Last month brought an explosion of breaking news about intellectual-property issues, including copyright--the public battle over Internet-piracy bills in Congress, with ideological alliances crisscrossing standard lines, and sponsors turning against their own bills; the Supreme Court decision, "Golan v. Holder," which strengthened copyright…

For years, libertarians had fought laws and policies barring Communists from teaching as direct assaults on the First Amendment, while supporters of loyalty programs had painted all Communists as mental slaves of Moscow. In 1952 the Supreme Court upheld New York's 1949 Feinberg Law, which required detailed procedures for investigating the loyalty…

For more than 30 years now, the author has benefited in his professional practice in student affairs from having attended some terrific graduate programs. His lack of knowledge of certain topics wasn't necessarily his programs' fault. Maybe the information was presented, but he wasn't ready to take it in. Or perhaps certain topics weren't…

At Middlebury College--and on campuses throughout the country--class is coming out of the closet. Long hidden from view, economic status is emerging from the shadows, as once-taboo discussions are taking shape. The growing economic divide in America, and on American campuses, has given rise to new student organizations, and new dialogues, focused…

The tantalizing vision of universal access to the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity seemed close to fulfillment in 2008, when Google announced the settlement of a class-action lawsuit charging that its Google Book Search project infringed copyright by scanning in-copyright books from major research-library collections. But it was not to…

The Supreme Court's members generally are too decorous to exclaim "I told you so." But U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy stands perched on the edge of an I-told-you-so moment, thanks to the court's decision to take up a challenge to a race-conscious college-admission policy that poses some of the same questions he had accused…

The author reports on a legal battle over oral-history records housed at Boston College that casts light on how little legal weight pledges of confidentiality to research subjects actually have. As a federal court weighs whether to let the federal government seize, and hand over to British authorities, the college's records of confidential…

The author reports on the U.S. Supreme Court hearing regarding the Texas admissions case that exposes gaps in the affirmative-action law. As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a lawsuit challenging race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin, it became evident that the court's past rulings on such policies have failed to…

In lawsuits pending in federal courts in Boston and Chicago, Americans harmed by terrorist attacks linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran are asserting claim to artifacts they believe belong to that nation, in their quest to win more than $4-billion in damages. The institutions that hold the artifacts, which include Harvard University and the…

The author reports on the ruling of a divided appellate court that held that the state law unconstitutionally made it harder for minorities to seek preferences than for other groups. The court struck down a voter-passed ban on the use of race-conscious admissions by Michigan's public colleges, holding that the measure had unconstitutionally put…

As colleges and lawmakers seek better data about the employment success of graduates, a lack of standardized tracking makes much of the information unreliable. Many colleges release placement rates based on scant information: More than a third of colleges' reported rates in 2010 were based on responses from half of their graduates or fewer,…

An African-American stripper's false accusation of rape against three white Duke University lacrosse players in 2006--and the overzealous prosecution that followed--ultimately exposed prosecutorial misconduct, a rush to judgment, and simmering tensions of class, race, privilege, and gender. Michael L. Seigel, a professor of law at the University…

The author reports on a Supreme Court case that is echoing across the University of Texas at Austin, and for some students, it is personal. Not long after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Abigail Fisher's case against the University of Texas at Austin, a lighthearted joke made the rounds at the Warfield Center for African and African-American…

Google's Book Search program mines the holdings of research libraries for texts to digitize. Some of that material is out of copyright; a lot of it isn't. A lawsuit came about when some authors and publishers decided that Google's project exceeded the bounds of fair use. As part of a settlement, the parties have proposed creating a Book Rights…

In early 1916, the legendary Yale University archaeologist Hiram Bingham III completed his third and final expedition in southern Peru. He shipped home 74 boxes of artifacts from Machu Picchu, a spectacular site in the Andes that is believed to have been the last major settlement of the Inca empire. Those boxes were supposed to be on temporary…