Legal Commentary

Is uncoercive workplace democracy impossible?

Posted on January 11, 2009
The ongoing propaganda battle over the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is largely two sides? trading anecdotes. The apparent futility of the debate suggests a larger and depressing possibility ? that uncoercive workplace democracy is simply impossible...

The Difficulties of Law and Finance: An Update from Roberta Romano

Posted on January 11, 2009
In a 2005 article entitled After the Revolution in Corporate Law, Roberta Romano said that an economics Ph.D. was not the "best match" for business law scholarship. Romano argued that finance, not economics, was the future for corporate law scholarship, and that empirical work was more important than modeling...

How Much Poetry Should a Law Professor Write?

Posted on January 09, 2009
I wanted to follow up on some of the later comments in Paul's excellent recent post about what prawfs ought to be doing prior to getting tenure. David Zaring "mildly disagrees" with what he takes to be Paul's suggestion to "write your bliss" and says that a prawf who is inclined to write about his/her favorite poet's views about liberty might have more fun actually writing poetry...

Dickens in Alabama

Posted on January 09, 2009
Unbelievable story this morning in this NY Times piece; a tale best relegated to Dickens novels.DECATUR, Ala. ? The prisoners in the Morgan County jail here were always hungry. The sheriff, meanwhile, was getting a little richer. Alabama law allowed it: the chief lawman could go light on prisoners? meals and pocket the leftover change...

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Edward P. Mahoney, R.I.P.

Posted on January 09, 2009
My undergraduate degree was in Philosophy. This was in no small part because of the encouragement and example provided by a wonderful teacher, friend, and priest, Prof. Ed Mahoney, who died yesterday. (See Brian Leiter's notice here, and the nice memorial at the Duke Philosophy Department's webpage here...

Reminder: Happy Hour at AALS San Diego Marriott tonight at 9pm in Lobby Lounge

Posted on January 08, 2009
Greetings from San Diego. So much to share, so little time. Here are two. I had breakfast yesterday near Super Dave Osborne. Wow. And tonight is the happy hour at the San Diego Marriott Hotel/Marina in the Lobby Lounge. We're co-hosting it with our friends at Co-Op and ELS Blog, and we're especially grateful to the folks at Indiana University Maurer School of Law--Bloomington for buying the first 200 drinks...

Israel?s Silent Weapon

Posted on January 08, 2009
Famously, Israel has the best military on the planet, but the IDF?s campaign in Gaza seems destined once again to prove the limits of hard power, especially in shaping failed states like Palestine and Lebanon. Less famously, the ?Jewish? state also has one of the strongest legal cultures on the planet...

The Great OLC Document Dump of 2009

Posted on January 08, 2009
Courtesy of a colleague in the know, I came across this website, where DOJ has today posted a whole bunch of heretofore classified or otherwise undisclosed OLC opinions about lots of interesting war-on-terror and war-in-Iraq stuff, including the original November 2001 memo defending the constitutionality of military commissions, the controversial Goldsmith memo on the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention in Iraq, and a host of other goodies...

The Wave: The Fear of Urban Gun Homicides Haunts the Rebirth of America's Cities

Posted on January 06, 2009
Most of us are ready to leave Nixonland behind, and the current fiscal crisis of states like California may help provide the needed pressure to help walk politicians down from ever tougher criminal laws (as Hadar reports), but the road from fear to hope is shadowed by a ghost from the '60s that won't go away, the wave of violent crime in America's cities...

On Class Exercises

Posted on January 06, 2009
One of my upcoming classes this semester is Legal Profession -- also called Legal Ethics most places. This will be the fourth time I've taught the class, and like many others, I've found it a difficult course to teach. Many students feel like a captive audience, and many legal ethics teachers feel like captive performers; it's code-based, with all the attendant difficulties of mixing code and cases; and so on...

Smith on Tenure Advice

Posted on January 06, 2009
One of the interesting things about watching junior profs (or prawfs, I suppose) grow up on the blogosphere is that our subject matters are slowly changing. After years of repetitive and semi-narcissistic posts about what it's like to start teaching, how to be a junior scholar, etc...

Fun with process: Who is Terrance Gainer?

Posted on January 06, 2009
Want to sound smart and well-informed about legal and political process at your next cocktail party? Then the name to know in the coming weeks is Terrance W. Gainer. Who is he? And why do we care? He is the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the United States Senate, the law-enforcement and administrative manager for the body...

Police Brutality in Oakland? Lethal Force? Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe?

Posted on January 06, 2009
In the last CELS conference, Dan Kahan, working on the Cultural Cognition Project, presented a beautiful piece of research in which he and his coauthors showed a car chase video to a broad sample, to see whether they thought the police usage of lethal force was justified...

The DOJ's Investigation of Governor Richardson: Is there a legitimate federal basis for criminalizing patronage politics?

Posted on January 05, 2009
The U.S. Department of Justice is engaging in a nation-wide attack on "pay-to-play" contracting practices under which businesses win government contracts in part because they make donations to politicians' campaign funds. Governor Richardson is the latest victim of this play-for-power from DOJ: He has withdrawn from consideration as Secretary of Treasury because of allegations that CDR Financial won contracts with the State of New Mexico in return for donations to Richardson's PACs...

Are the Boy Scouts beyond the pale?

Posted on January 05, 2009
The Ninth Circuit is working on an intriguing idea of injury sufficient to confer standing in a Barnes-Wallace v. City of San Diego, a case in which a lesbian and agnostic couple is challenging the lease of a portion of city land to the Boy Scouts who run a facility called Camp Balboa...

Amazon.com: Great, but really really weird

Posted on January 05, 2009
First of all, I'd like to thank Dan and the rest of the Prawfers for inviting me to stay around for another few months. I've really enjoyed posting here and look forward to posting throughout the rest of the winter and spring. Perhaps I may even get around to posting something substantive, rather than twisted and deviant...

The future of legislative appointments (Updated)

Posted on January 04, 2009
The pathology that is Rod Blagojevich to one side, we are going through a rare period in which federal legislative appointments (i.e., gubernatorial appointments to fill vacant seats in Congress) are in the public eye. Four seats (NY, Illinois, Delaware, and Colorado) have become vacant simultaneously, something that I would guess never has happened since passage of the Seventeenth Amendment (does anyone know for sure?)...

The Emperor Has No Budget

Posted on January 04, 2009
This post accompanied by a soundtrack: I've really enjoyed Jonathan's post on exiting Nixonland, which offers a path for healing the disease he has written so eloquently about in Governing Through Crime and on his blog. But much as I would like to believe it, I think a new discourse has permeated our correctional language: the discourse of limited resources...

Law School Hiring Thread, Part II: Callbacks/Offers Phase

Posted on January 03, 2009
Here's some of the info agglomerated so far from here. Please use the comments to this thread as a place to share info about callbacks and offers for the law teaching market. And feel free to note any errors and omissions. Please note that I have been updating the information based on compilations previously created by Marc DeGirolami...

More on appointments madness: A Response

Posted on January 02, 2009
Rick posted on the constitutional mess that is the effort to fill the Senate seat recently vacated by Barack Obama. Norman Williams gave some detailed comments and asked for counter-thoughts; I decided to write mine in a separate post. After the jump, I quote his comment in full in italics, then give my response: There is another constitutional angle not too far down the road: whether the Lt...

Kosher food at AALS

Posted on January 02, 2009
One of our readers has asked me to post an inquiry into whether there are any attendees at next week's AALS conference in San Diego who would like to have kosher food available over the duration of the conference. If so, please leave a comment on this thread or get in touch with Hillel Levin (UGA), and there will be some efforts to coordinate through one of the kosher caterers or restaurants there...

Exiting Nixonland

Posted on January 02, 2009
Forty years ago this January, America awaited the inauguration of another President who marked a sharp break with the previous 8 years, and who promised a whole new logic of governing. That president was Richard Nixon, and with his election, albeit a narrow one, America began four decades of a war on crime that has come to transform our social and political landscape...

Blago, Burris, Powell v. McCormack, and the Senate's power to judge "returns"

Posted on January 01, 2009
Calvin Massey has concluded that the holding of Powell v. McCormack requires the U.S. Senate to seat Roland Burris. I believe that Massey is mistaken: In my view, the Senate may refuse to seat Burris pursuant to its power to judge "the elections" or "returns" of its members...

To thine own self be true?

Posted on January 01, 2009
If you injure someone in self-defense, do you then have a duty to aid him? A student asked me this, which got me thinking ... if I were to get the jump on Jason Voorhees before he was able to cleave me in half with his ax, leaving him mortally wounded (but not irretrievably so), would I need to call the doctor, quick, quick, quick? Instinct says, no, let the psychopath bleed out...

So long, and best music of 2008?

Posted on December 31, 2008
Thanks to Dan and the gang for inviting me to guest in December. It's been fun as always. Before I go, I will, as I have in the past, solicit suggestions for cool music done in the past year. I'm too old to even pretend to be hip anymore, so I rely on the advice of others...

Is New Year's the greatest holiday?

Posted on December 31, 2008
I?ve never thought much about New Year?s as a holiday, and when I have, it?s mostly struck me as a second-tier holiday, closer to Labor Day than to Thanksgiving. (Nothing against Labor Day, but for most people, myself included, it?s pretty much just a day off in late summer, not a day with much special relevance of its own...

Sobering Vacation Reads 1: Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness

Posted on December 31, 2008
Greetings, Everyone; it's good to be back for yet another blogging stint.I write this as I recover from my so-called vacation, which included being stranded in American and Canadian snowstorms for the better part of a week, missing connections, napping at airports and at motels reminiscent of a Coen Brothers movie, and sitting, in hostage-like setting, inside airplanes for hours with nothing to eat or drink as they de-ice...

Other Carols

Posted on December 31, 2008
Michael's taxonomy of carols left out one important category: Chanukah Carols. Herewith, the Top 5 (as seen on a greeting card): 5) "Silent Night, Shmilent Night (You don't call, you don't write)" 4) Shlepping through a Winter Wonderland" 3) Oh Little Sale at Bloomingdale's" 2) "I'll Be Home for Chanukah (So Save Me Some Latkes)" 1) "What (Ungrateful) Child is This?"

Resolutions, Libations, and Rotations

Posted on December 31, 2008
It's the end of the year, and the onset of the new one. PrawfsBlawg had a good year: our visitor traffic is about 30-40% higher than it used to be in 2007. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.And things are only getting better. I'm very pleased to say that Jay Wexler has agreed to stay on at Prawfs through June, enlightening us with his twisted and deviant notions...

Late to the Party, Again

Posted on December 31, 2008
So, regarding my recent post on fantasy law professor leagues, I was googling around yesterday to see if the idea had been taken up over at Gawker or the Times or whatever when I realized that Joseph Liu already came up with this joke/idea over at Concurring Opinions more than 3 years ago! I guess I need to start doing "preemption checks" for blog posts now...

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