Law + Policy

Berkeley Law professor Jesse Choper first got into horse racing in 1969, when he and his friend’s father, a district attorney outside of New York, took a trip to the track. At first, Choper didn’t really get the appeal: “I never did understand how a person who worked really hard, I mean long hours, would take off a whole afternoon in the middle of a week to go to the races…. But then I did.”

In a letter to the editor in The New York Times last October, Susan Neely, president of the American Beverage Association, wrote: “Taxes on beverages do not improve public health.”

Since most of the inmates in private federal prisons are immigrants—a population shown to be less violent and less inclined to present security threats—the government’s plan to cut ties with private prisons due to safety concerns show just how sub-par these private prison conditions can be, according to Stephen Raphael, professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.

The debate raging about testosterone tests in track and field will come to an ugly climax in Rio, and reasonable people on both sides agree it is unfair that the ugliness has landed squarely on the shoulders of women like South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya.

The link between Russian hackers and last week’s WikiLeaks release of 20,000 Democratic National Committee’s internal emails may never be proven conclusively. However, a federal investigation has reported that the leak was probably conducted by Russian hackers and orchestrated by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)—two of Russia’s major intelligence agencies.

Over a long, somewhat tumultuous, and at times fractious four-day stretch, the delegates at the Republican National Convention managed to release a platform for 2016, and crown Donald Trump its presidential nominee, all while party officials struggled to contain blowback from Melania Trump’s plagiarism scandal, Ted Cruz’s very public un-endorsement of Trump, and the general dystopian tone of the event.

Yeah, Hillary’s email missteps were deeply inept. Still, in the end, the FBI cleared her of any criminal malfeasance, though it did deem her “extremely careless.” And let’s face it: Hillary wasn’t the only government bigwig to flub Email 101.