Legal Commentary

Garfieldlessness

Posted on August 01, 2008
Two years ago that seem like two decades, I wrote a Prawfs post about the Nietzsche Family Circus, then the internet fad du jour, and still a phenomenon that gets linked on blogs worldwide daily (so its creators tell me). The present-day incarnation of the NFC is Garfield Minus Garfield (?G-G? for short), a site that takes Garfield cartoons and removes from them their protagonist feline, leaving only the cat?s loser owner, Jon...

FSU Law Ranks Very Highly on the New Leiter Methodology

Posted on August 01, 2008
It may not please Jason in terms of what he's trying to measure in the race to the top, but according to Jim Rossi, our fearless number-crunching Associate Dean for Research, Florida State's College of Law compares quite favorably on the new Leiter Rankings methodology...

Rotations

Posted on August 01, 2008
It's the beginning of August -- and with it some rotations on the Prawfs guest list. This month we're excited to welcome to Prawfs for the first time Verity Winship, a VAP at Cardozo who teaches civ pro and corporations, and is the author of the forthcoming article, tentatively titled, Fair Funds and the Compensation Conundrum...

Obama v. McCain: No one is leading because the game has not started yet

Posted on August 01, 2008
I have tried not to get caught up in the horse-race analysis of the presidential election at this point so as not to drive myself nuts, but I cannot help myself. I find myself checking lefty political blogs (mainly Huffington Post, TPM, and Kevin Drum) and a good new lefty poll-analysis and projection site...

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Are previously "under-taught" course now more taught in law school?

Posted on July 31, 2008
For my sign-off post to finish a month of sporadic guest-blogging, I thought I might return to a topic that I covered in a prior guest stint in this post, titled "What course is most "under-taught" in law school?". That post generated lots of interesting suggestions, including: Sentencing Law (my suggestion) Disability Law Information Privacy Law Enforcement proceedings Remedies Insurance Law Conflicts / Choice of Law Limited Liability Companies White-Collar Crime Legal History and all sort of transactional law I seriously doubt that, three years later, many (or any) of these course are more taught now than they were three...

On Workshop Formats

Posted on July 31, 2008
I just workshopped two different papers in two different formats -- and had some ruminations on their differences. One was an "incubator" workshop for works-in-progress at Hofstra (called Prawfsfest!, whose name gives me the creeps, I confess) and the other was an online Junior Scholars Workshop at The Glom for essentially complete papers...

Thursday Morning Randomness: On the Naming of Supreme Court Cases

Posted on July 31, 2008
I once heard a story, although I forget from whom, about why Bush v. Gore is captioned "Bush v. Gore." After all, the particular lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court was captioned "Gore v. Harris" in the Florida state courts, since it was an attempt to contest Katherine Harris's certification of the election...

More on Duke Lacrosse at SEALS

Posted on July 31, 2008
We held the panel on the Duke lacrosse controversy yesterday at SEALS. I thought it went very well, an excellent, vibrant discussion. We managed to hit almost all the points and issues I wanted to hit, although not necessarily in any expected order; in fact, we got knocked out of expected order after the first answer...

New Version of Retributive Damages up on SSRN

Posted on July 31, 2008
Just a note to highlight that there's a revised draft of my article, Retributive Damages, up on the funky new SSRN over here. The article, which sets out a normative theory defending punitive damages as an intermediate sanction from a retributivist perspective, is coming out in January 2009 in the Cornell Law Review...

Prawfstra! wrap up and happy hour reminder

Posted on July 31, 2008
Just a reminder for those of you here at the SEALS conference: we will have a happy hour at Stir in the Ritz tonight at 9pm. With some degree of luck, it will be more successful than the happy hour we had scheduled in NYC last week, when, at around 8pm and after a delicious dinner at Crave, all the Prawfsfest! participants decided to pack it in after a long day of having their papers be Ristrophed, i...

Picture a Port

Posted on July 30, 2008
The city that never sleeps ? this is the motto of Tel-Aviv. When I am here, I am at home. I love everything about this city, the good and the bad, the new and the old, the beautiful and the ugly. It is a city full of paradoxes and chaotic developments and something for every soul...

The Glom Workshops Friends as Fiduciaries

Posted on July 30, 2008
In connection with the Fourth Annual Conglomerate Junior Scholars Workshop, people are talking about my article Friends as Fiduciaries today -- and I'm trying to respond all day. Long comments are up from Eric Goldman, Doug Moll, Curtis Bridgeman, and Brett McDonnell...

Race To The Top Project Begins

Posted on July 30, 2008
Over the last few weeks, I have been blogging about the possibility of creating a race to the top in legal education by using information on relative educational quality to fill out the U.S. News surveys of law professors, lawyers and judges. Based on the significant interest expressed by many of you, what started as a thought experiment is now turning to a real one...

On Publishing and Professorial "Happiness"

Posted on July 29, 2008
One of the benefits of conferences like SEALS is the chance to have searching conversations with lots of folks you don't usually get to speak to, and then to reflect on those discussions. Here's one such reflection: Increasingly, I've noticed that I tend to get introduced at conferences and the like as "prolific," a moniker that I believe the speaker usually intends as a positive -- as indicative of a productive scholar who writes a lot (and, to be fair, I do) in a discipline where publishing is generally valued above almost anything else, whether or not it should be...

Duke Lacrosse at SEALS

Posted on July 29, 2008
Tomorrow I will be at SEALS, hosting and moderating a panel titled The Phases and Faces of the Duke Lacrosse Controversy. This will be a moderated conversation about the multiple facets, details, and issues of this still-ongoing legal controversy. Panelists include KC Johnson of Brooklyn College (author of a bestselling book on the case), James Coleman of Duke Law (who chaired a University committee that investigated the case), Michael Gerhardt of UNC Law, Lyrissa Lidsky of Florida Law, and Angela Davis of American/Washington College...

ExpressO Delivery Confirmations

Posted on July 29, 2008
At the short-lived Anonymous Articles Editors Blog that popped up last March, a law professor left the following comment: I and at least one colleague at my top tier law school submitted paper copies by mail this go-round because we perceived a break-down in the electronic system last fall, with articles submitted by ExpressO never even downloaded by most journals...

"Pervasive Surveillance" and the Limits of Video Evidence

Posted on July 29, 2008
During last Friday night's Critical Mass bike ride in New York, a uniformed NYPD officer, seemingly out of the blue, tackles a rider, sending him flying off his bike. The rider (the last of a pack to ride past the officer, who was standing in the middle of the street was arrested and held on charges of attempted assault and resisting arrest...

Can we explain why (and should we care that) SCOTUS gets its first negative rating?

Posted on July 28, 2008
This short story from the folks at the ABA Journal, headlined "Supreme Court Gets First Negative Approval Rating," has me thinking about the dynamics (and significance) of SCOTUS popularity. Here are the latest SCOTUS polling numbers: Only 39 percent of U...

AALS Plenary, Call for Talents, and Legal Education: The Musical

Posted on July 28, 2008
I am looking for suggestions / self- or other-nominations of law professors who use singing as part of their classroom teaching. Turns out, many do and students love it! HLS's Dean Bob Clark for example is well-known for having composed approximately 50 jingles that he then sung to his corporations classes...

Negotiating Protest

Posted on July 28, 2008
The AP reports (via First Amendment Center) about negotiations taking place between Denver police and certain protest groups to establish rules and details about parades and parades for next month's Democratic National Convention. Similar negotiations are underway between protesters and police in Minneapolis and St...

Using a class blog instead of TWEN

Posted on July 26, 2008
For a variety of reasons, I have never been a big fan of propriety law-school-support technology like TWEN. Though I did begrudgingly utilize the Lexis Blackboard for a few years, more recently I have begun developing a class blog to support and supplement each of my courses...

Attack ads and going negative

Posted on July 26, 2008
Nate Oman at CoOp talks about and links to two of the masterpiece political ads: Lyndon Johnson's 1964 "Daisy" and Ronald Reagan's 1984 "The Bear" (the first political ad that ever really stuck with me and still the best of my lifetime). Nate labels both as "attack ads," but I am wondering why (especially as to the Reagan ad)...

"Save the World On Your Own Time"

Posted on July 25, 2008
That's the title of Stanley Fish's latest book. In the book, as the dust jacket says, Fish argues that "the only goal appropriate to the academy is the transmission and advancement of knowledge. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the mthods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose...

Still more on religiously affiliated schools and institutional pluralism

Posted on July 24, 2008
I really appreciate the recent posts -- by Paul, Jason, and Gordon -- on religiously affiliated law schools and law schools' "missions" generally. (For what it's worth, Paul's experience at the religiously affiliated law school at which he recently visited is -- whaddya know! -- very much like my own experience at Notre Dame Law School...

Gordon Smith on BYU

Posted on July 24, 2008
Over at the excellent business law blog, Conglomerate, Gordon Smith, who just finished his first year as a professor at BYU and has taught at five other law schools, is good enough to share some thoughts on mine and Paul Horwitz's posts from yesterday on BYU and other religiously affiliated law schools...

Q: What do you call that guy who hangs around with musicians?

Posted on July 23, 2008
A: A highly skilled world-class athlete. Drummers, vindicated at last. P.S.: The answer is 16 -- one to change the lightbulb, and 15 to tell you how much better Steve Gadd would have done it.

Just How Good Are Non-Religious Law Schools?

Posted on July 23, 2008
Jason's posts, however many qualms I may have about them, continue to be thought-provoking, and his latest post , about BYU Law School, is no exception. What has me thinking this time is the anonymous commenter who notes the "religious homogeneity" of BYU, which I am assuming is accurate, and adds, "I guess there should be places for people who are really into religious homogeneity...

Flexing the Mind Muscle

Posted on July 23, 2008
Making decisions, even about the simplest thing such as what sandwitch to have for lunch, may reduce our short-term ability to solve problems, articulate arguments, and write articles. Check out On Amir's piece in Scientific American: The brain is like a muscle: when it gets depleted, it becomes less effective.

Judge McConnell on "pervasively sectarian"

Posted on July 23, 2008
Today, in an opinion written by law-and-religion scholar Michael McConnell, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that Colorado violated the Constitution when it refused, on the ground that the school is "pervasively sectarian", to permit otherwise-qualified students to use publicly funded scholarships at Colorado Christian University...

Just How Good Is BYU Law?

Posted on July 23, 2008
It seems to me the answer is very good, and underrated by U.S. News survey respondents. So if you look back at the Paul Caron/MoneyLaw chart I posted last week, on which schools have the biggest differential between the Princeton Review ranking and U...

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