Fifteen hundred and seventy-five people have been exonerated in the U.S. The best off are those whom Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who has written extensively on post-conviction litigation, describes as “the ones that win the tort lottery.” These are exonerees who seek compensation through the courts, arguing that their fundamental civil rights were violated by the police or by prosecutors. (The same legal principle is at issue in federal suits brought by people who have been shot by the police.) In such cases, the potential damages are un...
Humans have had such a huge impact on the Earth that some geologists think the human era should be enshrined in the official timeline of our planet. But some researchers say, wait a second — humans actually began to transform the planet thousands of years earlier, with the development of agriculture. “If the Anthropocene began in 1945, then the entire story of changing the surface of the earth by cutting forests and plowing prairies occurred before the Anthropocene,” points out Bill Ruddiman, a climate scientist at the University of Virginia. “Does that make sense?...
(By Maurie D. McInnis, author of “Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade,” A professor of art history at the University of Virginia and the curator of “To Be Sold: Virginia and the American Slave Trade,” a show at the Library of Virginia on view until May 30.) We don’t know exactly when the last sale of enslaved persons occurred in Richmond, Va., known as “the great slave market of the South,” but it must have taken place before April 3, 1865. On the previous day, the order had come to evacuate in advance of the arrival ...
Paper airplanes flew across Memorial Gymnasium at the University of Virginia as students from UVa, Virginia Tech and James Madison University competed for a trip to Europe. Students were attempting to qualify for a spot in the Red Bull Paper Wings championship scheduled for May 8-9 in Salzburg, Austria. There are 75 qualifying rounds throughout the United States and more than 80 countries participate in the championship.
Growing up nerdy builds character. I know it sounds trite but being an outcast, growing up outside the circle frees you, lets you be you. Trying to be cool wastes so much time and effort, acting and talking and dressing the way you think other kids expect you to. Nerds simply are. A University of Virginia study published in the journal Child Development showed “coolness at 13 does not translate into success by age 23.” The study followed 184 kids for ten years, interviewing them first in middle school then intermittently until they turned 23. They came from “various...
Unconscious bias testing could provide one way to find hard-to-spot tendencies. This online test by Project Implicit is designed to look at reaction time to different word or picture combinations and suss out an unconscious bias. The project is a multi-university research collaboration including Harvard University, University of Washington and University of Virginia.
(By Saras Sarasvathy, the sidore Horween Research Professor, at the Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia) In a dramatic scene in the film Gravity, a space shuttle on a research mission is bombarded by high-speed space debris. The resulting damage kills an astronaut and hurls another into deep space. The movie then gets busy with making life worse for its main characters. The message that space exploration is perilous is only half the message, of course. The other half of the message is usually the point of the story, namely, that some things are worth doing, even if...
In all the media coverage surrounding the Saudi Arabian-led bombing campaign in Yemen in recent days, few have stopped to ask a fundamental question: Is it legal? Yemen’s President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi had specifically called for an intervention as rebels from the Houthi movement threatened his rule. But having overstayed his term in office, resigned once and even fled the country, Hadi’s legitimacy as ruler is shaky, legal experts say, placing the Saudi military action in murky legal territory. “If Hadi were still in Sana’a and had a relatively modest rebel...
Data plays a big role in our world. But how do companies use it to influence our lives? Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia, answered this question in a lecture at the Sheldon Museum of Art Wednesday as a part of the 2015 “Humanities on the Edge” series. The lecture was titled “The Operating System of Your Life and How Tech Companies and Big Data Govern Your Identity, Knowledge and Refrigerator.”
When Gov. Mike Pence signed the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act last week, he probably didn’t expect Indiana to become the center of a national firestorm. But that’s what happened. In practice, the concern may be misplaced. University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, a religious liberty expert who favors same-sex marriage, says that “no one has ever won a religious exemption from a discrimination law under a RFRA standard.”
The proposed amendment to Indiana’s controversial religious freedom law stops businesses and individuals from refusing service or goods to people based on sexual orientation, gender identity or other reasons -- but the law could still serve as the basis for some denials of services or goods, though only when religious officials or groups are involved, experts say. Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said RFRA claims are rarely brought to court and generally come in the form of “low-profile conflicts between diverse religious prac...
Sen. Harry Reid’s retirement has strengthened the Republicans’ chances of flipping the Nevada Senate seat in the 2016 election, according to a new breakdown from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. “The retirement of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) last week gives Republicans something they have been lacking in the early stages of this Senate cycle: a 50-50 shot at picking up a seat currently held by a Democrat,” Kyle Kondik wrote in the group’s latest analysis of the Senate map. “True,&...
(By W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia) Men who get married work harder and more strategically, and earn more money than their single peers from similar backgrounds. Marriage also transforms men’s social worlds; they spend less time with friends and more time with family; they also go to bars less and to church more. In the provocative words of Nobel Laureate George Akerlof, men “settle down when they get married; if they fail to get married they fail to settle down.”
How swiftly times change. When Bill Clinton signed the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993, hardly anyone objected. The House of Representatives had supported it unanimously; the Senate by 97-3. Likewise, when a young state senator called Barack Obama voted for a similar measure in Illinois in 1998, it seemed like a shrewd move for a man with lofty ambitions. Yet when Governor Mike Pence signed a nearly identical law in Indiana on March 26th, the outrage was deafening. “They ought to pass a good statewide gay-rights law,” argues Douglas Laycock at the Uni...
Last week, Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed into law SB101, the state’s religious freedom bill, which prompted a sharp and vocal backlash. Critics say the bill will allow discrimination against the LGBT community on religious grounds. Amid the furor, law professor Douglas Laycock, himself a supporter of same-sex marriage, has come to the law’s defense. Religion & Politics corresponded with him over email about his views. Laycock is a leading scholar on religious liberty issues. He had a role in crafting the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration A...
Indiana’s hotly contested religious freedom law is being misinterpreted by its opponents, said the University of Virginia law professor who helped author the earlier federal version. “The Indiana law is essentially the same as the federal law,” Douglas Laycock said Wednesday. “There’s been a huge amount of misinformation put out by the opponents.”
The University of Notre Dame has issued an updated volume of University of Virginia professor Kevin Hart’s New & Selected Poems called, aptly, Wild Track. The title comes from a recent poem, Tarrawarra, in which Hart’s long deliberation in verse on the mysterious coexistence of God and Eros finds a late and apposite manifestation. Since the Angus & Robertson edition the siesta-lit solitude of his poetry has exploded somewhat, his previous internalised space interrupted as if to maintain faith with himself as a sexually charged, flesh and blood human.
A novel molecule designed by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Virginia inhibits progression of a hard-to-treat form of recurring acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in patient tissue. The small molecule is one of the first designed to specifically target a cancer-causing transcription factor.
The University of Virginia last week approved an 11 percent price increase for incoming in-state students next fall as part of a plan that will use increased tuition revenue to bolster its financial aid program.The tuition and fees for state students who start at U-Va. this fall will total $14,468, up from $12,998 this year.
Wednesday was a day for ridiculous stories at campus papers, double-takes, pranks by some college presidents — and some backlash and apologies at the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily for April Fools Day satire that some readers didn’t think was at all funny, coming days after a nationally publicized arrest that sparked a heated debate about race on campus.