Legal Commentary

We Can't All Be Lesbians

Posted on May 01, 2008
In the next couple of days I?ll endeavor to pull my weight without overstaying my welcome. The month certainly has flown by. I have had the pleasure this term of teaching a great group of students in an International & Comparative IP course. One of them sent me a link today about a lawsuit filed by three citizens of the island of Lesbos against the Greek Homosexual and Lesbian Community (OLKE), a gay-rights group, in a Greek court...

Denning on "The New Doctrinal Scholarship"

Posted on May 01, 2008
Brannon Denning (Cumberland) has a nice, and pleasantly short, piece on SSRN called The New Doctrinalism in Constitutional Scholarship and Heller v. District of Columbia. Here's the abstract: This brief essay examines an apparent new trend in constitutional scholarship that focuses less on the fixing of constitutional meaning - the usual focus of constitutional theory - and more on the rules courts develop to implement constitutional commands...

Does Teaching Really Help Scholarship (and Vice Versa)?

Posted on May 01, 2008
I haven't yet read the piece that Rick discusses below; I'm looking forward to it. But, Rick, I want to ask you: If one believes your second proposition, the adage that "the problem is, it's the same third," does that necessarily mean one buys the first proposition -- that more engaged scholars will also be more engaged teachers? I do believe it's often the same third that excels across the whole range of activities, although putting it in that waggish way is perhaps a little unfair; the number is definitely higher than that for some faculties, and some of those...

The hidden logic of kooky conspiracy theories

Posted on May 01, 2008
How should we assess the kookiness of conspiracy theories? Does a theory become less kooky if enough people believe it? Does it matter which people believe it -- for instance, whether a large plurality or majority of black voters accept a theory that is rejected by the vast majority of whites? Take, for instance, the belief that the federal government deliberately concocted HIV or spread drugs to infect or addict racial minorities...

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Sovern on rankings and incentives

Posted on May 01, 2008
Over at The Faculty Lounge, Alfred Brophy has posted a link to Jeff Sovern's short play, "Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools". The piece is engaging and provocative and, like Alfred says, it touches on a lot of the rankings- and "whither legal education"- issues that people have been thinking about all around the blogosphere...

Thank You and Signing Off

Posted on May 01, 2008
Thanks again to the Prawsblawg crew for having me on again. For those of you who will be on the market next year, I look forward to seeing you at job talks, conferences, etc. Try not to let the paperwork, stress, and uncertainty sour the whole job market experience...

Responsibility for Health, American and African style

Posted on May 01, 2008
A great draft paper I just read by my colleague Norm Daniels on the issue of responsibility for health, a topic which was also the focus of a fantastic conference we had here at Harvard last year, made me think that these issues would be of interest to a generalist legal audience as well...

Green's Goodbye

Posted on May 01, 2008
Assuming my TypePad account is still valid now that it is May, I would like to take this opportunity to say thanks to my friends at PrawfsBlawg for having me on board during April. I now head to my padded cell to grade my Professional Responsibility exams...

Summer Submissions at the Alabama Law Review

Posted on April 30, 2008
From my friends at the Alabama Law Review comes this announcement: This year, the Alabama Law Review is beginning a Summer Submission Reading Program. Alabama Law Review will be accepting special summer submissions starting Monday, May 19. If you submit in our special summer program, we will guarantee you either an offer or a rejection within two weeks of your submission to Alabama Law Review...

Parting Thoughts & AmLaw100 PPP

Posted on April 30, 2008
Well, it looks like this is the end for me (more specifically, the end of my month-long guest blog stint). Like any good houseguest, I don?t want to overstay my welcome, but I do want to thank my hosts, Dan, Orly and the rest of the gang at PrawfsBlawg...

Could GMU sue the ABA and win?

Posted on April 30, 2008
Law schools and litigation: what a combo. Yesterday, Geoff posted about profs suing students. Today, the question is: could a law school sue the ABA and win? Here's the background. Via Orin, I found my way to USD Prawf Gail Heriot's sparky op-ed in the WSJ yesterday about how the ABA pressures schools like George Mason on diversity objectives...

Ravitch's Law and Religion, 2nd Edition

Posted on April 30, 2008
Congratulations to Frank S. Ravitch on the publication of the second edition of his casebook, Law and Religion, A Reader. Casebooks may not always get much respect from law professors (envy, yes -- I'd very much like to be an editor of a con law or law and religion casebook!), but the best of them are interesting and valuable enterprises, and I think this latest and much-expanded edition fits the bill...

Ritual and Scholarship

Posted on April 30, 2008
Later this evening, I'll be helping to lead a community-wide service in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. (For those of you in or near the 'Hassee, it will be at Temple Israel on Mahan at 630pm; all are welcome.) This powerful story in today's NYT about the rededication of a Torah from Auschwitz will be on my mind...

Sins of omission and commission in police work

Posted on April 30, 2008
In a recent post, Adam Kolber quotes a letter to a newspaper complaining about the verdict in the Sean Bell case in which the writer demands that ?police officers ? hold our interests and our lives above their own? and ?accept the threat of harm as part of their jobs and their oaths...

Advertisement: Legal Writing Competition Sponsored by the Pacific Legal Foundation

Posted on April 30, 2008
To augment the ongoing efforts of the Program for Judicial Awareness to encourage legal scholarship related to Pacific Legal Foundation?s litigation objectives, we are pleased to announce three new awards, made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation...

Is "You're a racist" an opinion, or a statement of fact?

Posted on April 30, 2008
Yesterday, I posted a story about a law professor who has sued several former students after they made what he characterizes as false accusations of racism. I don't know the professor involved, or anyone at the school. But it seems like this case is a dog.

Kolber Signs Off

Posted on April 30, 2008
At the stroke of midnight tonight, I may turn into a guest blawging pumpkin. So I send my thanks now to Dan, the other permaprawfs, and my fellow guest blawgers for lots of stimulating posts and conversations over the last two months. It's been a pleasure!

Old Media v. New Media: Sports and Politics

Posted on April 30, 2008
On Tuesday evening, HBO's Costas NOW hosted a live town-hall program that attempted to analyze the changing face of sports media. There was a panel on the Internet, featuring Will Leitch of Deadspin (the best and most popular of the sports blogs) and Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights and, one of my favorites, A Prayer for the City...

Blue Dogs on the Bayou

Posted on April 29, 2008
This Saturday the Sixth Congressional District in Louisiana will hold a special election to fill the seat vacated by long-time Republican Congressman Richard Baker, who resigned to become head of the main lobbying group for the hedge fund industry. Needless to say, Baker?s salary should experience a nice bump up...

The (Academic) Politics of "Sustainability"

Posted on April 29, 2008
At Inside Higher Ed, Peter Wood has an interesting op-ed called Sustainability's Third Circle. Wood argues that the very concept of "sustainability" can, accordionlike, be narrowed to "hard core empirical questions" or expanded into a "sail for utopian dreams in which advocates imagine themselves transforming humanity itself by changing our appetites...

Life and Death for Police Officers

Posted on April 29, 2008
Today's New York Times has several letters to the editor about the verdict in the Sean Bell case, where three police officers were acquitted on all charges associated with Sean Bell's death and the wounding of two others. Here's an excerpt from the first letter: The verdict repudiates the very notion of police as protectors...

A Few Items of Interest

Posted on April 29, 2008
Here are a few items that may interest Prawfs readers: New Method of Crime Scene Analysis: A technology that examines distinctive "antibody signatures" rather than DNA to help at crime scenes (and is probably quicker and cheaper to analyze than DNA). Fujimori on Trial: Following former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori's trial What Tyler Cowen Calls "Reverse Prostitution": (But is really) paying people to avoid unsafe sex...

Arkansas-LR Law Prof Suing His Students for Defamation

Posted on April 29, 2008
Kashmir Hill at Above the Law relates a simmering controversy at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock School of Law. Professor Richard Peltz has filed a suit against two of his former students, accusing them of defamation. Here's Sunday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article on the dispute...

Voting, political protest, and meaningful judicial review

Posted on April 29, 2008
A lot of great commentary on yesterday's decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, upholding as against a facial challenge Indiana's requirement that people present a government-issued photo ID in order to vote. Several people have drawn parallels between this decision and other, (generally conservative-leaning) decisions on voting rights and abortion rights, particularly in the consistent rejection of facial challenges and in requiring individual plaintiffs return later with more developed facts of particular harms...

Proxy Season & Board Diversity

Posted on April 28, 2008
Well, if you haven?t noticed, proxy season is here. Companies have sent their glossy annual reports, ballots, and financial statements. Based on my annual informal poll of my Business Associations students, I?m guessing that many of you simply throwaway the annual reports and ballots you receive...

Dude, Where's My Blog?

Posted on April 28, 2008
Over at the Sports Law Blog, where I regularly contribute (or at least, where, when I have the time, I try to regularly contribute), we had a somewhat rude awakening this morning. Instead of seeing our blog when visiting its usual home, sports-law.blogspot...

Why are grades private?

Posted on April 28, 2008
Why are an individual?s grades considered to be a private matter that others presumptively should not disclose or observe? The Federal Educational Right to Privacy Act (FERPA), for instance, prohibits disclosure of a student?s academic records without that student?s consent...

In (Partial) Defense of the Michigan Books Issue, and of Book Reviews Generally

Posted on April 28, 2008
Stephen Griffin has an interesting post at Balkinization lamenting what he calls "the sad decline of the Michigan Law Review's books issue." He argues that the review has recently ignored significant works in constitutional law and theory, while disdaining the con law-related books the editors have chosen to review recently...

Bullseye

Posted on April 28, 2008
Since writing a "good" exam takes a fair amount of time, it's always good to get an early start. Aiming to have an exam done a few weeks before finals gives time for tweaking, proofing, and of course, printing, xeroxing and stapling. But it also raises the possibility of a delicate situation...

Is the Mich LR Books Issue in Decline? No.

Posted on April 28, 2008
Brian Leiter and Stephen Griffin appear to think it is. Methinks they doth protest too much. Griffin's complaint centers on the fact that in recent years a cluster of well-known con law theory books have not been reviewed: Consider some of the better contheory books to be published over the last few years: Jack Balkin, What Roe v...

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