Legal Commentary

U.S. News and "assessments"

Posted on April 20, 2009
I know we're not supposed to take notice of the U.S. News rankings (ed.: so don't!), but . . . I continue to be struck by the facts that (a) very few of the "top 50" schools (only UCLA and USC, it appears) have "peer assessment" scores that are *higher* than their lawyers / judges score, (b) the schools with the largest gap between peer assessments and lawyer-judge assessments seem to be ones that are often said, with varying degrees of accuracy, to be "conservative" (e...

Deaths and death.

Posted on April 20, 2009
Today is officially the publication date of my new book with Ethan and Jennifer but the publisher's selection of this date is not especially auspicious so I'll share some exciting news about that later in the week. It's not just Hitler's birthday; weirdly enough, it's also Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day...

Congrats to Paul!!!

Posted on April 20, 2009
Paul blogged, a bit cryptically, about tenure the other day. I figure, though, if one is facebooking about celebrating tenure with a new iPhone, then one is not worried about keeping the news close. So . . . congratulations to Paul! This is wonderful (if entirely expected) news...

Stimulus Blogging III: Conditional Grants & the Tenth Amendment

Posted on April 19, 2009
Legal controversy over ARRA, the stimulus legislation, continues. This week, a student in South Carolina filed an original petition in the South Carolina Supreme Court, seeking a declaration that the legislature could act to apply for more than $700 million in funds for S...

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Reaction to Thomas among some FIU faculty

Posted on April 18, 2009
Not surprised this is happening: The director of women's studies at FIU is organizing protests against the hiring of Isiah Thomas as men's basketball coach, relating to Thomas having been found liable (along with the Knicks and the team owner) for the sexual harassment of a Knicks employee...

On Research Agendas

Posted on April 17, 2009
Sparked by a form he must fill out for research purposes, Eric asks sound questions about a common subject: research agendas. As one of his commenters suggests, Eric may be reading too much significance into the question; it may just be a symptom of creeping form-itis...

The Take-Home Final Exam

Posted on April 17, 2009
It's that time of year, so I'm working on my final exams. In my 1L structural constitutional law course I'm giving a take-home exam, as I have done for the last two semesters in this course. My sense with this subject had been that I was reading too much of a rushed exam when I tried to test in three hours what I thought the students should take out of the semester, which made me less confident that the better-prepared students could distinguish themselves consistently...

Why Have a Thematically Consistent Research Agenda?

Posted on April 17, 2009
To apply for summer research-stipend funding, I am to write a memo to my dean describing my proposed project. That makes sense. I get that. But there is a detail that is not quite so self-evident. The stipend-application instructions specify that I am to explain the "[r]elationship between this project and [my] overall scholarly agenda...

On Tenure

Posted on April 17, 2009
A propos of either something or nothing in particular -- I'm not saying -- I want to share a quote from Elyn Saks' fine book, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, which I've been waiting to use for some time: "With tenure, . . . the central issue in one's life moves from survival to desire...

Three Strikes, but Safe

Posted on April 17, 2009
Just before Easter, French lawmakers declined to approve an Internet piracy legislation that would have been arguably the most far-reaching law of its kind. Championed by leaders of the film and music industries (similar steps are being explored in the U...

Finally! Fan challenges speech restrictions at publicly owned ballpark

Posted on April 16, 2009
A lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York yesterday by a baseball fan named Bradford Campeau-Laurion, who alleges that he was kicked out of Yankee Stadium last summer by two uniformed NYPD officers for trying to go the men's room during the Seventh Inning Stretch and the playing of God Bless America...

Second Annual Junior Faculty Federal Courts

Posted on April 16, 2009
THE SECOND ANNUAL JUNIOR FACULTY FEDERAL COURTS WORKSHOP October 22-23, 2009 Michigan State University College of Law East Lansing, Michigan The Michigan State University College of Law is pleased to announce that the Second Annual Junior Faculty Federal Courts Workshop will take place on its campus October 22?23, 2009...

The Path Ahead: Evidence Based Empirical Work

Posted on April 16, 2009
In my posts so far, I have tried to point out some serious issues I have with how empiricists go about drawing statistical conclusions. My key concern is that while our hypothesis-testing procedures are built around the idea of deductive falsification, what we are actually doing is more inductive confirmation...

That Uneasy Feeling

Posted on April 16, 2009
Many people have already pointed readers' attention to the symposium at Concurring Opinions on Danielle Citron's article on "cyber civil rights." There is certainly much to recommend it, and I encourage readers to seek it out and get caught up on the discussion there...

Not Testing Material From the Last Week of Class or: Do We Need to Make the Reading Period Longer?

Posted on April 16, 2009
I still remember the meltdown of Paper Chase proportions that resulted in another section of my 1L class after they took their Civil Procedure final exam. You see, that Civ Pro final was their first last school exam, and the last topic they covered in a frantic final class was the class action...

Socio-Economic Rights II

Posted on April 16, 2009
One of the leading problems facing South Africa is the AIDS epidemic. The number of people who have died and who are infected is staggering. At one point, the U.S. government even chacterized the instability that could be brought about by the epidemic as a national security threat here...

Isiah Thomas, FIU Basketball Coach?

Posted on April 15, 2009
Beginning when I was around 16, I wanted to be a college basketball coach. I was a student manager in college, worked as a coach at summer basketball camps throughout college, and my first job after college was as assistant coach at a D-III school in Chicago...

Money for nothing, get your coach for free

Posted on April 15, 2009
So, Isiah Thomas is going to coach for free in his first year at FIU--upon finding out about the substantial budget cuts and firings, Thomas agreed to donate his first-year salary (the amount of which was not reported in any story I have seen) back to the university...

Avoiding a Biased Exam: Always Expect Students to Know the Law But Never Expect Them to Know the Facts

Posted on April 14, 2009
I remember being a law student and taking the class Women and the Law with the terrific Susan Grover when a topic came up that would (thankfully) inform the way that I draft my law school exams when I became a professor. The topic: Biased exams. One student brought up a Torts exam she had taken her first year that left her perplexed...

More Problems With Hypothesis Testing (From a More Technical Perspective)

Posted on April 14, 2009
I had mentioned on Friday that I wanted to follow up this post with a wonkier one. The arrival of the whirlwind that is my 2-1/2 year old neice pushed that back to today. In my earlier post, I argued that what we do in the social sciences is not deductively test hypotheses but inductively measure actual effect sizes; we simply mask the inductive endeavor with the appearance of falsification...

Dworkin on Sunstein

Posted on April 14, 2009
Ronald Dworkin has an interesting review of Cass Sunstein's most recent book in the April 30, 2009 edition of the New York Review of Books. The Sunstein book is called "A Constitution of Many Minds." Prof. Dworkin's review contains a typical criticism of Prof...

Fav Quote

Posted on April 14, 2009
I was prepping professional responsibility for this week and returned to this gem of a quote that to me so accurately captures much of the practice of law: "About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists of telling would-be clients that they are damn fools and should stop...

The Beautiful Game . . .

Posted on April 14, 2009
. . . at its most captivating time, here?

Socio-Economic Rights

Posted on April 14, 2009
The United States has recently seen high numbers of home foreclosures because more people are in dire economic straits. Typically people in the U.S. place the burden on our political officials to assist with such problems, or we hope for charitable efforts...

MLR's Annual Book Review Issue

Posted on April 13, 2009
The Faculty Lounge has an interesting post up about the Michigan Law Review's annual book review issue, which this year is considerably smaller than recent years' issues have been. One thing the post doesn't note that I think is worth pointing out is that this year's issue is almost entirely (there are a couple of exceptions) devoted to public law-oriented books...

Obama's Controversial Choice

Posted on April 13, 2009
Americans should be deeply concerned today by the Obama Administration's new nominee for White House Special Assistant for Tail-Wagging and Bone-Fetching. Characteristically, this choice was arrived at through an untransparent process, involving little public consultation...

"Hard" Word Limit, "Soft" Word Limit, or No Word Limit: What Type of Tester Are You?

Posted on April 13, 2009
Back in 2006, Steve Vladeck did a post about what type of "punishment" there should be for a student exceeding the word limit on an exam. He noted that his "[t]enative course of action [w]as to grade the answer it its entirety, and then reduce it in proportion to the percentage of excess words...

Stimulus Blogging II: Can Legislatures "End Run" Governors?

Posted on April 12, 2009
Some recent news reports have mentioned that governors who earlier said they would reject stimulus money now have "backed off" and certified that they will take federal money. But, as I described in my first post, "certification" is only one of two steps states must take to receive much of their stimulus money...

Forgetting Erie

Posted on April 11, 2009
When I was in law school in the early/mid-1990s, there were two civ pro professors teaching sections of a one-semester, four-hour course. And it was legend that one of them always taught Erie and the other did not. In fact, the failure of the latter to do so was a frequent topic for the annual student revue...

Will work for . . . (part two)

Posted on April 11, 2009
In an earlier post I noted that a number of recent conversations with upperclassmen have left me wondering?and to an extent worrying?about state of the job market for those students as well as for recent graduates. In addition to the LRAP issue mentioned in that post, the effect of downsizing measures being employed by Biglaw and other legal employers is another concern for these students...

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