Congress is considering several amendments to the False Claims Act which would broaden whistleblower protection and qui tam provisions.  Supporters argue that these amendments will lead to better government and a closer monitoring of federal expenditures.  Others maintain that the amendments, which make federal employees relators under qui tam, are inadvisable at best and potentially detrimental to business and other concerns.

The U.S. House of Representatives has grown in membership in its more than two centuries of history,
from the sixty-five seats allocated in the original Constitution (Art. I, sec. 2, cl. 3) to a more than fi vefold increase (356 seats) a century later, following the 1890 census, to its present size of 435 seats—unchanged since the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states were admitted in 1912. In all its history, there have been only two mechanisms by which the membership of the House has been augmented: by the admission of new states, whose people thereby take on the character of a political unit amenable to representation in the House; or by the addition of new seats to be distributed proportionally among the existing states of the Union to reflect population growth. Both of these steps are of course accomplished by act of Congress....

Although Congress failed to pass climate change legislation in 2007, the year was nevertheless highly signifi cant for climate change litigation. Many courts are increasingly willing to interpret existing statutes (particularly the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act) to require federal agencies to address some aspect of global warming. At the same time, they generally have proven far more reluctant to frame judicial climate change relief under federal or state common law nuisance theories. Such claims have largely been dismissed on standing or justiciability grounds....

This is the first issue following our twenty-fifth anniversary. Audio and video from the 25th National Lawyers Convention is online. In addition, we are pleased to announce that the transcripts of nearly all of the panel debates will be published in various law reviews this coming year, including The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Texas Review of Law and Policy, The William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, The New York Journal of Law and Liberty, Ave Maria Law Review, Hofstra Law Review, Regent University Law Review, The Southern New England Roundtable Symposium Law Journal, The SMU Technology Law Review, The University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review, and The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. Publication details appear on the individual webpage for each panel in our new Multimedia Archive. Consequently, we will not be publishing the transcripts as an issue of Engage this year; our next issue will be in June.