Law School

Se7enth heaven

Posted on May 13, 2008
"GrumpyLaw"? Hardly. Unwarranted name-calling aside ? ? ? , Geoffrey Rapp deserves the highest praise for his Prawfsblawg post on the reasons that some tenured law professors give for not writing. As Lynn Baker once told me, joining issue is the highest form of intellectual flattery...

Teaching Evaluations Again

Posted on May 08, 2008
I have written before about teaching evaluations but have not done an in depth study of what they tell us. As a economist many years ago all of us teaching the basic course did use a common exam and compared student evaluations with how the students did and found no correlation...

Forget about Memorization

Posted on May 07, 2008
A recent article in Wired, Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm, offers both a fascinating sketch of Piotr Wozniak's single-minded pursuit of memorization and all that you need to know if you want to match his incredible achievements...

Writing, Talking, and Anonymity

Posted on May 06, 2008
The exchange on anonymous posts made me think of another small discussion on this blog about written and spoken messages. (I am not talking about the series on the (not) New York Times rule.) I took the position that a written message ? even an argument ? is sometimes preferable because it forces the other person to ?listen? before responding...

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MoneyBall 101 for managers

Posted on May 05, 2008
During the InterACT San Francisco conference in May 2007, managerial consultant James Taylor nicely summarized the tenets of MoneyBall, as presented by Michael Lewis himself:Michael [Lewis] said that writing about sports is a way to tackle broader issues...

The Law of Rock

Posted on May 04, 2008
By way of the Daily Californian, Jurisdynamics and MoneyLaw have learned a matter of earthshaking importance in legal education:Josh Keesan, a law student at the University of California-Berkeley, has recorded The Law of Rock, Volume 1. To the best of my knowledge, this album represents the first, full-length, studio-recorded effort to express legal doctrines as works of rock 'n' roll...

Law, Finance, Accounting, and the J.D.-M.B.A.

Posted on May 04, 2008
(Cross Posted at Legal Profession Blog)Over at PrawfsBlawg, Adam Levitin  (Georgetown, left) provoked a discussion on the value of the JD-MBA degree, as well as the general shortcomings of business law education.  Let me throw in my two cents' worth.We need to distinguish between the value of the skills and the value of the degrees...

My Best Teacher

Posted on May 04, 2008
Professors hear a great deal about good and bad teaching. Virtually every teacher I know has a group of students who think he or she is the greatest and virtually all of them have some students who feel just the opposite. In reality most of us know practically nothing about what goes on in the classrooms of colleagues...

The Student Loan Bubble

Posted on May 02, 2008
Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity thinks the next US financial crisis will be the popping of the student loan bubble. In a recent report, Gillen draws parallels between the conditions leading up to the current housing crisis and those in the market for higher ed...

The Future of the Legal Academy - Some Thoughts

Posted on May 01, 2008
(Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog)A recent blog post by Josh Wright on the future of law and economics has prompted responses from Larry Ribstein and Larry Solum.  In a nutshell, Wright discusses the relationship between the basic skills underlying expertise in law versus expertise in economics, and, in particular, the increasing sophistication and inaccessibility of the the economic modeling and econometric work as L&E comes to be dominated by economists rather than lawyers...

Majoring in Not Teaching

Posted on April 29, 2008
Commenting on Jeff Harrison's April 27 MoneyLaw post,"Majoring in Not Law," Anonymous Yale Grad Turned Law Professor writes:You assume that law professors should teach the law -- as declared by the courts. But as every Yalie knows, what courts do is often wrong; judges' words are not "the law...

Graduation Day

Posted on April 29, 2008
All good things must come to an end, and so it goes for law school. The big day is almost upon us for the Class of 2008. Mom and Dad are beaming, particularly at the thought of not having to pay any more tuition bills. Law students are exercising their right arm, ready to flip that tassel to the side of worldliness...

More Thoughts on Art

Posted on April 29, 2008
In Thoughts on Art, on Red Lion Reports Kelly Bozanic asked: What is art? Kelly offered an answer to her own question partly in response to a story in the Yale Daily News. The story reported that a Yale art student inseminated herself "as often as possible" and used an abortifacient drug to abort multiple pregancies...

Der amerikanischen Bevölkerung

Posted on April 29, 2008
Hans Haacke, Der Bevölkerung (1999/2000)Hans Haacke's bold transformation of an interior courtyard dedicates the German Reichstag to Der Bevölkerung. A play on the Reichstag's original dedication, Dem Deutschen Völke (To the German People), Der Bevölkerung pledges the symbol of new German democracy "To the Population...

Majoring in Not Law

Posted on April 27, 2008
I guess by now most have seen or read the empirical study byRoyce de Rohan Barondes showing that the higher the percentage of Yale grad clerks a judge has the higher the likelihood that a decision by the judge will run into trouble on appeal. The correlation between other elite clerks and appellate problems is equivocal...

The Foolish Decision Safety Commission

Posted on April 26, 2008
(Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog)Just to prove, I guess, that even Harvard law professors, and distinguished ones at that, can get carried away with analogical reasoning, Elizabeth Warren has proposed a Financial Product Safety Commission, on the theory that, if government regulation can protect you from an unsafe toaster, it ought to be able to protect you from an unsafe mortgage...

Let Me Count the Ways

Posted on April 26, 2008
As I have noted before sometime in the mid to late eighties or early 90s legal scholarship took a shift to a race for lines on resumes. In think it roughly coincides with the ratings chase and the full development of symposia issues. I think it was June 17, 1991 but that could be off a day or two...

Beware the dreaded Gopher Jacket!

Posted on April 23, 2008
  François Sainfort is the head of the University of Minnesota's Division of Health Policy and Management. Julie Jacko, his wife, serves as director of Minnesota's Institute for Health Informatics and holds double appointments in that university's schools of nursing and public health...

A Hard Day's Night

Posted on April 22, 2008
The Beatles, A Hard Day's NightDigging into the MoneyLaw mailbag, I'm pleased to share this note from Jessica Silbey:I am writing to recommend a new article by my colleage Michael Rustad and his co-author Thomas Koenig. It?s in a Syracuse Law Review symposium devoted to lawyering in the 21st century (volume 58, number 2, 2008)...

Evaluations

Posted on April 22, 2008
A recent experience and thoughts of a departed colleague led me down the path of thinking about how to evaluate teaching. The event was a conversation with a student who noted that a certain teacher left him in stitches everyday as though this meant it was good teaching...

Is Moneyball Passé?

Posted on April 22, 2008
Dan Drezner suggests that the Moneyball phenomenon may be a victim of its own success -- Winning Strategy Loses Its Edge (Marketplace):Dan Drezner, Team's winning strategy loses its edge  (April 18, 2008)Some baseball traditionalists are delighted by the A's woes...

a seat at the (conference) table

Posted on April 22, 2008
Part of being a good institutional citizen of your school/university is attending paper talks. No, not just those free food ones sponsored by this and that student org or law firm. Go to those too, although you will get sick of pizza. If you are the type that goes just to get food but not from interest, well, that's a little mercenary of you, but who am I to parse and judge motives?No, I am talking about the true test of intellectual interest and commitment: the brown bag paper talk...

Satisfied by simple things, like breathing in and breathing out

Posted on April 21, 2008
As the academic year comes to a close, it is time to take stock and look forward. If, like me, you often walk between the twin shadows of despair and defiance, perhaps a little musical validation is in order. Herewith Natalie Merchant, Not in This Life, on Motherland (2001):Not in This LifeLately I've been walking all aloneThrough the wind and through the rainBeen walking through the streetsFinding sweet relief in knowing that it won't be longLately it's occurred to meThat I've had enough of thatAnd lately I've been satisfied by simple thingsLike breathing in and breathing outNever again, not in this lifeWill I be taken twiceNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeI can't make it twiceLately it's occurred to meExactly what went wrongI realized I compromised, I sacrificedFar too much for far too longNever again, not in this lifeWill I be taken twiceNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeI can't make it twiceStarting out from here todaySwear I'm gonna change my waysOnce mistaken in this lifeBut never twiceNever again, not in this lifeWill I be taken twiceNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeCan't make it twiceStarting out from here today ...

Birthday as (Athletic) Destiny

Posted on April 21, 2008
Growing up in Boston, my goal was to play first base for the Red Sox. After a mediocre high school and college career, I hung up the spikes for good. It turns out the my failing owed more to my July 27 birthday than to my inability to hit a curveball: The Boys of Late Summer: Why Do So Many Pro Baseball Players have August birthdays? (Slate), by Greg Spira:Since 1950, a baby born in the United States in August has had a 50% to 60% better chance of making the big leagues than a baby born in July...

Law School Rankings by 1L Attrition Rates

Posted on April 18, 2008
LawSchoolNumbers.com ranks the 195 law schools by 1L attrition rates. (The ABA Section on Legal Education publishes aggregate attrition rates, and each school's attrition rate is available on its official ABA data sheet.) TaxProf Blog lists the 25 law schools with the highest and lowest attrition rates, along with the school's 2009 U...

Vega: Star power and earthly reality

Posted on April 16, 2008
Vega, also known as ? Lyrae, is a zero-magnitude star in the constellation Lyra. The fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest in the northern celestial hemisphere, Vega forms, with Deneb and Altair, the Summer Triangle. Suzanne Vega — well, she's just a star, plain and simple...

John Yoo and Tenure

Posted on April 13, 2008
I am not a first amendment lawyer nor am I well-qualified to write about academic freedom, but I have been intrigued by the discussion of whether John Yoo can or should be fired in connection with his authorship of the infamous torture memo.The National Lawyer's Guild, which opposed efforts to fire Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado, has called for Yoo to be fired...

Fidelity in translation

Posted on April 11, 2008
Cross-posted at Madisonian.netWith apologies to Larry Lessig, whose classic law review article title I am snagging and translating quite faithlessly, and with kudos to Al Brophy, who has stated the financial realities as bluntly as anyone in this mobblog has...

Class is in

Posted on April 10, 2008
At law schools there tend to be three divisions. One is between faculty and staff. And then there is the tenure track/non tenure track faculty division. Finally the high paid and low paid tenure track people. This last division is not necessarily between tenured and untenured people...

And then there are those who prefer Pottersville

Posted on April 09, 2008
The classic movie, It's a Wonderful Life, has its fans on MoneyLaw, most vocally Marie Reilly and me. Stumbling across an old Salon article reminds me that there are those who prefer Pottersville to Bedford Falls.Why does this matter? Because the market for academic labor is fickle and heavily populated with players who tend to prefer big-city entertainment over quieter settings with greater intensity than the broader pool of educated professionals, let alone the American population as a whole...

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