NCAA President Says Change Needed, But It Won’t Include Paying Athletes

There is pretty general satisfaction with the way college athletics are governed – if you’re talking about the NCAA’s Division 2 and Division 3 schools, the smaller universities and colleges that don’t have big budgets and don’t often break into the spotlight.

But Division 1? “There is absolutely no one satisfied with the current model,” Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA, said during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session this week in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall. The big, high-profile sports programs with huge budgets have attracted great controversy, to the point, Emmert said, that upcoming meetings will consider changes in how college sports programs are governed.

One thing that Emmert said is almost certain not to be changed is the longstanding prohibition against paying college athletes anything that would amount to salaries. Doing that has been the subject of extensive attention in the news media recently, including a cover story in Time magazine that called it “a moral imperative” to pay college athletes.

Continue ReadingNCAA President Says Change Needed, But It Won’t Include Paying Athletes

Milwaukee Area Divide in Voting Is Unusually Deep, Gilbert and Franklin Say

 

It isn’t just that we disagree whether we prefer pepperoni or anchovies on our pizza. We disagree about what pepperoni and anchovies are. And we disagree in increasingly strong ways.

That’s one way that Charles Franklin, professor of law and public policy at Marquette University Law School, described the sharply partisan atmosphere of American politics. He spoke Thursday in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall in the first session of the 2013-14 season of “On the Issues with Mike Gousha.”

Franklin and Craig Gilbert, Washington bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, presented some of the early findings of research the two are conducting on polarization in politics, especially in the Milwaukee area and Wisconsin. Gilbert is on a six-month leave from the newspaper to take part in the project, supported by the Law School’s Sheldon B. Lubar Fund for Public Policy research.

Continue ReadingMilwaukee Area Divide in Voting Is Unusually Deep, Gilbert and Franklin Say

Crime, Art, Sports, and Judge De Sanctis: An Update

De SanctisLast September, the Law School hosted a lecture by the Hon. Fausto Martin De Sanctis, a distinguished federal judge from Brazil. A former fellow at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington D.C. (2012), Judge De Sanctis has spearheaded Brazil’s efforts to crackdown on international and domestic money laundering, among other crimes. In his lecture, Judge De Sanctis described how museum-quality art served as a medium for laundering cash that left only a scant trail for investigators to follow. It is, he said, an international problem that cries for international solutions.

Judge De Sanctis has now published a book on this intricate topic, Money Laundering Through Art: A Criminal Justice Perspective (Springer, 2013).Central to Judge De Sanctis’s argument is the need to lift the secrecy that shrouds many art transactions. While art dealers proclaim the need for confidentiality and the cultivation of a mystique, law enforcement contends that this same secrecy facilitates crime and fraud. The complexities of these crimes, including references to Judge De Sanctis and his (then forthcoming) book, were recently canvassed by the New York Times in a May 2013 story. (See link)

Continue ReadingCrime, Art, Sports, and Judge De Sanctis: An Update