are found not through litigation, but through legislation. “Courts are ... ill-suited to the overarching, complex and comprehensive policymaking that is required in a circumstance like the current conflict between two great values,” Oaks, a former attorney, law professor and Utah Supreme Court justice, said in a speech at the University of Virginia.
The pandemic forced many colleges to address their students’ lack of access to the internet, but experts say most schools still don’t have good data on their students’ home connections. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know the extent of it. “There is this presumption of connectivity when you get to college, like, ‘Oh, you’ll just have it.’ Well, that’s not the case,” says Christopher Ali, who studies internet access at UVA.
“Yes, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a big deal,” said Peter Norton, a history professor in UVA’s Engineering School. “But the bill is not transformational, because most of it is more of the same.”
COVID-19 cases are rising in a number of U.S. states ahead of the holiday season, and it’s prompting warnings of a coming winter wave, as health care officials point to rising cases in Europe as a sign of what’s to come in the United States. “Sadly, I do think that we’re at the beginning of a wave,” said Dr. Taison Bell, assistant professor of medicine in UVA Health’s divisions of Infectious Diseases and International Health and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. “Unfortunately what we’re seeing are cases rising in Europe, driven by areas that are unvaccinated. We tend to run behind them by...
The Shenandoah County man who grew a rural telephone company into a regional telecommunications enterprise is being remembered this week not only as a visionary businessman but also as an active community member, a passionate farmer, and a devoted family man. Warren Ballinger French Jr., of Edinburg [a UVA Engineering alumnus], died Nov. 4 of natural causes. He was 98.
John Freeman is no stranger to broadcasting, and he’s especially no stranger to the University of Virginia community. “I was going to Virginia basketball games when I was a kid back in U-Hall, and here I am walking into JPJ [John Paul Jones Arena] waiting to call a game and there’s a microphone sitting there for me that I get to talk into,” he said. “It’s been a surreal experience.” Freeman grew up in Crozet, and now he’s the first ever UVA graduate to be named the “Voice of the Cavaliers.”
A cybersecurity company founded by an alumnus of the University of Virginia has grown and is taking aim at suicide prevention. Tom Miller founded ClearForce in Vienna in 2016.
On Thursday night, the University of Virginia Center for Politics debuted its newest documentary: Common Grounds. It all started with a simple question from fourth-year student Raed Gilliam: “Is there common ground?” The answer took Gilliam and other interns at the center to an unlikely place.
Evangelicals tend to be more suspicious of public education, and Youngkin successfully grabbed hold of the topic, said J. Miles Coleman, an analyst for the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Coleman said that he looked at the 13 counties in Virginia that the PRRI identifies as 50% or more White evangelical. Largely clustered in the southwest part of the state, those counties cast 33% more votes this year than in 2017, while the number of votes cast statewide increased by 26%. “Everyone keeps talking about how Youngkin made suburbs a little redder, which he did,” he said. “To me the bi...
A report by Abraham Sutherland, an adviser to Proof of Stake Alliance and an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, charged that the 1984 law “is such a mismatch with still-nascent 21st century digital asset technology that it is difficult to catalog its consequences or even to list the scenarios that might give rise to a duty to report financial information to the government.” “I also leave to others the important task of assessing this surveillance and reporting regime against every American’s 4th amendment right ‘to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and eff...
(Podcast and transcript) Think critically about what makes a good piece of legal writing, not what do I like, not what does the judge that I clerked for like but what writ large makes a good piece of writing and what is a good process on how to do that. There’s a great professor, a guy named Joe Fore at the University of Virginia, who wrote a whole article about how we convey certainty in legal memos. He compared it to a bunch of different other professions. What does the phrase probably mean? Is that 50%, 60% or 70%?
A large body of research shows that the DESSA screener for grades kindergarten through eighth grade is a reliable tool for identifying these skills, but there’s less known about the newer high school survey, said Sara E. Rimm-Kauffman, professor at University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development who has studied how the social and psychological dynamics of a classroom influence child development.
But Brazil is a deeply divided nation where the institutions safeguarding democracy are more vulnerable to attack. The adoption of Mr. Trump’s methods is adding fuel to a political tinderbox and could prove destabilizing in a country with a history of political violence and military rule. “Bolsonaro is already putting it into people’s heads that he won’t accept the election if he loses,” said David Nemer, a University of Virginia professor from Brazil who studies the country’s far right. “In Brazil, this can get out of hand.”
Srini Venkatramanan, research assistant professor at the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative said the cases need to be interpreted in the context of the Delta wave that hit the U.S. over the summer which affected some states more than others. “While Florida, and Texas to a lesser extent, experienced high case rates during the Delta wave, in California it has been flatter,” he said. “So, although current rates in Florida and Texas are marginally lower than California, they are coming down from much higher levels.”
Getting vaccinated is more important than ever, experts said, including a booster for those who are eligible. “We are seeing more breakthrough infections simply because the coronavirus comes back in waves and we do see that protection does wane over time with the vaccine,” said Dr. Taison Bell, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia. “But having vaccination, having that protection is the best way to protect yourself.”
A doctor at the University of Virginia Department of Medicine has received national recognition. The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases awarded Dr. Bill Petri the Maxwell Finland Award for Scientific Achievement. The NFID says this award honors scientists who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding of infectious diseases and public health.
(By Marlene Daut, professor of African diaspora studies) The artist Firelei Báez created an immersive installation of the lost Haitian palace Sans Souci. Haitian historian Marlene Daut ruminates on what the castle’s ghost means during a turbulent year in Haitian history.
(Commentary) Treasury Secretary Mellon understood the principles which today we associate with Economist Art Laffer and his Laffer Curve. During the push and passage of the several Revenue Acts of the 1920s Mellon argued that “high tax rates discourage business initiative and foster tax avoidance and evasion,” writes George Yin, Law and Taxation Professor of the University of Virginia. Yin continues, “[Mellon] provided evidence of a significant decline in both the number and reported income of high-income taxpayers between 1916 and 1921, despite a general tripling of taxable income...