Legal Commentary

More on § 1983 and Government Incentives

Posted on September 22, 2008
At CoOp, Tim Zick links to a news report (via the First Amendment Center) that the City of St. Paul announced that charges were being dropped against a number of journalists arrested during the RNC earlier this month. Mayor Chris Coleman announced, apparently with great self-satisfaction, that this move shows "the values we have in St...

Everyone Squeezed; Everybody Squeezes?

Posted on September 22, 2008
The Big Squeeze is a tour the force exploration of the American labor market, employment relations, and the realities of American workers. Steven Greenhouse does an extraordinary job mapping a broad range of industries, companies, and jobs. Greenhouse describes the shocking and the mundane, the ?downright Dickensian? and the out of luck programmers, ?workplace hell? and the overstretched supervisors, the huge squeezes and the little squeezes...

"The high cost of low prices"

Posted on September 22, 2008
The Big Squeeze is a remarkable collection of anecdotes and data that leaves the reader almost overwhelmed by the circumstances faced daily by so many American workers. Steven Greenhouse highlights the full range of problems workers today face -- long, undercompensated, and often uncompensated, work hours; dangerous work conditions; discrimination and other illegal mistreatment; lack of health care coverage or reasonable leave to attend to family responsibilities...

Random Updates on Punitive Damages, Eighth Amendment and Family/Criminal Law Work

Posted on September 22, 2008
Hope everyone had a good weekend following the Wall Street crisis and the Noles game. I spent most of my time the last few days revising my draft of Retributive Damages, which I've just uploaded to SSRN over here. As I've mentioned before, this paper is the first in a series of three papers proposing a new way to think about punitive damages...

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Causes of the "Big Squeeze"

Posted on September 22, 2008
"The Big Squeeze" eloquently captures the plight on particular workers caught up in the machinery of our modern economy. Along with these vignettes, Greenouse also sketches the broader trends that are driving the pressures being placed on workers. I wanted to follow up on Noah's thoughtful post by talking about some of the potential causes for the squeezes being felt by many Americans...

bargaining in the shadow of conflict

Posted on September 22, 2008
Quick update to an earlier post on the conflict between the Pittsburgh Pirates (of Major League Baseball) and their first round pick in this year's amateur draft, Pedro Alvarez. Quick recap: the parties had agreed orally sometime around midnight of August 15 -- the deadline for such an agreement to occur -- to a contract, but Alvarez and his agent refused to finalize the deal, claiming that the agreement occurred after midnight...

Public Responsibility for Stopping the Big Squeeze

Posted on September 22, 2008
It's a pleasure to be part of this discussion of Steven Greenhouse's masterful, though depressing, The Big Squeeze. The book is impressive in scope, weaving together changes in corporate structure like outsourcing and contingent work, faces of globalization ranging from immigration to offshoring, shifts in management philosophy, and the assault on labor unions...

Book Club: "The Big Squeeze"

Posted on September 22, 2008
"You work for a company for ten years and you give a hundred and fifty percent. Customers call in and say how much they like you. I used to go above and beyond. And then I get sick, something totally out of my control. And then to get fired." -- Jean Capobianco, former driver for FedEx Ground who was terminated after being diagnosed with stage-4 cancer Welcome to PrawfsBlawg's Book Club on "The Big Squeeze" by Steven Greenhouse...

Converse Video Cases

Posted on September 22, 2008
One of the questions I consider in my video project is how summary judgment courts might respond to videos that appear--on that visceral, emotional level at which video initially works and at which a summary-judgment court (because not a fact-finder) might look at it--to favor the plaintiff's version of events...

Marjorie Knoller's murder conviction reinstated

Posted on September 22, 2008
Marjorie Knoller, owner of the dog that mauled Diane Whipple to death several years ago, has been sentenced by the Superior Court to 15 years to life imprisonment for murder. Thus ends (for now, until the appeal) a painful legal saga that has generated a lot of interest in the Bay Area and beyond...

Revisiting Apodaca

Posted on September 21, 2008
SCOTUSBlog (via Volokh) has Lee v. La, which I discussed here, as a cert petition to watch. As I suggested at the start of the month, if the cert petition is granted, and you feel willing to go up against Fisher and Stanford resources, be in touch. I will likely write in favor of the constitutionality of non-unanimous verdicts at the state level if the cert petition is granted.

Anathem

Posted on September 21, 2008
It's the title of the new book by Neal Stephenson. It's brutally good. If I may speak in Nerd for a moment, it's Cryptonomicon good. It is messing with my deadlines, cutting short my sleep, and generally fooling with my head. In other words, it's available at your local bookstore now.

"Institutional Pluralism" at the AALS

Posted on September 21, 2008
I'll confess that I have rarely attended the plenary (now "presidential") programs at past AALS annual meetings. This year's sessions, though -- exploring variations on the annual meeting's "institutional pluralism" theme -- look very interesting. As I've suggested here before, and here, I think this theme is an important one...

Counterquiz (Interesting Non-Law Stuff You Can Do With a Law Degree)

Posted on September 19, 2008
Having gotten a whopping 0% on the NYU Law Professors quiz questions posted by Matt Bodie, I can?t resist the temptation to make myself feel better by posting another quiz to which I already know the answers (or at least I?m pretty sure I do). Each of the following entries describes a law degree recipient (or recipients) who decided to take a career path atypical for those with a J...

Pink Floyd at the UFO

Posted on September 19, 2008
Pink Floyd at the UFO

"Yippee! You Can't See Me, But I Can You": Pink Floyd and Public Video Surveillance

Posted on September 19, 2008
I visited London for the first time in 2003 and like, any self-respecting Pink Floyd fan, immediately set out on a pilgrimage to the site of the long-vanished UFO Club, where the band first achieved cult status. It was quite hard to find, in part, because unlike concert venues such as TT the Bear?s in Cambridge, The Metro in Chicago, or CBGB?s (may it rest in peace) in New York, the UFO Club was not a particular place but rather a periodic experience that took place every Friday night in what was, during the rest of the week, an Irish...

NPR Podcast about Conditions in San Quentin

Posted on September 19, 2008
Believe it or not, the picture to the left depicts what used to be the San Quentin gym. The prison has become so overcrowded that they have had to place hundreds of beds, side by side, in the gym. Beyond the physical difficulties, think of the daunting task of making sure that people from feuding gangs aren't bunking next to each other...

How incorporating Heller against the states undermines the Second Amendment

Posted on September 19, 2008
Chicago's gun regulations are now under assault in the wake of Heller. The open legal question is whether the Second Amendment should be incorporated against the states under either the Fourteenth Amendment?s privileges and immunities clause or due process clause...

Want Your School to Rise in the Rankings? A Best Practices Survey For Law Schools

Posted on September 19, 2008
You might not want your school to rise, I don't know. But if you do, you might encourage your dean or associate dean to fill out this survey on your school's use of best practices in legal education, which along with information on bar passage rates relative to entering credentials, and student satisfaction, will be used to compile a list of law schools that provide exceptional "value added" for students...

Thursday Afternoon Fun: The NYU Prof Quiz

Posted on September 18, 2008
In the latest edition of "The Law School," NYU's magazine about itself, there is a "Professorial Pop Quiz." Thie quiz is based on fun facts about NYU faculty who joined the school between 2002 and 2008. You can find the Quiz on page 46 of the magazine, or on page 7 of this ...

Reminder: "Big Squeeze" Book Club next Monday

Posted on September 18, 2008
Just a reminder: please join us Monday for our book club on "The Big Squeeze". Steven Greenhouse, Melissa Hart, Orly Lobel, Noah Zatz and I will all be participating. It should be particularly interesting to discuss the book in light of this week's events in the financial sector...

Post-mortem of the RNC

Posted on September 17, 2008
Tommy Crocker at CoOp discusses a New York Times report that St. Paul officials are beginning a post-mortem analysis of police conduct during the Republican National Committee earlier this month. Two former prosecutors will lead an investigation into the overall handling of convention protesters...

Control a computer with only your

Posted on September 17, 2008
Control a computer with only your brain

Mind Games and Privacy Risks

Posted on September 17, 2008
In case you missed it in the Neuroethics & Law blog earlier this year : A company called Emotiv is getting ready to roll out a video game that you control with your mind. As a recent CNN article describes it: ?The Emotive EPOC headset ? the first Brain Computer Interface (BCI) device for the gaming market ...

The Shining Bibliographical Resource on the Hill

Posted on September 17, 2008
Adam Liptak has a reasonably interesting story up on the Times web site on what he describes as the waning global influence of American judicial law: Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices...

the order of things

Posted on September 17, 2008
Does the order in which we teach subjects matter? Some thoughts after the jump regarding the Administrative Law course. Provisional short answer: yes. Provisional longer answer: well, maybe, but look out for the downside!

Hey You! Yes, You. You own AIG!

Posted on September 17, 2008
Congratulations! You are now a proud owner of AIG stock. You might want to start learning more about your investment. Here's AIG's website. Here's the Yahoo financial page; hey, it looks like the stock is starting to go back up! You also might want to learn a little something about credit default swaps; here's a brief primer (including economic models!)...

Too Big to Be Illegal?

Posted on September 17, 2008
David Zaring, the legal blogosphere's expert on the Fed, has been all over the developments in the financial markets of the last few days. His latest post on the AIG bailout/takeover/bridge loan is a must read. In questioning the legality of the discount-window-loan-for-equity deal, he writes: There's really no statutory authority for the AIG takeover (the Fed and Paulson went to the Hill, and got nothing, not that they possibly could have in a couple of Tuesday evening hours)...

Obama versus McCain = Adams versus Jackson?

Posted on September 17, 2008
With a sort of eerie precision, this year?s Presidential election looks like a replay of the Jackson-Adams race of 1828. Obama is playing the role of the arch-Brahmin and Puritan John Quincy Adams; McCain, the role of Jackson, the populist military hero and voice of outrage against corruption in the capital...

Is Joe Biden An Idiot?

Posted on September 16, 2008
Ann Bartow thinks so, in a post titled "Cripes is Joe Biden an Idiot." But notwithstanding my earlier skeptical remarks on Biden, methinks Ann is wrong -- at least based on the new evidence adduced. Linking to a youtube video, Ann writes that in the video, Biden is importuning Missouri State Senator Chuck Graham to stand up and be recognized...

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