Law Students

Draft Lessig for Congress!

Posted on February 16, 2008
The congressional representative for the district incorporating large chunks of Silicon Valley died recently. There's a special election on April 8. There's a movement afoot to draft Larry Lessig to run for the seat. The facebook group (of course there is a facebook group) got 1000 members within 24 hours...

Be It Resolved

Posted on February 14, 2008
...that mix tapes are best when they combine the familiar with the surprising and "challenging," and that "message" songs need not be serious. For instance, "That's Really Super, Supergirl" is a great song for any mix tape. I don't really know what it means...

How Much (Deconstructionist) Theory Belongs in Law and Society? In An Empirical Study?

Posted on February 14, 2008
I've recently had occasion to re-read Laura E. Gomez's article "A Tale of Two Genres," which is in The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (ed. Austin Sarat). In this article, she argues that Law and Society scholars, while focusing on discrimination and oppression, have failed to utilize fully the theories of Critical Race Theory, which might enhance and flesh out "undertheorized" studies of institutional and structural discrimination...

Against Love, Or At Least The Idea Of It

Posted on February 14, 2008
(Happy Valentine's Day.)Most people who have met me for even a minute or who have corresponded with me beyond two instances will wonder at this post. I am, as they would say, an unabashed, uncloseted (or rather poorly closeted) romantic. I am like a Tina Turner song in her post Ike years, knowing what it means to love hard and deep...

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Law and Love

Posted on February 14, 2008
Last year saw the celebration of the Supreme Court's land,ark decision Loving v. Virginia. In Loving, Virginia statutes prohibiting inter-racial marriage were struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment...

A Well Respected Man

Posted on February 13, 2008
Thank you to Bryan D. Brown , a friend and CSS wizard, for fixing my template!

The Danger of Deconstructionism

Posted on February 13, 2008
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Prof. Peter Brooks (comparative literature, Yale) has an essay called "The Ethics of Reading":I've long been invested in the notion that teaching to read literature carefully, seriously, reflectively can be an ethical act...

C. Wright Mills on Blogging

Posted on February 12, 2008
Well no, not really, but the awesome Kieran Healy adapts Mills' Essay "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" over at OrgTheory. Idea that sparked the post by Shamus at Scatterplot.Kieran:Of course you can waste your time blogging. And you can do stupid stuff like badmouth your colleagues or peers...

How Do I Center the Blog?

Posted on February 12, 2008
No, I do not mean "on the political spectrum". I'm pretty squarely left of center, and there I shall remain.Anyway, you HTML wizards, why is my blog always shoved to the left side of the screen in any browser? How can I fix this?I will let you tinker with the template if you tell me how to fix it...

Weird Statue of the Day

Posted on February 12, 2008
Not weird statute. That's a never-ending meme.But what is this statue depicting? This is football?! What is the kneeling dude doing with the rag cloth?Despite growing up with three brothers, I just don't get sports. I get art, but I can't get this...

What I Really Look Like

Posted on February 12, 2008
...when I'm doing my statistics reading.With all due apologies to my new friends at Scatterplot. Usually I'm very much enthralled and engaged by my homework! I love STATA! Really!Granted, this may be due to my "urgent care chronic ache narcolepsy" talking, but perhaps the special care doctor will tell me if this 1) allergies (which I suspect), 2) chronic fatigue syndrome (which would suck), or 3) boredom and ennui (which are epidemic to my generation)...

Paging Dr. Love, Dr. I.M.N. Love

Posted on February 12, 2008
Click to enlarge. You can find every C&H here.Sometime in 2001, I resolved to never again be het up about celebrating Valentines' day, whether I was single or attached. Occasionally I will slip and care a little, even though I know rationally that blah blah it is a made up holiday blah blah...

Reasons For NOT Blogging and For Not Blogging on That Thing I Told You I'd Blog About

Posted on February 11, 2008
1. Occasionally, I indulge in a personal life with "real life" people.2. I am actually working. This may surprise you.3. I periodically suffer from weird aches that span my head, neck, shoulders, arms, down my back and to my fingertips, and it's accompanied by what I can only call "narcolepsy...

McCain-Lieberman?

Posted on February 10, 2008
Juan Cole (Wednsday, February 06, 2008, scroll down) recently discussed the possibility of a McCain-Huckabee ticket speculating that such a pairing could sink the GOP ticket in November. Professor Cole observed that, in the end, voters ultimately mobilize for the top of the ticket, and having Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee won't necessarily mobilize evangelicals who, apparently, are beginning to drift away from the GOP...

Schneider On Inventories

Posted on February 09, 2008
Whoa . . . hold on there . . . no need to panic . . . I?m not going to be blogging about tax law. I just want to thank Belle for having me, and let you know what an honor is to be a guest blogger here. One of my colleagues and I have an ongoing discussion about people we would like to meet, any level of fame, who are not necessarily obvious to most (i...

Superdelegates Part II: WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!

Posted on February 08, 2008
Nobody seems to have caught my last post about superdelegates. And nobody has said anything about Belle's post about the general disaster that is our electoral system. But the fact is, things are messed up. In my last post, I said that things were looking like the superdelegates are going to decide...

Awesome New Blog: The Faculty Lounge

Posted on February 07, 2008
Go to The Faculty Lounge!Sounds like a great blog! You should read this, if you care about law, culture, and academia.I am very happy to see Dan Filler back in the blogosphere! I am a big fan of his and have missed his blogging when he left Concurring Opinions...

Blasphemous Thought of the Day

Posted on February 07, 2008
Pablo Neruda is just too....much.I can't read more than five poems in a row without going "Gah, ack, too much! Too much romance! Stop! I am not your ocean! You are not the waves to my shore!" This is the problem with trying to read an entire collection of Neruda's poetry...

Links!

Posted on February 07, 2008
Empirical studies can be (and often are, should be, etc.) normative, you know.Rawls' "liberalism"?The importance of disambiguating Google searches about yourself to others, particularly prospective employers.The "New" Legal Realism, as if Cass Sunstein needed another SSRN download...

Stuff I Like: Nerd Edition

Posted on February 07, 2008
This blog doesn't have enough endorsements, mainly because I don't want to do ads, or have Amazon.com tie-ins, etc. Not a moral superiority thing. In general, I avoid commercial stuff, but I am not above selling out and I don't judge others for doing so...

xkcd of the day

Posted on February 06, 2008
This is from Exploding Dog, but pretty much sums up my life:I find this one sweet and lovely. Although I'm always at my desk, too. If only I were sailing. You can sail to just as well as you can sail from, but each being stuck to a respective desk, there's little hope for coming together...

Foundational, Pathbreaking, Seminal, Cutting Edge, etc. Articles

Posted on February 06, 2008
Every sociologist will read Marx, Weber, and Durkheim a few times before graduating from college, and then a few more times before graduating from graduate school, and ad nauseum when s/he starts teaching Soc 1.Everyone doing constitutional structure whether in political science or law will read/assign Federalist 51 and 10 dozens of time over...

A Particular Kind of Heaven: Solitary Living

Posted on February 06, 2008
(This is my favorite Ed Ruscha)I'm pretty much all unpacked, except for one large box of books, because I am stupid and don't do math beforehand and calculate how many inches of shelf I need for my books. So I can't organize by broad categories (law, social science, fiction, poetry, art) or alphabetize by last name author until this is settled, and that is a little unsettling...

History Lesson of the Day: Why Our Electoral System Sucks and How it Got to This Level of Suckage

Posted on February 06, 2008
Eric Rauchway explains the history and development of our electoral system over at The Edge of the American West, another excellent academic (history) blog you should read:So the function of the American party system is to thwart the genteel, deliberative process envisioned in the Constitution, by turning the party conventions and the electoral college into the deciders...

Superdelegates

Posted on February 05, 2008
A discussion question.Is there any normative justification for the existence of superdelegates? This page explains what they are -- I think accurately, though I don't know for sure. Basically, a bunch of high-ranking party hacks control fully a fifth of the democratic delegates, and the republicans have a similar (though smaller) number...

Introducing: Zorba The Geek(y Lawyer)

Posted on February 04, 2008
This is all that I am at liberty to say about our enigmatic new guest blogger, Zorba The Geek. I will put it in bullet style, because he is all bad ass like that. He is so bad ass, that his alternate pseudonym was Tracer Bullet. Or maybe Chuck Norris...

Dude.

Posted on February 04, 2008
No one posted over the weekend, despite my guilt trip? WTF?!Some days, they just ran out of carne asada at your burrito place and you have to eat chipotle chicken, which is fine, but not carne asada and you really wanted carne asada after two days of eating spaghetti with butter and cheese because that's all you had on hand after moving and unpacking completely in 2 days...

Venkatesh's Gang Leader For a Day and IRBs

Posted on February 01, 2008
Yet another IRB post to kick up some kerfuffle between Daniel Goldberg, Bruce Boyden, and maybe 1L+:This is the book by Sudhir Venkatesh, who basically embedded himself in gangs to do his ethnography for his dissertation.This is the exchange with Venkatesh on Slate...

I AM MOVING TODAY

Posted on February 01, 2008
No more coldness,no more moldThe Creepy Landlord done got told! Between the general creepiness, the entries without notice or permission, messing around with something in my roommate's room, having to buy a SpyFinder camera detector just for peace of mind, the extreme coldness of the house, the sink that always leaks, the showers that run brutally cold for 10 minutes in the middle, and the damp mold that always bothers my allergies, I am glad, glad I tell you, to move to a fancy apartment building that I can afford because it's far from school and in technically the gritty city next door...

Blog Break For Belle

Posted on January 31, 2008
I really, really want to post on this really interesting discussion I have been having off-blog about Bourgie on Bourgie Hatred that is coincidentally also currently being played out on literary studies blogs. But while it is no trouble to copy and paste the email portion of the discussion, it's trouble editing and formatting...

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