While Virginia’s gay community celebrated the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling Friday clearing the way for same-sex marriage in all 50 states, the decision’s immediate impact here was minimal. “It certainly will be a massive undertaking in terms of the number of areas of the law that might be affected,” said A.E. Dick Howard, a professor of constitutional law at the
Thursday’s Affordable Care Act ruling marked the second time in three years that a centerpiece of the health law often called Obamacare came under heavy legal assault and survived. It cost Chief Justice John Roberts about 5,700 words (21 pages) to uphold the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance subsidies on Thursday. He spent three times as many in 2012, when he authored the majority ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, upholding the law’s individual mandate. But Supreme Court rulings have also become more accessible, when their authors want th...
University of Virginia neuroscientist Jeffrey T. Barth, 66, who retired last week, will be remembered for his pioneering research in the long-term effects of mild head injuries. His work kicked off a wave of studies on the topic that eventually brought about major cultural changes in the NFL, which for years resisted the warnings issued by Barth and other neuroscientists — that repeated minor head injuries, often undetectable, leave lasting damage.
One of about six existing dementia assessment centers in Virginia is located at the University of Virginia. Dr. Carol Manning is the director of the Memory and Aging Care Clinic. “We have people from multiple disciplines neurology, neuropsychology, clinical psychology, social work, nursing, we have clinical trials,” she described.
On Friday, in a momentous decision, the Supreme Court allowed same-sex marriages nationwide. At oral argument, Alito asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli the question nagging many religiously affiliated educational institutions — the fact that Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status in the 1980s because it opposed interracial marriage. “So, would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­-sex marriage?” Verrilli conceded that tax exemption is “certainly going to be an issue.” Some insist that the risk to tax exemption is “...
The tumult over gay marriage and the Confederate flag could spell an electoral day of reckoning for Republicans - and both they and the Democrats know it. Overall, "The Republicans have a much more serious 'base-versus-general-electorate' split than the Democrats do," notes Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "The GOP base insists that the Republican presidential candidates condemn the Supreme Court decision - and they do, with some fervency. But 57% of the electorate favors gay marriage, and 75% or more of young voters do," Sabato ...
Legal experts on Friday said the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage could have a sweeping impact on religious conservatives from faith-based universities and nonprofit groups who are major government partners in providing social services to individuals, including county clerks and people in the wedding industry who oppose the celebration of such unions. University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, an expert on religious liberty, predicted “political gridlock” in the states, where the battles would continue.
Before the January 2010 earthquake destroyed much of Haiti's capital, the only occupants of the arid hills near the city's northern edge were skinny goats foraging amid the cactus and scrub. Today, hardware stores sell wood and rebar to a flood of homesteaders and children lug water up dusty paths between rows of cinderblock homes and tin-and-tarp shacks. The government estimates that in five years, some 250,000 people have settled in the unregulated sprawl called Canaan, named for the biblical land of promise and prosperity. "On the one hand, it's amazing that people have man...
Miss Piedmont Region Savannah Morgan Lane captivated the audience and the judges Saturday night at the Berglund Center, where she was crowned Miss Virginia 2015. She has a varied background in dance and is currently a student of a University of Virginia vocal teacher. The 20-year-old is a rising third-year at UVa, where she studies foreign affairs and Arabic.
During Virginia’s amazing run as one of the nation’s most successful overall athletic programs, one of the keys has been hiring the right people, something that Craig Littlepage, Jon Oliver and assistant AD Jane Miller have excelled. “There’s only a handful of athletic departments like this around the country,” said Bennett, who has led the Wahoos to back-to-back ACC regular season basketball titles. “What they say and what they stand for is actually what they stand for. It’s not lip service.” Not only do the Virginia coaches slap one another on ...
(By Jonathan Oberlander and Eric Patashnik, professor of Public Policy and Politics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia) The Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell is an enormous victory for the Obama administration and the Affordable Care Act. By upholding the provision of subsidies in the 34 states that rely on the federal insurance exchange, the court ensured that 6.4 million Americans would not lose access to affordable coverage. Instead of dealing a devastating blow to Americans with ACA insurance plans, the court hande...
The University of Virginia Health System has opened a high-tech clinical genomics lab that will personalize care for patients, help doctors determine the best treatments for cancers and other diseases, and allow UVA to offer the most cutting-edge clinical trials, according to a news release from the university.
“Whenever you get on the road, you’re making a trade-off between mobility and safety,” Noah Goodall, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has written about the ethics of self-driving cars, said in an interview. “Driving always involves risk for various parties. And anytime you distribute risk among those parties, there’s an ethical decision there.”
Visitors walk on the lawn in front of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on Tuesday. Thomas Jefferson presented his plans for the Rotunda to the board of visitors in 1821 and it was still under construction, plagued with delays and problems, when Jefferson died in 1826. It is now undergoing a $42.5 million renovation.
The Michael LaCour scandal, which broke in May and culminated in the retraction of what appeared to be a groundbreaking study in Science, thrust the conversation about scientific integrity into the mainstream spotlight. Even as the scandal was unfolding, the Center for Open Science’s (COS) Transparency and Openness Promotion Committee was working on a plan to make the scientific process a bit more transparent — and, hopefully, trustworthy. Today the group released its guidelines in Science, lead-authored by Bryan Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist and research-transp...
The US House of Representatives is wading into the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes. Its fiscal year 2016 spending bill for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would prohibit the agency from spending money to evaluate research or clinical applications for such products. In fact, the IOM committee that is evaluating mitochondrial transfer includes a bioethicist, James Childress, who teaches religious studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
While students around the country are enjoying summer vacation, legislators in numerous states are still working to determine how education funding and access might be different come fall. With limited funding on the table, Texas policymakers were smart to focus on improving the quality of existing pre-K programs instead of increasing enrollment. The state still has a long way to go on that front though. For more information on the quality of Texas pre-K, check out the comprehensive report that Robert C. Pianta and Catherine Wolcott from University of Virginia released last fall.
The Affordable Care Act has survived its second and likely its last constitutional challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court, but the political battle lines over health care reform haven’t changed in Virginia. “We’re going to wait and see what happens in the next presidential election,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “All the decision has done is preserve the status quo.”
Photographer Jimmy Nelson has spent the last several years trekking across the planet to meet and visually document the rich cultures of the planet's indigenous tribes. The culmination of his work is a gorgeous collection of photographs titled "Before They Pass Away." Are these accurate reflections of indigenous peoples or simply embellished caricatures sprung from the mind of an outsider? In the opinion of John Edwin Mason, a history professor at the University of Virginia, it's the latter: “[Nelson has] staged these elaborate production shots, which in their tech...
With a temporary full-time job, Ginny Whitener considers herself to be in “the real world” now. A rising third-year student at the University of Virginia, Whitener has spent the past two summers working for the Martinsville revenue commissioner’s office as part of the New College Institute’s (NCI) internship program.