The UVA School of Law is kicking off its bicentennial with millions of extra dollars. Alumni Martha and Bruce Karsh announced Thursday that they will be donating $43.9 million to the school.
Oaktree Capital Management’s Bruce Karsh and his wife Martha have announced plans to donate $25 million towards a $44 million total gift to the UVA Law School, where the couple first met as law students. The donation, which was announced at a dinner on May 10, is the largest in the law school’s history and will be made in stages through 2022.
New research suggests that the link between financial insecurity and pain may be driven, at least in part, by feeling a lack of control over one's life. "Overall, our findings reveal that it physically hurts to be economically insecure," UVA researcher Eileen Chou said. "Results from six studies establish that insecurity produces physical pain, reduces pain tolerance and predicts over-the-counter painkiller consumption."
A team led by UVA’s Kostadin Kushlev randomly assigned 200 parents into two groups at a trip to Science World in Vancouver, Canada. The first group were told to use their phones as much as possible, while the other group was told to use it as little as possible. “The key message is that, as enticing and as useful as they might be, smartphones can make spending time with your children feel less meaningful than it would otherwise be,” Kushlev said.
The 2017 NFL season saw a “statistically significant” increase in the proportion of head injuries caused by helmet-to-helmet collisions. UVA engineer Richard Kent, deputy director of UVA’s Center for Applied Biomechanics, shared preliminary findings from the NFL’s forensic concussion research during a call Wednesday with engineers and equipment designers.
Republicans have ruled Ohio since 2010. A high-profile ethics scandal for one of their leaders, in an environment already favorable to Democrats, could give Democrats the steam they need to get to the governor’s mansion to replace term-limited Gov. John Kasich. “Kasich is doing his party a favor in that he’s trying to hand the baton off without any sort of ethical problems. But there may be an ethical problem — not with the governor but with the Republican brand,” said Kyle Kondik of UVA’s Center for Politics. “Democrats have sometimes been aided in big elections in Ohio by GOP ethical and cor...
Overall, Ohio voters stuck with the center of their political parties yesterday in picking their statewide and congressional candidates. But the centers of Democratic and Republican politics remain well separated. We spoke with Kyle Kondik, author of “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President,” about what the primary election revealed and what it portends for the fall.
Saikrishna Prakash, UVA law professor and Miller Center senior fellow, said the court might decide that asking for a set of materials, such as tapes, is different from demanding that the president sit down for an interview. Trump’s lawyers are laying the groundwork to argue that a subpoena for questioning would be overly broad, he added.
University of Virginia Police Chief Michael Gibson will retire this summer, according to President Teresa Sullivan. A Crozet native, Gibson has been chief since 2007. He moved through the ranks at UVA, starting in 1982 as a patrol officer. He later served as a general investigator, narcotics investigator, sergeant and shift commander.
In all, 23 colleges in Virginia received extra aid through the Federal Work Study program. After Liberty, the highest amounts disbursed were $68,116 to the University of Virginia; $60,283 to Virginia Commonwealth University; and $47,132 to George Mason University.
The University of Virginia is offering “Foundations of Medical Yoga for Health Professionals” this fall. This three-credit course “will provide graduate students, medical students and practicing health professionals with a foundational understanding of medical yoga to improve health and wellness from a historical, theoretical and research perspective,” the announcement states.
(Commentary) Robert Turner, former counsel to President Reagan's Intelligence Oversight Board and co-founder of UVA’s Center for National Security Law, put it well in The Wall Street Journal: "Ms. Haspel is not an attorney, and she had every reason to rely in good faith on the legal memoranda produced by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel upholding the controversial techniques."
“There’s definitely an opportunity for there to be kind of a Trump backlash in this district,” said Kyle Kondik, an analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics, who wrote a book about Ohio’s presidential voting history. He said it was the kind of district filled with Republicans who might think that someone like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney or John Kasich “is a better fit for their sensibilities” than Trump.
UVA literature professor Andrew Kaufman started a unique program where college students and incarcerated youth study together. The class has changed the lives of several people, including Joshua Pritchett, a young man who was formerly imprisoned and is now studying at UVA.
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the nonpartisan Sabato's Crystal Ball at UVA’s Center for Politics, gives Democrats an even shot at taking back the House. "I am not jumping up and down saying the Democrats will take the House back," said Kondik, who added that with the election still six months out, plausible options range from Democrats gaining only 15 seats to a blue takeover that could net them as many as 50.
Kyle Kondik, of UVA’s Center for Politics, said the race in Ohio for Tiberi’s old seat in the suburbs north and east of Columbus could be the main event in this round. Tiberi and the Republican Main Street Partnership are supporting state Sen. Troy Balderson, while Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and the political arm of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus has thrown its lot behind insurgent Melanie Leneghan, a Liberty Township trustee who bills herself as a ‘Trump conservative.’
Trump won Ohio by eight percentage points. Brown can't ignore the increasing Republican hold on Ohio politics, wrote Kyle Kondik, who works at UVA's Center for Politics and is managing editor of political forecasting newsletter Sabato's Crystal Ball. "With Ohio changing, Brown cannot leave anything to chance," Kondik wrote in his column last week.
Rep. Jim Renacci won the Ohio Republican Senate nomination on Tuesday, setting up a showdown with Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in November. Helping matters for Brown is Trump’s deep unpopularity nationwide and his relative unpopularity in Brown’s state. “It may sound overly simplistic, but Trump being in the White House is the biggest reason why Brown is favored,” Kyle Kondik at UVA’s Center for Politics said recently. “There’s just a frequent midterm drag that hurts the presidential party and helps the non-presidential one, and that’s exacerbated when the president is unpopular.”
Primary voters are generally the most motivated and often the most radical voters. “Republican primary voters have grown increasingly suspicious of the party leadership over the past decade,” says UVA political analyst Kyle Kondik.
(With UVA law professor Ashley Deeks) Because autonomous weapons systems are already in use today, the ultimate question about their capabilities is not a technical one, but rather a legal and ethical one.