In the News - September 28, 2020

Media Highlights

The Pandemic Imperils Working Mothers’ Careers
Society for Human Resource Management—September 26, 2020
Joan Williams: “There’s no wishing this pandemic away. If employers don’t come to terms with this, we will come out a workforce bleached of mothers.”

Blue Health Insurers Reach Tentative Antitrust Settlement for $2.7 Billion
Wall Street Journal—September 24, 2020
Tim Greaney: “They are removing two of the mechanisms that are pretty flatly anticompetitive.”

‘Evergreening’ Stunts Competition, Costs Consumers and Taxpayers
Arnold Ventures—September 24, 2020
Robin Feldman: “They pile these protections on over and over again — so often that 78 percent of the drugs associated with new patents were not new drugs coming on the market, but existing drugs.”

Lyft Backing Campaign to Unseat Oakland Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan
Oaklandside—September 24, 2020
Veena Dubal: “They are employing the exact same tactics as the tobacco, alcohol, oil, and agricultural industries have employed in the regulatory arena.”

RBG’s Fingerprints Are All Over Your Everyday Life
The Atlantic—September 23, 2020
Joan Williams: “The breadwinner-homemaker model is built into the structure of American society and American law at a very deep level.” One of Ginsburg’s crucial contributions to American feminism was the insight “that you had to talk about these as a set of matched stereotypes, and attack them both at once.”

Democrats Urge Republican Senate to Hold Off on Supreme Court Nomination Until After the Election
KTVU—September 21, 2020
David Levine: “Will four Republican senators say we took a principled stand in 2016 and we’re going to stay with that principled stand here in 2020?”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death Leaves Affordable Care Act in Jeopardy
KPIX/CBS SF—September 21, 2020
Hadar Aviram: “Because the majority to uphold the ACA has been pretty slim, the concern is now that there’s one less justice on the court. If a new justice is not appointed by then who’s not going to support the law, that makes the law fairly vulnerable.”

RBG Knew That Women’s Equality Meant Liberating Men, Too
Forbes–September 21, 2020
Joan Williams: “You’re never going to liberate women from their roles at home if you don’t liberate men to assume responsibilities at home.”

Remembering Trailblazing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
KQED Forum: September 21, 2020
David Levine: “She helped us to knock down stereotypes. And she was proud of creating men’s liberation as well.”

Ginsburg’s Death Sets Up Titanic Battle Over Abortion Rights
San Francisco Chronicle—September 20, 2020
Joan Williams: In many ways, the left long ago lost the debate over abortion; 89% of U.S. counties lack a clinic able to terminate a pregnancy. If Roe were overturned, states would decide abortion rights, most likely leaving California women with access to abortions.

Ginsburg Championed Gender Equality Before Joining Supreme Court
Bloomberg—September 19, 2020
Joan Williams: “What Ruth Bader Ginsburg did was persuade a Supreme Court of Justice Thurgood Marshall and eight pretty recalcitrant white guys that women were protected under the Constitution and entitled to equal protection and gender equality.”

‘She Was My Idol’: Bay Area Legal Community Shares Memories of Supreme Court Icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
ABC7—September 19, 2020
David Levine: Justice Ginsburg was particularly influential because she was so good at reaching out to the other justices in order to find common ground and that fifth vote.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an Inspiration to Working Mothers
NPR—September 19, 2020
Joan Williams: “She established the principle that you could not treat mothers differently than fathers in a wide variety of contexts.”

Hundreds Attend San Francisco Vigil to Honor Late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
ABC7—September 18, 2020
Hadar Aviram: “We’ve already seen as soon as this happened Mitch McConnell announced that they are going forward with the next nomination. I think it’s going to be a political game of time.”

Speaking Frankly: Feminism
CBSN –September 2020
Joan Williams: “One of the things holding women back is class conflict making feminist claims implausible, or indeed sometimes distasteful, to other groups.”

College and Community Stories

Patent Database Exposes Pharma’s Pricey “Evergreen” Strategy
AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Gilead lead a crowded field of drug makers who excessively extend patent protections to limit the market entry of competing products in an anti-competitive practice called “evergreening,” a primary driver of high drug prices. This is one finding of many according to a public database created by the Center for Innovation (C4i) at UC Law SF.

Scholarly Leadership

Abe Cable: Appeared on the Business Scholarship Podcast, speaking on representation-and-warranty insurance in mergers and acquisitions.

Veena Dubal: “Time Politics of Digital Piecework,” Future of Work Conference, Center for Ethics, University of Toronto

Veena Dubal: “Surveillance is Not a Social Good: Technocapital, Public Health, and the Pandemic,” Ethics of COVID Speaker Series, Center for Ethics, University of Toronto

Jared Ellias: “Bankruptcy Hardball,” 108 California Law Review 745

Dorit Reiss: “Why a COVID-19 Vaccine Shouldn’t be Mandatory,” Bill of Health, Harvard Law

Karen Musalo: Spoke on “Legal Issues in Asylum 2020″ at an event sponsored by the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative, “Advanced Asylum and Refugee Symposium”

Lois Weithorn: “When Does a Minor’s Legal Competence to Make Health Care Decisions Matter?” Pediatrics

Upcoming Events

LexLab: Oct. 1, Legal Ops Panel
Learn how legal operations is transforming the practice of law. With Greg Kaple, Senior Director, Legal Operations Programs at Kaiser Permanente; Catherine Krow, Founder and CEO at Digitory Legal; Julie Lee, Director, Legal Operations and Innovation at Levi Strauss & Co.; and Josh Rosenfeld, Corporate Chief Practice Officer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

CREJ: Oct. 7, From Prop 209 to Prop 16: Historical, Legal and Activist Perspectives on Affirmative Action
Prop. 16, which is on the November ballot, would restore affirmative action in California. This panel will discuss the legacies of Proposition 209 and the promise of Proposition 16.

CNDR: Oct. 14, Lunch and Learn Series
Grande Lum, former director of CNDR, discusses his book, “America’s Peacemakers,” the story of a federal agency within the Department of Justice that assists and mediates in communities as they reconcile and recover from discrimination, hate crimes, and unrest based on issues like race and religion.

CREJ: Oct. 16, Diversity in Legal Thought and Practice Speaker Series
Adjunct Professor and Center for Racial and Economic Justice Affiliated Scholar T. Anansi Wilson will present two of their papers, “Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being” and “The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life.” Open to the public.

CNDR: Oct. 28, Lunch and Learn Series
Professor John Lande will describe how practitioners can combine supposedly inconsistent negotiation models based on the framework his new book, “Litigation Interest and Risk Assessment: Help Your Clients Make Good Litigation Decisions.”