Corporate Governance

Outrageous! In what world is it ok for a judge and a prosecutor to sleep together while working on the same case?

Posted on June 17, 2008
Charles Hood is scheduled to be executed tonight at 6pm Texas time. According to the New York Times (here) and ABC-TV (here), Hood has alleged that the judge in his case was sleeping with the prosecutor in his case. Late yesterday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Mr...

Local lawyer does the right thing

Posted on June 14, 2008
After a lawyer misappropriated more than $200K from her firm's client trust account (an act for which she was later suspended from the practice of law), an associate in her firm compensated all of her clients.  For the full story about this case, see here...

Brian Leiter is becoming one of my go-to bloggers for problems w/the USNWR rankings

Posted on June 05, 2008
As I sit in the Phoenix airport, grateful for the free wireless, I've been browsing my favorite blogs, and I always read Brian's posts on the rankings.  On June 3 (hey, I have some catching up to do....), Brian names names about the schools that take the most transfer students (see here)...

VINDICATED! Dell's marketing, warranties problems show up in court

Posted on May 28, 2008
In today's New York Times about Dell's failure to follow through on its "next-day" warranties:  see here.  NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had accused Dell of "false and deceptive advertising":  "For too long at Dell the promise of customer service was a bait and switch that left thousands of people paying for essentially no service at all...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

And a great post from the Legal Profession Blog about depressed lawyers

Posted on May 06, 2008
For those of us who struggle with depression, the Legal Profession Blog has a great post today (here) about depression, lawyers, and job satisfaction issues. Hat-tip to Alan Childress.

Urban myth or chilling commentary on law firm life?

Posted on May 06, 2008
This post (here) from Above the Law is making the rounds today. A hat-tip to my buddy Kathleen Lyon for telling me about it.

A lovely post about dean qualifications

Posted on May 04, 2008
A hat-tip to Alan Childress over at Legal Profession Blog for pointing out a well-done post (here) by Michael Froomkin.

American Bankruptcy Institute/University of Illinois College of Law's Interdisciplinary Academic Symposium on Debt

Posted on May 03, 2008
I'm sitting in the session that Elizabeth Warren & Bruce Markell are doing in the Debt symposium, marveling at how well this whole interdisciplinary symposium is going.  (For some play-by-play blogging of the conference, see Mechele Dickerson's posts over at Credit Slips...

Bravo to Bill Henderson & Andy Morriss (as always)

Posted on April 17, 2008
For their op-ed in the National Law Journal (here) about other choices that students can make, in light of the rankings.

A post on the lighter side

Posted on April 16, 2008
Over at PrawfsBlog, there's a discussion of the most screwed victims in caselaw history, along with the list of finalists.  Not only does the list include one of my faves (the Peevyhouses), but it includes other classics as well.  Enjoy!

Bob Morse on comments about the rankings

Posted on April 16, 2008
See here.

Are bankruptcy judges unconstitutional?

Posted on April 09, 2008
Another one of my colleagues here at UNLV, Tuan Samahon, has made some interesting arguments that they are--see here. (If you're getting the impression that there's cool work being done here at UNLV, you're right!)

A new take on article selection for law reviews

Posted on April 09, 2008
One of my colleagues at UNLV, Rachel Anderson, has posted an intriguing article on SSRN about market failure in the selection of articles for law reviews. See here for the draft.

Musings on the ideal law faculty

Posted on April 08, 2008
That's the topic of my second post on the mobblog, over at Madisonian.net (here).

Mobblog on legal education over at Madisonian.net

Posted on April 07, 2008
Thanks to Mike Madison & Deven Desai, there's a fun mobblog going on at Madisonian.net: see here for Erwin Chemerinsky's first post, here for Mike Madison's first post, here for Deven Desai's first post, and here for my first post. Enjoy!

Wondering about the fate of the billable hour?

Posted on April 07, 2008
I'm going to be at DePaul's one-day conference on Lawyers, Law Firms, and the Legal Profession: An Ethical View of the Business of Law (click here for more information). This year's conference, part of the Commercial Law League of America's Spring Meeting in Chicago (here) seems particularly timely, and the speakers are going to be quite good...

You've gotta love this--the perfect decanal letter(s) responding to USNWR rankings

Posted on April 07, 2008
Thanks to the WSJ.com Law Blog, you can now read University of Tennessee law prof Gregory Stein's parodies of decanal letters responding to increases and decreases in the USNWR rankings (here). Bravo!

A must-read blog post by Jeff Lipshaw

Posted on April 05, 2008
If you ever wonder what lawyers and other service providers in the corporate world are thinking when they give grey-area advice that might precipitate a corporate scandal, then you'll want to read Jeff Lipshaw's post, Realism and Idealism in Business Ethics:  A Post-Bear Reflection, on Daniel Solove's Concurring Opinions blog (see here)...

Yet more suggestions about the rankings

Posted on April 05, 2008
See Daniel Solove's very sensible observations (here).  

More suggestions about changing the rankings

Posted on April 02, 2008
See Brian Leiter's open letter to Bob Morse of USNWR (here). Although I don't agree with all of Brian's suggestions, I certainly commend his efforts to suggest ways of reducing schools' abilities to game the rankings with easily manipulable or fraudulent data...

Cognitive dissonance and the USNWR rankings

Posted on March 31, 2008
As Brian Leiter correctly points out (here), the schools listed on Paul Caron's post (here) are trying to eat their cake and have it, too: objecting to USNWR's rankings, on the one hand, as being misleading, arbitrary, etc., and publicizing the heck out of their own results, on the other hand...

Putting my money where my mouth is....

Posted on March 27, 2008
In keeping with my comments in the recent ABA Journal article on the rankings (here), talking about improving USNWR's rankings to make them, well, useful would be helpful. Over at Concurring Opinions, Daniel Solove has started such a project (here). Here are his suggestions:1...

Before the USNWR rankings come out....

Posted on March 25, 2008
Here's the ABA Journal's spin on all of this (click here).

Some thoughts on Jeff Skilling's appeal and his allegations about the suppression of exculpatory evidence

Posted on March 17, 2008
The more I see groups of people making obviously bad decisions with clearly foreseeable repercussions, the more I realize that law has very little power to regulate human behavior unless the law takes into account the fact that humans tend toward certain types of cognitive errors...

Some fun reads

Posted on March 14, 2008
Paul Secunda's Tales of a Law Professor Lateral Nothing (here) and J. Robert Brown, Jr.'s Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings (here).  Thanks go to Jeff Lipshaw and the Legal Profession blog for turning me on to Secunda's piece, which turned me on to Brown's piece!

Bravo to Brian Leiter for his suggestion about blogging on the upcoming USNWR rankings!

Posted on March 13, 2008
Brian has posted a very sensible suggestion (here) about blogging about the upcoming USNWR rankings, which come out in a couple of weeks. As he suggests, blogging about the overall rankings is mostly a "garbage in, garbage out" exercise: the overall rankings have too many problems that specific postings on them is like shooting fish in a barrel...

More on the Deadwood Report

Posted on March 04, 2008
Bob Morse of USNWR has blogged about it (see here), and he suggests that deans and faculty members may not be so sanguine about having the claims in their publications challenged by the Green Bag's Deadwood Report.  I think that all of us are looking forward to seeing how the methodology works:  every school's website and publications is different, and verifying claims will be no easy task...

Bravo to the Green Bag!

Posted on February 27, 2008
Thanks to Inside Higher Education, Brian Leiter, my dad, and the Green Bag itself, there's a new ranking system in town: Green Bag's Deadwood Report system.Different from HBO's 2004 Deadwood TV series, Green Bag "will [focus] on the most dully objective of measures: whether the work is being done ? whether each law school faculty member is teaching courses, publishing scholarly works, and performing pro bono service...

More on Judge Sneed's passing....

Posted on February 21, 2008
Over at one of my favorite blogs, TaxProf Blog (here).

Why the anonymous posts?

Posted on February 19, 2008
I've been wondering why people post comments to blogs on an anonymous basis. Are they afraid of being harassed? Are they shy? Are they uncomfortable putting their names on their opinions?So far, I've allowed anonymous posting, but most of what I've seen is just nasty stuff, which leads to my conclusion that only cowards post anonymously...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.