Legal Commentary

Dep't of Silly Warnings

Posted on August 14, 2008
At the VC, Eugene notes a recent Travel Channel warning: "This program contains indigenous nudity. Parental discretion is advised." Not bad. But my ongoing, flabbergasting favorite is still the warning that the MPAA now uses in some cases, warning that a movie contains "thematic elements...

Menace 2L Society

Posted on August 14, 2008
One of my many great memories of John Langbein's Wills and Trusts class is how he warned us on the last day of class not to think we were now prepared to go out and handle estates matters. Knowing what you know now, he told us, "You are a menace to your clients...

Another police video and some legal questions

Posted on August 14, 2008
Dave Hoffman at CoOp gives my paper on video evidence a nice shout-out (thanks, Dave). He then reports on a new video on YouTube of a police/public confrontation. In it, a man (apparently a staffer for Democratic Washington Governor Gregoire) is recording a press conference by Dino Rossi, GOP gubernatorial candidate, at which Rossi is accepting the endorsement of a police-officers guild...

Law Reviews and Academic Titles

Posted on August 14, 2008
In the body of law review articles, authors often refer to other academics as Prof. So-and-so. In other academic disciplines, however, scholars are usually referenced without their titles. I want to put in a plug for the less formal approach. There are at least four reasons: (1) With rare exception, the strength of a scholarly argument should stand or fall on the quality of the argument itself and not the academic title of the person putting forth the article...

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Are Law Reviews Useful to Lawyers?

Posted on August 13, 2008
[This post is from Adam Scales, who teaches Torts at Washington and Lee.] Even to pose this question is to invite a degree of ridicule; the estrangement of academic law from "real" law has been long and amply commented upon. I pose the question to Prawfs readers because I'm debating it with my teaching assistant...

Approaching Deadline: Current Scholarship in Labor and Employment Law, San Diego, October 2008

Posted on August 13, 2008
Even if you are not a hardcore employment, labor, discrimnation or benefits scholar, you can benefit from this lively and enriching program coming up soon in lovely San Diego. The deadline is quickly approach to submit your paper topics and abstracts to Third Annual Colloquium on Current Scholarship in Labor & Employment Law...

The Law Review Fall Submission Cycle

Posted on August 13, 2008
Apropos a comment made on another post stating that the Harvard Law Review will begin reviewing manuscripts this week, I invite law review editors to post here when they are opening their window for fall submissions, how many slots they have available, and any other relevant infomation they would like to share: ie, we prefer Expresso or hard copy, etc...

How Old is Old Enough for a "Big Game" Hunting License?

Posted on August 13, 2008
I'm not certain, but I feel like it should be something more than eight.

New York and Coffee: Are Edible Burritos Next?

Posted on August 13, 2008
It is about time that decent coffee will be coming to New York. I mean, you could always get a good espresso there. And Oren's really is pretty good. But coffee has been a weak link in a city that otherwise does so much food so well. Now all NY needs is edible burritos...

My Research Agenda's Yuck Factor

Posted on August 13, 2008
Most people find my research agenda about friendship and the law yucky (or icky, depending). I blog about the yuck factor over at the New York Times's Freakonomics blog today.

Federalizing non-profit pay?

Posted on August 13, 2008
Verity blogs below about NFL (and Major League Baseball) efforts to avoid disclosing the salaries of their top executives, as required by federal tax law. Since she uses almost all of my buzzwords (federalism! compensation! nonprofits!) I have to chime in here...

Women Lawyers on TV

Posted on August 13, 2008
This year's 50 Best Law Firms for Women survey is out (a good resource for students among other things). An accompanying article provides a timeline of "TV's Leading Women in Law." I'm not sure this subject has the appropriate gravitas for a real problem: the article and survey report that attrition rates for women at major law firms is about 76% by the fifth year and that 42% of women lawyers leave the profession at some point in their careers...

"Borrowing" Syllabi -- and Exam Questions

Posted on August 12, 2008
Christine Hurt has an interesting post at The Glom, asking about the norms surrounding the use of other professors' syllabi and exams. It does seem hard to believe that the lifting of a syllabus from another professor (especially in the law world where there are limited numbers of casebooks that people adopt -- and a small number of ways to read them) could be deemed plagiarism...

Orwell's Vision: Video and the Future of Civil Rights Enforcement

Posted on August 12, 2008
Update: I just submitted my new article, Orwell's Vision: Video and the Future of Civil Rights Enforcement to law reviews. I did not do anything as bold as what Brian suggested; I usually just submit straight-up to journals and hope for the best. Sort of a 1999 approach to things (except done by ExpressO)...

The High Art of the Casebook Supplement

Posted on August 12, 2008
We don't normally think of casebook supplements as especially artful projects; they're just late-summer catch-alls that, at least in my field of constitutional law, try to shoehorn in the major and not a few minor decisions, usually at undue length and without much commentary, until it's time to try to restitch everyting into a Frankenstein's monster of a new edition...

Frank Herbert and the Five-Ring Circus

Posted on August 12, 2008
I was leafing through Frank Herbert's wonderful (and, let us be honest, frequently tiresome) Dune the other day, in between heats of the swimming competition on NBC and the network's adoring description of the Chinese train to Tibet and the Three Gorges Dam...

Executive Compensation and the NFL

Posted on August 12, 2008
In a story that mixes sports, tax, non-profits, agencies, executive compensation, and questions about federalism, the New York Times reports today that the NFL is lobbying Congress for an exemption from a new IRS requirement that salaries over $150,000 be publicly disclosed...

Dante and Homophobia

Posted on August 12, 2008
A conservative friend of mine protested my recent post that used the term ?homophobia? to refer to persons who disapprove of same-sex sexual relationships. He noted that such disapproval is not necessarily ?phobic?: It could simply be based on some perfectly rational theory of sexual morality...

A Long Time Coming

Posted on August 12, 2008
This morning, the Cambodian genocide tribunal began to conduct its first formal hearing. This tribunal is unusual in that the defendants, former members of the Khmer Rouge, are being tried for crimes that occurred about 30 years ago (1975-79). The first defendant to appear, Kaing Guek Eay, has been charged with several crimes associated with his tenure as commandant of the notorious interrogation center Tuol Sleng...

Presidential Debates and the Judge-as-Umpire Analogy

Posted on August 12, 2008
The Presidential Debate Blog is an interesting discussion site created by three law students (all of whom debated in college). In a recent post, editor Aaron Zelinsky discusses a recent call by Newt Gingrich and Barry Casselman for a series of open-format debates, under which the candidates question one another directly and the moderator simply keeps the conversation "moving and orderly," but otherwise remains in the background...

The Nature of Authority

Posted on August 11, 2008
Don't cite Wikipedia, they said. Fair enough. But today comes the news that John McCain may have plagiarized a speech about the crisis in Georgia from Wikipedia. If the political branches get their information from Wikipedia, does that mean that courts now need to consult Wikipedia as a means of reconstructing legislative history? Will Wikipedia become part of the original public meaning of future constitutional amendments?

First post up at the NYT's Freakonomics blog

Posted on August 11, 2008
My first post is up at the NYT's Freakonomics blog. Enjoy. Although the general ideas should by now be familiar to readers of this blog (or at least to those who don't filter out my posts), I saved some new content just for the New York Times about the California Law Revision Commission's use of my work on friendship...

The New Look at SSRN: An Interview with CEO Gregg Gordon

Posted on August 11, 2008
You may have noticed changes at Social Science Research Network -- both in the page design and in some new features. Below is a discussion with SSRN CEO Gregg Gordon about these new changes. A few highlights: SSRN is getting into citation-counting. If you open up a SSRN author page, on the right there are now colums for "Total Downloads" and "Total Citations...

Boycotts at the Retail Level: Of Casebook Selection and Ideology

Posted on August 11, 2008
As a footnote to the AALS boycott debate, note this comment from Professor Anita Bernstein on the Legal Ethics Forum: For those who teach in law school, slightly O/T: When you are choosing casebooks for your courses, do you take into account the ideology of the editors, bearing in mind that you're sending revenue their way? When I mentioned this penchant of mine, a sales rep for one of the Big Three told me that as far as she can tell, only women share it...

Stephen Douglas, Legal Realist?

Posted on August 11, 2008
In re-reading the Lincoln-Douglas debate at Freeport, Illinois, it occurs to me that Stephen Douglas ought to get credit for stating the essential Legal Realist position in 1858 -- more than a half-century before the classic statements of Realism in property law by Morris Cohen (Property and Sovereignty (1927)) or Erie v...

Jack Balkin, Soul-Killer: Or why "theoretical sophistication" is bad for the orginalists

Posted on August 11, 2008
That's the provocative claim, at least, that Steven Smith (USanDiego) makes in his new essay on SSRN, That Old-Time Originalism. The soul whose death Jack instigates by his mere presence is originalism. On Smith's view, if Jack and like-minded thinkers are originalists now without sacrificing little or nothing in the "conversion," then that spells trouble for originalists, rather than provides a basis for jubilation because the club of originalists is bigger now...

When speech and counter-speech collide

Posted on August 11, 2008
I have been meaning to write about this case from the Third Circuit for a month now. Startzell v. City of Philadelphia was a § 1983 action by members of Repent America (a religiously based anti-gay-rights organization), who staged a protest at Philadelphia's OutFest in 2004...

"Legal epistemology is ninety per cent quantitative. The other half is qualitative."

Posted on August 10, 2008
The last month I've been developing a bit of an SSRN-induced brain crush on epistemologist Larry Laudan, who I've not met before, but whose recent work (all posted on SSRN) ought to be pressing the criminal justice commentariat to re-think a lot of our assumptions when we talk about trial errors and risk-risk trade-offs between Type I errors and Type II errors...

Blogging at the NY Times

Posted on August 10, 2008
For what it is worth -- I'm told this and a metrocard will get me a ride on the subway -- I'll be blogging on the NYT's Freakonomics Blog this week. I've got some posts on friendship, juries, and other matters in the hopper. Check it out if you have a moment -- and I'll provide some links later in the week, too.

Are law students lazy?

Posted on August 10, 2008
Before I ask my surly question, I should apologize for my own laziness, having not posted anything for the last two months despite my status as a permanent blogger. (I confess that I do not know how Leiter, Volokh, etc, keep up with blogging while maintaining an active writing schedule...

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