Tag: University of Notre Dame

Mayoral election won’t be held for 2 months

METHUEN — Residents will have to wait until at least December to vote for a new mayor.

After the unexpected death of Neil Perry, 66, over the weekend, a City Council in mourning began planning for his successor Monday night.

It is unclear who will run for mayor but due to state law, the city will not be able to hold an election until 64 days after it is scheduled. Councilor D.J. Beauregard is the acting mayor.

Perry, serving his third term, died Saturday while surrounded by his family.

City officials choked back tears as they spoke Monday night during an emotional, 30-minute meeting attended by city department heads and other employees.

While councilors authorized the clerk’s office to begin planning, they will not vote to schedule the election until Oct. 7. The clerk’s office will have the complex task of planning a mayoral election while also preparing for the presidential election in November.

Beauregard will possess most of the authority traditionally held by the mayor but would not be able to permanently hire or fire staff, according to City Solicitor Ken Rossetti. The 64-day waiting period provides sufficient time for residents to be informed of the election and for candidates to prepare, he added.

Perry’s “strength of character” was an inspiration, Rossetti said.

Perry had been battling kidney disease and while not always able to physically attend meetings, he worked right up until his death. Beyond simply being colleagues, councilors and other officials described Perry as a friend, struggling at times Monday night to find the right words to say as they spoke about him.

Only a week ago, Perry attended the council’s meeting in person Sept. 16, showing no indication of failing health.

Perry began leading the city as mayor in January 2020. Last year, he won reelection with about 70% of the vote against challenger Matthew Wicks, a former Air Force officer and a machinist.

Each year, the council elects a member to serve as acting mayor in the event of a vacancy. Beauregard was elected to fill the role Jan. 4.

Beauregard is a councilor at large and has served the city since January 2020. He worked at Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School as the director of strategic initiatives. But at the council’s meeting Monday, Beauregard announced he had resigned from his full-time job.

The newly elected mayor would serve the remainder of Perry’s term, which ends Dec. 31, 2025.

During Perry’s administration, an embattled Methuen Police Department underwent significant reforms, previously vacant leadership positions in the city were filled, and significant development was achieved, including at The Loop, among other positive changes.

In only his first few months of office, Perry was tested with leading the city at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city is providing free, confidential counseling services in the wake of the mayor’s death.

Prior to running for mayor, Perry spent 38 years working at Raytheon. He previously worked as a bilingual educator for Methuen Public Schools

Perry’s funeral will be held Sept. 30. City Hall will be closed that day.

“He started it and we are going to finish it for him,”said Chief Administrative & Financial Officer Maggie Duprey.

By Teddy Tauscher | ttauscher@eagletribune.com

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September 24, 2024
Automate or informate? Firms must invest in specific types of IT to improve working capital management

Newswise — The management of working capital — or a firm’s current assets minus its current liabilities — aids organizations in making efficient use of their existing assets and maximizing cash flow.

The relationship between efficient working capital management and firm performance can be complex due to globally dispersed supply chains, number of suppliers and product variety, and technological uncertainty, among other factors.

New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that information technology represents a critical investment that firms must make in order to make informed, objective and firm-specific working capital decisions that would result in improved performance.

“Impact of working capital on firm performance: Does IT matter?” is forthcoming in the Journal of Operations Management from Sarv Devaraj, the Fred V. Duda Professor of Management in Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Based on a sample of 1,054 U.S.-based manufacturing firms during 2011-13, the study analyzes IT infrastructure investment, which includes spending on servers and hardware, and IT labor investment — hiring and training IT employees.

The study explains how IT infrastructure and IT labor perform distinct roles that can help automate (use technology to increase the speed and accuracy of process execution) and/or informate (use technology to create new information), thereby moderating the working capital-firm performance relationship.

“Our results show that IT infrastructure investments have a stronger impact on the positive relationship between working capital management and firm performance than IT labor investments,” said Devaraj, who specializes in business analytics, supply chain management and the business value of technology. “This is mostly due to the structured and transactional nature of the data underlying working capital processes.”

The three metrics that drive a firm’s working capital performance are days inventory outstanding (DIO), which represents the firm’s inventory on hand at the current sales rate; days payables outstanding (DPO), or the period of time that a company takes to pay off its suppliers; and days sales outstanding (DSO), which represents the period of time between the sale of goods and the collection of revenue by the company.

Firms can improve performance by aggressively managing their working capital by reducing DIO and DSO and increasing DPO. However, delaying payables excessively, cutting down on inventory or unduly shortening the receivables cycle can make the supply chain vulnerable and impact firm performance negatively.

The study reveals that IT infrastructure expenditures improved the positive effects of DPO while reducing the negative effects of DIO and DSO on business performance. It also found that IT labor investments can boost the beneficial effects of DPO while lessening the negative effects of DIO. However, the DSO-firm performance link was not reduced by IT labor investments.

While the performance effects of working capital processes related to inventory, payables and receivables are amplified by IT infrastructure due to the mostly structured nature of the underlying processes, IT labor can also have a unique role to play in the working capital-performance relationship.

IT business analysts can interpret working capital data, analyze key cash flow metrics, gauge the implications of changes in the supply chain environment for working capital management and share these insights with senior management and other employees. They can also develop new processes based on the needs of relevant stakeholders.

“As businesses struggle to figure out how best to manage their working capital, it’s important for managers to get buy-in from their superiors for any new IT investment,” Devaraj said. “Our findings should enable managers looking after working capital-related processes to justify making greater investments in IT and, particularly, in IT infrastructure.”

Co-authors of the study are Palash Deb from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Suvendu Naskar from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Preetam Basu from the University of Kent.

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August 22, 2023
Upward trend in ‘deaths of despair’ linked to drop in religious participation, economist finds

Newswise — Over the past 20 years, the death rate from drug poisonings in the U.S. has tripled and suicide and alcoholic liver disease death rates have increased by 30 percent — particularly among middle-aged white Americans, according to studies by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Further evidence shows that these dramatic changes in mortality rates within American communities actually began in the late 20th century, but researchers have been unable to pinpoint a cause for these “deaths of despair.”

To fill that gap in understanding, Daniel Hungerman, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and his co-authors studied the connection between a sharp downturn of religious participation in the late 1980s and the swift rise in deaths of white Americans ages 45 to 54 in the early 1990s. Their findings were recently issued in a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

While the post-1999 mortality increase has justifiably attracted a large amount of attention with the introduction of OxyContin, “this change in the early 1990s is perhaps as striking but has received little attention in prior work,” the researchers explained.

“It’s pretty unusual for an advanced country like America to see people start dying sooner, at a younger age,” Hungerman said. “And what we found is that there is a direct correlation between the effects of religious practice and these mortality rates from alcoholism, suicide and overdose.”

Their study highlighted how changes in religious participation can have large consequences for the health and well-being of middle-aged, white individuals, wrote Hungerman and his co-authors.

“Our work provides evidence that religious participation matters,” they said.

Bringing the data together, comparing

Comparing mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Multiple Cause of Death files and religiosity survey data from the General Social Survey, the researchers identified a definite correlation between the decline in religious affiliation and church attendance and the increase in deaths of despair among middle-aged white Americans that began in the late 1980s and continued through the 1990s.

Researchers also found that states that had experienced larger declines in religious participation in the last 15 years of the century saw larger increases in deaths of despair. Notably, the decline in religious participation was not specifically driven by males or females, nor was it initially observed for non-white Americans.

Hungerman and his co-authors presented evidence that this decline in religious participation was driven more by a collective resistance to formal or organized religion than by changes in personal religious beliefs or spiritual habits.

“What happened is that they quit going to church — they stopped affiliating with religious places,” Hungerman said. “But if you ask them, ‘Do you believe in God,’ then that is still a constant. It has more to do with the social aspect of the formal participation.”

One explanation for the decline in religious activity is the shifting relationship between religion and politics, Hungerman theorized. “There are some indications that more progressively oriented individuals stopped affiliating with religion,” he said. “Another is an increase in education — those educational gains may have led to lower participation.”

The causes of the decline in religiosity and religious participation are less important than the consequences, however, Hungerman said. “We’ve accepted this decline has occurred, and now we want to show what it has caused in people’s lives.”

Historical ‘shocks’ contribute to decline

The researchers considered two additional “shocks” occurring at different times in our history that seem to have also contributed to the decrease in faith activities and increase in mortality. One was the repeal of the blue laws in the 1960s and 1970s. These laws restricted commerce during a certain time of week, typically Sunday mornings. Unlike some blue laws of today, which limit alcohol sales on Sundays, the earlier iterations prohibited all labor on that day — which allowed more people to attend church versus working or going shopping. According to the researchers, repealing the blue laws led to a 5-10 percent negative impact on weekly attendance of religious services for middle-aged Americans and increased the rate of deaths of despair by two deaths per 100,000 people.

The second shock occurred much later with the increase of opioid use in the 1990s, particularly following the introduction of the prescription drug OxyContin in 1996 and its subsequent abuse.

“With these sorts of shocks occurring, we see — for the groups affected — a coinciding change in suicides, heavy drinking and drug use,” Hungerman said. “We’re seeing these relatively smaller, earlier shocks as setting the stage for the later, larger effects (sharp mortality rate increases). We use that as another piece of evidence to help us better understand this relationship between what you’re doing on Sunday morning and your health outcomes.”

Cultural influence or true despair?

Scientists have had difficulty studying the cultural or social influences in this arena, Hungerman said. “Despite the title ‘deaths of despair,’ they have struggled to see whether or not despair actually plays any role here, or if it’s just a cultural anomaly, more generally. We think our research provides novel evidence that it does.”

Hungerman and his co-authors noted that prior studies have indicated nonreligious organizations are unable to provide the same sense of community, closeness and social service that religious traditions have typically supplied. And while they acknowledged that their study confirmed the importance of religion alone in promoting well-being, future research can be done to see if other cultural institutions — including voluntary and community activities — could have similar large-scale effects on health and mortality.

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March 7, 2023
Notre Dame study finds voter ID laws mobilize voters in both parties, rather than sway election results

Newswise — In the past two decades, many state governments have enacted voter identification requirements for constituents voting in their state, requiring a photo ID or other significant proof to access a ballot. These laws were intended to prevent voter fraud and increase election security, but they also sparked national debate over whether they disenfranchised disadvantaged groups such as people living in poverty or people of color, who may not have a valid ID nor be able to obtain one.

Many argued that implementing the ID requirements gave Republicans the electoral advantage while harming Democrats, whose supporters were more likely to be affected by the laws. Up until now, the extent to which these laws provided electoral benefits for Republican candidates and/or disadvantages for Democratic ones had not been considered.

In a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jeffrey Harden, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and concurrent associate professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, and Alejandra Campos, a third-year graduate student in the political science doctorate program, both at the University of Notre Dame, found that voter ID requirements motivated supporters of both parties equally to comply and participate, but had little overall effect on the actual outcomes of the elections.

“We addressed a very simple question of whether or not these laws actually have the sort of electoral effects that people seem to think they do,” Harden said. “It was surprising to us to see that no one had really addressed that question yet.”

The two researchers examined the effect of voter ID laws on the electoral results for significant political races at the state level (state legislatures and governorships) and federal level (U.S. Congress and president) from 2003 to 2020. The framework of the study was to find out whether a voter ID requirement affected the vote share advantage of Republican or Democratic candidates in these races. The assumption, Harden explained, is that because Democratic voters tend to be the ones who are more impacted by voter ID requirements, it is in the Democratic Party’s interest to push back against these laws and in the Republican Party’s interest to advocate for them.

“This suggests that one party’s candidates would benefit more, and one party’s candidates would be penalized more, by these laws,” Harden theorized. “But that’s not really what’s going on here — the long-term implications of voter ID are more nuanced than that.”

Rather, the researchers speculated, voter ID laws had a countermobilization effect by creating a complex series of events, happening over the course of the campaign, that resulted in supporters of both parties getting motivated and mobilized, which ultimately diminished the laws’ anticipated effects on the actual election results.

“The parties had to take additional steps to counteract these laws,” Campos explained. “The Democratic Party, for example, mobilized their constituents to meet the ID requirements so the laws would not impact their electoral fortunes.”

Other implications include the idea that ID requirements frustrated Democrats and enthused Republicans — motivating both groups’ supporters to vote. In addition, the researchers wrote, voters may have become accustomed to adhering to the laws, thus softening their controversial stigma in the public’s opinion and eventually reducing their effects.

“Any impact these laws exert on voter access occurs concurrently with their effects on other elements of the electoral process,” the researchers pointed out. “What we find out, in the end, is that the results get washed out to the point where these voter ID laws don’t have much of an impact on the actual electoral outcomes.”

With existing research pointing to the fact that voter ID laws don’t necessarily impact voter fraud or voter turnout, and Harden’s and Campos’ research indicating that they don’t have much of an effect on election results, Harden suggested we ask ourselves: “How difficult should it be in a democratic society for a person to vote?”

“We think this should be a part of the discussion,” both researchers said. “Future election policy may benefit from a shift in the debate.” Instead of focusing on which is more important — voting security or access — lawmakers should consider what is the minimum amount of voter responsibility required to vote, the researchers said, rather than setting up barriers to voting not supported by evidence.

“We need to ask ourselves: Why are we doing this?” Campos noted. “We need to think seriously about the consequences of these laws and whether or not there’s any benefit to them at all.”

Harden noted the importance of studying democratic institutions and the way in which democracy can ebb and flow within a country — and how this practice fits in ideally with the mission of Notre Dame.

“What we’re talking about here are reforms that make a fundamentally democratic practice (i.e., voting) more or less difficult for people,” Harden said. “Being at a university committed to truth and the common good, we need to understand if this significant reform is doing what people expect it to when they enact that reform.”

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February 7, 2023
University of Notre Dame Expert Available to Comment on House Bill Regarding Immigration Legislation, Border Safety and Security Act

Newswise — Erin B. Corcoran, Acting Director and Executive Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and Associate Teaching Professor at the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, is available to respond to any media inquiries or speak to the press about this legislation.

Corcoran has expertise in U.S. immigration law and policy, refugee and asylum law, human trafficking and the protection of vulnerable migrant populations. Prior to Notre Dame, Corcoran served as a resettlement consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Lusaka, Zambia; a staff attorney for Human Rights First in Washington, D.C.; and legal counselor to former Senator Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland.

The following quote from Corcoran is available for pick-up:

“This proposed legislation effectively codifies the Trump Administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, which the Biden Administration began rolling back last February. The ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy was subject to various legal challenges because it placed asylum seekers and other vulnerable populations at significant risk of serious harm while awaiting to have their refugee claims adjudicated.

“This bill requires that individuals presenting themselves at a border, without proper travel documentation, be detained or returned to their territory of origin to await an immigration hearing. This undermines our nation’s domestic and international legal and moral obligations to provide protection to individuals fleeing persecution and serious harm.”

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January 13, 2023
Boards of directors and the media generally ‘get it right’ in rewarding CEOs based on performance, study shows

Newswise — A main focus in corporate governance research is whether boards of directors and the media appropriately reward and sanction CEOs based on their performance.

Evidence shows CEOs vary significantly in their ability to generate positive firm results. While some revitalize underperforming companies, others assume the reins of successful companies only to lead them to failure.

Prior research provides a pessimistic view of boards of directors, portraying them as inefficient and unable to monitor CEOs. But many of these studies approach the problem in the wrong way, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame. The study takes a broader view of these relationships and asks the question: Do boards generally get it right? The answer, the researchers find, is yes.

“Do Boards and the Media Recognize Quality? An Assessment of CEO Contextual Quality Using Pay, Dismissal, Awards, and Linguistics” is forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal from Timothy Hubbard, assistant professor of strategic management at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, along with Cole Short from Pepperdine University.

Boards of directors are responsible for the monitoring, rewarding and sanctioning of CEOs, while the media also plays an important role in corporate governance by distilling and disseminating key information about firms and their leaders.

“We find that boards of directors and the media do accurately reward CEOs based on their performance,” Hubbard said. “Higher-performing CEOs earn more, are dismissed less and receive more CEO media awards.”

The study looks at performance based on the impact the CEO has on the firm within the context of the performance they inherited and the time period in which they ran the firm. After establishing this relationship, it examines the signals that boards and the media may use to ascertain quality.

Using advanced linguistic methods, the researchers show that CEOs differ in the language they use. More specifically, they introduce the idea of CEO unscripted novelty, or how much a CEO deviates from the prepared portion of earnings calls in the unscripted question-and-answer portion.

They looked at CEOs and performance from the S&P 500 using company financials, media reports and earnings calls transcripts and studied CEO pay, dismissal and CEO of the Year awards. They used a separate sample to look at earnings calls and unscripted novelty and used natural language processing as a method to understand the topics CEOs discuss during their calls.

“CEO quality is positively related to unscripted novelty, which positively influences stock market reactions,” Hubbard said.

According to Hubbard, past research in this area has attempted to relate board characteristics, such as the proportion of independent directors or CEO duality, to short-term performance. He points to the study’s broader look at relationships, which he says should re-energize boards and remove some of the pessimism around their role, as well as linguistic signals that can indicate CEO quality.

“Our results should encourage board members to pay attention to the language CEOs are using in their earnings calls to understand motivations and ability based on what they say,” Hubbard said.

The study states, “Appropriate rewards for and sanctions against CEOs are important as CEOs have considerable influence over firm outcomes. Firms and society benefit when CEOs are compensated, awarded and dismissed based on their performance.”

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January 12, 2023
New visual scale offers simple measure to help identify job burnout

Newswise — “Job burnout” is a term that’s far too familiar to many people. A 2020 Gallup poll showed that 76 percent of employed Americans surveyed have experienced burnout.

Perhaps due to the condition’s prevalence, the World Health Organization recently reclassified burnout in its International Classification of Diseases as an occupational syndrome resulting from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

Employees and employers, across industries, are increasingly experiencing the harmful effects of chronic stress at work. Job burnout can lead to reduced productivity, increased absences and leaves, job turnover and even hospitalization.

Existing methods of identifying job burnout are lengthy and sometimes proprietary, but new research from the University of Notre Dame offers a faster and easier way.

“Matches Measure: A Visual Scale of Job Burnout” is forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology from lead author Cindy Muir (Zapata), professor of management and organization at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, along with Charles Calderwood from Virginia Tech and Dorian Boncoeur, assistant professor of management and organization at Mendoza.

“Because the Matches Measure is a visual measure, it makes assessing burnout as quick and easy as it gets — across countries even,” Muir (Zapata) said. “It eliminates one of the reasons organizations fail to assess their employees regularly: time. By using the Matches Measure, managers and organizations can better understand how prevalent job burnout is amongst their employees and how it fluctuates over time.”

Similar to the smiley face pain scale used in doctors’ offices and hospitals (Wong-Baker FACES), the Matches Measure describes burnout (“Job burnout refers to feeling physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted”) and instructs employees to “select the match that best represents how burned out you currently feel.”

Across multiple pre-registered studies surveying more than 1,200 participants in various industries, this research demonstrates that the visual scale is comparable to existing burnout measures, including the Maslach Burnout Inventory. The Matches Measure similarly relates to the known predictors and consequences of job burnout, yet uses a more efficient, intuitive scale.

The study concludes, “Given the advantages of a short, visual measure —reduced participant fatigue, the reduced need for translating feelings into words and increased participant understanding, there is ample evidence to motivate future scholars to rely on the Matches Measure rather than shortening existing burnout scales.”

For access to the scale, visit www.muirmatches.com.

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November 30, 2022
Researchers develop superfast new method to manufacture high-performance thermoelectric devices

Newswise — Yanliang Zhang, associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and collaborators Alexander Dowling and Tengfei Luo have developed a machine-learning assisted superfast new way to create high-performance, energy-saving thermoelectric devices.

The novel process uses intense pulsed light to sinter thermoelectric material in less than a second (conventional sintering in thermal ovens can take hours). The team sped up this method of turning nanoparticle inks into flexible devices by using machine learning to determine the optimum conditions for the ultrafast but complex sintering process.

The achievement was just published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

Flexible thermoelectric devices offer great opportunities for direct conversion of waste heat into electricity as well as solid-state refrigeration, Zhang said. They have additional benefits as power sources and cooling devices — they don’t emit greenhouse gases, and they are durable and quiet since they don’t have moving parts.

Despite their potential broad impact in energy and environmental sustainability, thermoelectric devices have not achieved large-scale application because of the lack of a method for fast and cost-effective automated manufacturing. Machine-learning-assisted ultrafast flash sintering now will make it possible to produce high-performance, eco-friendly devices much faster and at far lower cost.

“The results can be applied to powering everything from wearable personal devices, to sensors and electronics, to industry Internet of Things,” Zhang said.

“The successful integration of photonic flash processing and machine learning can be generalized to highly scalable and low-cost manufacturing of a broad range of energy and electronic materials.”

Zhang is principal investigator of the Advanced Manufacturing and Energy Lab at Notre Dame. Dowling, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Luo, the Dorini Family Professor for Energy Studies — both experts in machine learning — contributed to this research, along with doctoral student Mortaza Saeidi-Javash (now assistant professor at California State Long Beach), doctoral student Ke Wang and postdoctoral associate Minxiang Zeng (now assistant professor at Texas Tech University).

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November 8, 2022
The Future of the Supreme Court: A Conversation with Law Professor Richard W. Garnett

Newswise — On Oct. 3, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) began hearing cases for its new term, following one of its most significant sessions that featured a landmark abortion ruling, a major leak, ideological differences and security threats.

Chief Justice John Roberts expressed hope for a return to “normalcy,” and the court welcomed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

Also welcomed back, the public can now attend oral arguments in person for the first time since the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Justices remain under tighter security than in previous years, though barricades around the Supreme Court following last term’s ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade have been removed.

Richard W. Garnett is the University of Notre Dame’s Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law, director of the Law School’s Program on Church, State & Society and a concurrent professor of political science. He clerked for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist during the court’s 1996 term. Garnett is co-author of “Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment.” He teaches and writes about the freedoms of speech, association, and religion and constitutional law more generally and is a leading authority on the role of religious believers and beliefs in politics and society.

Garnett discusses the future of the Supreme Court.

How do you respond to complaints that the Supreme Court is “broken” or “illegitimate”?

This year’s Supreme Court term, like the last one, will involve a number of high-profile, controversial cases and, as usual, commentators’ and critics’ attention will focus almost exclusively on them. However, it is important for Americans to appreciate that the vast bulk of the court’s work involves technical legal questions, not ideological or partisan battles. Those who claim or complain that the court is “political” or even “illegitimate” simply because the justices do not always deliver their preferred policy outcomes misunderstand the court and its role in our constitutional system.

The court is not “broken” simply because it has recently corrected some previous errors or because a majority of the current justices were appointed by presidents of one particular party. The threat to the court today comes not from the justices’ rulings but from media coverage and political criticism that assume the court’s role is to deliver particular results.

As the first Black woman, how will Ketanji Brown Jackson influence the Supreme Court?

It is too early to tell, of course. All of the justices bring their experiences, formation and background to their role; at the same time, they are all committed to deciding legal questions, as best they can, on the merits and not on the basis of their personal beliefs or preferences. Apart from her influence on the court, though, it seems very likely that her groundbreaking appointment will inspire many citizens, lawyers and law students.

What are the most important cases you’re watching this term?

It is worth remembering that every case at the Supreme Court is important to someone. And, we do not yet know all of the cases the justices will consider during this term; they are likely to add several dozen more. That said, like most public law scholars, I am interested in the cases involving the use of race in college admissions and also those having to do with the role of state courts in reviewing states’ election laws.

In addition, the justices are considering cases involving — to mention just a few — the tension between free-speech rights and antidiscrimination law, the ability of a state to regulate in-state commercial activity when that regulation has dramatic out-of-state effects, the reach of the Clean Water Act and the legality of certain Biden administration immigration policies.

There were several high-profile religious freedom cases during the last term. What are some other religious liberty questions that you expect to come before the court this term?

Last term was one of the most significant in the court’s history, in terms of religious freedom and church-state relations. So far, there are no major religious liberty cases set for argument, although there is a chance the justices will take up a New York case involving the right of a religious institution, Yeshiva University, to decline official recognition for an LGBT student group. In addition, there could be new religious freedom challenges to official vaccine mandates for public employees, public school students, etc.

What will be the impact of the overturn of Roe, and how might that decision affect other precedents or invite new challenges to past decisions?

The overturning of Roe v. Wade means that the question of abortion regulation is now one primarily for state legislators and courts. In many large states, with very permissive abortion laws, the Dobbs decision will not have any effect. In some others, there will be efforts to convince state courts to find Roe-type abortion rights in their own state constitutions. In still others, states will enact new regulations that, under Roe, would not have been permissible, and those new regulations will, almost certainly, be challenged. And we can expect efforts on the part of the current administration to use the powers of the executive branch to increase access to abortion and to push back on states’ pro-life policies.

The Dobbs decision was a reminder that, among other things, all of the justices believe that, sometimes, a past decision of the court is so misguided, and so damaging, that it may and should be abandoned. Again, no justice and no commentator believes that past precedents may never be abandoned, and nearly everyone agrees that stability and predictability are important in the law. Roe v. Wade was contested and controversial from the very beginning and its reasoning was widely seen, including by people who support abortion rights as a policy matter, as weak. The court majority determined, applying familiar and fairly settled criteria, that the decision was so wrong that the law’s integrity required them to admit, and undo, their mistake.

How will the leak of the Dobbs opinion affect the court going forward?

The leak of the Dobbs draft was extremely regrettable and, if the leaker is a court employee, a gross breach of trust. Not only did the leak put some of the justices in very real danger, it undermined the judicial process and, indeed, the rule of law. It appears to have been an attempt to put non-legal pressures on the court and to undermine the court’s institutional standing.

What more should be done to ensure the justices and their families are protected from violence or physical intimidation?

It is unfortunate, but also unmistakably clear, that the justices require protection from people who do not respect the rule of law or the court’s role in our constitutional democracy. It is, of course, well within every citizen’s right to criticize the justices’ work, but there should be no tolerance for threats.

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October 24, 2022