Some would say Obama isn’t a lame duck until after Election Day in November when his successor is chosen. Others might say all second-term presidents are lame ducks because they know they won’t serve again. "The definition has evolved," said Larry J. Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for. Decades ago, the lame-duck label was applied to a president after an election, but the term has changed over time to include any officeholder in his or her last term.
A Trump win in South Carolina on Feb. 20 would be “huge,” says UVA Center for Politics analyst Geoffrey Skelley. “As long as the field is crowded, that’s great news for Trump,” he said.
(Commentary) “One of the things that I always stress in my classes… is that African-American history is American history,” Asst. Prof. Andrew W. Kahrl, who teaches African-American studies and history at the University of Virginia, told the Cavalier Daily. “This is not something that is some sort of an addendum or something that is separate and apart from what we traditionally think of as so called ‘American history.’”
Experts say the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia could have an impact on a Republican challenge to a newly imposed congressional redistricting map for Virginia. Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of “Sabato’s Crystal Ball” at UVA’s Center for Politics, said, “I’ll leave it to legal experts to determine how the court might have acted with Scalia’s participation, but his passing means there is a very good chance that the new congressional map in Virginia will be upheld.”
The death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia greatly decreases the chances of Gov. Bob McDonnell having his conviction on corruption charges dismissed and of new court-ordered congressional district boundaries being tossed out, three Virginia professors said Sunday. John C. Jeffries Jr., a law professor at UVA School of Law, said it's impossible to say exactly what the impact of Scalia's death would be on the two cases, but that it certainly increases the likelihood of a Supreme Court tie – bad news for McDonnell.
Justice Antonin Scalia had deep ties to the University of Virginia where he started his teaching career. John Duffy, a current UVA law professor who worked for the Supreme Court justice, was just a young lawyer when he went to Washington to clerk for Justice Scalia, but the mentor and teacher left a big impact on him.
Hooking up and finding romance are far from mutually exclusive: The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia found that 32 percent of marriages began as a hookup.
In a surprising new discovery about potentially deadly salmonella, researchers have determined that the foodborne bacteria has a most unexpected way of telling where it is in the body: It uses its food as its GPS. The bug can sense if it’s in the gut or elsewhere in the body based on a substance found in our cell membranes – a nutrient it consumes. It then uses that information to determine whether it should be feasting greedily to establish an infection or whether it needs to focus on fighting the immune system, researchers at the UVA School of Medicine have determined.
A series of studies from the University of Virginia, published in the journal Science in 2014, found that 18 out of 42 students who were left in a room with nothing to do for 15 minutes gave themselves at least one mild shock on the ankle to alleviate the boredom. The authors concluded that people would rather do something unpleasant than nothing.
The Charlottesville area is under a winter storm warning until 10 a.m. Tuesday. UVA cancelled classes for Monday, but the men’s basketball team is still scheduled to host North Carolina State University at John Paul Jones Arena at 7 p.m.
"That leads to only one conclusion: Increased turnout" of voters in November, said UVA political scientist Larry Sabato, who also noted that the Supreme Court vacancy could rally establishment Republicans who currently oppose the anti-establishment Trump to support him if he becomes the party's nominee.
A major new project to transcribe and annotate more than 13,000 documents of Martin Van Buren will partner with UVA’s Center for Digital Editing to make his letters, speeches, notes and miscellaneous material available in three formats.
In a clean room located in a UVA basement laboratory, a state-of-the-art infrared spectrograph is being built that will greatly advance our knowledge of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
If history is any indication, who wins the nomination this year will be forecast in Lexington, where Washington and Lee University is holding a mock political convention this weekend. “I’m a big fan of the Mock Con because it’s one of the best college civic education tools I’ve ever come across,” Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, wrote in an email this week.
“She is still likely to be the Democratic nominee,” wrote the respected UVA Center for Politics analyzing Hillary Clinton’s prospects. The center, headed by Larry Sabato, acknowledges that “these are perilous times for Clinton.” It also concludes that the biggest threat to Clinton isn’t Bernie Sanders, but the new FBI investigation into her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.
Proving shoddy defense work contributed to your mistaken conviction is a tremendous legal hurdle to prove on appeal. "It's incredibly difficult to show," said Brandon Garrett, professor at the UVA School of Law. "The (U.S.) Supreme Court standard has been overly restrictive."
Although the percentage of U.S. teenagers with metabolic syndrome has remained stable during the last 15 years, the severity of some of the contributing cardiometabolic risk factors has improved, according to a study from Arthur M. Lee of UVA’s Department of Pediatrics and colleagues.
(Co-written by UVA sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox) Studies suggesting that evangelical Protestants face higher rates of divorce than the population at large do not give us the full picture: religious affiliation is less important than regular religious attendance when it comes to predicting divorce.
The UVA Children’s Hospital announced a partnership Thursday with Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh to expand its pediatric liver transplant program.
All year, Panera Bread stores will ask customers to round their bill up to the whole dollar. That extra change will go to the UVA Children's Hospital’s general fund to support little ones like Olivia Goodwin, who received a pacemaker at just 3 days old.