Legal Commentary

Off to CELS 2008

Posted on September 09, 2008
On Thursday, at the crack of dawn, I'll be heading out to Cornell for the weekend, to attend the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, where I hope to hear several interesting panels, and to present a paper based a forthcoming book I'm working on with Malcolm Feeley, Where Have All the Women Gone? The Decline of Women in the Criminal Justice Process...

Great Paper from Junior Crim Prof Conference

Posted on September 09, 2008
I had the good fortune to attend the Junior Crim Prof Conference last month at GW. Several junior profs presented interesting papers. All of the attendees were expected to have read the papers beforehand, and the majority of the conference was devoted to the comments on the papers (as opposed to the authors? summary of their work)...

The Case Free Class Day Experiment (Proposal)

Posted on September 09, 2008
I?ve been hoping for some time now to conduct the pedagogical experiment described below. But, as I haven?t had the chance to do so yet, I thought I?d just sketch the plan and see if any of you had words of wisdom or warning. The idea is that I?d teach a class three days a week, but we?d only read cases (or statutes or other legal source materials) for the first two of those days...

Is Breyer?s pro-commandeering argument in Printz the worst comparative constitutional law ever?

Posted on September 09, 2008
Preparing for my seminar on federalism, I was forced to re-read Justice Breyer?s dissent in Printz, which is now my nominee for The Worst Comparative Con Law Argument Ever. Justice Breyer, you'll recall, argued that being commandeered by the feds was not necessarily detrimental to the power of states: At least some other countries, facing the same basic problem, have found that local control is better maintained through application of a principle that is the direct opposite of the principle the majority derives from the silence of our Constitution...

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New tales of sport and free expression, Part III

Posted on September 09, 2008
The new Sports Illustrated reports on the involvement of a number of professional athletes as supporters and activists on behalf of both presidential candidates and suggests we are seeing the return of the activist athlete, thought dead-and-buried in the 1980s and 1990s by players more interested in commerce than politics...

McCain's Future Citizenship Problems

Posted on September 08, 2008
Now that I'm back in the 'Hassee after a great trip to Marquette in Milwaukee to present "How Should Punitive Damages Work?", I thought I'd quickly plug a few pieces of interest to Prawfs readers who have been following Jack Chin's provocative work on whether McCain qualifies under the Constitution to serve as POTUS...

losers, and the losers who prey on them

Posted on September 08, 2008
I'm cursed with being a fan of what is now officially the most pathetic team in major sports -- it's sixteen years and counting of losing seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Since being brainwashed by the guy who ran my little league team in New York City, I have variably enjoyed and endured the team's remarkable success in the 1970s, drug scandals in the 1980s, heartbreak in the early '90s (for which I've been mocked!), and irrelevance ever since...

Efficient Capital Markets?

Posted on September 08, 2008
From Reuters (via Yahoo): A nearly 6-year-old news story on the 2002 bankruptcy filing of UAL Corp (UAUA.O) resurfaced on the Internet on Monday, clobbering the airline's shares briefly as some traders mistook the report as current and plausible news...

A law school hiring thread: 2008-09

Posted on September 08, 2008
This thread is for both law professors and people who are on the market this year to become a law professor. We invite those on the market to leave comments (anonymously if they prefer) regarding a range of things: a) whether they have received a call from a particular school inviting them to an interview at the AALS meat market, and/or whether they accepted it; also whether the school has asked for a candidate's scholarship yet b) whether they have received a callback from a law school and/or accepted it c) whether they have received an offer from a law...

A Law School Hiring Wiki: Preliminary Thoughts

Posted on September 08, 2008
A person on the market writes: I wonder whether your readers might have some insight into the curious phenomenon (or rather, non-phenomenon) of the law hiring wiki. In many other academic disciplines, job hunters each year set up a wiki to report on how the process is progressing...

A 2008 Hiring Chairs Spreadsheet

Posted on September 08, 2008
In addition to the post here, which invites law schools to list who will be hiring chairs of their committees this year, I have recently received an Excel spreadsheet, which provides information for most of the top 100 law schools so far as I can tell...

Entitlements to Entertainment and Blog Posts

Posted on September 08, 2008
Some Harry Potter fans are fuming at the decision by Warner Bros. to delay the release of the next Harry Potter film by eight months. From the WSJ: To a world of wand-wielding Harry Potter loyalists, the studio executive had crossed to the dark side. Within hours of Warner Bros...

New tales of sport and free expression, Part II

Posted on September 08, 2008
This one is about two weeks old, but I just heard about it. Rick Reilly at ESPN.com writes about the new policy at the University of Virginia banning all signs at sporting events. The policy apparently was triggered by University objections to students last season wielding signs critical (and calling for the firing) of football coach Al Groh, in violation of a policy against signs bearing derogatory comments, and by the school's a desire to keep the game environment "positive...

Ten Reasons for Criminal Justice Scholars to Watch "The Wire"

Posted on September 08, 2008
David Simon's spectacular, devastating, unbelievable, gritty epic masterpiece is over, after five seasons. I don't really watch TV - no cable, no reception for regular TV, so if I watch anything, it's DVDs - but I've told all my criminal procedure students to see the entire thing if they get the chance...

Should Politicians? Children Be ?Off Limits??

Posted on September 07, 2008
In the wake of the news that Sarah Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant, it seems that the Republican and Democratic candidates are in agreement on one issue ? their children are ?off limits.? I tend to agree that a parent?s decision to seek political office should not result in their children?s lives being placed under a media microscope...

Inequitable Enforcement

Posted on September 07, 2008
Imagine that you're driving on a road where the maximum speed allowed is 55mph. You assume that you won't be stopped by the police unless you exceed, say, 65mph. You choose to drive, say, 58mph, and, to your surprise, you are stopped by a cop and she issues you a ticket...

Hiring Chairs 2008-09: Announce Yourselves!

Posted on September 07, 2008
Update: Note that this will be moved periodically to the front of the page. As is tradition here, it's time for law schools' appointments committees around the country to congregate here and share: a) the name of the chair (s) of the committee b) the law school c) whether your school divides work between entry-levels and laterals, and if so, who's responsible for which segment d) the names of other persons on the appointments committee(s) e) any particular subject matter expertise you're focusing on f) other information you think might be relevant...

New tales of sport and free expression, Part I

Posted on September 07, 2008
Some new stories of sport and speech this week. I originally was going to discuss them in one post, but it got too long, so I decided to break it up over the next few days. A blurb in the new Sports Illustrated reports that a fan was kicked out of Yankee Stadium when he tried to leave his seat and go to the bathroom while "God Bless America" was playing during the Seventh Inning Stretch...

Debating Bounces is a Bit Off the Wall

Posted on September 07, 2008
Everyone loves to talk about how conventions affect presidential candidates' chances of winning. This talk typically focuses on the candidates' standing in national polls; more specifically, these days, the focus is on national tracking polls. As just one, but hardly an exclusive, example, here's Jim Lindgren over at the VC...

Link to Passive Discrimination Paper

Posted on September 06, 2008
The "Passive Discrimination" paper whose abstract I provided the other day is now available at SSRN.

Levinson, the election, and constitutional procedural "minefields"

Posted on September 06, 2008
Over at Balkanization, Sandy Levinson has some great posts about "constitutional minefields" in existing presidential (and vice presidential) selection processes that may not be able to handle (or handle in a democratically legitimate way) some unlikely-but-not-impossible contingencies in this election...

Bob Dole, John McCain & Michael Lewis

Posted on September 05, 2008
In 2006, I discussed Trail Fever, Michael Lewis' brilliant account of the 1996 presidential campaign. At the time I noted: After pages and pages of describing his disgust with the political process, Lewis finally meets the hero of the book: John McCain...

Executing Retributivism is up on SSRN

Posted on September 05, 2008
Just a quick note to point out that I've placed on SSRN a draft of a new paper I earlier discussed on the blog. The paper is called, at least for now, Executing Retributivism. Unlike most of my work, which is largely normative legal theory applied to discrete policy issues, this piece is quite a bit shorter (!) and more interpretative in nature: that is, it furnishes a close read of a relatively recent case of SCOTUS, Panetti v...

The Emir of Alaska?

Posted on September 05, 2008
My colleague, Clay Gillette, refers to Governor Sarah Palin as "the Emir of Alaska," a sobriquet that is less a criticism of the governor and more a recognition of the corrupting effect of oil on democracy. As Governor Palin is the first to admit, Alaska's politics have been steeped in corruption...

Wikipedia, Class Blogs, and Student Input

Posted on September 05, 2008
I've read the comments to my posts on class blogs and Wikipedia in class with interest. My civil procedure class does have a class blog, which I've framed as "Civil Procedure in the News." But maybe this is the chance to pick up on two threads: the suggestion of creating a legal Wikipedia and the discussion going around the blogosphere about having a single student take notes for the class...

Pundit Adversarialism

Posted on September 05, 2008
Dan Solove has a great post ripping the punditocracy for their lacks of principles (or what Matt calls their hypocrisy) in spouting the talking points and arguments of "their" side, even if the person affirmatively does not believe what she is saying or said exactly the opposite a week ago when talking about the other side...

Target Letter Advice

Posted on September 04, 2008
Hi Everyone. Thanks to Dan and the rest of the Prawfs for inviting me back for another guest stint here. I did a previous stint in April of ?07, as I was finishing my Climenko Fellowship at Harvard. I?m now quite settled here at Arizona State, having started my second year of teaching...

Ekow Yankah on Sarah Palin's Sex Education

Posted on September 04, 2008
Greetings from Milwaukee. FoP Ekow Yankah (Cardozo) writes in with the following post: The news of 17 year old Bristol Palin?s pregnancy has been immediately met with calls by people across the political spectrum to respect the privacy of the Palin family and resist using this as a political tool...

Shameless Plug for "Passive Discrimination"

Posted on September 04, 2008
Here's the abstract of my new paper, co-authored with Lesley Wexler of Florida State and Jon Klick of UPenn, for which we've just accepted a publication offer by the University of Chicago Law Review. We don't have an SSRN version up yet, but I'll post it when we do...

"Hypocrisy!" (pt. 2054)

Posted on September 04, 2008
I complained about the hypocrisy meme yesterday. Yet another example -- but it did make me chuckle.

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