“The problem tends to involve the capture of the government by various interests – these problems are exacerbated when the company actually is the government,” said Alex Wang, professor at Berkeley and an expert in China’s environmental legislation.

Mark Gergen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said he did not know of any previous litigation in California over whether rewards should be paid if the suspect dies before conviction…. “Looking beneath the surface, in many of these cases there are qualms about whether the person claiming the reward really played an instrumental role,” he said.

One way to decrease sugar consumption would be to ask chain restaurants and retailers such as Trader Joe’s to reduce sugar in the products they sell by a certain percentage every year, says Stephen Sugarman…. “You require them to reduce the amount of added sugar that passes through their cash registers, by, let’s say, five percent a year,” said Sugarman. “And you just let them figure out how to do that—as long as they meet the target then there’s no tax, no penalty. Any individual shopper can keep on buying whatever he or she wants, but the company, just as they seduce us into buying the type of diet we buy now, will have to seduce us into buying an increasingly less sugary diet.”

“Economic reform is difficult. Taking on corruption even more so. The Party and the State must follow his (Li’s) words and seek social equity and balance,” said Robert Berring, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, who teaches courses on the Chinese legal system.

“The question is, Where is the bottom? How low can you go?” said professor Franklin Zimring, of University of California Berkeley School of Law, who has studied New York City crime trends.

“The media overwhelmingly predicted that the healthcare act would be declared unconstitutional. That turned out, of course, to be incorrect primarily because Chief Justice Roberts, who acted during the oral argument as if he had no use for the healthcare act, ended up being the most significant vote on the court for maintaining the constitutionality of core provisions of the act. So, with that warning in mind about reading or misreading the clues from an oral argument, I would say that yesterday was somewhat baffling.”

“I’m a terrible prognosticator, but it seems obvious to me that same sex marriage is inevitable. It was from Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, when the Court struck down laws that prohibited sodomy. Once you say that this behavior is no longer suitable to be regulated by criminal law, it seems that marriage is inevitable. Historically, the state either regulates sex through criminal law or through family law.”

Climate change is often thought of as a scientific topic, which it is, but it’s a lot more than that. Once we acknowledge that there are changes to our physical world as a result of climate change, there’s another step: What’s it going to do to human beings? What’s it going to do to you and me?

“Some conservatives are afraid of the outcome and are hoping the Court might kick the case out. But the whole point of the initiative process is that … voters of California didn’t trust their elected officials to carry out their policies. So they used the initiative process to go around established government. As a federalism issue, that’s a matter of state law, that’s for Californians to decide; who under our Constitution is the best person or party to defend the law.”

James P. Tuthill, a telecommunications expert who teaches in the international and executive law program at UC Berkeley School of Law, praised Genachowski’s accomplishments in moving to improve spectrum and broadband availability. “He’s done well in identifying the need for more spectrum,” Tuthill said, “and in focusing the country’s attention on broadband deployment.”

Bertrall Ross teaches law at UC Berkeley. “The two laws are very similar to each other and given the similarities, I would say that whatever the court says about Prop. 2 would have the same impact on Prop. 209,” he said.

“Marriage has been thought of as exclusively the province of the states, a creature of state law. DOMA was unprecedented in that it was the federal government making a federal law that would only define marriage to be between a man and a woman. So, for conservative justices like Scalia, Thomas, Alito, the federalism argument, the states’ rights argument, is one that is going to be very appealing.”

But the Supreme Court could overturn the 9th Circuit’s opinion for a variety of reasons, including if Kennedy disagrees with the court’s “very explicit effort to apply Romer to Proposition 8,” Hollinger said. “Kennedy may feel, well, Proposition 8 is a sort of specific target,” Hollinger said. “It isn’t a total rejection of gay people from participation in California society.”

Are more studies necessary before we accept the negative effects of violence in the media on our youth? How many more 5- and 6-year-olds must be slaughtered before we realize there is a connection between excessive media violence and violence in our communities? And that we must address more than just stronger gun-control laws to reduce it?

“The U.S. Surgeon General found that exposure to media violence increases aggressiveness in children,” said James P. Tuthill, a communications attorney and law professor.

Semel said whenever the prosecution in a criminal case alleges special circumstances—unless he or she says specifically that they are not seeking the death penalty—it becomes a capital-eligible case. “It is critical that the defense lawyer at that point begins thinking about and investigating the case from that perspective,” she said.

“When we have large-scale litigation, the demands on the system are such that we have to have an efficient way to resolve it,” Bradt said. “It doesn’t make sense for there to be 10,000 cases in 10,000 courts across the country. It makes sense for there to be some kind of consolidated proceeding that prevents inefficient duplication of litigation.”

“A conservative assumption is that we will see a rise in global temperature of 2 degrees Celsius in this century,” Guzman said. He said that type of rise in global temperature will kill hundreds of millions and “badly damage” billions of people. “Those numbers are alarming, but that is because we should be alarmed,” he said.

The ruling means “you can’t have the ghost of copyright following the object around and policing it,” said Jason Schultz, a law professor at UC Berkeley who filed an amicus brief on behalf of the student. When I talked to him yesterday, he told me the case has important implications for interpreting “first sale” doctrine in the digital world.

“I think President Obama has been as equally aggressive as President Bush, and, in fact, he has sometimes used the very same language to suggest that he would not obey congressional laws that intrude on his commander-in-chief power,” said Yoo…. “This is utterly hypocritical, both when compared to his campaign stances and the position of his supporters in Congress, who have suddenly discovered the virtues of silence.”