The Legal Eagle Lowdown

by Suzi Morales Imagine if your high school drama became the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court decision. That’s what happened in June 2021 when the Court decided Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., which considered how the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution...

by Robin Roenker Recently, voters in New York City used ranked-choice voting (RCV) to select the winner of the Democratic primary race for mayor. While New York may be the largest U.S. city to have adopted this form of voting, it’s not alone. According to FairVote, a...

by Maria Wood In 2020, when schools across the country were forced to abruptly disband in-person learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, school districts, administrators and teachers scrambled to find technological solutions that would allow for online learning from...

by Michael Barbella For decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has treated the issue of sentencing juveniles differently than the sentencing of convicted adults. Since 2005, the Court has decided five prominent cases dealing with juvenile defendants in the criminal justice...

by Michael Barbella Advances in the technology industry have made leaps and bounds in a short period of time. Google, founded in 1998 by two Stanford graduate students in a garage, now employs more than 135,000 employees. In January 2020, Alphabet Inc., Google’s...

by Jodi L. Miller In this era of “fake news,” the likelihood of coming across misinformation and disinformation while searching the Internet is high. Whether it’s a news story, a photo or a video, it’s hard to determine what’s true and what’s not. That is why many in...

by Maria Wood Throughout history, many crimes have been uncovered, not by law enforcement, but by ordinary citizens with a sense of civic responsibility. These citizens are sometimes called whistleblowers. A whistleblower is someone within a private organization or...

There have been countless whistleblowers throughout U.S. history. In most of these cases the public will probably never know their names, or if they do will soon forget them. Most whistleblowers don’t make headlines let alone have their stories made into films. Here...

by Maria Wood The concept of contact tracing is not new, having been used for centuries to halt the spread of disease, with the first known use in the 1500s during the outbreak of the bubonic plague. The practice is now being employed to stop the spread of coronavirus...

by Michael Barbella Among the many things that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light is that staying at home all the time is no fun and everyone has a different idea of what “essential” means. For example, California’s Santa Clara County—one of the nation’s first...