Academic

Which Law Reviews Still Publish Book Review Essays?

Posted on January 26, 2009
In light of our recent discussion of trends in book reviews, one loyal reader asked for some more specific data: which reviews still publish book review essays? So that sent me back to the Index to Legal Periodicals for the...

The attractiveness (to the opposite sex) of a Harvard degree?

Posted on January 25, 2009
Something lite for a weekend in January....Last fall we spoke about Emily Dickinson's romantic interests. At least that had some (remote) connection to law. Then came the law of People magazine. Now...From the folks over at 02138 magazine, a study...

Deadly Jails

Posted on January 23, 2009
Usually, when we focus on problems inside prisons, we focus on the prisons themslves, where we warehouse convicted criminals after trial and sentence. But today's article in the New York Times focuses on the corrupt and deadly practices occurring in....

Charles Rangel: Taxman Extraordinaire

Posted on January 23, 2009
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki has posted a link to this video by documentary film maker Evan Coyne Maloney, who may be the antidote to Michael Moore. Representative Rangel is, of course, chairman of the House Ways and...

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The Future of Book Reviews, Predicted from the Index to Legal Periodicals?

Posted on January 22, 2009
Well, there's discussion every now and then about changes in the Michigan Law Review's annual issue on book reviews. Seems pretty clear to me that the MLR's book review issue isn't as good for legal history as it used to...

Faculty Lounge Breaks Into The Rankings

Posted on January 21, 2009
Paul Caron has posted his 2008 law professor blog traffic rankings. We're not at the top of the heap, but we're in the heap - and that's gratifying news. For the period of January 1 through December 31, 2008, we...

Inaugural Musings

Posted on January 21, 2009
So much has already been said about the pageantry and speechifying of the Inauguration that I am happy to leave that task to others. But there were a couple of things that particularly struck me as I listened to the...

An Interracial Presidential Family

Posted on January 20, 2009
From today's NY Times--wonderfully written:In First Family, a Nation's Many FacesFor well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that...

Why a Good Associate Dean for Research is Worth Their Weight in Gold

Posted on January 18, 2009
Posted by D. Daniel SokolAt the AALS annual meeting, I had a a chance to catch up with friends and compare experiences across schools. From our perspectives, perhaps the most important person on the faculty for the untenured is the...

Law Faculty Lateral Moves List - 2009

Posted on January 15, 2009
It's that time of year! Following in the tradition of my 2008, 2007, and 2006 lists, here goes the newest aggregation of data on law professor lateral movement. Brian Leiter noted the other day that this may be a quiet...

Two Big S. Ct. Criminal Decisions

Posted on January 14, 2009
Well, the Supreme Court is starting off the New Year with a bang in the criminal procedure and sentencing arena. This morning it handed down two big opinions, one involving the 4th Amendment, and one involving consecutive sentencing.In Herring v....

Interpreting the Seventeenth Amendment

Posted on January 13, 2009
Last week, the New York Times ran an Op-Ed piece by Thomas Geoghegan that argued that the Seventeenth Amendment requires an election for vacancies in the Senate, and that the proviso in the Amendment which permits the legislature of a...

"Just Art?": The Place of Art in Rendering Justice

Posted on January 12, 2009
On Wednesday, January 28, Justice Albie Sachs will be speaking at Duke University's Nasher Musuem about "JUST ART?: The Place of Art in Rendering Justice." From Duke's announcement of the talk: Justice Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South...

Law Dean Searches, 2009 Edition

Posted on January 07, 2009
Following up on Garrett's comment on our May 2008 list of law dean searches, it's time to have a post collecting the current dean searches. I'm a little behind the news on this, so I'm going to start with Garrett's...

Punahou School

Posted on January 03, 2009
I've been mulling a post on Punahou School for a while and started drafting this yesterday. Now that the Washington Post's talking about Barack Obama's Hawaiian school (and the New York Times, too, I now see), I suppose I should...

Another Thought on Blago, Burris, and the Senate

Posted on January 01, 2009
Under Illinois law, the Secretary of State must endorse a Governor's appointment to fill a Senate vacancy. The Secretary of State is an executive official. If Illinois law expressly conditions the validity of a gubernatorial appointment to fill a Senate...

Blago, Burris and the Senate: A Reply to Rick Hills

Posted on January 01, 2009
Over at PrawfsBlawg, Rick Hills thinks I am wrong to declare that Powell v. McCormack controls the question of the Senate's power to refuse to seat Roland Burris, Governor Blago's appointee to the Senate. Hills relies on the Senate's power,...

Transformations In American Legal History

Posted on January 01, 2009
It's my great pleasure to announce that Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitzhas been printed (even though it's not being shipped until February 9). The volume, which Dan Hamilton and I edited, has....

Theorizing the Law of People Magazine

Posted on December 31, 2008
I've been criticized of late for not putting up more posts on the law of People Magazine--and also been criticized because the posts so far haven't articulated a unified theory of the law of People Magazine. So this growing area...

Blago, Burris, the Senate, and Powell v. McCormack

Posted on December 31, 2008
Now that Rod Blagojevich, the thoroughly discredited greedhead Governor of Illinois, has appointed Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat, and Senate Democrats have vowed to refuse to seat Burris, the obvious question is whether the Senate has the...

Found Property

Posted on December 30, 2008
Property professors who teach the law of finders will find this story interesting and a bit heartwarming. An old lady stashes her life savings of $10,000 in a cracker box from Whole Foods, then decides she wants to return the...

Spiller v. Mackereth

Posted on December 21, 2008
Users of the Dukeminier and Krier (and now Schill and Alexander) property casebook may recall the 1976 Alabama case of Spiller v. Mackereth, which dealt with relations between two co-tenants of a commerical real estate building in Tuscaloosa. Now the...

Caffeine and Alcohol?

Posted on December 18, 2008
I thought about titling this post, two great tastes that [don't] go great together. Resurfacing for a moment to comment on a story in the Times that MillerCoors (when did they merge? I'm so far behind the times) is taking...

End of Year Phrases

Posted on December 13, 2008
Been so buried in work of late that I haven't been posting much. As I go into winter hibernation--in preparation for a very busy spring, of trusts and estates using a new set of statutes, talks on pieces of University,...

Inflation in Zimbabwe

Posted on December 11, 2008
From the NYT:Inflation officially hit 231 million percent in July, but John Robertson, an independent economist in Zimbabwe, estimates that it has now surged to an astounding eight quintillion percent ? that?s an eight followed by 18 zeros.

Francis Daniel Pastorius Conference

Posted on December 10, 2008
Yesterday's email brought the fantastic news that the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies will be hosting a conference about Francis Daniel Pastorius in October 2009. (We've spoken about him once before at the faculty lounge...

New Formula For Assessing Scholarly Impact

Posted on December 10, 2008
Thanks to some serious new theoretical work by Jorge Cham here, we can finally end the debates about scholarly impact. Cham proposes a formula that captures most of the relevant issues and inputs. This is sure to clarify tenure decisions...

The Source of Perry Miller's Heart versus Head?

Posted on December 10, 2008
This is primarily of interest to legal historians, but as I was in the stacks of the library this afternoon I pulled John C.H. Wu's 1958 jurisprudence book off the shelf. I was on my way to Neil Duxbury's Patterns...

First Vietnamese-American Elected to US House

Posted on December 08, 2008
Anh Cao defeated William J. Jefferson in an election held over the weekend, making Mr. Cao the first Vietnamese American to be elected to Congress. Local citizens were stunned as Mr. Jefferson was a nine-term incumbent, and a stalwart of...

Are Legislative Limits on the Presidential Pardon Power Constitutional?

Posted on December 06, 2008
The American Freedom Campaign has proposed a legislative limit on the President's pardon power. Called the Pardon Disclosure Act, the heart of the proposal (scroll down) follows: "Any pardon issued by the President under Article II, section 2, clause 1,...

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