Legal Commentary

Faculty Workshops on Teaching

Posted on September 16, 2008
Like most other schools, Arizona State has a number of faculty workshops each semester. Our workshops follow the traditional pattern: a speaker will speak for 20 or so minutes, followed by 30 to 45 minutes of questions from the assembled faculty. The speakers are usually faculty members (either from our own faculty or invited from other law schools) who talk about a current article or book project...

Summary Judgment Gets a (Bad?) Rap

Posted on September 16, 2008
Here's an unusual tool for teaching summary judgment to civil procedure students. In a case against Eminem for defamation, Michigan state court judge Deborah Servitto composed a rap about the state-law summary judgment rule. (HT: Christopher Bignell, who has put our class blog to good use, and smoking gun website post)...

Philosophers and Family Values: ?Repro-normativity? as a contested norm in academia

Posted on September 16, 2008
This summer, I had the pleasure of writing a response to Punishing Family Status by Jennifer Collins, Ethan Leib, and Dan Markel (appearing soon in BU Law review with a reply). In the course of our e-mailing back and forth, ?Coleibkel? introduced me to the exquisitely bizarre neologism, ?repronormativity,? which apparently denotes the belief that the raising of children is normatively desirable...

Faculty travel in budget-strapped states: how's your school faring?

Posted on September 16, 2008
In today's Chronicle of Higher Ed, there's a story describing rough conditions imposed on travel on faculty at UGA: Some faculty members at the University of Georgia at Athens are trying to understand why out-of-state and international travel must now be approved by the provost, even if professors plan to pay for conferences and meetings with their own money...

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Louisiana SCT Judges: not so biased after all...?

Posted on September 16, 2008
Maybe four or five you will remember this, but back in January, I blogged briefly about Adam Liptak's NYT column about a study of potential bias among judges in the Louisiana Supreme Court. That study apparently has flies on it. Here's the press release I received yesterday and the relevant excerpts are after the jump...

Time For Rangel to Step Down

Posted on September 15, 2008
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) presently chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes much of the country's body of tax law; before the Democrats took over the House in 2007, Rangel was the ranking member of Ways and Means for years. It goes without saying, then, that Rangel should be expected to both know the basics of tax law and go out of his way to ensure his own compliance...

CELS 2008 Report

Posted on September 15, 2008
I?m back from Cornell, and happy to report about the conference, which was, in decidedly non-professorial terms, cool upon cool. The paper selection was done extremely well; almost everything I had the good fortune to hear was of very high quality. It was very reassuring to see people do carefully planned and meticulously analyzed social science, devote thought and care to their design, control for a variety of variables, "clean up" their data, and produce work that has enough richness and groundedness to be actually useful in the real world...

irony's tyranny

Posted on September 15, 2008
David Foster Wallace, dead of an apparent suicide over the weekend, was the author of Infinite Jest among other novels, short stories, and journalism -- a young (since I'm around his age, I declare him to be so) and brilliant "postmodern" (whatever that means) writer whose work I've never quite liked, although my wife does...

Life As a VAP, Some Thoughts for Law Schools

Posted on September 15, 2008
"VAP" (visiting assistant professor) programs seem to be gaining ground, as Mark Fenster pointed out in an earlier post below. I do think that there are some big questions about the purpose of these programs (broadening the legal academy? filling curricular gaps without making permanent hires? etc...

Neighborhood Shocked as Feds Let Family Slip Into Bankrupcty

Posted on September 15, 2008
The neighborhood of Shady Groves was shocked this morning when it learned that the Lemon family was going to slip into bankruptcy based on massive mortgage debt. Although the Lemons' financial troubles were well known throughout the neighborhood, the community expected the Federal Reserve to step in to save the family with last-minute financing...

Party on?

Posted on September 15, 2008
Have American political parties finally become ?programmatic? ? that is, organized around coherent ideological identities? Programmatic parties would theoretically permit ?responsible party government? (RPG) ? the holy grail of political scientists from Woodrow Wilson to V...

Chair Search

Posted on September 14, 2008
I'm very happy to publicize the following message, which has also been distributed elsewhere, on behalf of my fine institution: The University of Alabama School of Law seeks nominations and applications for a University-level Chairholder who will diversify the school's academic community and enhance the intellectual life of the law school community through her/his scholarship and teaching...

Fifteen is the minimum

Posted on September 13, 2008
I was watching Office Space this afternoon after I had read Duncan Hollis' review of rank and tenure timelines at different schools. Does the conversation below remind anyone else of the requirement of "two-plus articles" for tenure at many schools? Maybe it's just me.

weekend suggestions

Posted on September 12, 2008
Since I'm sure at this point in the semester/ fall you have nothing better to do, here are a couple of semi-obscure suggestions for things to waste your time on: If you liked Deadwood, you might consider reading Oakley Hall's novel Warlock. I got to it because the current NYRB Classics edition has a blurb from Thomas Pynchon and an introduction by Robert Stone, two of my favorite novelists...

Efficient Capital Markets -- Now Automated for Your Convenience

Posted on September 11, 2008
The WSJ has a fascinating follow-up to the story about the United Airlines phantom bankruptcy (discussed here). It seems that the 2002 Sun-Sentinel story that resurfaced might not have fooled humans, but rather automated search robots that troll for stock information...

remembering 9/11 ... the commission

Posted on September 11, 2008
One of the most distinctive features of post-9/11 governmental reforms has been the role of the 9/11 Commission, the independent investigatory body created by Congress following the Congress's own failure to adequately investigate the 9/11 attacks. (The Bush Administration was against the Commission before later being in favor of it, though the administration never fully embraced it...

Charities & Politics III

Posted on September 11, 2008
Thanks to Rick G. for taking my comments seriously enough to respond to, notwithstanding their obviously silly rhetoric. First, let me commend to readers Rick's essay, which I would certainly count as among the more serious and thoughtful criticisms of existing political rules...

In Search of a Law Teaching Marketplace of Ideas

Posted on September 11, 2008
As I noted in my last post, I?ve been thinking about ways to incorporate more outside-of-the-casebook material in my classes -- like elaborate hypotheticals that aren't in the book. One question I?ve had in doing this is whether law professors can and should engage in more production and sharing of free educational resources ? much in the same way that developers of free software, as Yochai Benkler points in Coase?s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm (112 Yale L...

Copyright infringement?

Posted on September 11, 2008
An eminent philosopher from one of the top programs in the country wrote to me the other day with the following concern. He noted that he and countless others have given papers or presented parts of books at law faculty workshops around the country, but he was chagrined to see that various libraries, including those at Georgetown and University of Toronto, were keeping copies of those works and making them permanently available in their libraries even though that's a use or "publication" beyond the implicit license to circulate the work for a one-time audience...

Faculty Productivity

Posted on September 11, 2008
As you may have seen over on Brian Leiter's blog, there's a new study of faculty productivity that was produced by Professor Yelnosky at Roger Williams Law School. The study measures the scholarly productivity of professors at law schools ranked outside the top 50 of USNews...

9/11 and the Choices Ahead

Posted on September 11, 2008
Today marks seven years since 9/11. I remember watching the catastrophe from San Francisco. A friend's uncle, one of the heads of an investment firm, perished in the attack, along with many of his colleagues. At the time, I was clerking for Judge Hawkins on the Ninth Circuit and some of my office-mates were gathered at the breakfast bar at the hotel, waiting for the judge to come pick us up to take us to the Court for oral arguments...

More Conservative Economics, Palin-Style

Posted on September 10, 2008
Yesterday I posted on Sarah Palin's, ah, flexible notion of fiscal conservatism. I suggested that the sports complex Governor Palin supported back when she was mayor of the townopolis of Wasilla was perhaps not the best example of principled small-governmentism...

Information Wants to Be Free, Part II: The Law Reviews

Posted on September 10, 2008
Just a quick update and a new thread. First, it seems like there's no need to create a Wiki that's separate from Prawfs for the law school hiring info. One advantage of having it here is that we have a wide readership of actual prawfs and they can actually post information as much as wannabees can...

Book Club on Steven Greenhouse's "The Big Squeeze"

Posted on September 10, 2008
I'm delighted to announce an upcoming PrawfsBlawg book club. This club will be discussing "The Big Squeeze" by Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace reporter for the New York Times. "The Big Squeeze" is Greenhouse's wide-ranging exploration of the plight of the American worker...

Video Evidence and Sporting Events

Posted on September 10, 2008
I suppose this was inevitable: Video evidence of alleged public police unconstitutional conduct hits the sports world. Last weekend, East Carolina beat West Virginia in football. ECU fans rushed onto the field to celebrate the victory, encountering police along the way...

Professors and Politics

Posted on September 10, 2008
Over at TaxProf Blog, the indefatigable Paul Caron reports that 95% of the amount in law prof political contributions this year have been to Obama while 5% of the gross has gone to McCain. All told, 635 law professors made contributions totalling $623,472...

Palin's Tax Record: Offsides? Icing? High Sticking?

Posted on September 09, 2008
To get a sense of just how de-linked Sarah Palin's recent rhetoric is from her record, you really have to read this CBS story about Palin's plan to build a sports complex using a sales tax increase back when she was Mayor of the booming townopolis of Wasilla, AK...

More on charities and politics

Posted on September 09, 2008
It was proposed, in an earlier post ("Charities and Politics: A Phillipic"), that "calls for loosening the Tax Code's restrictions on political activities by charities" are "all wrong." (See, for some background, this Washington Post article on the Alliance Defense Fund's "Pulpit Initiative"...

Brain-Based Lie Detection Leads to Murder Conviction in India

Posted on September 09, 2008
According to this article in the Herald Tribune, a woman in India was convicted of murder on the basis of what is purported to be a brain-based method of lie detection: The various technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence - except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans...

Charities and Politics: A Phillipic

Posted on September 09, 2008
Lately there have been lots of calls for loosening the Tax Code's restrictions on political activities by charities. Some of these calls have been really thoughtful and well crafted. They're all wrong. Background: churches and other qualifying charities (hereinafter "charities") don't pay corporate income tax...

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