Legal Commentary

I?m a fairly big sports fan, and my enthusiasm includes (though is by no means limited to) serious appreciation for soccer on both the club and international levels. Liking soccer is a bit of a rogue taste in the U.S., where all manner of critics from reasonably smart essayists like Chuck Klosterman to brain-dead blowhards like Jim Rome are eager to go on at tiresome length about why the sport is evil and awful. (The latter has always puzzled me. There are sports I find insufferable, like golf, but I can?t imagine wasting any time obsessing or pontificating about why others don't share my distaste for it. Anyway.)

Because a preference for soccer is a tad iconoclastic, when the U.S. soccer fan runs into a kindred spirit, there?s always a distinctive bond produced by discovering a rare commonality (not unlike, one imagines, what two Kansas City Royals fans would experience if they ran into each other in Seattle). And since I?ve entered the law-teaching world, I?ve been interested to see what the overlap is between the two populations. I?ve been fortunate to have good soccer conversations with lawprofs David Schleicher, William Birdthistle, Graeme Dinwoodie, and Mike Madison (who has done some really good soccer writing over at Madisonian), but I?m sure there are others out there. So in the great Prawfs info-aggregation tradition, identify yourselves, soccer-liking lawprofs! This is mostly to satisfy my own curiosity, but may have functional value as well. If there?s ever a Champions League or World Cup game going on during a conference, having a list will help organize a group outing for game-watching purposes.