Law Students

First Post

Posted on March 07, 2010
Hello everyone,I am new to the blog and would first like to extend a very warm thanks to Dean Chen for inviting me to contribute. I graduated from Temple University last year and will likely be starting at the University of Chicago for law school this fall (still haven't made a seat deposit, but am almost 100% sure about enrolling)...

Publication Announcement

Posted on February 12, 2010
David Schraub, Comment, The Price of Victory: Political Triumphs and Judicial Protection in the Gay Rights Movement, 77 U. Chi. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2010).

Sticky Slopes Draft Posted

Posted on December 12, 2009
You can download the full text of the draft at my SSRN page. Below is the abstract: Legal literature is replete with references to the infamous ?slippery slope?, basically, where a shift in policy lubricates the path towards further (perhaps more controversial) reforms or measures...

McDonald/NRA v. Chicago: Primal animal salivation

Posted on July 11, 2009
Ok, I haven't posted to this blog in a very, very long time, but I don't blog anywhere else, so I just had to state how absolutely amazingly awesome it will be for anyone interested in constitutional law (which, after all, is anyone who reads this blog--or any law blog for that matter) if the Supreme Court grants cert...

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Menu Labeling Laws ? Sweeping The Nation?

Posted on February 22, 2009
As a newcomer to First Movers, I would like to briefly introduce myself and thank Dean Jim Chen of the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law for inviting me to contribute. I am 2003 graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and a current doctoral student in public health, focusing on health promotion...

2 year J.D. Now a Reality at Northwestern

Posted on June 20, 2008
See here.

Spread Firefox: Download Day!

Posted on June 18, 2008
Today's the day to download the newest version of Mozilla Firefox, the fast and free browser. Firefox 3 has a number of cool features, which you can read about in this field guide. There is also the revamped ccSearch in the browser's toolbar. This search function identifes CC-licensed works from a range of sources by indexing works tagged with ccREL, the metadata specification developed by Creative Commons to express its licensing elements...

Oh By The Way

Posted on June 07, 2008
I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but oh well.Next year, when I (finally!) enter law school, I will be doing so at the lovely University of Chicago.If you're in town, please stop by and say hi as I finally lose my amateur status.

Law Review Innovation: The Peer-Assist System

Posted on May 22, 2008
Back when I first joined this blog in November 2006, one of the first topics I discussed was law review innovation (see here and here). What I didn't disclose back then was that law reviews were on my mind because just five days before I made my first post here, a few friends and I had submitted to Penn Law School a proposal for a new business law journal (in response to an open call for proposals from the administration)...

Is Libertarian Paternalism Consistent with Parternalist Principles?

Posted on May 08, 2008
Thanks to Marc Randazza linking to my blog post from last month about whether libertarian paternalism is libertarian, I feel obligated to make the promised follow-up post on whether libertarian paternalism is consistent with paternalist values.Unlike libertarians, paternalists do not place nearly as high a premium on true freedom of choice...

Is Libertarian Paternalism Libertarian?

Posted on April 15, 2008
As mentioned yesterday, Cass Sunstein is currently guest blogging on the topic of libertarian paternalism at the Volokh Conspiracy. In his introductory post, Professor Sunstein summarizes his idea as follows:The basic idea is that private and public institutions might choose approaches that a) fully maintain freedom of choice (and are in that sense libertarian) but b) gently steer people's decisions in directions that will make their lives go better by their own lights (and are in that sense paternalistic)...

Sunstein Blogging on Libertarian Paternalism

Posted on April 14, 2008
Cass Sunstein is guest blogging about libertarian paternalism over on the Volokh Conspiracy. His first post can be found here. I will likely post some of my thoughts on the subject here later this week.

sousveillance: a worm´s eyeview

Posted on April 14, 2008
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us.-- John Berger in About LookingWhat do you get when you inverse surveillance? A neologism: sousveillance.For those of us who don't speak français as well as we ought, at least we can decipher that sousveillance is not describing the "traditional" perspective of an observer, i...

slide rulz: a librarian?s best friend?

Posted on April 08, 2008
For anyone that mourning the death of slide rulers, dry your eyes because the OITP Copyright Slider is alive and on the market! While the slider vaguely recalls the horrendous Mathland modules I suffered through in Department of Defense Dependents Schools, it does indeed seem like a useful tool for establishing the year in which copyrighted works (in the US) enter the public domain...

Don't Take The Bait

Posted on March 26, 2008
On the recent Medellin decision, Orin Kerr: "I predict at least a handful of student case comment titles in 2009 that will try to make use of the similarities between the defedant's name and the word "meddling." (For example, "Meddling With the Treaty Power in Medellin," etc...

Anonymous Articles Editor Blog

Posted on March 26, 2008
Several articles editors at top law reviews have started a very interesting blog, available here. Not many posts, but lots of extremely useful information for authors in the active comments sections.

U.S. News Rankings Leaked Early?

Posted on March 25, 2008
See here, here, and here.

keys, money, and mobile phone: the holy trinity

Posted on March 24, 2008
(via thornet)Every day when you prepare to the leave the house, you are confronted with a decision that market analysts and designers drool over, namely, what items do you take with you out of the house?Let's model this. Presumably you have already in your life accumulated an impressive array of objects...

Another Mover: Michelle Thorne

Posted on March 24, 2008
Testing...testing. 1...2...3.A warm hello and a hearty thank-you from the new girl. By way of introduction, I'm Michelle Thorne, often mistaken in a hasty Google search for another, more notorious Michelle Thorne. To any false hits through my Googlegänger, I fondly retort, "I'm sorry...

Chilling Effects: The Communications Decency Act and the Online Marketplace of Ideas

Posted on March 09, 2008
The current draft of my latest paper, titled Chilling Effects: The Communications Decency Act and the Online Marketplace of Ideas, is now available here at SSRN.

The AK47 Motion and Anonymous Internet Speech

Posted on March 03, 2008
Jill at Feministe has made a post about the motion to quash a subpoena directed at AT&T filed by pseudonymous defendant "AK47" in the AutoAdmit litigation (the motion is available here).Jill makes a good point about the identification issue. I don't find AK47's "I was just talking generally about Jills...

David's J.L. & Cool Stuff (Vol. 4)

Posted on January 17, 2008
Adeno Addis, The Concept of Critical Mass in Legal Discourse, 29 Cardozo L. Rev. 97 (2007)Darryl K. Brown, Democracy and Decriminalization, 86 Tex. L. Rev 223 (2007)Brent T. White, Say You're Sorry: Court-Ordered Apologies as a Civil Rights Remedy, 91 Cornell L...

David's J.L. & Cool Stuff (Vol. 3)

Posted on November 14, 2007
It's been awhile, but thanks to Concurring Opinion's "law review table of contents" project, finding neat articles is easier than ever!Dan Ortiz, Nice Legal Studies (draft paper).Katherine Y. Barnes, Is Affirmative Action Responsible for the Achievement Gap Between Black and White Law Students?, 101 Nw...

When Separation Doesn't Work

Posted on October 29, 2007
When Separation Doesn't Work: The Religion Clause as an Anti-Subordination Principle, 5 Dartmouth L.J. 48 (2007).Hot off the virtual press (though print copies should, theoretically, be floating out there too). And my first real academic publication, to boot!

Young Scholars Call for Papers

Posted on October 15, 2007
Apropos for readers of this blog, so I thought I'd pass it along: THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW ANNOUNCES ITS SIXTH ANNUAL YOUNG SCHOLARS' CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS FROM JD STUDENTS Deadline: December 10, 2007 The Yale Journal of International Law (YJIL) is accepting submissions for its Young Scholars' Conference, which will take place on March 1, 2008...

hypothetical copyright exam question

Posted on October 02, 2007
[picture: 'Unsolved Mystery', by ButterflySha, used under a CC-BY license.]Hypothetical copyright exam question for your late-night pondering: If a poem is derived from statistical analysis of 22 books, but contains no actual direct sequences from those books longer than 2-3 words, is it a derivative work of those 22 books?Thou shalt be I...

Baby Blues

Posted on September 28, 2007
Just to reinforce how young I am....I'm taking the LSAT tomorrow!Scary. Wish me luck.

quick review of Law Study Systems

Posted on September 08, 2007
I suppose it was almost inevitable- you can study for LSATs and bar exams online, and you can invest piles of money into various law school study aids, so it was only a matter of time before someone created an online study system for the typical 1L legal curriculum...

The Id, The Ego, and Equal Protection Symposium

Posted on August 29, 2007
The Connecticut Law Review is going to host a symposium on the 20th anniversary of Charles Lawrence III's influential article, The Id, The Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism, published in 1987 by the Stanford Law Review. It's a great article, and the cast of the symposium looks pretty high caliber as well...

AltLaw

Posted on August 25, 2007
Announcing the launch of AltLaw, an advanced search engine for the last ten years of Supreme and Appellate Court opinions. The project was created with the help of our very own Luis Villa, and looks to be quite the nifty little creature.So thanks, Luis, and everybody else who got this tool up and running.

I'm #9!

Posted on July 10, 2007
According to SSRN download statistics for the past two months (May 11th to July 10th), my article is ranked #9 in downloads among all articles in the Law & Society: Public Law section. It reached that lofty position with 58 downloads.The article, in case you've forgotten, is entitled When Separation Doesn't Work: The Religion Clauses as Anti-Subordination Principles, and it is forthcoming soon in the Dartmouth Law Journal...

Do Law Reviews Matter?

Posted on June 28, 2007
So asks CONNtemplations, the Connecticut Law Review's online supplement, which has just posted some very interesting essays examining this question.I will try to post some thoughts on these essays sometime in the coming weeks (bar prep permitting), particularly since a few authors have engaged some of my earlier arguments regarding law reviews and online supplements...

Thomas v. Breyer Smackdown

Posted on June 28, 2007
Amid all the drama of today's school racial classification decisions, check out footnote 15 of Justice Thomas' concurrence. It compares Justice Breyer's dissent to the Lochner majority opinion by cryptically, but unmistakenly, implying Justice Breyer seeks to import his book Active Liberty into the law as Lochner allegedly sought to import Herbert Spencer's book Social Statics...

How I'm Spending My Summer, GPL v3 edition

Posted on June 26, 2007
I'm spending my summer working in the Legal Affairs department at Red Hat, Inc. ("The Open Source Leader.") Not coincidentally, the past several weeks of my life have been a deep dive into the esoterica of copyright/copyleft licensing- particularly the new GNU General Public License, due to be released this week...

Balkin/Ackerman Throwdown

Posted on June 03, 2007
Well, not quite--but "respectful engagement" just doesn't pop the same way. Still, any law geek readers (any of y'all out there?) shouldn't miss Jack Balkin's four-part response (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four) to Bruce Ackerman's Holmes Lectures, The Living Constitution.

Conference Spotting

Posted on May 31, 2007
A few months ago, I described the color-blind ideology as "the French model," due to the fact that color-blindness has found its purest home in the land of the Gauls (and also, admittedly, because I figured it would annoy those on the right who like to think of Europe as enthralled by hyper-liberal multiculturalism)...

The Digital Identity of University

Posted on May 31, 2007
Tomorrow afternoon I will facilitate the Digital Identify of University working group at Harvard Law School's Internet & Society conference. Here is the description of the working group:With digital tools such as message boards, social networks, and search engines making University and its clients? identities more public than ever, navigating the integrated media landscape for students and other members of University has become increasingly difficult...

Will The Real Jonathan Adler Please Stand Up?

Posted on May 26, 2007
Running through a very interesting NYT article on how we use narratives to construct our lives, I read this passage: Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people?s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery...

Student Publishing Opportunity in Penn Law Review

Posted on May 18, 2007
Topic: The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005Deadline: September 15, 2007PDF flyer available here.Hat tip: Concurring Opinions.

Torture and Newspeak

Posted on May 15, 2007
Did anyone get the sense that Ron Paul was the only candidate in the Republican Debate tonight that has read the book 1984? He took Brit Hume's covert phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" and said "it sounds like newspeak" and is just another word for torture...

Horowitz on Anonymous Internet Defamation

Posted on May 15, 2007
Steven J. Horowitz has uploaded a short essay, titled Defusing a Google Bomb, to SSRN. Here's the abstract:Anonymous internet defamation is nothing new, but the recent Autoadmit controversy highlights one particularly difficult aspect of this problem: Google bombing...

Drumbl Making an Appearance at PrawfsBlawg

Posted on May 10, 2007
Washington & Lee Law Professor Mark Drumbl will be guest-blogging at PrawfsBlawg over the next few weeks. Drumbl, for those of you who don't know, is a baller and one of the most interesting theorists on the punishment of mass atrocities (genocide and the like)...

The Second Amendment--Next Stop Supreme Court?

Posted on May 08, 2007
Via David Kopel at Volokh, the DC Circuit has denied en banc review in Parker v. District of Columbia, the (for now) successful challenge to the District of Columbia's ban on handguns and functional longarms. I was all set to blog tomorrow about how it had been a month since the District filed its petition for review and no response had been requested by the Court...

Symposium Announcement

Posted on May 07, 2007
The Berkeley Journal of African-American Law and Policy will be hosting its annual symposium on "Setting the Agenda: Examining the Critical Legal Issues Facing African-Americans and Minority Communities in the 2008 Election." Papers are due June 8th, decisions will be given out by June 20th, and the conference itself will be held November 9th...

The Motive and The Message

Posted on May 03, 2007
Over at my home base, I give some thoughts on the proposed hate crimes bill moving through Congress.

What allows for a "Thatcher" Moment?

Posted on April 28, 2007
There's a great piece in today's Times (I would say "London Times," but it really is just "The Times") by Matthew Parris on prospects for economic reform in France if Nicolas Sarkozy is elected in a week. That France is in dire need of economic liberalization there is no doubt, argues Parris and as I would agree...

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