Category: UW Experts in the News

In the 19th century, Congress implemented this policy called allotment. The idea was that where tribes own things in common — meaning all members and the tribe itself owns the property — they decided to break up that communal title and parcel out individual parcels of land to different families, and then sell the surplus. The process of selling the surplus land within the reservation is what led to these checkerboarded reservations that we see today, where there are significant populations of non-Indians that own fee land within the exterior reservation boundaries.

“This is a natural cycle for lakes to go up and down,” said Katie Hein, UW-Madison Trout Lake Station research scientist, “and they go up and down on a decadal time frame. So, we were in a drought in like 2012, so about 14 years ago now.”

Inflation hit a three-year high in May, leaving a growing number of Americans struggling to afford necessities. The rate has since slowed a bit, but most prices aren’t likely to come down. Analysts say “affordability” could be one of the deciding issues in this fall’s midterm elections.

But while we all notice the spike at the gas pump and the cash register, many people may not realize they can use simple, free tools to quantify the change and figure out whether their pay is keeping up.

After months of President Donald Trump threatening a US takeover of Cuba and ramping up a decadeslong economic assault of the island, The New York Times revealed Wednesday that the Central Intelligence Agency created a related task force, “setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political, and leadership changes.”

Earlier this year, the Madison suburb of DeForest abruptly rejected a $12 billion, 1,600-acre data center amid mounting public opposition.

In doing so, the village of 12,000 also turned down wide-ranging public benefits that some experts say could be a model for what communities can demand from hyperscale data center projects.

Wisconsin Watch reported in January that DeForest and other communities around the state had, for months, secretly worked on proposals for billion-dollar data centers before informing the public.

“The tax benefits are big,” said professor Ross Milton, a local government tax expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Milton said the guarantee means that even if the data center’s property valuation didn’t reach $1.2 billion, the village would still receive the amount of property tax revenue as if it did, though other local taxing bodies would not.

A constitutional court is built to do something almost no one else in a democracy can do: tell the majority it has gone too far. But a court has no army, and no budget of its own. Whether its rulings mean anything depends on other people choosing to honor them, including the officials who must carry them out, and, as Barry Friedman has argued, the public that those officials ultimately answer to. That dependence is the soft spot at the heart of judicial power, and populists everywhere have figured out how to press on it.

Ion Meyn, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reviewed videos shared on social media and Patterson’s remarks about the shooting at the request of the Cap Times. Meyn called the shooting unnecessary.

“What’s particularly egregious to me is that this person seems to have been going into compliance at the time he was shot in the head,” Meyn said.

John Gross, a clinical associate professor in UW-Madison’s Law School who researches police use of force, also reviewed the videos. He questioned whether there were opportunities for officers to de-escalate the situation before making physical contact with Ruiz.