Professor Steven Davidoff and University of Notre Dame Professor Matthew Cain's paper A Great Game: The Dynamics of State Competition Litigation was reviewed and quoted from by Thomson Reuters News & Insight.

"The paper ... features up-to-the-minute commentary and a deep understanding of why lawyers do what they do," writes Alison Frankel in her On the Case column.

She continues: "Davidoff and Cain looked at the litigation spawned by 955 public deals, completed between 2004 and 2010 and valued at more than $100 million. From that hand-curated sample, they examined Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court filings, and other public documents to find out where cases were filed, whether they were dismissed or settled, what kind of benefits shareholders achieved in settlements, and what plaintiffs' lawyers were awarded in fees. They assembled the data into a series of charts and tables that show some significant trends in M&A shareholder litigation."

Professor Daniel Tokaji, a senior fellow at Election Law @ Moritz, was quoted by The Birmingham News in an article about a local county's crusade to end 47 years of federal government oversight of its election returns.

Shelby County is hoping a federal appeals court will agree that the county no longer needs the U.S. Justice Department to approve changes in the ways elections are conducted because the area has progressed from its discriminatory past. It is unclear whether the case would be the vehicle with which justices of the U.S. Supreme Court would review the constitutionality of Section 5.

"I am reasonably confident they're going to take up the question of Section 5 constitutionality within the next few years," Tokaji said. "It could be Shelby County, it could be South Carolina, or some other."

Professor Peter Shane's participation in a Thursday tele-debate hosted by the Constitution Project was previewed by  the blog Lawfare. Shane, the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law, will be joined by Professor Michael McConnell, the Richard & Frances Mallery Professor, director of the Stanford Law School Constitutional Law Center, and Hoover Institution Fellow for the tele-debate, Are the President's Recent Recess Appointments Constitutional.

Professor Michelle Alexander was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day broadcast about her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

"People are swept into the criminal justice system — particularly in poor communities of color — at very early ages ... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes," she told Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "[The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they're released, they're relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement — like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon."

Professor Michelle Alexander was interviewed on Democracy Now! as part of a discussion in time for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

"Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion. Through the war on drugs and the 'get tough' movement, millions of poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color, have been swept into our nation’s prisons and jails, branded criminals and felons, primarily for nonviolent and drug-related crimes — the very sorts of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle-class white neighborhoods and on college campuses but go largely ignored — branded criminals and felons, and then are ushered into a permanent second-class status, where they’re stripped of the many rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits," Alexander said.

Professor Michelle Alexander was referenced in an article by The Guardian about the cycle of incarceration repeating itself from one generation to the next among the African-American community. Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

"According to Ohio State University law professor and author Michelle Alexander, there are more African-American men in prison, on probation or on parole in the US now than were enslaved in 1850," the British newspaper reported. "Alexander also calculates that because felons lose the right to vote, more African-American men were disenfranchised in 2004 than in 1870, the year male franchise was secured."

Professor Steven Davidoff and University of Notre Dame Professor Matthew Cain's paper A Great Game: The Dynamics of State Competition Litigation was featured on the Securities Law Prof Blog, edited by Barbara Black, director of the Corporate Law Center at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.

A Martin Luther King Jr. Day appearance by Michelle Alexander at Thomas M. Cooley Law School's Lansing campus was touted in the Lansing State Journal. Alexander is the author of the 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

"Alexander's book focuses on the conviction rate and the astonishing number of African Americans who are in the nation's jails," the Michigan newspaper reported. "While speaking at Cooley, she will share how the consequences of a criminal conviction lead to barriers when individuals seek employment and how these barriers adversely affect communities, families and taxpayers."

Professor Steven Davidoff was interviewed for a piece that aired on NPR's Morning Edition about private equity firms, such as the one Republican presidential nominee hopeful Mitt Romney ran in the 1980s.

After private equity firms find a few large investors — usually pension funds, university endowments, and possibly wealthy individuals — they use that money to borrow more so they can buy other companies, usually those that are in trouble or undervalued, Davidoff explained.

"They buy them in hopes that they can increase the value of the companies and sell them at a fantastic profit," said Davidoff, who worked on merger and acquisition deals as a lawyer before becoming a professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

"Sometimes operating them efficiently means that employees lose their jobs, plants are closed down and companies are restructured," he told NPR.

Davidoff later added that a valid criticism of private equity firms is that their managers make use of a lucrative loophole to cut their tax bill. "The barons of private equity are probably paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries, in terms of percentages."

Professor Peter Swire was quoted by the magazine Security Management in an article about the European Union's strong customer data privacy protections tripping up U.S. organizations that are noncompliant.

“A ‘we don’t care about privacy’ attitude from the United States creates major risks for U.S. jobs, exports, and businesses,” Swire said at a recent House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. “The lack of U.S. privacy rules can become a powerful excuse for protectionism, risking U.S. jobs and the sales of U.S.-based businesses."