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The Faculty Lounge 
General interest law blog that seeks to replicate the experience of overhearing the conservation in a faculty lounge.
Post Frequency: 5.8/day Last Entry: November 20, 2009 at 23:58:19 Recent Entries: 1569
By Dan Filler, Laura Appleman et al.
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Tenure Reviews and the Appointments Process
Posted on November 20, 2009I've often wondered about norms within academia about appropriate uses for tenure letters, particularly in appointments processes involving other schools. I'm thinking particularly about two situations. 1. If Professor X writes a tenure letter in support of Candidate Y's application...
Twitter for Class
Posted on November 20, 2009What is a good way of sharing information with your class that is effective and not annoying? I often see news articles, video clips, or blog posts that my be of use to students, but I don't want to email...
Iowa Law Slowly Unfolds List Of Five Dean Finalists
Posted on November 20, 2009The University of Iowa College of Law is starting on-campus interviews of candidates for its deanship. The first person coming to campus will be Gregory Mark, a professor and associate dean at Rutgers - Newark. Other individuals will be coming...
Google Delivers The Law. Are West and Lexis Sweating?
Posted on November 19, 2009Google is at it again. Google Scholar has just been expanded to include (some number of) federal judicial opinions. I'm not certain the extent of this collection and, because of that, I'm not sure whether this collection is tons more...
Your Thursday morning retro entertainment
Posted on November 19, 2009You have to dig really deep into the 80s vault to find this one.
Mid-week Links
Posted on November 19, 2009From Above the Law, Law School Tuition Hikes in California. Says Elie Mystal: ?And UC Davis, what the hell are you thinking? Do students get their own private sex slave with those tuition checks?? (Prior Lounge coverage of the UC...
Call For Papers: Articles, Essays And Reviews About South Asia
Posted on November 19, 2009The Drexel Law Review has posted this call for papers for an upcoming symposium issue: The Drexel Law Review is pleased to announce a symposium issue focusing on law and policy in South Asia to be published during Spring/Summer 2010....
Super Lawyers Rankings and Law School Size
Posted on November 19, 2009Following up on Dan Filler's post on the Super Lawyers Rankings (as modified by Dean Van Zandt of Northwestern) and correcting for size of JD institution, I thought that I'd take a quick look at the rankings and their relationship...
The Van Zandt Law School Rankings
Posted on November 19, 2009The folks over at Above the Law are reporting that Northwestern Law dean David Van Zandt has issued an email to law students addressing the new Super Lawyer rankings. In these rankings, which we discussed here, Northwestern landed at #18....
Rankings Fever! Super Lawyers Announces New Law School Ranks
Posted on November 18, 2009Hot of the freaking press!!! Super Lawyers, that publication that tells us just who the Super Lawyers really are, now tells us just who the Super Law Schools really are. It's here. The top 15, in order: Harvard, Michigan, Texas,...
Edward Woodward: 1930-2009
Posted on November 18, 2009Versatile actor Edward Woodward died earlier this week. You can find The New York Times obituary here. Many readers may remember Woodward from his television work in "The Equalizer" (1985-89). But I'll always remember him from his role in "Breaker...
Rankings: This Just In!
Posted on November 18, 2009Car & Driver magazine to rank law schools on the basis of how many faculty members subscribe to Car & Driver magazine.
And the winner is ...
Posted on November 18, 2009In my usual attempt to avoid serious issues, I've noticed that we're about to step into the Hollywood awards season in the next few months and the NY Times has started using phrases like "Oscar Buzz" in its entertainment section....
Deval Patrick Tentatively Supports UMass Dartmouth Law School
Posted on November 17, 2009Score one for Southern New England School of Law and the rah-rah squad at UMass - Dartmouth. As we've talked about previously, SNESL trying to merge with UMass Dartmouth. Put perhaps more precisely, SNESL is trying to stay afloat (and...
Crusaders against Political Correctness, Prenez Courage!
Posted on November 17, 2009It's an article of faith among some cultural warriors that the truth about American Indians, Islam, and, well, nearly everything has fallen to the forces of political correctness. The idea is that back in the good old days, textbooks presented...
What Took Them So Long? Motive's Easy!
Posted on November 17, 2009It's shameful that CNN took more than two years to figure out the motives for these murderous shootings by U.S. soldiers when that sort of inquiry into motive really shouldn't take more than a few hours.
Fooled By Randomness
Posted on November 16, 2009No, not the Nicholas Taleb book ? Madoff?s investors and the SEC. From Ashby Jones, two computer programmers for Madoff?s former operation were arrested and charged Friday with creating computer programs that helped Madoff hide his fraud from regulators (complaint...
The South Carolina Monument to the Mexican American War
Posted on November 16, 2009Continuing on my posts on monuments around the South Carolina statehouse.... I usually think of nineteenth century monuments as blocks of granite (or if you're in a cemetery, perhaps marble -- though often granite there as well). But every once...
Seattle Law Posts A Notable List Of Dean Finalists
Posted on November 16, 2009The Seattle University School of Law has announced the four finalists in its dean search. It's an interesting and impressive list both because the talent pool is pretty exceptional and all four individuals are people of color. They include: Karen...
Weekend Links
Posted on November 15, 2009Erik Gerding is doing a great series of guest posts over at The Conglomerate, ranging from legal education and law firms to the financial crisis and corporate law scholarship. Head over there and check out all the recent activity. Bill...
Taxing Taboo Trades
Posted on November 14, 2009Via Paul Caron, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on Wednesday, GETTING PERSONAL: Tax Code Lags Growing Body-Parts Market (subscribers only). The article begins: Organs and blood products, eggs, sperm, breast milk and other goods from the human body...
I Think We All Know Someone Like This.
Posted on November 14, 2009"Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution to Be."
Just call me "soft socratic"...
Posted on November 14, 2009One late observation on the hiring conference (and this happens every year)... When asked about their "teaching style", candidates invariably answer "soft socratic". In other words, they like to create a welcoming atmosphere in the classroom where students feel free...
Kelo and Eminent Domain
Posted on November 13, 2009Readers interested in Kelo and eminent domain may enjoy the most recent "room for debate" column in The New York Times. Titled "A Turning Point for Eminent Domain?", the commentary includes remarks from journalist and author Paul Bass, attorney Dana....
FantasySCOTUS
Posted on November 13, 2009This is a very, very clever idea! I've just kicked in the $5 to sign up. Come on, SCOTUS geeks. Put your money where your mouths are.
Feeling OK?
Posted on November 13, 2009(A previous post, but timely again.) Did you wake up feeling under the weather? Got a case of the shakes? Maybe a bit of breathlessness? Nausea? Perhaps excessive sweating and dry mouth? Did you wake up with heart palpitations and...
A Colossal Error in Judgment
Posted on November 13, 2009Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try the terrorist kingpins in federal court in New York City is a terrible judgment call, but probably to be expected from an administration that fails to understand that Islamic jihadists have, in their...
Harvard Law Grad Loses Two Husbands To War
Posted on November 12, 2009Cynthia Tidler graduated from HLS in 1997. Her first husband, also HLS 1997, died in Afghanistan in 2003 while serving his country. Cynthia married another 1997 classmate from HLS earlier this year. Last month he, too, died in Afghanistan while...
Major Hasan: Why Nobody Acted to Prevent the Fort Hood Massacre
Posted on November 12, 2009NationalPublic Radio reported yesterday that Hasan's superiors and co-workers at Walter Reed Hospital thought he was mentally unstable and openly speculated, based on Hasan's comments about Islamic jihad and the American military presence in the middle east, that he would...
More on Kristallnacht and David Brooks
Posted on November 11, 2009My post about Kristallnacht and David Brooks's NYT column has drawn some critical reaction from Steven Lubet (in the comments to the post) and from co-blogger Calvin Massey. Steven asks "precisely what [I was] suggesting by cautioning Brooks about Kristallnacht,"...
Mid-week Links
Posted on November 11, 2009Law fellowships: Paul Caron More Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors, put together by the Harvard Legal Theory Forum (using, I gather, Caron?s initial list of fellowships as a launching pad) Brian Leiter on Law and Philosophy Fellowship at University of...
Happy Birthday!
Posted on November 10, 2009A big shout-out to Elmo, Cookie Monster, Grover, Big Bird, and all of our other friends over at Sesame Street. The television show, which premiered on this date in 1969, turns 40 today. Happy Birthday!
Yet More Embryo Errors
Posted on November 10, 2009From Courthouse News Service: A couple who sought fertility services to prevent passing on a genetic disorder says doctors at the Reproductive Genetic Institute carelessly commingled their eggs and sperm with that of other patients to create embryos. ...
Catching My Eye
Posted on November 10, 2009A few days ago I received "legal education abstracts" from our friends at SSRN. Catching my eye is the abstract of an essay by Professor Scott Taylor (pictured), of the University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota). The essay...
Fort Hood: Let's Be Clear
Posted on November 10, 2009I must disagree with my co-blogger Eric Muller. There is no equation between Kristallnacht and calling Major Hasan an apparent jihadist. Facts: 1) When Hasan was required to present a medical topic to fellow medicos he instead delivered a radical...
On the 71st Anniversary of Kristallnacht
Posted on November 10, 2009Seventy-one years ago today, my grandfather Felix Müller was dragged from his home in Frankfurt to the Buchenwald concentration camp. His brother, my great-uncle Leopold, was arrested at his home in Bad Kissingen and locked up in the local jail....
It?s Raining, Men.
Posted on November 09, 2009The fourth annual Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms by the National Association of Women Lawyers is out and reports that: women are significantly under-represented in the upper levels of law firms and that the large...
Monument Law: South Carolina Statehouse Version
Posted on November 09, 2009Last summer I blogged some about the monuments around the Tennessee statehouse. Among the things I noted were that Tennessee has, in recent years, placed a monument to the slave trade alongside -- depending on the time of day, perhaps...
Free Speech and Media Consolidation: What's going on in Venezuela?
Posted on November 09, 2009In the United States, we're skeptical of media consolidation for fear that it stifles diversity of thought in the marketplace of ideas. But when do ownership limits that increase access to the airwaves themselves stifle free speech? That's the question...
Weekend Links
Posted on November 08, 2009Jeff Lipshaw on Louis Menand on the Marketplace of Ideas. The Daily Mail: South African athletics issue apology to Caster Semenya over handling of gender tests (HT: Doriane Coleman) ABA Journal: Ex-Associate Badmouths Former Firm in Legal Blog on his...
Is the Ban on Selling Bone Marrow Unconstitutional?
Posted on November 08, 2009Ian Ayres has doubts: I?m not sure if NOTA is unconstitutional. It?s pretty hard to convince a court that a statute is unconstitutionally irrational. But I?m pretty sure the United States would be a better place if MoreMarrowDonors.org could offer...
Law Professors Gone Wild!
Posted on November 08, 2009From Ashby Jones at the WSJ.com: Law Blog on the latest law professor complaint: Can we call this a trend: law professors tucking their grievances not into law review articles, but federal court complaints? (Gosh do we hope so. Law...
Here at the Hiring Conference....
Posted on November 07, 2009So we've made it half way through the AALS hiring conference. Any stories anyone wants to share? Best interviews? Worst interviews? (no names necessary) One anonymous candidate shared the following with me. First, the sight of the long and lonely...
?Meddling Women? In The Boardroom
Posted on November 06, 2009Gotta love the British press. According to the FT, this Daily Mail headline from August, ?Why ?meddling? women in the boardroom can wreck a company?s performance,? is understandably causing some consternation. The Daily Mail coverage was prompted by the Renee...
Michelle Marvin of "Palimony" fame, Dies at 76
Posted on November 06, 2009Michelle Triola Marvin, former partner of movie star Lee Marvin ("Dirty Dozen") died recently from lung cancer. She died at the home of Dick Van Dyke, her partner of 30 years. Marvin is most widely known from her public split...
Mary Harter Mitchell (1953-2009)
Posted on November 06, 2009Gerard Magliocca has already announced over at co-op that Mary Mitchell, a beloved and long-time professor at Indiana University-Indianapolis passed away earlier this week after a sudden illness. Indiana University's announcement is here. Mary was, in addition to being a...
An Old Fashioned Book Cutting?
Posted on November 05, 2009I blogged earlier about the Halloween plans at the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C., which included friend chicken and a burning of satanic music and books, most notably bibles that aren?t the King James Version. According to an...
Melbourne Law Dean Resigns
Posted on November 05, 2009Just to show that decanal scandals aren't limited to the United States, The Australian newspaper yesterday reported that the relatively new dean at Melbourne Law School (James Hathaway, originally from Canada) has resigned his position after 18 months into a...
Belmont Law School Names Jeffrey Kinsler Charter Dean
Posted on November 05, 2009Jeffrey Kinsler, a former dean at Applalachian School of Law, has been named the inaugural dean of Belmont University College of Law, in Nashville, Tennessee. The law school plans to open its doors in the fall of 2011 and will...
Mid-week Links
Posted on November 04, 2009Via Historiann, Johns Hopkins students are annoyed that Hopkins is playing Harvard in "The Social Network," a movie about the creation of Facebook by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. Ernst on Mashaw on Administrative Law in the Gilded Age Mary Dudziak?s...
My Life in the World's Top 3 Financial Centers...
Posted on November 04, 2009In full disclosure, fellow blogger Tim Z suggested it would be fitting for me to blog about the following. Yesterday, the World Economic Forum released its new rankings of the world's top financial centers. The big news was that the...
Is Health Public?
Posted on November 04, 2009I've been laid up with H1N1 for over a week now, so perhaps that makes me particularly obsessed with health issues. (I can't recommend the disease at all; my fever broke after 8 days and I still feel totally worn...
Bone Marrow Suit
Posted on November 04, 2009I?ve been remiss in not finding time yet to blog about Flynn v. Holder, the suit filed by the Institute for Justice challenging NOTA?s prohibition against compensated bone marrow donation. Luckily, Jeff Rowes has now saved me the trouble with...
More on A New Literary History of America
Posted on November 04, 2009We've been following for a while the roll out of Greil Marcus' and Werner Sollors' A New Literary History of America, along with the discussion of it as an innovation in how we think about literary history. The Chronicle of...
One Girl's Childhood with Harry Potter
Posted on November 03, 2009"Despite having known for years that the only thing at the back of a wardrobe is a wall and that no twig or pebble will ever be more than a twig or pebble, we all know that we can get...
Professor Michael Goldsmith: 1951-2009
Posted on November 03, 2009I've blogged previously on BYU law professor Michael Goldsmith, his courageous battle with ALS, and his work with Major League Baseball to raise awareness of the disease. See here and here. I had the honor of being one of Professor...
From Money To Diamonds To Toothpaste
Posted on November 03, 2009I've posted previously on the Justice Department and the IRS and their attempts to enforce disclosure laws concerning offshore financial accounts. Of particular interest have been accounts maintained with banking giant UBS. Recently, in a story written for the Los...
Manzanar finds just the right niche ...
Posted on November 02, 2009... for Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment," the egregiously flawed justification of the incarceration of Japanese Americans that she published back in 2004. I visited the Manzanar National Historic Site for the first time last Thursday. It was a...
New Uproar At DePaul: Women And Tenure
Posted on November 02, 2009It's been a tough year for DePaul University in Chicago. A few months ago we watched a nasty flame out over at the law school. When Dean Glenn Weissenberger concluded that the university was not conforming to (his understanding of)...
Marriott Wardman, Here We Come!
Posted on November 02, 2009This is the life-changing week so many have waited for: the arrival of the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference. Dance cards are filled, research agendas have been polished, questions are being anticipated (and responses rehearsed), etc. At this late stage, there's...
JOTWELL
Posted on November 02, 2009Today marks the grand opening of the new online Journal of Things We Like (Lots) - or JOTWELL - edited by Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami School of Law. This is a new kind of online law journal...
Hiring and Visiting
Posted on November 02, 2009Just to give those on the entry level market some more food for thought, it might be helpful for those being interviewed to give some thought to the scenario where they get a visiting offer rather than a tenure track...
Swine Flu Prediction Markets
Posted on November 02, 2009From Wednesday?s FT, swine flu contracts are trading on the Iowa Electronic Markets, run by Iowa University?s Henry B.?Tippie College of Business. The IEM has operated flu futures markets since 2004 and ran a bird flu market last year. This...
Is Jones v. Harris Boring? Is My Boss Overpaid? Blawg Readers Be The Judge
Posted on November 02, 2009I've posted the following at The Conglomerate for their inaugural masters forum on Jones v. Harris. Several good guest bloggers have already posted on the case, and more will do so over the next few days, so head over there...
First Conglomerate Masters Forum: Jones v. Harris
Posted on November 01, 2009The Conglomerate is holding its inaugural masters forum, coinciding with tomorrow?s Supreme Court oral arguments in Jones v. Harris. The Forum will feature commentary from several guest posters, including yours truly. The always ahead-of-schedule Larry Ribstein has already gotten the...
Weekend Links
Posted on November 01, 2009Eric Posner (here and here) and Henry Farrell continue to argue over international law. Linda McLean on the death of Michelle Triola Marvin as an opportunity to consider Marvin v. Marvin (1976) and nonmarital unions (Marvin?s NY Times Obituary is...
Brute Force, Stupid Criminals, And My Home State
Posted on October 31, 2009In a strange and (I trust) unrelated confluence of events today, I: (1) Happened upon a blog post about stupid criminals in High Point, North Carolina, that (2) Was building off the poster's Economist article on the ?velvet glove? approach...
A History of Violence . . . Through Soccer
Posted on October 31, 2009Via Andrew Sullivan, odd and clever abstract of the day: Civil War Exposure and Violence, by Edward Miguel, Sebastián M. Saiegh, and Shanker Satyanath: In recent years scholars have begun to focus on the consequences of individuals? exposure to civil...
Trade Secrecy in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory
Posted on October 30, 2009I had been meaning to post about this for a while but life got on top of me. Jeanne Fromer at Fordham has written a great essay on trade secret law with reference to the confectionery industry and with specific...
Questions FAR Candidates Would REALLY Like to Ask!
Posted on October 29, 2009Borrowing, but tweaking, the caption from Christine Hurt's post here, I submit the following thirty questions (in no particular order, and with a few suggestions from a friend): 1. Why did your academic dean ask you to serve on the...
Selecting for Sex: US entrepreneurship in the baby market
Posted on October 29, 2009Via Al Roth: Choosing sex of children: repugnant in Britain but not in U.S. The Times reports: US clinic offers British couples the chance to choose the sex of their child A new clinic in Manhattan is appealing to British...
Mid-week Links
Posted on October 28, 2009The GAO Report, Issues Related to Law School Cost and Access, is out and being much discussed in the blawgosphere. GAO concludes ?According to law school officials, the move to a more hands-on, resource-intensive approach to legal education and competition...
October Bank Failures Update
Posted on October 27, 2009It?s been a while since I?ve had time to do a bank failures update, but it?s overdue. The FDIC closed seven more banks on Friday, and that brings the total FDIC bank failures to 106 in 2009. See here for...
AALS Bait and Switch II - Buyer's Side
Posted on October 27, 2009Posted by D. Daniel Sokol In my last post I discussed one of my biggest pet peeves about entry level hiring - situations in which faculties puff (at best) about the inter-disciplinary nature of their school. I want to focus...
Two Big Mac Stories To Sink Your Teeth Into
Posted on October 27, 20091) Mark McGwire retired from baseball following the 2001 season. He ranks #8 on the career home run list with 583 round-trippers (tied with A-Rod). He hasn't fared all that well in HOF balloting and has been rather successful in...
The AALS Bait and Switch I - Seller's Side
Posted on October 26, 2009Posted by D. Daniel Sokol The AALS entry level meeting is upon us. Yesterday, I chatted with someone I know who is on the market who has advanced training and degrees in a non-law field. They asked me for advice...
In law school dean news ...
Posted on October 26, 2009The Cleveland Plain Dealer has today reported that Case Western's interim dean, Robert Rawson , will be staying on for a while. We're all happy to welcome him into his new extended role and look forward to working with him...
Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard . . . Poorer Harvard, Still Rich
Posted on October 26, 2009And Yale too. It?s been known for some time that Harvard, Yale, and other elite educational institutions would report large endowment losses this year. For example, Harvard disclosed in mid-September that its endowment fell by almost 30 percent this fiscal...
Black Thursday
Posted on October 26, 2009To commemorate what was roughly the start of 1929?s Great Crash, the blog, News from 1930, is giving a quick summary for each day during the week, in addition to its usual summary of the day?s news from 1930. As...
Before Judge as Baseball Umpire, What Analogy Did People Use?
Posted on October 26, 2009Well, "the judge as IBM machine," of course! But then it was used as, "judges aren't IBM machines." This I learned by reading a brief essay on "The Law and the Changing Times," by the University of Alabama law school's...
Multiple Choice Exam: Myron Rolle
Posted on October 25, 2009Myron Rolle is/will be a a. NFL player b. Rhodes Scholar c. Brain Surgeon d. Philanthropist e. All of the above. Answer: (e). Story here.
Arti Rai Joins PTO
Posted on October 25, 2009Duke Law Professor Arti Rai will oversee legislative, congressional, and international matters as the Patent and Trademark Office's new administrator for external affairs. Stories in The BLT and NationalJournal.com, among others.
Culture and Freedom: A Debate
Posted on October 25, 2009Reason features a debate this month: Libertarians traditionally have viewed coercion, especially when institutionalized in the form of government, as the main threat to freedom. But cultural pressures outside the state also can restrict people?s ability to live as they...
I Want (To Send) My Baby (Einstein) Back ....
Posted on October 24, 2009Yesterday's New York Times ran a story about the Walt Disney company offering refunds on Baby Einstein DVDs sold in past years in response to complaints that not only was the advertising for the DVDs misleading (in claims about their...
Cats Have Nine Lives. John Meriwether Has At Least Three
Posted on October 24, 2009From the FT, John Meriwether setting up new hedge fund. Most readers will remember Meriwether as one of the principals of LTCM, whose 1998 collapse triggered a wave of panic across the world?s markets and prompted the US Federal Reserve...
Weekend Links
Posted on October 24, 2009Steve Levitt explains through quiz the disagreement over the SuperFreakonomics climate change chapter. Paul Volcker and Bank of England Governor Mervyn King urge break up of big banks. Ben Bernanke and Fed Governor (former Georgetown Law prof) Dan Tarullo disagree...
Once-proud giants, now wards of the state whose leaders? compensation is being set by a Washington paymaster
Posted on October 23, 2009Yesterday?s NY Times Room For Debate commentary addressed Kenneth R. Feinberg?s pay plan, which calls for significant pay cuts (50 percent on average) from the 25 top earners at seven companies that received exceptional bailout help ? Citigroup, Bank of...
The Power 30
Posted on October 22, 2009The November issue of SmartMoney Magazine profiles the "power 30," a list of powerful and influential movers and shakers. The list breaks down into five categories: government, finance and Wall Street, real estate, industry, and health and medicine. Making the...
Who Knew?
Posted on October 22, 2009Nobel-Prize-winning, Heisenberg's-and-Einstein's-elbows-rubbing, matrix-mechanics-developing physicist Max Born's granddaughter is Olivia Newton-John. Maybe when she told us of Xanadu, that "everlasting world" where "a million ... lights ... danc[e]," "dream[s] ...
An Old-Fashioned North Carolina Halloween Celebration
Posted on October 22, 2009At the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C. Featuring barbecued chicken, fried chicken, and ?all the sides,? plus a burning of satanic music and books, which includes bibles that aren?t the King James Version. Story from: kwtx, stltoday.com, myfoxdc...
New York Suit Seeks To Block Payments For Oocytes Used In Stem Cell Research
Posted on October 22, 2009Feminists Choosing Life of New York (FCLNY) has filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to block the use of taxpayer funds to pay women recruited to donate their eggs for embryonic stem cell research. The complaint, filed in...
Morehouse College: Not so Fabulous?
Posted on October 21, 2009Morehouse College (which, as most readers will know, is a private historically black liberal arts college for men) is in the news for its ban on ?the wearing of women's clothes, makeup, high heels and purses as part of a...
Mid-week Links
Posted on October 21, 2009Posh Law Prof Pads, via Above The Law, including an $8.45 million Manhattan pied-à-terre recently purchased by Daniel Fischel, former dean of the University of Chicago Law School. The others, as you might expect, are at Harvard, Yale, NYU, and...
Monday's Medical Marijuana Memo
Posted on October 20, 2009Via WSJ Law Blog, on Monday Deputy Attorney General David Ogden released a memo affirming the Obama administration?s policy on medical marijuana disclosed earlier this year. The memo states that: For example, prosecution of individuals with cancer or other serious...
The Polymath on BBC
Posted on October 20, 2009In a two-part series two weeks ago (The Disappearing Academic Fox? Parts I and II), I discussed Edward Carr?s article in the Autumn edition of Intelligent Life, The Last Days Of The Polymath, drawing lessons and questions about its implications...
IVF And The Cost of Multiples
Posted on October 20, 2009Last week, the New York Times focused on the issue of multiple births from fertility treatments, including IVF and intrauterine insemination. Stephanie Saul begins with a two part series, here and here, which is followed by a Room for Debate...
Annette Gordon-Reed, Houstonian
Posted on October 19, 2009The Houston Chronicle has a very nice story on native daughter Annette Gordon-Reed, who won the Pulitzer Prize in history and the National Book Award in non-fiction for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. From the Chronicle article: As...
United States of America v. 1st Lt. Ehren Watada
Posted on October 19, 2009Late in September, the very interesting case of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada quietly went away. Watada was the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq (early in 2006) on the strength of his convictions that the war was fraudulently...
Harpers Ferry Monument to Hayward Shepard
Posted on October 19, 2009We've just passed the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (it was October 16, 1859), so it's time for a post on Harpers Ferry.... Back in the 1930s the United Daughters of the Confederacy put up a...
Moon Law
Posted on October 19, 2009The latest on Moon Law, "A Legal Regime for the Mining of Helium-3 on the Moon: U.S. Policy Options," from Richard Bilder at Wisconsin.
Digital Copyright Law: What Authors Want ...
Posted on October 19, 2009cross posted from madisonian.net With the second movie in the Twilight series (New Moon) imminently about to appear on the big screen, I found myself getting interested in this pop culture phenomenon, particularly as I strolled around a bookstore this...
An Animal Lesson for JoP Keith Bardwell in Louisiana
Posted on October 18, 2009Another video clip for the weekend: Earlier this week, Kathleen Bergin blogged about the justice of the peace who refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple in Tangipahoa Parish. Post here. As a scholar interested in nontraditional....
Pot Critic Wanted (Just To Make A Reefer-Threefer For The Weekend)
Posted on October 18, 2009Just to make it an even three in terms of pot posts for the weekend (see here and here), via Hit & Run, and according to the New York Times, Westword, a Denver alt-weekly, is looking for a marijuana critic;...
Weekend Links
Posted on October 18, 2009The recent David Letterman scandal is renewing interest in the old (but still interesting) question of why blackmail is illegal. Lizzie Widdicombe takes up the case in The New Yorker, interviewing law professors, economists, and other theorists. Is the Use...
Rock star professors
Posted on October 18, 2009And none From the Law School? I?m shocked. The Harvard Crimson profiles ?Three Rock Star Professors? -- Niall Ferguson, N. Gregory Mankiw, and Robert A. Lue: They are the celebrity professor, the rock star professor, the professor whose book you?ve...
More On Marijuana, And A Bleg
Posted on October 17, 2009Since I already kicked off the weekend with one pot post, I thought I?d continue the trend by mentioning the excellent recent article in Fortune magazine by Roger Parloff, How Marijuana Became Legal. As Parloff notes, the medical marijuana industry...
Median Family Incomes
Posted on October 16, 2009As Illinois law prof Bob Lawless explains here, "median family income" is an important figure in bankruptcy. For filings on or after November 1, 2009, the figures (by state and family size) are available here. Assuming a family of four,...
Pothead Arrested
Posted on October 16, 2009Police in central Pennsylvania arrested 29-year-old Cesar Lopez after spotting him inside a convenience store with a bag of marijuana stuck to his forehead. Lopez apparently took off his baseball cap and was seen peering inside. According to police, the...
Is there a Jurisprudence of Black Hair?
Posted on October 16, 2009What do cornrows, twists, locs, afros, perms, American Airlines, Sacha Obama, $9 billion, and jurisprudence have in common? A common theory of black hair. For some, this topic is superfluous, trivial, and a spoil of the multicultural/politically correct era of...
SNESL Redux: Will UMass Finally Get A Law School?
Posted on October 16, 2009The State of Massachusetts, so rich in many ways, is missing one crucial piece: a state operated law school. Or at least that's the perspective the folks at Southern New England School of Law hope pervades the halls of power...
Hey everyone . . . it's 1958!!
Posted on October 15, 2009That's the year Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a White man, were married in D.C., only to be arrested upon their return to Virginia under a statute that prohibited Whites from marrying outside their race. Their case,...
Am I Offending You?
Posted on October 15, 2009I had lunch yesterday with a few of my colleagues. Among other topics, we discussed Justice Scalia's recent comments concerning whether a cross is an appropriate symbol to honor all dead people (see Kathy's recent post here). Some folks, on...
Substantial Evidence or Substantial Uncertainty? If Gender Diversity on Boards Clearly Adds Value, Then Why Are There So Few Women on Boards?
Posted on October 15, 2009Recently in the FT (HT: Lisa Fairfax), Alison Maitland and Sarah Halls rank the top 50 women in world business and discuss the evidence surrounding gender diversity and firm performance: This inaugural ranking comes as the global crisis has turned...
This Year's Dean Searches
Posted on October 15, 2009Following my practice from the lateral moves list, I'm not moving the dean search list to the top...for fear that the permanent link will be lost. Instead, I'll note that there have been a couple of updates. So those of...
Mid-week Links
Posted on October 14, 2009John Cassidy in The New Yorker on this year?s economics Nobels (includes a roundup of links to reactions from the econ community). There?s been less talk in the blogoshere about this year?s Ig Nobel Prizes, which ?honor achievements that first...
Vermonster: Beer? Or Energy Drink?
Posted on October 14, 2009I don't drink beer or energy drinks (unless one includes the "buzz" I get from an occasional Pepsi or Coca-Cola). Nevertheless, this "David v. Goliath" story holds some appeal for me. Matt Nadeau owns Rock Art Brewery, a small brewery...
Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns Der Stürmer.
Posted on October 14, 2009Late last month, North Carolina State Senator Andrew Brock, State Representative Brian Holloway, and Raleigh businessman Will Head launched WakeUpAmerica.com, with the goal of ?tak[ing] on MoveOn.org and the radical socialists attacking America.? On Monday, this image graced their homepage:...
Why October drives your dean crazy
Posted on October 13, 2009For profs, October is usually a pretty decent month. You?re in the middle of classes and so don?t have to worry about either the crush of the first weeks or the scramble of the last weeks of the semester. It?s...
Yet Another Reason to Avoid Public Schools
Posted on October 12, 2009Today's New York Times carries this article about a Delaware public school district's application of its zero-tolerance policy regarding weapons in schools. Six-year old Zachary, enthusiastic about joining the Cub Scouts, brought his Scout combo utensil -- fork, spoon, and...
You Know You Live in a University Town When ....
Posted on October 12, 2009I have a couple of occasional series --the law of people magazine, the "this is why...." series (as in this is why it's called the moonlight and magnolia school and this is why it's hard to get good laterals), and...
Slavery Study Roundup: Massachusetts Slavery Bill and University of Maryland Report
Posted on October 12, 2009The Boston Globe has the details. The bill would study Massachusetts' connections to slavery. Sounds pretty similar to Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which we've spoken about a bunch of places, including here. This is also similar...
Scalia's Even Out of Touch With Christians
Posted on October 11, 2009I'm not sure what's worse: telling Muslims, Jews and other non-Christians they should like it when someone "honors" their dead with a Christian cross, or telling Christians that the cross doesn't really represents Christ's execution or gift of eternal salvation...
Weekend Links
Posted on October 11, 2009Arthur Levitt, ?We need an orderly way to let institutions fail.? From the FT (via Paul Kedrosky): So in the unique series of events that started with the fall of Bear Stearns, there was no way to deliver an orderly...
Law School News
Posted on October 10, 20091) The inaugural class of the Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University posted very impressive numbers on the July 2009 bar exam in Pennsylvania. Kudos to Dean Roger Dennis (a faithful reader of this blog), our very own...
The Discourse of DNA
Posted on October 10, 2009My co-author, John Conley (UNC) will be giving an interdisciplinary (their terminology, but perhaps we should say ?multidisciplinary??) seminar sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?s Center for Genomics and Society on October 20...
A Different Take on the "Piece" Prize
Posted on October 09, 2009Here is how political cartoonist, Jeff Darcy, responded to the news of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to President Obama: Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer Online
Oklahoma's Abortion Information Law
Posted on October 09, 2009Oklahoma State Senate Republicans Dan Sullivan and Todd Lamb have pushed an abortion bill that collects information about abortions performed in the state, with an ultimate result of posting them online. The data collected includes:1. Date of abortion 2...
Ten Things Bankruptcy Court Won't Tell You
Posted on October 09, 2009In its "Ten Things" column this month, SmartMoney Magazine explores "Ten Things Bankruptcy Court Won't Tell You." Included on the list compiled by author Elizabeth O'Brien are: "this could actually improve your credit score down the road" (#4); "debt-settlement firms...
A Prize for Strengthening America
Posted on October 09, 2009Ann Althouse: A man on the street in Egypt "nails it" when he says that "they are handing him the Nobel Peace Prize because he isn't George Bush." That doesn't do justice to what I imagine to be the Nobel...
Nobel Farce
Posted on October 09, 2009The Nobel Committee can give its Peace Prize to whomever it wants, but it ought to be given to someone who has actually done something to promote peace. Obama's prize is for his aspirations, mostly embodied in rhetoric. His policies...
Criminal Law Prof News Items
Posted on September 30, 2009For those of you on the criminal law side of academia, I've got two quick news items. 1. Chris Slobogin at Vanderbilt has started up a Criminal Justice Program. In this kickoff year, they've brought in a bunch of interesting...
Mid-week Links
Posted on September 30, 2009Lipshaw on Leiter on Religion (Legal Profession Blog) National Law Journal: The EEOC has announced a record $6.2 million ADA settlement of a nationwide class action against Sears over the firing of disabled workers. According to the NLJ, it is...
Creativity and Law Faculties
Posted on September 30, 2009Kelly and Eric have both said their good-byes, and after spending a couple of months here, it is my time to wander on, as well. I've thoroughly enjoyed being here, and am grateful to Dan and the Lounge for the...
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Posted on September 30, 2009It has been a real treat to contribute to the Lounge this past month. Many thanks to the hosts for their hospitality, and to the readers for their kind indulgence. In parting, I wanted to make one last nod toward...
"Son, We Need to Talk ..."
Posted on September 30, 2009What a loser this piece describes! Bassoon! *snicker* Loser instrument! Now French Horn, on the other hand, which I played -- that was cool.
Remixing the President
Posted on September 30, 2009Via Michael Froomkin at Discourse.net, we find a set of 134 photos of President Obama posing with visiting dignitaries, remixed and . . . well, you have to just see it to believe it. Don't miss this piece of the...
Barney Turns 63
Posted on September 30, 2009I have thoroughly enjoyed my visit to The Lounge this month, and I am signing off with a small bit of trivia. Remember Barney Bush? Today is his ninth birthday. So, in dog years, he is a seasoned 63. I...
War on Terror
Posted on September 30, 2009Oxford University Press has just released The War on Terror and the Laws of War. From the introduction: This book is about commitment, commitment to a tenet that has animated the development of the laws and customs of war since...
Mod Men & Law Firm Chic
Posted on September 29, 2009It seems that the popular television show, Mad Men, has started an underground style craze, including an official competition. The look actually reminds me of a crisper version of the mods ? guys in my Southern California high school who...
Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda: Constructing the War on Drugs
Posted on September 29, 2009I will try to keep this shameless plug as brief as possible - my new book (with co-author Andrew Whitford) is now available (at Amazon or on the Johns Hopkins University Press site). Wait, don't hurt your mouse-hand clicking through...
Judgeing Women Judges
Posted on September 29, 2009Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Mirya R. Holman, and Eric A. Posner have a new article up on ssrn, "Judging Women." Here's their abstract: Judge Sonia Sotomayor?s assertion that female judges might be ?better? than male judges has generated...
Take Me I'm Yours
Posted on September 29, 2009Yes, I?ve returned. Some of you may know that I messed around with blogging as early as January of 2003, when I launched IsThatLegal. It was fun sharing some points of view and a bit of the truth as I...
Happy New Year! Westboro Baptist Love Campaign Targets Christ Killers
Posted on September 29, 2009In honor of the High Holidays, the friendly folks from Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas, got up off their tucheses and came to Oklahoma University for a Rosh Hashanah protest last week. I never really thought that Rosh Hashanah...
"The Giant Pool of Money"
Posted on September 29, 2009If you haven't already listened to it yet, I encourage you to check out the episode of This American Life titled "Return To The Giant Pool of Money". The episode recaps and augments an episode from May of last year,...
It's Legal! Welcome Eric Muller, Our Newest Permanent Lounge Lizard
Posted on September 29, 2009It's Tuesday morning and we've got news! We're very pleased to announce that Eric Muller is joining the Faculty Lounge as a new permanent member of the team. Many of you are probably familiar with Eric as either a) an...
Dancing with the Politicians
Posted on September 29, 2009So Dancing With the Stars is actually one reality show (reality? I use the term loosely) that I actually don't watch, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a funny story about politicians who SHOULD be on the show and what...
Domain Names and Protest
Posted on September 28, 2009Tomorrow's Cyber Law class includes a discussion of domain names as an example of the internationalization of legal regimes in relation to the Internet. While running through my final preparations (read: while procrastinating by catching up on my blog reading),...
The Coming Term of the Supreme Court: Salazar v. Buono
Posted on September 28, 2009I figure it's time to preview some of the important cases that will be heard by the Supreme Court in the coming term. First up, in no particular order, is Salazar v. Buono, 08-472. About 70 years ago a veterans...
More on Facebook and the Perils of User Generated Content
Posted on September 28, 2009According to CNN, the U.S. Secret Service asked Facebook to suspend the use of an application that allows users to create online polls when someone created a poll asking whether the president should be killed. The possible answers were "yes",...
Beast Books: Better, Faster, Cheaper ... or at least Faster
Posted on September 28, 2009The New York Times has an article on a new agreement between Daily Beast and Peasus Books, to create a new imprint, "Beast Books." The idea is to have Daily Beast writers produce books that'll come out sooner than the...
Judge pricks finger, sticks it to plaintiff
Posted on September 28, 2009The New York Law Journal reports on a case derailed by an apparently small detail: In a case of first impression -- no pun intended -- a Queens, N.Y., judge has thrown out a tort action because, in part, the...
More Embryo Errors
Posted on September 28, 2009I?ve blogged a few times in the last couple of weeks about sperm and embryo mix-ups, as well as egg misappropriation. Two more cases were in the news this past week. In Louisiana: Ochsner Hospital Elmwood has indefinitely suspended operations...
Antebellum Literary Societies: UGA Version
Posted on September 28, 2009Time for some fun and photographs. Following up on the occasional series from last spring on pictures of antebellum law schools -- Princeton (yes! they once had a law school) and Litchfield -- it's time for some photos of antebellum...
McAmerica
Posted on September 28, 2009Via Felix Salmon (created by Stephen Von Worley) a map of the contiguous USA by how far any given point is from the nearest McDonald?s. ?The McFarthest Spot, somewhere in South Dakota, is 107 miles, as the crow flies, from...
Things We Take for Granted
Posted on September 27, 2009It used to be that when you wanted to find a law review article, you looked it up in the Index to Legal Periodicals, and then you went to the shelf, found the volume, and read or photo-copied it. Today,...
Weekend Links
Posted on September 27, 2009From the SEC Historical Society: Audio Webcast on New World of Financial Regulation, moderated by Theresa Gabaldon, The George Washington University Law School, and with presenters Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica; Roberta S. Karmel, Brooklyn Law School; and Joseph E...
Top 10 law schools for Constitutional Law & Theory
Posted on September 27, 2009On his Law School Reports Blog, Brian Leiter ranks, or perhaps more accurately lets readers rank, the top 10 law school faculties for Constitutional Law & Theory. He uses condorcet internet voting to discern who has the top faculties in...
Crazy Bike Skills
Posted on September 27, 2009From women. Video here. (HT: Chris Bodenner at The Daily Dish) And to think that I still struggle with a simple ?look ma, no hands? move. Of course, I?m not the only one:
The Amazing Race
Posted on September 26, 2009Season 15 of The Amazing Race gets underway Sunday night. As fans of the show may recall, last season's winners of the $1 million prize were siblings Victor and Tammy. Victor is a partner at O'Melveny & Myers, and sister...
Are Online Networks Company Towns, Shopping Malls, or Neither?
Posted on September 26, 2009The Southern District of California District Court held last week that the First Amendment does not apply to stop Sony from removing people from its "Playstation 3 Network" based on their speech. Erik Estavillo sued Sony seeking $55,000 in damages,...
Merrill Peterson (1921 - 2009)
Posted on September 26, 2009From H-Law comes the news that this year has seen the close of the life of another great American historian, Merrill Peterson. He was an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia. You may recall we've already spoken about the...
Mercer Law Dean Daisy Hurst Floyd Stepping Down
Posted on September 25, 2009It's that time of year when deanship transitions begin in earnest. Now we learn that Mercer's dean, Daisy Hurst Floyd, will be stepping down and returning to the faculty this summer. She has been dean since 2004. Her six year...
Securities Regulation and the Global Economic Crisis: Conference at Seton Hall Law School
Posted on September 25, 2009On behalf of the editors of the Seton Hall Law Review: "The Seton Hall Law Review will be hosting its annual Symposium on October 30, 2009, to address the impact of securities regulation on the current global financial crisis. Specifically,...
Faces in the Crowd
Posted on September 25, 2009Tomorrow marks the 49th anniversary of the famous (or infamous) debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which is widely credited as the catalyst for giving rise to the importance of television in politics. The BBC offers an interesting...
Cupcake Law
Posted on September 25, 2009For some students, law school can be a piece of cake. For others, it is difficult. And for some very, very specific others, graduating from law school is a cupcake. Recent New York Law School graduate Lev Ekster, eschewed the...
More on The Decline of Print Journals: Northwestern's TriQuarterly
Posted on September 25, 2009We've been talking for a long time about the declining fortunes of academic presses (OUP and CUP had layoffs at the beginning of the year; YUP laid off staff later in the year; HUP shut its display room this summer;...
The Jurisprudence of Second Life
Posted on September 24, 2009My colleague Richard Myers will be serving as a judge in the first trial ever conducted in Second Life on September 25. The trial is based loosely on the Michael Vick criminal case. "Just like a regular mock trial, they...
Charting Law Schools Over Time
Posted on September 24, 2009Gary Rosin has a new post, "Do We Need More Law Schools," up at Law by the Numbers, which charts the growth in the number of law schools from the early twentieth century to today. There are now 199 law...
A Good Week For Justice Brandeis
Posted on September 24, 2009Pantheon Books (a division of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, itself part of Random House, Inc.) is releasing a new biography of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis this week. The book is titled Louis D. Brandeis: A Life and is...
Stripping the Student Body? UC Walkout Goes Naked
Posted on September 23, 2009(Thank goodness it?s the students and not the faculty) As we reported earlier, the UC faculty walkout is planned for tomorrow, September 24 ? the first day of class for eight of the ten UC campuses. Many events, including teach-ins,...
'What's Law Got To Do With It?'
Posted on September 23, 2009This past spring I was fortunate enough to attend a mini-conference at the University of Indiana Maurer School of Law that ostensibly drew upon Tina Turner's classic "What's Love Got to Do With It" for its title. It was a...
Mid-week Links
Posted on September 23, 2009Chicago on ?The Chicago School? and its critics (U of Chicago Magazine. HT: Mark Thoma) Because housing prices always go up . . . Ginnie Mae?s buy versus rent calculator accepts only positive values for Yearly Home Value Increase Rate....
Elyn Saks, Southern California Law Professor, Wins MacArthur Genius Grant
Posted on September 22, 2009The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is announcing its new fellows today and one of the winners of these so-called "genius grants" is Elyn Saks. Saks is Associate Dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and...
An Antebellum Bookcase
Posted on September 21, 2009One of my most favorite works of history, the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's Report, begins with a very elegant line: "Let us begin with a clock." I absolutely love first lines, like Marshall Sahlins' line in...
Consensus about Consensus?
Posted on September 21, 2009I've been reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) which is marketed as a "leadership fable" based largely on corporate life although it may have some interesting applications to academia. Three things I found notable about Lencioni's theory...
Conservative "Faculty Lounge" Blogger And President Obama Find Common Ground
Posted on September 21, 2009The President foresees a World Series match-up between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees. Some of our readers may remember that the two teams last did battle in the Fall Classic in 1964. For a wonderful book...
All That Jazz -- In Tokyo?
Posted on September 21, 2009There?s an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about the popularity of jazz in Japan, particularly in Tokyo. I don?t know why this surprises me, as I?ve heard (pun intended) that Tokyo is one of the most cosmopolitan cities...
Weird Books
Posted on September 21, 2009From the Weird Books Room of AbeBooks.com: The Pop-Up Book of Phobias How Green Were the Nazis? Poop-eaters: Dung Beetles in the Food Chain The Great Pantyhose Crafts Book Dead Clients Don't Pay: The Bodyguard's Manual How to Survive a...
Law Prof Named To Head New SEC Division
Posted on September 20, 2009Last week the SEC announced the creation of its fifth division, the Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation. From the SEC's press release: The new division combines the Office of Economic Analysis, the Office of Risk Assessment, and other...
UCI Egg Theft Case Developments
Posted on September 20, 2009From The California Bar Journal: Egg donations Award: $4,230,000 Doctors at UCI Center for Reproductive Health were found to have engaged in the misappropriation and nonconsensual transfer of donor eggs, several of which resulted in live births (Beasley v...
Weekend Links
Posted on September 20, 2009Before buying that Prada knockoff . . . Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), who I do not think normally wears that Hugh Heffner jacket/robe around campus (HT: Freakonomics) The audio of Obama calling Kanye West a ?jackass.? Cutting Carbon Through Condoms...
More on ISI's Selection Criteria for Journals
Posted on September 19, 2009Following up on my post yesterday about the 35 student-edited general interest law reviews in ISI's Social Sciences Citation Index -- and a few anomalies in there, I thought I'd post a little on what ISI says about its selection...
Physicians and the public health option
Posted on September 19, 2009The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an interesting study on physician views concerning the public health option. Here's a selection from the introduction portion of the article: In the past few months, a key point of contention in....
Life After The Supreme Court
Posted on September 19, 2009We wrote a little bit about Justice Souter when he left DC at the end of last term and his plans for doing some cool things, like writing a history of his hometown. It seems he's enjoying life back in...
Paperless to Papered Up
Posted on September 18, 2009It seems the pendulum is swinging back from computers helping us go "paperless" to computers helping us make physical copies of the written word. As Amy Landers notes over at PrawfsBlawg, lots and lots of really good books are available...
Social Sciences Citation Index and Law Reviews
Posted on September 18, 2009As I'm working up some thoughts on the use of the social sciences citation index as a companion to westlaw citation searches, I've been looking a little at the journals that the ssci already uses. Couple of things of some...
Faculty Lounges: Rooms with a View?
Posted on September 18, 2009As my colleagues will attest, I am passionate about interior design, and the title of this wonderful Blog inspired today?s post about?faculty lounges. I think most law schools have them, but I doubt they?re often used for their intended purpose....
Difficulties with Death Penalty
Posted on September 18, 2009I don't know if people outside of Ohio have heard about the situation this week in the case of Romell Broom who was to be executed earlier this week for a murder committed some 25 years ago. The governor was...
Robins Chair Open at University of Richmond
Posted on September 18, 2009The University of Richmond has begun a search for the E. Claiborne Robins Chair in their law school. The field is open. From the announcement: The University of Richmond School of Law is seeking to fill the E. Claiborne Robins...
The Birther Defense for Military Deployment
Posted on September 18, 2009Birthers--conspiracy theorists who believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore constitutionally ineligible to be President--have lost their latest lawsuit. (Full text here.) Connie Rhodes, a doctor in the US Army, recently lost a case...
Yesterday in 1930
Posted on September 17, 2009From the excellent blog, News from 1930, which provides a daily news summary based on the author?s reading of the Wall Street Journal from the corresponding day in 1930. Yesterday?s entry had some gems: Tuesday, September 16, 1930: Dow 236.62...
Taking the Right Seriously
Posted on September 17, 2009This week's Chroncile Review has an essay by Mark Lilla, "Taking the Right Seriously," that you may be interested in. I think Lilla under-serves the conservative movement (and those of us who take conservative ideas seriously as scholars) with statements...
Should we teach meltdowns?
Posted on September 17, 2009I regularly read the Legal Profession Blog. At times it's kind of like the car accident I can't help but look at as I drive by. Some of the recent situations highlighted there include a lawyer sanctioned for filing frivolous...
Civility
Posted on September 17, 2009Know anyone who could use a lesson or two in civility? How about a politician? Maybe a professional athlete? Perhaps an awards presenter? Your boss or co-worker? Possibly even a blogger, or a comment writer? If someone comes to mind,...
Wrapping It Up: The Struggle To Explain Why Difference Makes a Difference (Sotomayor And The Value of Diversity, The Final Installment)
Posted on September 17, 2009In my prior post on this topic, What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters, I noted that (though our work is still preliminary) our research suggests that corporate insiders appear not to have arrived at a master narrative to...
The entrepreneur as non-risk taker ...
Posted on September 17, 2009... or perhaps at least not as big of a risk-taker as conventional wisdom has led us to believe. On the 4HWW blog Tim Ferris reviews "Leap" by Rick Smith of World 50, a senior executive networking company. In the...
Does The Number 1700 Cause Sperm (And Embryos) to Go Where It Shouldn?t?
Posted on September 16, 2009And how is Nancy Hersch always there to see it happen? It?s an address -- 1700 California Street, San Francisco. And it?s the home of both Laurel Fertility Clinic and Fertility Associates. Fertility Associates made the news in 2004 when...
Thomas Cobb
Posted on September 16, 2009Last month I attended a fabulous seminar at the Thomas Cobb house in Athens, Georgia. The reading for the seminar was Cobb's An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, which he published in 1858. The first half of the...
My Cousin Vinny Strikes Again
Posted on September 16, 2009After Justice Scalia's recent remarks indicating that "My Cousin Vinny" is his favorite movie, the film appears again in a Seventh Circuit opinion [pdf] relating to an ineffective assistance of counsel claim. Defendant's counsel was held in contempt and jailed...
Why September drives your dean crazy
Posted on September 16, 2009Last month I explained the melt (link), how it affects the demographics of the incoming class, and why it drives your dean crazy. But the dynamic of the melt that profs are least familiar with is likely to be the...
Mid-week Links
Posted on September 16, 2009Georgetown law prof Chai Feldblum nominated as a Commissioner to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Katherine Franke has the story: This is huge not only because Feldblum would be the first out lesbian or gay person on the EEOC (which,...
Update on Peer Reviewed Law Reviews
Posted on September 15, 2009I was recently contacted by John Zimmer, the former peer review editor for the South Carolina Law Review. On the Voir Dire Blog we had previously reported on the law school's pilot peer review program. He reports that the "experiment"...
Lawyer Disciplined for Blog Comments About a Judge
Posted on September 15, 2009The New York Times ran an article a few days ago on the pitfalls into which lawyers can fall through blogging and social networking sites. The portion that interested me most concerned Sean Conway, a Florida criminal defense attorney who...
Turkey Hits Media Conglomerate with $2.5 Billion Fine
Posted on September 15, 2009Yikes. The government says that's what the Dogan Media Group owes in back taxes, but observers both inside and outside of Turkey aren't convinced. PM Erdogan has been urging citizens to boycott Dogan's holdings (which include CNN-Turk, and the top...
AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference: Returning Telephone Calls
Posted on September 15, 2009Over at Prawfsblawg, one can cut the anxiety with a chainsaw as candidates (many adopting the moniker "anon" or some variation thereof) trade updates and questions on interview scheduling for the "meat market." I started making telephone calls last week...
Ballerina Epistemology
Posted on September 15, 2009As legal scholars, we often find ourselves on a side of an issue where it is difficult to comprehend the other side. Many times, understanding the opposing side is a teleological triumph unto itself. In my Family Law classes, I...
What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters (Sotomayor And The Value Of Diversity, Part IV
Posted on September 14, 2009In my prior post on this topic, Money Is Diversity Or Diversity Is Money?, I discussed performance-based rationales for board diversity, but noted that there is no consensus on the crucial question of whether board diversity improves corporate performance...
Social Sciences Citation Index and Law Faculty Rankings
Posted on September 14, 2009I haven't blogged about rankings in, oh, a while--maybe not since the US News rankings came out this spring? (Ok -- I had a fun post on the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, which was feature on Law and Order,...
US-China Trade War Erupting: Remember Smoot-Hawley?
Posted on September 14, 2009The Financial Times is reporting that the Obama administration's decision to impose special high tariffs on Chinese auto tires has caused China to consider retaliatory trade barriers against imposts of American poultry and autos. Chinese tires are, of course, but...
Cartoons in the Academy
Posted on September 14, 2009Cruise the halls of a typical grouping of faculty offices in any law school, and several cartoons are sure to adorn the walls and doors. Some are funny in a mild-mannered way, while others can be quite political. Are cartoon...
Mice Levitate; Are People Next?
Posted on September 13, 2009Am I the only one who enjoyed this weekend story about levitating mice? Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge have succeeded in levitating mice...."We first tried a fully conscious mouse, and he didn't like it very...
Weekend Links
Posted on September 13, 2009What not to say on your blog (especially if you?re a public defender): that your client lied to the court, and that certain judges are clueless or a-holes, among other things. ABA Journal. James Boyle, A Copyright Black Hole Swallows...
Half of Britons Injured While Eating Biscuits
Posted on September 12, 2009The Telegraph, via Tyler Cowen. Half of Britons surveyed report being injured while eating biscuits. Risks include such varied hazards as scalding from hot tea or coffee while dunking, breaking a tooth, injury from flying fragments, people poking themselves in...
Law Schools (and by implication, lawyers)
Posted on September 12, 2009There has been a lot of talk lately about whether there are too many law schools, and whether new ones should be opening or not (especially the "not" part of that). The arguments are many, but they seem to focus...
The Magic No. 15
Posted on September 12, 2009As the fall submission season (I assume) is coming to a close, I thought I'd muse on the number 15. For some reason, I've always found that when trying to trade articles up within the top 30 or 40 general...
Weekend Musing
Posted on September 12, 2009Thoughts after seeing a "What Would Hitler Do" sign during coverage of this morning's "tea party" protest: It?s a pity we can?t just seriously divide the country in two. On one side, all you people who don?t want ?socialism? can...
Baseball Trivia: All-Star Games
Posted on September 12, 2009Identify the players who hold these all-star game records: Hitters: 1. Most career hits. 2. Most career RBI?s. 3. Most career home runs. Pitchers: 4. Most appearances. 5. Most starts. 6. Most innings pitched. Miscellaneous: 7. Most career appearances...
Sexism, Collusion, and the Price of Eggs
Posted on September 12, 2009Over at doublex, Kerry Howley's talking about Kim Krawiec's paper Sunny Samaritans and Egomaniacs: Price-Fixing in the Gamete Marketa. Howley said she was afraid that Kim's paper on "would send me into a Joe-Wilsonesque fit of rage." But there are...
Goodbye Buies Creek, Hello Raleigh!
Posted on September 11, 2009A big shout-out to our friends at Campbell University's Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law, which opens the doors today to its new facility in Raleigh (bottom of picture). Story here. Details of the facility here. May the transition be...
Success Is In the Eye of The Beholder
Posted on September 11, 2009. . . or rather the camera angle. This "robbery" looks very different from the first video footage shown than from the following three. Via Rolfe Winkler:
Google Books Settlement: The Go-To Guy
Posted on September 11, 2009For anyone who has been following or even just wondering about the Google Books Settlement, it seems to me the go-to guy is James Grimmelman over at the Laboratorium. Not only is James up (very, very up) on the settlement,...
Conference on Empirical Legal Studies - Update
Posted on September 11, 2009At long last the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) has come up with its tentative conference schedule (i.e. what papers were accepted). It is available here. This year, CELS will be held at the University of Southern California School...
Mentoring Junior Faculty: Confidentiality versus Conflict of Interest
Posted on September 11, 2009As a research dean, one of my roles is to ensure that we have a workable mentoring program in place for tenure track faculty. For some years, the school has been playing with the structure and contours of its tenure...
Casebook Authors, Don?t Let Your Students Read Ian Ayres
Posted on September 11, 2009Unless you want to shell out some rebate money, that is. In a post over at Freakonomics today, Ayres reveals that he paid out more than $150 in rebate money to his contracts small section this year, because he assigned...
Bad legal writing
Posted on September 11, 2009Rob Heverley's post, about Larry Cunningham's criticism of starting sentences with "so", reminded me of the very worst brief I ever read while I was in legal practice. The case involved the discharge of an employee for alleged misconduct. I...
Newspapers
Posted on September 11, 2009I have been following, albeit not closely enough, the trials and travails of the newspaper industry. From general complaints by the industry that the web is challenging it unfairly, to newspapers both cutting staff and shutting down (even when they...
Obama Picks Progressive Law Prof/Judge, Denny Chin, For Second Circuit
Posted on September 10, 2009The WSJ Law Blog is reporting that the Obama administration will select Denny Chin to fill a vacancy on the Second Circuit. (There are currently four open slots on the Second Circuit.) Chin is 55. He moved to the U.S....
Poverty At State U? Alabama Signs Nick Saban To $42.35 Million Coaching Contract
Posted on September 10, 2009Formally, at least, the University of Alabama Crimson Tide football team is affiliated with - indeed, part of - the University of Alabama. Times may be tough for state education budgets, and with an 11% cut this year, Alabama is...
So . . . a Sequal
Posted on September 10, 2009Last week Dave Hoffman made the following observation on writing and word usage: "All else equal, shorter law review articles are better than longer ones. But bloat?s allies are legion: editors; footnote-related positional competition; bad publisher incentives, etc...
Wanted: Faculty Candidate Who Has Been Anointed To Teach Secured Transactions, Payment Systems, Bankruptcy, And Other Commercial Law Courses. Must Have High EQ.
Posted on September 10, 2009My friend, Beau Baez (pictured), is the chair of the faculty appointments committee at Charlotte School of Law. In a recent hiring-related post over at Prawfsblawg, Beau wrote: Our primary focus will be on those that will fit in with...
To Re(view) or not to Re(view)?
Posted on September 10, 2009It seems to be that time of year where I'm receiving a ton of requests to review articles for peer-reviewed journals - as I suspect many of you are too. They are not all law journals as I do a...
Law School Dean Searches, 2009-10 Edition
Posted on September 10, 2009I'm going to get started a bit earlier this year in creating a list of law schools currently doing a dean search. In light of this week's announcement out of the University of Chicago, it appears that one position has...
Money Is Diversity, Or Diversity Is Money? (Sotomayor And The Value Of Diversity, Part III)
Posted on September 10, 2009In my prior post on this topic, Do The Right Thing, So Long As It?s Free, I discussed fairness arguments related to corporate board diversity, but noted that serious discussion of board diversity (both academically and in the business community)...
Cincinnati Needs A Visitor
Posted on September 09, 2009Over at TaxProf Blog, editor Paul Caron has posted this announcement: Due to the sudden retirement of a colleague, we are looking for a 2010 Spring Semester visitor to teach Corporations I and one other business-related course at the University...
Students in Breckinridge County Spared Socialist Indoctriniation; Offered Salvation Instead
Posted on September 09, 2009"Local control" is a big deal to school officials in Breckinridge County, Kentucky, which is why instead of allowing parents to opt their children out of the Obama speech earlier today, they required them to opt-in by providing written notice...
Oral Argument in Citizens United
Posted on September 09, 2009Scotusblog has a summary and analysis of today's oral argument in Citizens United, which suggests that a majority of the Court is leaning strongly towards overturning Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and that portion of McConnell v. FEC which...
A "Not-To-Do" List
Posted on September 09, 2009Busy professionals and academics often find solace and guidance in constructing "to-do" lists. However, it might be useful to think about a "not-to-do" list. On the Voir Dire Blog I have occasionally highlighted the blogging of Tim Ferris, author of....
Gratuitous, tenuously-law-related, musical post
Posted on September 09, 2009Because I'm covering World Wide Volkswagen v. Woodson and Calder v. Jones in Civil Procedure this week, and because I'm a fan of old movies, I couldn't resist the temptation to show this clip of Shirley Jones in her movie...
The Year of Living Electronically
Posted on September 09, 2009There?s an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the use of e-textbooks ? or the lack thereof. The article discusses the wariness of students, but I also can?t help but wonder about the potential drawbacks for authors,...
Mid-week Links
Posted on September 09, 2009UCLA Law Dean Michael Schill to become dean at Chicago Law, effective January 1, 2010. Leiter gloats; Bainbridge mourns. (See Dan's post on this here). The Boston Globe reports that some professors are giving their courses a sexier name to...
Dean Michael Schill Leaves UCLA, Joins Chicago Law
Posted on September 09, 2009As Brian Leiter now informs us, the University of Chicago Law School has selected UCLA Law dean Michael Schill to be its new dean. He replaces Saul Levmore, who will step down at the end of the year. Schill has...
Do The Right Thing ? So Long As It?s Free (Or, Sotomayor And The Value Of Diversity, Part II)
Posted on September 08, 2009As I noted in my last post on this topic, Sotomayor, Diversity, And Group Dynamics: Why Do We Care? What Do We Know?, the concept of diversity has over the last generation become almost commonplace and taken-for-granted in discourses ranging...
Finding a Hippie Jurisprudence?
Posted on September 08, 2009We're in the midst of classes; I'm teaching two huge lectures; I'm drowning in work. So no time for new posts. That means ... it's time for a classic. And after talking about State v. Shack in property last week,...
Catching My Eye
Posted on September 08, 2009Two articles recently abstracted in the SSRN digests I receive weekly have caught my eye. The first is authored by cross-town friend and UH law prof Jim Hawkins (pictured) and is titled "Doctors as Bankers: Evidence from Fertility Markets." The...
Supreme Court Justices as Human Decision Makers
Posted on September 08, 2009How do U.S. Supreme Court justices decide how to vote in cases? I would suggest that for all of the complex legal, strategic, and attitudinal models set forth by scholars, a reasonable response to this question would be to ask...
The Court Gets its Digs, and Paris Gets Her Day in Court
Posted on September 07, 2009If you've not been following it (and why would you be), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision last week in Paris Hilton v. Hallmark Cards, [pdf] no. 08-55443 (August 31, 2009). The suit involves a card, produced...
Parental Discretion Advised
Posted on September 07, 2009Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama Back to School Event Arlington, Virginia September 8, 2009 The President: Hello everyone ? how?s everybody doing today? I?m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we?ve got students tuning...
Business Ethics from the Shark Tank
Posted on September 07, 2009I guess I have to start this post by admitting that I am getting a little hooked on ABC's new series, Shark Tank, modelled (I assume) on the BBC's Dragons' Den. This is the reality show where would-be entrepreneurs try...
"Law and Order SVU" and the Ranking of Law Reviews
Posted on September 07, 2009Last night I watched a rerun of Law and Order SVU -- about someone who faked multiple personality disorder to get away with killing her parents (she was found not guilty by reason of insanity -- or something like that)....
Michael Moore: Capitalism is Evil
Posted on September 07, 2009That's the message of Michael Moore's new film. Hmmm. Moore has earned gross box office receipts of close to $173 million on his films to date. Need I say more?
Countdown to Obama
Posted on September 07, 2009Well, it's Monday. We're one day closer to what Johathan Turley aptly describes as: Obama?s brain-washing, soul-crushing, communist-loving subliminal-laced speech to our children. By Wednesday, our schools will be little more than communes with kids calling for redistribution of wealth...
A potential opportunity for recent (unemployed) law graduates
Posted on September 07, 2009Recent unemployed law graduates or 3rd year law students who are working to find a job in this tough market will likely need to think outside of the box in order to find gainful employment. This can take many forms...
Do Museums Still Need Objects?
Posted on September 07, 2009Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects, which will be published next month by Penn Press, is yet another book I want to read. I'll pick up a copy when I'm in Philly for the Pastorius conference next month. In...
Understanding the Difference Between Men and Women (in Corporate Law)
Posted on September 07, 2009Posted by D. Daniel Sokol I am in the office working on an article as we are officially off today at the University of Florida for Labor Day. This semester I am teaching corporate law and have a gender breakdown...
Sotomayor, Diversity, And Group Dynamics: Why Do We Care? What Do We Know?
Posted on September 07, 2009Sonia Sotomayor arrives at the Court this week for a special session, capping off a long and often heated debate about her qualifications, her ideology, and her potential impact on the Court. This latter point, of course, has included many...
"Blame it on the Muslims . . . no, wait, it's the Jews." Actually, the problem is the prosecutor.
Posted on September 06, 2009Remember back in 2006 when a Dutch newspaper published a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb that was about to explode? Neither the cartoonist nor the newspaper were investigted for inciting hatred under Denmark's...
Some advice and a gift for recent (unemployed) law graduates
Posted on September 06, 2009First, I'd like to thank the editors at Faculty Lounge for inviting me to guest blog. I've always enjoyed this blog and I am honored to be a guest blogger. I plan to offer a variety of posts on topics...
Student Reaction to UC Faculty Walkout: Not Good
Posted on September 06, 2009Fellow Faculty Lounger Kim Krawiec posted on 9/5 links to talk about a UC Faculty walkout concerning mandated furloughs. I thought readers might be interested in this post on the Berkeley Law student blog Nuts and Boalts. Self- indulgent might...
Welcome Guest Blogger Jeff Yates
Posted on September 06, 2009We're pleased to welcome Jeff Gates as a guest here at the Lounge. Jeff is a professor of political science at Binghamton University (aka SUNY Binghamton). Jeff moved to Binghamton in 2008, after serving as an associate professor in the...
Weekend Links
Posted on September 06, 2009Alex Tabarrok, Sally Satel, and Frank Delmonico on Putting A Price On Organ Donation. (Al Roth) Also via Al Roth: The current issue of the American Journal of Transplantation contains a survey of the ASTS membership, which finds that a...
The Drama Returns: UC Prof Walkouts Planned
Posted on September 05, 2009Regular Lounge readers should be well-versed by now in the University of California?s woes, since we covered it here, here, here, and here. Now the drama continues as professors gear up for a walkout during the first day of class...
Baseball Trivia: Nicknames
Posted on September 05, 2009Identify these members of baseball's hall of fame by their nicknames: Whitey. Pudge. Yaz. Sparky. Yogi. Dizzy. Catfish. Too easy, right? Edward "Whitey" Ford (aka "The Chairman of the Board"). Carlton "Pudge" Fisk. Carl "Yaz" Yastrzemski. George "Sparky" Anderson...
Paying it Forward in the Legal Academy
Posted on September 04, 2009In recent years, a number of senior colleagues - who I won't name here for fear of embarrassing them - have helped me out in the professional context by both agreeing to serve as references for hiring, promotion, tenure, fellowships...
The web of blog affiliations
Posted on September 04, 2009Having imbibed a great deal of Pierre Bourdieu during my graduate study in Sociology, I have a reflexivity reflex that some might regard as excessive. During my two forays into the AALS meat market, I couldn't help regarding the experience...
Deans on Film
Posted on September 04, 2009I am honored and delighted to join The Faculty Lounge this month. During my stint as a guest, I will focus primarily on "Law and Popular Culture" topics. The following issue is freshest on my mind because it took place...
Tickers, Trackers, and . . . Tamils? Today in 1930
Posted on September 03, 2009I couldn?t think of a better word beginning with ?T? to represent India, so that will have to do. Regular readers know that I am a fan of the blog, News From 1930, which provides a daily news summary based...
Welcome Guest Blogger Kelly Anders
Posted on September 03, 2009We're very pleased to welcome Kelly Anders as a guest blogger here at the Lounge. Kelly is the Associate Dean for Student Affairs at Washburn University School of Law. She also directs Washburn's externship program and teaches Art Law. (Is...
AALS Faculty Recruitment: "I Wish I'd Known That BEFORE The Conference!"
Posted on September 03, 2009Nine weeks from today the AALS will kick off its annual Faculty Recruitment Conference. The AALS released its first distribution of FAR forms a few weeks ago, and the second distribution is scheduled for release today. Faculty appointments committees are...
General vs Specialty Journals
Posted on September 02, 2009A couple of people commented with respect to a previous thread that they had received offers from both general and specialty journals during this submission season. Some people also blogged about how confusing the different sets of rankings are when....
What's In Your 'Sent' Box?
Posted on September 02, 2009Five Wisconsin teachers are objecting to the release of personal e-mails they sent using the school's computer pursuant to a citizen's public records request. The school district disclosed the e-mails after concluding that they were "records" under the applicable statute...
"Of Pedagogical Epiphanies ..."
Posted on September 02, 2009Suffolk law professor Jeff Lipshaw (pictured) posted "Of Pedagogical Epiphanies and the "On Call" List - Will the Deontological Prevail Over the Consequential in Class Participation?" yesterday at the Legal Profession Blog (where he is one of the founding contributors)...
Mid-week Links
Posted on September 02, 2009The newest thing in hip hop culture? White Scottish law professor reading rap lyrics with careful enunciation. (The Public Domain). Brian Leiter on Information and Advice for Persons Interested in Teaching Law. Tom Bell on How Top Ranked Law Schools....
Fear The Robots. Fear The Robot Love.
Posted on September 01, 2009From the News & Observer (via boingboing, Andrew Sullivan). Remember this statement from David Gibbs III at an anti-gay marriage rally in Raleigh, North Carolina this spring? (Gibbs) told rally participants gay marriage would "open the door to unusual marriage...
Cloud computing? Maybe not . . .
Posted on September 01, 2009The "next big thing" in Internet applications is called "cloud computing" (there's even a Cloud Computing Journal). The idea is rather simple: you (the user) carry around a computer that has a web browser on it. Using the web browser,...
The Case of the Framed Fly-Fisher?
Posted on September 01, 2009It isn't everyday that fly fishing plays a role in a criminal investigation and appellate court decision. So imagine my glee upon reading the (sadly unpublished) opinion in Miller v. Spiers, 2009 WL 2219256 (10th Cir. July 27, 2009), a...
Vermont Debuts 'Hubby Hubby' . . . And Marriage Equality
Posted on September 01, 2009Beginning today, same sex couples can marry in Vermont and to celebrate, during the month of September, Ben & Jerry's will be selling pints of their enormously popular "Chubby Hubby" under its new name "Hubby Hubby." From the website: In...
Montana Supreme Court to hear Right to Assisted Suicide Case
Posted on September 01, 2009Tomorrow, the Montana Supreme Court will hear argument in Baxter v. Montana, DA 09-0051, a case in which it is claimed that the Montana Constitution secures the right of a person to the aid of a physician in committing suicide....
Online Privacy in Israel
Posted on September 01, 2009For those interested in reading and writing in the area of online privacy, Michael Birnhack and Niva Elkin-Koren recently posted an article on SSRN that details their study of compliance by Israeli websites with Israeli privacy laws. The study is...
New Laws in Texas
Posted on September 01, 2009Many new laws take effect in Texas today (September 1). Here are a few (paraphrasing; consult statute for actual language): Drivers and passengers, regardless of age and seat location, must wear a seat belt (some exceptions). Drivers under the age...
A Self-Referential Book Review: On Blogs and Blogging
Posted on August 31, 2009At the risk of sounding like a coffee table book about coffee tables in the shape of a coffee table... I have just completed Scott Rosenberg's new book, Say Everything. If you have the time, it's a really interesting history...
That Post Was Written By A Lawyer?! No Wonder It Doesn't Make Any Sense
Posted on August 31, 2009In what one hopes is an unusual combination, a musician, the Zodiac Killer, and the Tennessee bar association cross paths on the message board of Goner Records, a record store in Memphis, Tennessee.
A New Literary History of America
Posted on August 31, 2009Last week brought a wonderful volume that I've been eagerly awaiting all summer: Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors' A New Literary History of America. The book has about 250 essays on American literary history -- organized around dates (like 1692,...
Preparing To Be A Law Professor: A List Of Faculty Fellowships
Posted on August 31, 2009One of the new realities of law faculty hiring is that appointments committees increasingly tilt toward candidates with advanced degrees, a fellowship/VAP experience, or both. But where do you get that fellowship or VAP experience? The answer from Paul Caron...
The New School Year and Subconscious Copyright Infringement?
Posted on August 31, 2009Following Al's musings on pre-Civil War curricula in honor of the new school year, I thought I'd share my own musings as my little 4 year old trudged off to pre-school for the first time this morning. He had informed...
Supersize Me: Too Big To Fail, and Getting Bigger
Posted on August 31, 2009From the Washington Post: The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it...
What did students study in Southern Colleges before the Civil War?
Posted on August 31, 2009With classes starting today and curriculum on my mind, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the curriculum of the antebellum southern college. In algebra class, they sometimes studied how terrible Yankees were. Take several examples from the math...
Yet Another Politician's Thesis
Posted on August 30, 2009I've been following now for some years the periodic stories about politicians' writings when they were in college or law school. Hillary Clinton's Wellesley College thesis on Saul Alinsky got some attention a few years back. We're heard about Barack....
More On Atheist Pet Rescues After the Rapture
Posted on August 30, 2009Following up on last week?s post, Let Atheists (or Jews or Muslims) Care For Your Pets After the Rapture, the news video clip below discusses the rapture industry, including an interview with the head of Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, one of...
Weekend Links
Posted on August 29, 2009Oh, that kind of ?stimulus package!? (New York Post) More on the economists, this time Justin Wolfers (Freakonomics), versus Posner versus Romer (The Atlantic). Prior Lounge coverage: Conversations About Richard Posner And The People He Fights With, and More Conversations...
Fear and Loathing Come to Greensboro
Posted on August 28, 2009This afternoon, passing through the law school lobby on my way to teach Civil Procedure, I was distracted by the roar of motorcycles. A biker caravan passing down Greene Street might not have attracted much notice, but for the fact...
Global Free Speech Update Argentina:
Posted on August 28, 2009Global Free Speech Update Argentina: President Christina Frenandez is pushing a media reform bill that would give state broadcasters and non-profits organizations a better opportunity to compete with private companies for broadcast space. The bill would also limit the total...
Failures, Funds, and the FDIC
Posted on August 28, 2009On Wednesday, the FDIC released new rules (available in PDF here) regarding private equity acquisition of failed banking institutions. From the New York Times: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation board on Wednesday imposed tough new restrictions on private equity firms...
Sorry, No Direction Home. Bob Dylan To Become GPS Voice?
Posted on August 27, 2009Simply because it is hard to imagine a more entertaining way to find Highway 61, and because life is truly stranger than fiction, I offer for your consideration this story indicating that Bob Dylan is negotiating with a couple of...
Hal Turner's 'Shock-Jock Defense'
Posted on August 27, 2009The complaint in US v. Turner is available here. In it, the FBI alleges that Hal Turner, the right-wing shock-jock, internet blogger, and one-time FBI informant, threatened to assault and murder three federal judges because of an anti-gun rights ruling...
SENATOR TED KENNEDY AND THE DEREGULATORY AGENDA
Posted on August 27, 2009The avalanche of commentary on the life of Senator Kennedy has mostly concentrated on his commitments to and successes in legislating around issues of social justice. His central role in the advancement of the deregulation movement has received far less...
The Faculty Cocktail Lounge
Posted on August 27, 2009Taking up Kim Krawiec's excellent suggestion, here is my contribution to law & cocktails blogging: I wonder if anyone has written an article on country music and domestic relations law?
Bank Failures and FDIC Fund Losses
Posted on August 26, 2009The bank failures are coming fast and furious (and large) now ? a poor blawger can barely keep up. In my last post on bank failures, Bank Failures Update And Future Problem Banks, I noted that the total number of...
Trading Up or Falling by the Wayside?
Posted on August 26, 2009In an effort to empathize with those people on the entry level market anxiously awaiting calls from interested schools, I thought I might try and start a parallel "anxiety thread" for law profs and aspiring law profs who are currently...
Mid-week Links
Posted on August 26, 2009Most people don?t understand sarcasm. At Psychcentral, via Andrew Sullivan: the majority of people ? 55 percent ? who responded to this survey thought they were giving an example of a sarcastic remark they made, when in fact what they...
Fly Fishing: A Legal Angle
Posted on August 26, 2009I want to thank Dan for inviting me to visit here at the Lounge. As I was casting about for what to write for my first post, I decided that Kim Krawiec's recent post about saltwater and freshwater economists, and...
If You Thought Nobody Would Notice . . .
Posted on August 26, 2009In thinking last night about the issues raised in one of my first posts here as a guest blogger, I started looking for additional examples of the persistence of digital artifacts. In running my searches, I came across other issues...
Welcome Guest Blogger Eric Fink
Posted on August 25, 2009We're very pleased to welcome Eric Fink as a guest blogger here at the Faculty Lounge. Eric is an Associate Professor at Elon School of Law. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins, the London School of Economics, and NYU...
More Conversations About Richard Posner And The People He Fights With
Posted on August 25, 2009As I predicted in my last post on this topic, Richard Posner?s current dispute with the macroeconomists continues to provide entertainment and, perhaps, education (at least for me). For example, in a third post on Friday on the topic, Posner...
In Memoriam: Judge Andree Roaf
Posted on August 25, 2009One of the quiet heroines of the ABA accreditation process, Judge Andree Roaf, recently passed away. Judge Roaf was the first African-American woman to serve as a justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court. She thoughtfully brought her experiences as a...
Let Atheists (or Jews or Muslims) Care For Your Pets After the Rapture
Posted on August 25, 2009For a small fee, of course. Via Tyler Cowen, two websites -- Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA and JesusPets ? that promise a service in which atheists who are also animal-lovers agree to care for the pets of those taken in...
Follow Justin @shitmydadsays
Posted on August 24, 2009Seriously, folks, if you needed a reason to join Twitter, this is it. "Justin" is apparently 28 years old, and says in his bio: "I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he...
Hatfields And McCoys Move To Alabama; Families Riot In Marion
Posted on August 24, 2009You don't see this every day: two feuding families rioted in bustling downtown Marion, Aalabama (pop. 29,465) today. I'm surprised the National Guard wasn't called in; everyone else was! The details from the Birmingham News: Officers from eight police departments...
Second FAR Distribution
Posted on August 24, 2009So, my calendar says the second AALS FAR distribution happens this week. Anyone want to guess how many CVs this time around? Since I was so way off the first time, I hesitate to even guess, but for what it's...
Trespassory Art and the Limits of the Right of Exclusion
Posted on August 24, 2009Randall Bezanson and Andrew Finkelman have posted a most creative work, "Trespassory Art," on ssrn. In short they argue for an expansion of the rights of artists to trespass on public and private property and perform on that property--an expansion,...
Maine's "Resident Only" Lobstering Proposal: Constitutional?
Posted on August 23, 2009The remote islands off the Maine coast are tough places to make a living. Indeed, Maine is a tough place to make a living. As a part-time resident of Maine I am sympathetic to the pressures afflicting hard-working Mainers. As...
Strange Copyright Claims: Copyright and Train Schedules
Posted on August 23, 2009I was, for awhile, trying to collect strange (ie, largely indefensible) copyright claims. I didn't get a lot of feedback on this, so the project died. You can, of course, always visit Chilling Effects to find these kinds of cases,...
The Constitutional Validity of ObamaCare
Posted on August 23, 2009In a provocative op-ed in the Washington Post David Rivkin and Lee Casey argue that the requirement that every American purchase health insurance is unconstitutional because the regulated activity is non-economic and has insufficiently substantial effects on interstate commerce...
I need a faculty retreat like I need a hole in the head . . . Hey, wait!
Posted on August 23, 2009We had our faculty retreat last week, which, strangely, got me thinking about drilling holes in my head. So I decided to do some internet digging on the phenomenon. Via Wired Science, Archeologists have found some amazing things in peat...
Weekend Links
Posted on August 22, 2009In this iTunes podcast, Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational fame) interviews Duke law prof Barak Richman about Richman?s current research on insurance coverage of outpatient mental health services. John Yoo and Academic Freedom: Berkeley law dean Chris Edley at Balkinization,...
Call For Papers, Law & Literature, John Jay College (CUNY)
Posted on August 21, 2009Call For Papers Second Biennial Literature and Law Conference When: April 16, 2010 (Friday) Where: John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) (59th Street and 10th Avenue?near Lincoln Center in Manhattan) Conference Organizer and Contact Person: Andrew Majeske, ajmajeske@gmail...
Computer Terrorism and the Laws of War
Posted on August 21, 2009A colleague of mine today raised an interesting question to which I don't know the answer. He wondered if anyone was writing on the parallels between cyber-terrorism and the laws of war. He was thinking specifically about situations where a...
Friday Funny
Posted on August 21, 2009How is it that we put someone on the moon before figuring it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage? -Kathleen Bergin
Concentrated Crime, Cheaper Solutions
Posted on August 21, 2009In his wonderful book, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse, Todd Clear shows that prisoners come overwhelmingly from a small number of communities. These affected communities are then devastated by the effects of this export and stigmatization...
Haggling Over ... What Exactly?
Posted on August 20, 2009Contracts are pretty neat things, even when they don?t feature elaborate iconography. One reason is that they reveal a lot about how parties anticipate and plan for disputes. I?ve been thinking about this subject lately in connection with a project...
Judge Orders Westlaw and Lexis To Remove Opinions in Kline v. Amtrak. So Access Them Here.
Posted on August 20, 2009Amtrak agreed to a confidential settlement with two PA teens who suffered massive burns in 2002 after they climbed aboard a parked railcar and stepped too close to a live wire. Part of the settlement calls for the trial judge...
The Faculty Lounge Conversations
Posted on August 20, 2009The Faculty Lounge Conversations About Richard Posner And the People He Fights With Not being very tech savvy, this was the best I could do in terms of remaking our banner and motto to reflect current events here at the...
Lockerbie Bomber Released From Scottish Jail
Posted on August 20, 2009The Scots have caused what is starting to amount to an international storm by releasing Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. According to the initial BBC...
Google on Coffee
Posted on August 20, 2009News has been out for a week or so that Google is test-driving, and encouraging others to test drive, a new search algorithm, which it calls "Caffeine." According to Google: For the last several months, a large team of Googlers...
When Zombies Attack!
Posted on August 19, 2009In keeping with our mission of bringing readers the latest in cutting edge research, a team of researchers (two students and one faculty member) from Carleton University (no, not lovely Carleton College!) and the University of Ottawa have published an...
Things Antebellum (and a little post bellum) in Southampton Virginia
Posted on August 19, 2009Just back in the office briefly after a trip to Philadelphia. Couple of really cool things to share right now, before my trip down to lovely Athens tomorrow for a conference on Thomas Cobb. (The image at right is of...
Harvard Yard Transformed Into Plaid Blazer
Posted on August 19, 2009Neville Longbottom, the notoriously incompetent young wizard from Harry Potter, must have just materialized in Cambridge, Mass. How else can we explain the fact that Harvard Yard has just been convered into a plaid blazer. And a pair of khaki...
Mid-week Links 8-19
Posted on August 19, 2009Mike Konczal, Tyler Cowen, and Felix Salmon on NPR?s Planet Money answer the question: has financial innovation in the last 25 years been positive or negative? Podcast here: http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/pmoney/2009/08/podcast08.17.09.mp3?_kip_ipx=725366478-1250611423 Duke History Professor Laura Edwards guest blogging at Legal History Blog...
tl;dr and discourse
Posted on August 18, 2009tl;dr, or, alternatively -- TL;DR or TLDR -- is an abbreviation for "too long, didn't read." It is used when a post or description of something is considered too long by the forum members or community in which it is...
Chicken (&) Breasts
Posted on August 18, 2009Thanks to Tiffani Darden for forwarding me this link about a protest at an Orlando Chick-Fil-A related to patrons' rights to breastfeed in the restaurant without "covering up". Having asked a breastfeeding mother to cover her baby while feeding, the....
Fraud, Fortune Telling, and The First Amendment
Posted on August 18, 2009The ACLU of Maryland says that a Bethesda law against fortune telling violates the First Amendment. Their client, who says he learned the craft from his father, was denied a permit to open a fortune telling shop because the practice...
Why We Should Ignore The ?Octomom? . . . Except Maybe Tomorrow
Posted on August 18, 2009Via The New York Times, Fox Broadcasting will present a two-hour television special on Nadya Suleman on August 19: The special could reignite debate over the well-being of the children and the media frenzy that surrounded their birth. Ms. Suleman...
Laptops On State Bar Exams
Posted on August 18, 2009Most of our students use laptops constantly. They take notes (and surf and IM) on their laptops. And they most certainly take final exams on computers. But when it comes time to take their bar examinations, they'll discover that not...
Maurice Sendak, Courtroom Artist
Posted on August 18, 2009My morning has already improved. I was watching an Onion newscast about PETA's degrading and exploitative treatment of women ("they make women strip down, put vegetables over their genitals, and subject them to hours of photo shoots") and at the...
Health Care Hypocrisy: Glenn Beck Channels Karl Rove
Posted on August 17, 2009Remember this delicious segment from Jon Stewart - when he tastefully noted the way the GOP talking heads like Karl Rove had flipped on the experience and gender issues with the arrival of VP candidate Sarah Palin? Stewart is at...
We Know Drama, And Its Name Is The University of California
Posted on August 17, 2009According to the Economist, the best public education in the world is to be found in California, and it is endangered. (HT: Mark Thoma) The Academic Ranking of World Universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, ranks UC...
Who Owns (and will profit from) Native Culture
Posted on August 17, 2009Since I'm recycling posts from years and years ago--like "who owns American folk culture? Parker Brothers, apparently"--and also thinking about issues of cultural property again, I thought I'd blow some dust off a post on native culture from propertyprof back...
Weekend Links
Posted on August 16, 2009Eater.com analyzes the Madoff AmEx statements, released to the public this week (PDF copy here), to determine the Madoff clan?s most expensive meal ($1,943.46 at Patroon); worst tip (6% at Lure); restaurant visits by neighborhood; and other matters of interest...
Teaching Law School Seminars
Posted on August 16, 2009There seems to be a lot of talk today about law schools and law school teaching. Should we engage in new methods of assessment (as someone who dealt with a system replete with discussions of "assessment, objectives, aims and outcomes"...
Cindy Sherman Meets Mad Men: Frank Ockenfels' Sterling Photos
Posted on August 16, 2009My friend Jeremy Butler points out that this photo of Peggy Olson (played by Elisabeth Moss) screams Cindy Sherman. It's really part of a fetching gallery of photos by Frank Ockenfels, prepared to promote Mad Men Season 3, which premieres...
Social Networking as Discourse
Posted on August 14, 2009With everything that's been going on in relation to health care reform, there are debates everywhere. Some are interesting, some provide some good, basic information, while others are, well, ridiculous. In the midst of this, the blogosphere is going ballistic...
Is Your Cell Phone Manufacturer Tracking You?
Posted on August 14, 2009Privacy. We talk about it all the time as an abstract concept. And we don't pay much close attention until our identity is stolen or our email password has been hacked. (Yes, both have happened to me.) But lurking in...
Alabama Finally Allows HIV Positive Prisoners To Have Work Release
Posted on August 14, 2009After years actively discriminating against prisoners with HIV, Alabama prisons have now changed their work release policies. HIV positive offenders are now eligible for these valuable programs. South Carolina is apparently alone among the 50 states in banning inmates with...
Fordham Law v. Reed Smith, Or, How To Scare Away Firms From OCI
Posted on August 13, 2009Those of you who follow the associate recruiting game may be interested in this little story. Apparently, Reed Smith - a law firm you never realized was so huge (1500 lawyers in 23 cities) - recently withdrew from On Campus...
Why August drives your dean crazy
Posted on August 13, 2009As a prof, months that start with the letter ?A? are the worst. In April you?re scrambling to finish teaching the material, you?re writing exams, and you?re making final plans for the summer. In August you?re scrambling to get ready...
The FAR form, a candidate's perspective
Posted on August 13, 2009So, after asking questions here (after joining a conversation here), I promised to let everyone know what I, as a candidate, think about the FAR forms and Tim's questions about them. It is, of course, a question many of our...
Cleansing History? Confederacy Museum (And Trip Advisor) Retouch The Past
Posted on August 13, 2009Our colleague Eric Muller is at the center of a remarkable set of events involving the White House of the the Confederacy, in Richmond, and Trip Advisor - the travel review and marketing website. Last weekend, Eric visited the White...
Future Directions on Probate in the Old South
Posted on August 12, 2009I've spent some time over the last few weeks talking about the new paper Stephen Davis and I have up on probate in the Old South. Now I think it's time to talk about new directions for scholarship. While we...
Search Engines: Origins (Trivia)
Posted on August 12, 2009Here's a trivia quiz about the history of Internet search engines. Do you know how the following search engines got their names? 1. Archie 2. Lycos 3. Yahoo! 4. Overture 5. Google Answers below the fold... 1. Name derived because...
FAR Forms -- The First Distribution
Posted on August 12, 2009The AALS is scheduled to release the "first distribution" of FAR forms tomorrow (Thursday). How many forms will be in the "first distribution"? Here's my guess: 943. How about you? (For those of you who are fans of "The Price...
What's Law School Like?
Posted on August 12, 2009I guess the impending school year is getting on top of me, but I keep having thoughts about how best to explain this strange career (and particularly the hiring process) to those who have not yet embarked upon it. And...
Mid-week Links
Posted on August 12, 2009The Odds On Athletes Spending Time Behind Bars This Season (via Above The Law). In The New Yorker, economist Andrew Zimbalist on the sports recession. Mary Dudziak at Legal History Blog with book reviews (here and here) of interest to...
Dodson to William and Mary
Posted on August 11, 2009Scott Dodson is moving from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, to William and Mary this summer. From the W&M Press release: Dodson received a B.A. from Rice University and a J.D. from Duke Law School, where he was an articles...
When 'any' means 'some' . . . or arguments only a lawyer could love
Posted on August 11, 2009At issue in DOD v. ACLU is whether the government is required to disclose 21 additional torture photos under the Freedom of Information Act (link to prior post here). FOIA requires the government to disclose certain information to the public,...
Weiner on Iceland ... and Slavery
Posted on August 11, 2009Resurfacing from work to mention a really great post over at legalhistoryblog.... At some point I need to talk about Mark Weiner's great books (like Black Trials) on race and law in American history. But right now I want to...
Lists
Posted on August 11, 2009Lists, lists, lists. Everywhere I turn I seem to find another list. Here are five that have caught my eye in recent days. Best Colleges: According to the folks at Forbes, the ten "best" colleges in America are: 1. U.S....
An Easier Path To Jury Verdicts . . . And Law School Hiring
Posted on August 11, 2009From the October 15, 1897, New York Times (PDF file): (HT: @JuryTalk via Overlawyered) The story goes on to report that, according to the affidavit, the jury vote stood at 11-1 in favor of the plaintiff, with juror R.A. Kennedy...
Bank Failures Update And Future Problem Banks
Posted on August 10, 2009A few weeks ago, in Bank Failures in Historical Perspective, I noted that the total number of FDIC bank closures for the year was at 57, putting us on pace for close to 100 FDIC bank closures for 2009. In...
A Dog Of A Case?
Posted on August 10, 2009Anwar Sadat was the former President of Egypt who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 with Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin. One of the characters in this year's movie I Love You, Man has a dog. The dog's name...
The Death at Hot Springs and the Exhumation of the Slave Child
Posted on August 10, 2009Now that I've written a little bit about the paper Stephen Davis and I have on antebellum trusts and estates -- and especially on the context of Greene County, Alabama, demographics of the testators, the use of trusts, and the...
Obama Administration Appeals Detainee Abuse Photos Case
Posted on August 10, 2009The controversy over detainee abuse photos moved to a new phase last Friday when the Solicitor General filed a cert petition in DOD v. ACLU. The Administration is asking the SCT to review an order issued by Second Circuit in...
Flight Fright
Posted on August 10, 2009So how was your weekend? Mine? Pretty good. Thanks for asking. But don't ask Link Christin, an adjunct law professor at William Mitchell. He and 46 other passengers were trapped in an airplane for several hours in Rochester, Minnesota. Story...
Forms of People, People and Forms
Posted on August 09, 2009In our exchange a couple of days ago, Tim asked (in the comments) my thoughts on the AALS "Faculty Appointments Form" used for the Faculty Recruitment Conference. His questions: My question for Rob, in his capacity as a candidate, is...
Another Reason To Pass The Bar Exam The First Time
Posted on August 09, 2009(310): we better have passed that bar exam - i dont want to have to drink like this again From Texts From Last Night, via Legal Antics, a text from a bar taker the night after the bar exam. A...
Oklahoma Law Dean Announces Retirement
Posted on August 08, 2009Andrew Coats (pictured) announced a few days ago that he will leave the deanship at Oklahoma next summer. He has been at the helm since 1996. University president David Boren already has a search committee in place. Stories here and...
Weekend Links
Posted on August 08, 2009. . . are mostly sad: Tim Zinnecker (here at the Faculty Lounge) and Elizabeth Nowicki (at Concurring Opinions) on the death of Tulane law professor Brooke Overby (1960-2009). Larry Solum (at Legal Theory Blog) and Chris Bertram (at Crooked...
Baseball Trivia: The Shot Heard 'Round The World
Posted on August 08, 2009Perhaps the most famous home run in the history of baseball occurred on October 3, 1951. The New York Giants won 37 of their final 44 games of the season to tie the Brooklyn Dodgers, forcing a best-of-three playoff series...
Our new insect overlords
Posted on August 08, 2009Robots again. When it's not self-feeding, "vegetarian" robots programmed (trust us!) not to desecrate the dead, it's ramen-making robot chefs. They're everywhere. So I'm sure we're all looking forward to a world populated by hordes of tiny, crawling or flying,...
Weird Stuff From NASA
Posted on August 08, 2009Like this 1965 photo of the Reduced Gravity Walking Simulator, via Wired Science. The man is in this photo is wearing a special pressurized spacesuit to help scientists study ?the lunar walking problem? by analyzing the phsyiological [sic] effects of...
Syracuse Law and the Sotomayor Nomination
Posted on August 07, 2009SU College of Law played an important role in the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association (ABA) Committee on the Federal Judiciary appointed SUCOL to review Sotomayor's body of written work, including judicial opinions,...
Bueller? Bueller? Frye? Frye?
Posted on August 07, 2009A couple of law prof have blogged about the death of writer/director John Hughes (here and here). I wonder whether his death will increase the value of the ?Cameron Frye Home?. If you saw Ferris Bueller?s Day Off, you know...
What Will Sotomayor's Record Look Like A Year From Now?
Posted on August 07, 2009The Segal-Cover score is used by political scientists to gauge how a judicial nominee will actually vote on the bench. A content analysis of newspaper editorials yields a score from 0.0 to 1.0 that's supposed to reflect the nominee's qualifications...
Texas Senator John Cornyn: Why I Voted "No" On Judge Sotomayor
Posted on August 07, 2009Senator Cornyn's remarks, published in today's Houston Chronicle as an editorial, can be viewed here. In part: "Judge Sotomayor's speeches suggest a surprisingly radical view of the law.... In her speeches, she argued that there is no such thing as...
Brooke Overby (1960-2009)
Posted on August 06, 2009Tulane law professor Brooke Overby has unexpectedly passed away at the age of 49. Professor Overby graduated first in her law class at Iowa in 1987, where she served as a senior articles editor for the law review and was...
Who knew books had trailers? (Oh yeah - and Sotomayor was confirmed).
Posted on August 06, 2009So until recently - make that yesterday - I had no idea that books came with trailers. But why not? If a movie's make-believe plagiarist novelist can have a real website, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. To the point,...
Law Review Submissions via LexOpus
Posted on August 06, 2009Given that we're all blogging about what and when to submit articles in the fall, has anyone given any thought to using LexOpus (W&L's newish submission service)? It looks interesting and includes a number of international journals - although I...
Now That?s a Presidential Puff Piece!
Posted on August 06, 2009In what the Wall Street Journal Law Blog is calling ?the best fair use controversy ever,? the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has ?tweaked? an old photo of then college freshman Barack Obama puffing a cigarette...
The Return of Professor Kingsfield!
Posted on August 06, 2009Most readers have seen The Paper Chase at least once. The film, released in 1973, starred Timothy Bottoms (as law student James Hart), Lindsey Wagner (the non-bionic daughter of a certain law professor, and the object of Hart's romantic desires),...
Death, Taxes, and Medical Bills
Posted on August 06, 2009The final installment of Melissa Jacoby's and Mirya Holman's guest posting on their new article: Today we?ll finish talking about our paper on medical bills and bankruptcy (our first post featured politics and controversy. Our second post had data and...
Inflation or Deflation?
Posted on August 06, 2009By popular request, another (earlier) Merle Hazard video: From the chorus: Inflation or deflation? Tell me, if you can Will we be Zimbabwe Or will we be Japan? Credit markets came undone And still are in distress Will the dollars...
Seventeeth-Century Quaker Legal Thought
Posted on August 05, 2009Well, I'm trying to finish up a draft of my paper for the Pastorius Conference. It reprises work I did ages and ages ago on Francis Daniel Pastorius' Young Country Clerk's Collection. The Collection was -- so far as I...
Cometh the Season of Hiring
Posted on August 05, 2009Following up on both Tim's and Jacqueline's posts, I am also interested in the hiring season, but from a different perspective (and thus the reversal of Jacqueline's title): I am going on the market this fall seeking a faculty position...
The Hiring Season Cometh
Posted on August 05, 2009Just looking at the post on entry level hiring over at Prawfs and I realized that the coming weekend is the last free weekend before those of us on law school appointments committees have to explain to our families why...
TODAY IS THE DEADLINE!!!
Posted on August 05, 2009Perhaps this message is a bit late, but today is the deadline for submitting your FAR form and payment to the AALS if you wish to be included in the "first distribution" of FAR forms to law school hiring committees...
More on Fall Submissions
Posted on August 05, 2009Obviously, I am too easily distracted FROM the fall submission window by blogging ABOUT the fall submission window, but if you haven't already seen it, you should check out Dave Hoffman's survey on when people are submitting articles/planning to submit...
Ashley Judd, Harvard Graduate Student
Posted on August 05, 2009I told myself that I was going on a blogging diet -- no more posting (other than posts that are already written -- like my series on probate in the old South) until I get dug out from the pile...
The Loving Analogy: Yes or No?
Posted on August 05, 2009Robert George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, has written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on gay marriage. His basic argument is this: redefining marriage to include same-sex unions would contradict the democratic process if courts intervened...
10 Things Adoption Agencies Won't Say
Posted on August 05, 2009Some of us (like Aristotle, Charles Dickens, and Faith Hill) are adopted. Some of us (like Paul Newman, John McCain, and Willie Mays) are adoptive parents. And some of us (like Joni Mitchell, Roseanne Barr, and David Crosby) have placed...
Shifting, Shelling Out, or Shirking? The Mystery of the Disappearing Medical Debts
Posted on August 05, 2009Continuing in the series that Melissa Jacoby and Mirya Holman are writing on their recent paper, Managing Medical Bills on the Brink of Bankruptcy: We?re back again on Managing Medical Bills on the Brink of Bankruptcy. Yesterday we talked about...
Mid-week Links
Posted on August 05, 2009James Boyle at Techdirt on the AP?s recently released plan to develop a new metadata/Digital Rights Management format for news stories. Robert Shiller on risk management failure as a cause of the current financial crisis in an interview with Charlie....
The Trusts for Freedom: Or How is Reese Witherspoon Related to Probate in the Old South?
Posted on August 04, 2009Rather remotely is the honest answer to this question. But, in my attempt to link everything to famous people--hey, if there's the "Tribe Obama Thesis," why not "Reese Witherspoon on Antebellum Trust Law"?-- I thought I'd use a connection to...
Do you Kindle?
Posted on August 04, 2009Green Apple Books in San Francisco touts the benefit of books over The Kindle in a couple of videos you can link to here. I'm sure The Kindle will continue to increase in market share, especially once its hefty price...
Why your dean is so productive
Posted on August 04, 2009You may have noticed that your dean is incredibly productive. He or she is able to complete an astonishing array of projects, big and small, short term and long. Or perhaps you haven?t noticed. If not, I can assure you...
Chess boxing it is, then.
Posted on August 04, 2009Following up on Kim's posts about cheating, doping, and technology and the wonderful spectacle of a bunch of drugged-up cyclists riding up a hill - or, um, whatever that whole Tour de France thing is about - yesterday's New York...
Does Your School Tweet?
Posted on August 04, 2009It seems to be the collective wisdom that if law schools aren't using social networking technologies, they're in the dark ages, but a lot of us "over 40s" (*ahem*) are not as savvy as our students about how we should...
Question
Posted on August 04, 2009Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable spokesman Earl Hutchinson calls the posters that have appeared in LA, depicting President Obama as a socialist variant of Heath Ledger's Joker character, "mean-spirited and dangerous." Article here. Where were these outcries when people were...
Jacoby and Holman on The Politics of Medical Bankruptcy
Posted on August 04, 2009I've asked Melissa Jacoby and Mirya Holman to post a little bit more about their paper, which I mentioned yesterday. This is the first of three guest posts they'll be doing over the next few days: We?re grateful to the...
Celebrity Look-Alike Sperm Sale
Posted on August 04, 2009L.A. Sperm Bank Offers Celebrity Look-a-Like Donors KTLA News 7:18 AM PDT, July 29, 2009 LOS ANGELES -- Want to have a baby that looks like your favorite celebrity? It just a whole lot easier to design your future baby,...
The New Technologies of the Antebellum Era: Steam and Trust
Posted on August 03, 2009Among the findings that surprised Stephen Davis and me in our study of wills in the old South is how many wills contained trusts (either explicit or implicit)--nearly 40%. I had expected that trusts would be more a post-war phenomenon....
Thinking about persistence
Posted on August 03, 2009I would like to thank Dan Filler for inviting me to join the Faculty Lounge this month. I used to blog at "Displacement of Concepts," but found that trying to teach, conduct traditional scholarly research, and perform service to the...
A New Meaning to Security Screening
Posted on August 03, 2009Cleveland Hopkins International Airport is trialling "whole body" security scanners for the first time, according to last week's Cleveland Plain Dealer. The new scanners see right through travellers' clothes and pick up security threats that metal detectors can miss, such...
Welcome Guest Blogger Robert Heverly
Posted on August 03, 2009We're very pleased to welcome Professor Robert Heverly to the Lounge. Rob is a Visiting Professor at Michigan State University College of Law. From 2003-2008, he was a Lecturer in Law and Director of the LL.M. Programme in Information, Technology...
Jacoby and Holman on Managing Medical Bills on the Brink of Bankruptcy
Posted on August 03, 2009Wondering about the connections between bankruptcy and medical bills? Melissa Jacoby (UNC Law School) and Mirya Holman (Duke Law School) have an important new paper on "Managing Medical Bills on the Brink of Bankruptcy: Evidence and Implications from a National...
And You Thought The UCC Was Challenging!
Posted on August 03, 2009Co-lounger Kim Krawiec alerted me to this story in today's edition of The New York Times: No Casual Fans at World Series of Baseball Trivia. (Hey Kim -- did you know that your initials -- KK -- represent "two strikeouts"...
What Does Goldman?s VaR Mean?
Posted on August 03, 2009Goldman Sach?s recent record profit announcement has been much in the news lately. See Chart 1 at right (image source CNN). And in some quarters at least, so has its Value-At-Risk (or VaR), which has also steadily increased. See Chart...
Singing the National Anthem
Posted on August 02, 2009Revisiting a post from a few years back at propertyprof: I thought I?d pass along a link to Marvin Gaye?s rendition of the National Anthem at the 1983 NBA All Star Game. Given the recent discussion of what language we...
Terry-cloth jumpsuits
Posted on August 02, 2009That's what I remember most about hand-me-downs as a kid - striped, fluorescent terry-cloth jumpsuits that my Aunt Eve pieced together from a McCall's pattern. That, along with bell-bottoms, concert Ts, and 2 inch heels on occasion. Being among the...
Food for Thought
Posted on August 02, 2009How many people in the world go hungry every day? a) 500 million b) 700 million c) 900 million The correct answer is "none of the above." The actual number now exceeds one billion people, according to the U.N. World...
Testing Sport?s Limits : Cheating, Doping, and Technology
Posted on August 02, 2009Last week, in Vive Le Tour! Vive Le Dope!, I discussed the issue of doping in professional cycling, contrasting the views on sports doping of Harvard Political Philosopher Michael Sandel and Judge Richard Posner, and suggesting that both missed an...
Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debts
Posted on August 01, 2009Amidst all the talk of probate in the old South, I've been meaning to talk about another paper that Sarah Ludington and Mitu Gulati and I have up, "Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debts." The short version...
I love the internet! ... For Its Electronic Library
Posted on August 01, 2009I'm sitting here working on my paper on Quaker ideas about justice for the Pastorius conference (and cursing why I agreed to this -- but I know it'll be fun once I get the paper finsihed). I just found that...
Thaler On Posner
Posted on August 01, 2009Last week, I blogged about Richard Posner?s Wall Street Journal critique of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009, Treating Financial Consumers as Consenting Adults, in which he also took on behavioral economics and leading behavioral economist, Richard Thaler:...
Weekend Links
Posted on August 01, 2009Feminist law professor Ann Bartow asks whether Lucia Whalen (aka the ?lady who called 911?) should also get a beer. That might make Al happy, but I vote that we forget the Bud Lite and non-alcoholic brews, and suggest a...
It's Saturday! Baseball Trivia!
Posted on August 01, 2009What team roster has included the highest number of players later elected to the Hall of Fame? (I found a roster with nine.) Pictured: Jackie Robinson -- card #1 in the 1953 Topps set. He was one of six future...
"Blogging" "On" "Unnecessary" "Quotes"
Posted on August 01, 2009Via Memo To Self, the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. Two of my favorites: Real estate "investments" And some kind of code
Bailout!
Posted on July 31, 2009Bailout -- the new video from Merle Hazard From the chorus: We got a great big bailout, ten trillion bucks and more Unprecedented bailout, it costs more than a war We bailed out even big banks, like Citi and WaMu...
Dear New Law Professor ...
Posted on July 31, 2009In just a few weeks, the fall semester will start. Many of us will welcome one or more colleagues who are beginning what we all hope will be illustrious academic careers. The Cardozo Law Review De Novo has recently published...
Probate in the Old South: Who?
Posted on July 31, 2009Now that I've introduced the paper that Stephen Davis and I have out on probate in the old South and written about the county where our study is centered, I'd like to talk a little bit about what we found...
Taboo Trades and Forbidden Markets
Posted on July 30, 2009On Monday, I blogged about the announcement by the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority that it will reconsider its restrictive caps on payments to egg and sperm donors, due to donor shortages and the resulting reproductive tourism. The proposed...
The Empirical Judiciary: Levi on Ponser on Judges
Posted on July 30, 2009Following up my post on the interview of Richard Posner by the Duke Law School class co-taught by David Levi and Mitu Gulati, I thought I'd talk a little about Dean Levi's review of How Judges Think, which has also...
You were counting on everything in your life being deferred for a year.
Posted on July 30, 2009Number One of the Top 10 Reasons You Failed The Bar Exam. Other reasons include: - -Inspired by Sarah Palin, you lost a week thinking that the best way to achieve your goals is to quit, and - -Worried that...
Just Say "No"
Posted on July 30, 2009As reported earlier this week, the senior senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison (pictured), will vote "no" on Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation to the Supreme Court (the story also notes the same "no" vote on Sotomayor's nomination to the appellate bench)...
"We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population." Well, that's settled then.
Posted on July 30, 2009From the be-careful-what-you-name-your-innovation files: The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (yes, that's EATR) is a conceptual (for now) robot designed in part for military use that can "find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment...
From Academia to the Race Track
Posted on July 29, 2009The NYT has a story about Michelle Nihei, former professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, who is now a horse trainer at Saratoga Springs. She has 14 horses there, and has won an equal number of races in her new...
Mid-Week Links
Posted on July 29, 2009USC?s Daria Roithmayr and Duke?s Guy-Uriel Charles on Why Race Still Matters at CNN. On Sotomayor: No one was surprised when the subject of race dominated the public conversation during Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. What was surprising was how unwilling...
OK Ben Stein, Tell Us What You REALLY Think!
Posted on July 29, 2009"Barack Obama is a super likeable super leftist, not a fan of this country, way, way too cozy with the terrorist leaders in the Middle East, way beyond naïveté, all the way into active destruction of our interests and our...
The Henry Louis Gates 911 Call
Posted on July 29, 2009In case you haven't already heard it, it's here. What's remarkable is the degree to which the caller - Lucia Whalen, a Harvard Magazine fundraiser - didn't seem at all sure there was a break-in occuring. She thought the men...
Powell Weighs in on Gates, Clinton, and the new Administration
Posted on July 29, 2009I didn't actually see CNN's recent interview with Colin Powell that covered issues of racial profiling amongst others. However the online summary is worth a look. I wonder if he'll come back into public life?
Obama has a beer with Gates and Crowley ....
Posted on July 28, 2009I couldn't resist one more post on Obama/Gates/Crowley. I just loved this cartoon from the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Editorial Cartoonist, Jeff Darcy. Image Source: Cleveland.com
North Carolina: First in Flight . . . and in Alienation of Affections
Posted on July 28, 2009Yet another reason to be proud to be a Tar Heel! Image source: Wright House
New Blog Devoted To Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
Posted on July 28, 2009Mike Koehler (pictured), set to embark on an academic career as an associate professor in the business school at Butler University this fall, has started a blog devoted to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act -- "FCPA Professor." Here's the "mission...
Huge Cigar Counterfeiting Ring Exposed. I Wonder If They Were Grape Flavored?
Posted on July 28, 2009Alabama authorities have busted a huge cigar counterfeiting ring involving hundreds of thousands of cigars. Apparently, many were masquerading as Swisher Sweets an "affordably priced" brand that comes in packs of five and boxes of 50. Swisher caught on to...
An Economist, A Historian, And A Billionaire Walk Onto A TV Set
Posted on July 28, 2009Nouriel Roubini, Niall Ferguson, and Mort Zuckerman discuss whether the end of the recession is near on CNN. Embedded video from CNN Video (HT: Paul Kedrosky, who also gets credit for the title)
HUP Books on Scribd
Posted on July 27, 2009While I'm still reeling from the news that Harvard University Press' display room is closed, I see that HUP has signed a deal with Scribd to distribute HUP books in electronic format. One thing that's interesting is the split of...
Skynet Comes to Hillsborough (the machines really are taking over)
Posted on July 27, 2009Well, I was up Hillsborough recently to check out some of the historical sites up there. (I wrote a little bit about Thomas Ruffin's grave not too long ago.) On the way back, there was a crew working on the...
Kevin Flynn Lives!!
Posted on July 27, 2009I'm probably the only Faculty Lounger nerdy enough to care about this, but here goes... The LONG awaited TRON sequel, Tron Legacy, is due to arrive in theaters in 2010/2011. There's some info and a link to a teaser involving...
Gates, Obama, Crowley - Inspiring Some New Poetry...
Posted on July 27, 2009In what I *promise* (fingers crossed behind my back) will be my last post on the Gates/Obama/Crowley media triangle, I wanted to share a website that includes two poems about the Gates incident (Gatesgate?) - the second poem is in...
Driving Dangers: Texting Is Equal To Driving Double Drunk
Posted on July 27, 2009Or, almost. A new study shows that a trucker's risk of collision rises 23 fold when the driver is texting. If the DWI Blog is to believed, this is roughly the risk associated with driving with a blood alcohol content...
U.K. To Reconsider Payments to Egg and Sperm Donors
Posted on July 27, 2009The UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has indicated that it will reconsider its restrictive caps on payments to egg and sperm donors, due to donor shortages and the resulting reproductive tourism. Via the BBC: More and more British couples...
FAR and Away!
Posted on July 27, 2009Given that the 8/5/09 deadline is less than two weeks away, I thought I'd repost my thoughts on the FAR form. Recent posts here and elsewhere have started to address the topic of faculty hiring and the upcoming AALS Faculty...
Vive Le Tour! Vive Le Dope!
Posted on July 27, 2009The Tour de France ended yesterday, with Alberto Contador in yellow, and Lance Armstrong on the podium in third. Like Gordon, I love the Tour de France for many reasons, including that the French just aren?t that good at it...
Antebellum Greene County
Posted on July 27, 2009In the series of posts that I'm doing on the paper Stephen Davis and I have up on ssrn about wills and trusts in the old South, I thought that I'd start by talking a little bit about the county...
I Second Christine?s Nomination . . .
Posted on July 26, 2009Over at the Glom for the best footnote ever: Compare INVASION Of THE BODY SNATCHERS (Walter Wanger Productions 1956) (depicting pod people as merely pointing silently at humans that had not been replaced) with INVASION Of THE BODY SNATCHERS (Solofilm...
About that Beer?
Posted on July 26, 2009When Officer Crowley, Professor Gates, and President Obama sit down to a beer at the White House (or perhaps it should be at a neutral place, like Fenway Park--next time the White Sox play the Red Sox?!), just what kind...
Gates, Crowley, and Obama: A Teachable Moment
Posted on July 26, 2009I think I read somewhere in the New York Times this weekend that President Obama described the incident involving the arrest of his friend, Harvard Prof Henry Gates and its aftermath as a "teachable moment" - a phrase I only...
Sunday Links Round Up
Posted on July 26, 2009Mary Dudziak, at Legal History Blog, discusses books and book reviews of interest to legal historians, including Charlotte Brooks' new book, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (University of Chicago Press, 2009) (see...
Paying The Ultimate Price For Your Faith
Posted on July 26, 2009Yesterday's local newspaper reported that 33-year-old Ri Hyon Ok was publicly executed last month in North Korea. The story also mentions that her husband, three children, and parents have been sent to a political prison. The crime? Ri Hyon Ok...
Around The Blogosphere (And Beyond)
Posted on July 25, 2009Naomi Cahn?s new book, Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation, is reviewed by Anne Lyerly in this week?s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. See here for an extract (subscription required for more). In...
Posner Conversation on How Judges Think
Posted on July 25, 2009Something that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves in the blogosphere is the conversation that Richard Posner had with a Duke Law School class led by David Levi and Mitu Gulati. The Duke Law Journal has recently printed it. The...
Baseball Trivia: "Career" Triple Crown Winners
Posted on July 25, 2009An earlier post raised the topic of Triple Crown winners -- a player who, in a single season, leads his league in homers, runs batted in, and batting average. The great Carl Yastrzemski was the last player to achieve this...
Rashomon on Ware Street
Posted on July 25, 2009I'd told myself that I wouldn't blog about Henry Lewis Gates' arrest, because I have nothing to add that hasn't been said better by someone else already. But I now have a title for one of the articles that certainly...
Are You Featured In Facebook Ads? Opt Out Today!
Posted on July 24, 2009Thanks to a friend's post on Facebook, I've just learned that Facebook now has a default feature that allows Facebook advertisers to use your news feed and wall to sell their products. As explained by Facebook itself, Facebook occasionally pairs...
Wanted: Cat Herder
Posted on July 24, 2009Wanna be a law school dean? Wanna live in the Dallas area? If you answered "yes" to these questions, then perhaps you should apply to be the founding dean at the start-up law school at the University of North Texas....
UC Civil War Expands to Law School
Posted on July 24, 2009On Monday, I noted that 21 UC San Diego department heads had signed a letter sent to all UC Chancellors urging them to preserve its elite, world-class research campuses ? namely UCSD, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Francisco ?...
Who Acted Stupidly?
Posted on July 24, 2009A pedestrian out for a walk notices two men wearing backpacks jimmying open the front door of a house. She calls 911 to report what appears to be a burglary in progress. A cop responds to the broadcast of an...
Because Law Professors Are A-Holes
Posted on July 23, 2009Number 7 of The Top 8 Reasons Not to Go to Law School: Law school professors are some of the most pretentious and arrogant people on this earth. They know everything about everything. In office hours you will find yourself...
Freak show owner fights for puppy ... saves law professor time
Posted on July 23, 2009It's nice when the local newspaper writes potential exam questions for you. This article, which displays a fine eye for legal nuance, features: a five-legged dog a contract between the dog's owner and ... wait for it ... the owner...
See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Tax Me
Posted on July 23, 2009In a post on Wednesday, When Taxpayers Welcome Taxes, Steven Levitt discussed this CNN report on Oakland?s new ?pot tax?: OAKLAND, California (CNN) -- Oakland's bid to become the first U.S. city to tax proceeds on medical marijuana passed Tuesday...
More on Arresting Harvard Professors
Posted on July 23, 2009I've been following the discussions of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr's arrest on the blogs and elsewhere, including today's report on CNN quoting President Obama saying that the police had "acted stupidly" in arresting a man at his own house...
NYU Law's Visiting Professor Of Homophobia Withdraws
Posted on July 23, 2009If you haven't been following the story, NYU Law invited a scholar (and former legislator) from Singapore to teach human rights courses this fall. While a member of the Singapore Parliment, Li-ann Thio had opposed the decriminalization of gay sex....
Faculty Leadership
Posted on July 22, 2009I attended a seminar on university leadership today. Here's some random impressions. 1. We did lots of talking about the importance of listening (but not much actual listening). I guess that's to be expected in a short program with a...
Rethinking Lifetime Tenure For Supreme Court Justices
Posted on July 22, 2009Proposal: ?Instead of lifetime tenure, each justice could be appointed to a finite term. If the justices served for 18 years, every president could appoint two justices during each four-year term.? Advantages? ?First, by ensuring that each president has an...
Shouldn't there be a question mark in that title somewhere?
Posted on July 22, 2009Following up on my earlier post on consumer debt arbitration: the National Arbitration Forum has announced, as part of a settlement with the State of Minnesota, that it is withdrawing from the business of conducting any form of consumer arbitration.....
Bank Failures in Historical Perspective
Posted on July 22, 2009Calculated Risk had a great analysis of bank failures over the weekend. On Friday, the FDIC closed four banks -- Temecula Valley Bank, Temecula, California; Vineyard Bank, National Association, Rancho Cucamonga, California; BankFirst, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and First Piedmont...
Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard
Posted on July 22, 2009That's the title of this article in the August edition of Vanity Fair. From Nina Munk?s lead-in: Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces...
Home Funeral, Backyard Burial, and the Easement for Access
Posted on July 22, 2009I see the New York Times has an article on the rising number of home funerals -- and the rising number of people buried on family property, rather than in a separate cemetery. There's something appealing about the return to...
It's true, it's really true!!
Posted on July 22, 2009Remember when your physics teacher told you how the water spins clockwise in the north, counter-clockwise in the south - or is it the other way around? Anyway, its true, its really true! I crossed the equator this week on...
Clevelanders on Moon Day
Posted on July 21, 2009After Mark and Kim's posts on Moon Day yesterday, and my comments about what percentage of Cleveland radio listeners still believe the moon landing was a hoax, I was interested in today's readers' poll in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. People...
Why your dean wants you to go to Starbucks
Posted on July 21, 2009I lived in Seattle for years and, of course, spent a lot of time in coffee shops. I found that they provided an environment wonderfully conducive to writing. I never really liked writing in my faculty office. There were too...
The Law of Baseball
Posted on July 21, 2009Tim Zinnecker has caused all of us who read the Faculty Lounge to strut our knowledge of baseball lore. Even Tim?s very cool dad is engaged in the interchange! But, Tim, this is a law blog. How about some information...
The News From July 21, 1930
Posted on July 21, 2009As regular readers know, I?m a fan of the blog News from 1930, which provides a daily news summary based upon the author?s reading of the Wall Street Journal from the corresponding day in 1930. Today?s entry is especially good:...
What's the Scholarship on the Sotomayor Hearings Going to Look Like?
Posted on July 21, 2009As I'm taking a mid-morning break from edits on Integrating Spaces, I see that lots of legal academics are disappointed in the Sotomayor hearings. I enjoyed listening to them (a little bit on CSPAN radio as I was driving through...
Plan For (All Of) Your Futures At Reincarnation Bank
Posted on July 21, 2009From Reincarnation Bank?s Website: Scriptures throughout the ages predict man's reincarnation and rebirth. During the transition period to your next life, 2i Limited is offering safe keeping for any asset you wish to deposit. There are people who say they...
Are Fish Tacos The New Latte?
Posted on July 21, 2009How do we characterize people we consider effete and out of touch? A popular term has been latte drinker. As in "Nancy Pelosi is a latte liberal." But I discovered some new language while plumbing the depths of Kim's UC...
Trusts and Estates in the Antebellum South
Posted on July 20, 2009Earlier this summer I mentioned that some Confederate cash was found in the probate office of an Alabama courthouse recently. While Stephen Davis and I were working on our study of probate practices in antebellum Greene County, Alabama, we had...
Happy Moon Day
Posted on July 20, 2009Image source: NASA Today marks the 40thAnniversary of the Apollo 11 mission lunar landing on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong took ?one small step.? With help from NASA, Wired Science, and The John F. Kennedy Presidential...
Should Law Professors Expect Loan Forgiveness?
Posted on July 20, 2009A caveat--this post is to incite dialogue, not to make grand pronouncements about the essential nature of Grad v. Law, or who suffers more in bearing loans. I would just like to know if loan debt is an issue for...
RIP HUP Display Room
Posted on July 20, 2009My friend (and co-editor) Sally Hadden gave me a report from the ground last week that Harvard University Press has closed its display room. Amidst all the dire news in publishing this is perhaps not shocking -- though I did...
One Small Step For Man
Posted on July 20, 2009On this day in history -- July 20, 1969 -- two major events happened in my life. First, I celebrated my tenth birthday. (By my calculations, then, today I'm turning ... no ... it can't be ... please say it...
Are All UC Schools Created Equal?
Posted on July 20, 2009Not according to this letter signed by 21 UC San Diego department heads. Press coverage here: The professors argue that the world's finest public university should preserve its elite, world-class research campuses ? namely UCSD, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC...
Henry Louis Gates Arrested Trying To Break Into His Home
Posted on July 20, 2009Harvard profesor Henry Louis Gates Jr., described by AP as "the nation's pre-eminent black scholar" was arrested Thursday as he attempted to force open the front door of his house. Apparently, a woman reported to the police that she'd seen...
The Aeronaut in the Garden: A New (Old) Case on Foreseeability
Posted on July 20, 2009Well, this is, so far as I can tell, the anniversary of my oldest memory. I recall running up the stairs in our house to call mom to come down and watch the television--a little black and white set--because we...
You mean Moon Day celebrates a real event?
Posted on July 20, 2009Looks like Kim beat me to the punch with her Moon Day post. In the interest of journalistic "balance," I initially considered a reply post proving, irrefutably of course, that Apollo 11 never made it to the moon, that the...
How to Prepare for a College Interview
Posted on July 19, 2009I've been meaning to talk about how to prepare for a college interview for some time. And this morning's New York Times has an article on this topic--or at least how the affluent prepare for them (by hiring extremely high...
California IOU Update
Posted on July 18, 2009Click play above to watch interview with SecondMarket's Jeremy Smith on the secondary market in California IOUs. (If video is slow to load, the outlink is here). A while back, I blogged about the emerging secondary market in California IOUs....
Return Of The Fern Bar? Starbucks Tiptoes Towards Beer And Wine.
Posted on July 18, 2009Can the return of Henry Africa be far behind? Starbucks, in an effort to find more ways to make money off of potables, is dipping its toe into the wine and beer market. According to Thursday's reports, the chain is...
When Lenny Dykstra Talks, People Bleep Out All The Expletives
Posted on July 18, 2009And when Jim Cramer talks, someone has to give Jon Stewart a Valium. The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cLenny Dykstra's Financial Careerwww.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorJoke of the Day (HT: Calculated Risk)
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Posted on July 18, 2009As was mentioned in yesterday?s ?Baseball Trivia? post, Joe DiMaggio?s 56-game hitting streak came to an end on July 17, 1941. (The other baseball story that caught the nation?s attention that same season was Ted Williams and his successful pursuit...
Around the Blogosphere
Posted on July 17, 2009Will law school get shorter, longer, or disappear altogether? Some of these on-going discussions about the future of law schools have transpired over the course of the last few weeks, meaning many readers will have seen at least some of...
Just About Every American Has A Credit Card . . . And Some Of Them Owe $23 Quadrillion
Posted on July 17, 2009Via Freakonomics, and following up on Mark's credit card post from yesterday: An unidentified computer glitch has led Visa to overcharge several of its cardholders for routine purchases at drug stores, gas stations, and restaurants, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500...
Books v. Cigarettes: Why Read When You Can Smoke?
Posted on July 17, 2009Visual Economics has an interesting, though slightly disturbing, pie chart that shows how the average American consumer spends his or her money. If there's a punchline there, it's that the average person spends 2.75 times more money on tobacco than...
Fall Submission Season Looming
Posted on July 17, 2009I know it's only July, but I guess it's time to start planning for the fall submission season. A colleague helpfully pointed me to a document on SSRN by Profs Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit from UMKC that provides updated...
Baseball Trivia
Posted on July 17, 2009Normally I've posted a baseball trivia question on the weekend, but I'll post this one today for reasons obvious from the clues. Also, mindful that one faithful reader thought last week's question was "too easy," I've tried to increase the...
Is "He Brings Home The Bacon" A Legitimate Sentence Mitigator For Corrupt Legislators?
Posted on July 16, 2009Two days ago, Pennsylvania State Senator Vince Fumo (from Philadelphia) was sentenced on 137 fraud (and fraud-related) counts. Among other things, he was convicted of defrauding the PA Senate and a non-profit for his own personal benefit. He also obstructed...
Ranking The Postmodernists? The Best Postmodern Fiction Ever!
Posted on July 16, 2009The LA Times, in what can only be called a sophisticated form of humor, has just published its Best of Postmodernist Literature list. It doesn't quite call it that, of course. But the paper's list of 61 essential works of...
John Yoo and Warrantless Wiretaps
Posted on July 16, 2009Cal-Berkeley law professor, and former Justice Department official, John Yoo (pictured) has an editorial in today's WSJ: Why We Endorsed Warrantless Wiretaps. You can read the editorial (and numerous comments!) here.
Just about every American has a credit card...
Posted on July 16, 2009So begins, ominously, a complaint filed by the State of Minnesota against the National Arbitration Forum, the major provider of consumer debt collection arbitration services. Some of the complaint's allegations are a bit silly. (The NAF works "to convince creditors"...
Law Career Services Advice Of The Day
Posted on July 16, 2009This headline from Bloomberg: Harvard Law Tells Students: Don?t Panic Over Jobs, Try Richmond. I can only imagine the comparable headline out of New Haven: Yale Law Tells Students: Don't Panic Over Jobs, Try Northwestern.
Blog Traffic Rankings, July 2009 Edition
Posted on July 16, 2009Paul Caron is up to more of his blog service work, posting his quarterly blog traffic rankings. These rankings list the top 35 law professor blogs in terms of visitors and page views. (A few aren't included on the list,...
Safe To Visit China Again!
Posted on July 16, 2009From The Telegraph: China has outlawed the use of electric shock therapy to treat internet addiction, after a scandal at a hospital in the Northern province of Shandong. Internet addiction has become a growing problem in China, where officials believe...
Kenneth M. Stampp, 1912-2009
Posted on July 15, 2009This morning's New York Timesbrings the sad news that Kenneth M. Stampp, a towering figure in American history, has passed away. Stampp was best known for his 1956 book The Peculiar Institution. Though published more than fifty years ago, the...
Number Crunching The List of Visitorships
Posted on July 15, 2009Having wrapped up my two summer courses earlier in the week (the UCC never takes a vacation!), I looked around for another challenge (perhaps something just a bit less daunting than inventory financing, yet just as riveting as the topic...
Famine, genocide and AIDS
Posted on July 15, 2009I suspect these things come to mind when most Americans think of Africa. But the continent is much more diverse, and far more magnificent, than that. There?s a side to life here that?s alive, and vibrant, and on the move....
?Michael Jackson Wanted to Buy Octomom?s Babies?
Posted on July 15, 2009Via Starpulse Entertainment News. I kept waiting for this story to make its way into a mainstream media source so that I could blog about it. It never did. But I decided that if Dan is going to blog about...
Supreme Court Nominee Louis Brandeis
Posted on July 14, 2009The Wall Street Journal has posted some of its archives on the 1916 nomination of Louis Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court. See here, here, here, and here. (Photo source: here.)
The other "F" word
Posted on July 14, 2009Elizabeth Nowicki has an interesting series of posts over at Concurring Opinions (see here, here, and here) about race and gender discrimination in legal academia. One intriguing question she poses - at least it's one I've always wondered about -...
?Wells Fargo Sues Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo Denies Allegations?
Posted on July 14, 2009Via Calculated Risk, who gets credit for the excellent headline. FOX Business reports: Yet I could not resist asking Wells Fargo Bank NA why it filed a civil complaint against itself in a mortgage foreclosure case in Hillsborough County, Fla....
The Top 100 Best Places To Live
Posted on July 13, 2009Money Magazine has announced its list of America's top 100 "best small towns." The top ten are: 1) Louisville, Colorado 2) Chanhassen, Minnesota 3) Papillion, Nebraska 4) Middleton, Wisconsin 5) Milton, Massachusetts 6) Warren, New Jersey 7) Keller, Texas 8)...
Did A Wise Woman Justice Change The Outcome Of Safford v. Redding?
Posted on July 13, 2009Apropos of the start of today's hearings, and all the hullabaloo over Sotomayor's wise Latina comment, it's useful to ask whether the existence of a wise female Justice on the Supreme Court altered the outcome of a major case. Did...
Advanced Placement for Law School?
Posted on July 13, 2009Over at propertyprof, Ben Barros (whose scholarship overlaps in surprising ways Justice Alito's work when he was at Yale) has a post on the possibility (unlikely, I know) that law school might be extended from three to four years--and speculating...
Mary Eastman was married to whom?!
Posted on July 13, 2009Yup--Mary Eastman, author of the important proslavery novel Aunt Phillis' Cabin (notice the parallel title to Uncle Tom's Cabin--Eastman was writing in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe) was married to Seth Eastman, who was a somewhat important landscape artist...
Your Faculty Email: Lessons From Enron?
Posted on July 13, 2009How?s the traffic on your faculty listserve these days? Quiet? Active? The answer, along with other information about inter-faculty email traffic, may hold the key to predicting both your school?s social health and impending crises. Consider, for example, how the...
Around the Blogosphere
Posted on July 12, 2009It seems everyone is talking about Michael Lewis?s new Vanity Fair article, The Man Who Crashed the World. From the lead-in: Almost a year after A.I.G.?s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation...
An Orgasm A Day Keeps The Doctor Away. Is This Really NHS?
Posted on July 12, 2009Sometimes the real news seems so good that you wonder whether The Onion is mere surplussage. Such is the state of affairs today, as leading British papers the Times of London , the Daily Mail, and the Telegraph notify us...
The Market in Academic Bomb Threats
Posted on July 11, 2009So, you?ve decided that egg and sperm selling are not for you, and the California IOUs don?t look like such a great investment now that Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan have allowed the time limit they set on...
Really Bad Advice
Posted on July 11, 2009According to this A.P. news account the Marinette County, Wisconsin District Attorney, Allen Brey, advised police that they could remove a US flag being flown upside down by a businessman to protest the town's refusal to grant him a liquor...
Baseball Trivia: Who Am I?
Posted on July 11, 20091. I signed African-American superstar and future hall-of-famer Jackie Robinson. 2. I drafted the first Latin-American baseball player, future hall-of-famer Roberto Clemente. 3. I created the framework for baseball's "farm club" system. 4. Some called me "The Mahatma...
Today in 1930 And The Great Mississippi Bubble
Posted on July 10, 2009Wednesday, July 9, 1930: Dow 219.08 +0.75 (0.3%) Washington Irving's book ?The Great Mississippi Bubble? republished by Random House. "The story was written about a hundred years ago and the actual event occurred more than two hundred years ago, but....
Beware: Summer Rental Scams
Posted on July 10, 2009The NYT has a very entertaining, albeit alarming article giving advice for summer rental nighmares. It is filled with stories of people showing up to beach or mountain houses filled with vermin, slugs, bats, and landlords with alligator boots and...
You can't stop Moneyball; you can only hope to contain it.
Posted on July 10, 2009I'm not the only one who likes to draw Moneyball analogies. Here's one on the topic of health care reform on The New Republic's health care blog. (The topic: devising metrics for evaluating reform proposals.) Also: more bad news for...
Predicting change... for lawyers
Posted on July 09, 2009In my last post, I noted that statistical models typically out-perform experts at predictive tasks. What's true of baseball managers and talent scouts is true of many other professionals, too. Go here for a list of relevant studies (pp. 22-24),...
The Prominence of Plagiarism
Posted on July 09, 2009We recently received a request at the Lounge to do a post on plagiarism in law schools from someone who said that (s)he had experienced significant instances of plagiarism in his/her school. The concerns raised include the fact that many...
Supreme Interview
Posted on July 09, 2009Emily Bazelon (pictured), affiliated with Yale Law School and a contributor to Slate magazine, has a lengthy interview with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appearing in The New York Times, available for your reading pleasure here. (Hat tip: The BLT.) In....
Glad To Join The Lounge
Posted on July 09, 2009What a lovely welcome, Dan! Since I don?t have Tim?s wit, I?ll just thank Dan for inviting me to join the Lounge and thank all of the other Loungers and Lounge readers for making me feel so welcome here. Al,...
Kim Krawiec Joins The Faculty Lounge As Permanent Blogger
Posted on July 09, 2009We're very pleased to announce that Kim Krawiec is our newest permanent blogger here at the Faculty Lounge. As many of you know, Kim is a Professor of Law at Duke University. She is a graduate of North Carolina State...
A New Meaning to ?Nest Egg?
Posted on July 09, 2009From Tuesday?s USA today: Sperm, egg donors increase during recession By Judy Keen, USA TODAY CHICAGO ? Sperm banks and donor agencies say the recession is prompting a surge in calls from people who hope to make money by donating...
Massachusetts AG Brings Suit to Declare DOMA Unconstitutional
Posted on July 09, 2009Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts Attorney General, has filed suit in Boston's federal district court, seeking a declaration that section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. Read the Complaint here. Section 3 of DOMA stipulates that for federal...
Should GPA Count In Selecting Law Review Members?
Posted on July 08, 2009Summertime. Long days. Hot nights. And large numbers of rising 2L's wondering whether they'll be selected for Law Review. One of the factors that most law school Law Reviews seem to consider, in picking their new editors, is classroom success....
Why July drives your dean crazy
Posted on July 08, 2009After surviving the end of the June 30th fiscal year, July should be a good month. For many, it?s a great time to go away on a restorative vacation. A lot of law school deans go away in July for...
It's okay, but it wasn't as good as the first one.
Posted on July 08, 2009Following the less than rosy reviews for the Transformers sequel recently released in cinemas, I thought it might be fun to test the adage that sequels are never as good as the first movie in the series. This summer appears...
Update on Ward Churchill Saga
Posted on July 08, 2009The Denver Post has the story on yesterday's ruling here.
No End To Men
Posted on July 08, 2009Since, here at the Faculty Lounge, we never bypass an opportunity to publicly discuss sperm (see, e.g. Live Sperm, Dead Donor and More Live Sperm, Dead Donor) I bring you news that scientists have created human sperm from embryonic stem...
The Epistemology of Baseball (or, Joe Torre and an actuary walk into a bar...)
Posted on July 07, 2009... where, of course, they watch a baseball game. Let's say it's the bottom of the 9th inning, the game is tied with no one out, and there's a runner on first base. Should the home team bunt? The bartender...
Former AG To Be Red Raider
Posted on July 07, 2009Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is joining Texas Tech University, working in a variety of roles. Story here. Hat tip to The BLT.
FAR and Away (Again)!
Posted on July 07, 2009Steven Erickson, an Olin Fellow at Penn, has informed me (and a visit to the AALS website has confirmed) that AALS is now accepting payments of $400 for FAR form submissions (DON'T MISS THE DEADLINE OF AUGUST 5!). This must...
More Thoughts on the Lateral Market
Posted on July 07, 2009As many of us Loungers have remarked before, the lateral market is a strange beast with less clearly defined rules/norms than the entry level market. So to add to the mix, here's a bunch of issues to ponder about lateral...
The Secondary Market In California IOUs
Posted on July 06, 2009I suppose it shouldn?t be surprising that a secondary market has already emerged in California IOUs. A Craigslist search, for example, turns up a number of bidders looking to buy some of the $53m of registered warrants the state issued...
President Taps Law Professor To Be Ambassador
Posted on July 06, 2009Last week, President Obama nominated Pepperdine law professor Doug Kmiec as ambassador to Malta. The White House press release is here. Kmiec (pictured), a well-known constitutional law scholar, is a devout Catholic who angered some members of his faith with...
Twittering in the Jury Room ... A Comparative Perspective
Posted on July 06, 2009It appears that the United States is not the only country in which concerns are being raised about jurors twittering on a case in progress. My old colleague from down under, Sharon Rodrick, here muses on the application of Australian...
Next-to-Final Visitor List 2009-2010
Posted on July 06, 2009Thanks to those who submitted names. There are some schools that are notably missing. Any help in filling in those blanks should be directed to thefacultylounge.org, or added to the comments below. Image courtesy of "The Visitor," starring Richard Jenkins...
Visiting Assistant Professor List, 2009-2010, Version 2.0
Posted on July 06, 2009This year's VAP list is rather short. Many thank yous to those who have submitted names. Still missing news of large VAP programs. Any news of Climenko (Harvard), Bigelow (Chicago), or others? Email thefacultylounge@gmail.com Names of next year's VAPs after...
The Longest List Of Great Kids' Books Ever. And Why Jim Dale Rocks.
Posted on July 06, 2009Nicholas Kristol has posted his list of the best kids books in Sunday's Times here. But he's also opened up his blog to comments - which is to say, 1600 other folks' lists of the best kids books ever (so...
Let's Clog Some Bases!
Posted on July 06, 2009I suppose I should follow Al's lead and post something on a serious topic. However, now that the baseball All-Star break is nearly upon us, I thought I'd first pause to remember the late, much-lamented (by me, anyway) baseball blog...
The University and the University Press
Posted on July 06, 2009The July 4th holiday is over and this is the heart of the scholarship-production season, so perhaps it's time for a serious post. Ok--look--the news is really starting to trouble me. We've spoken already this spring about University of Michigan...
American Sex Scandals Are Boring
Posted on July 05, 2009Unless they involve a law school dean, of course. But Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's diplomacy efforts in anticipation of the G8 summit to be held July 8-10 in the Italian city of L'Aquila have caused me to question whether,...
Global Free Speech Update Ethiopia:
Posted on July 05, 2009Global Free Speech Update Ethiopia: Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew expressed concern to Prime Minister Meles during a trip to Ethiopia about a proposed anti-terrorism law that reportedly would define criticism of the government as a "terrorist act...
Disappearing Indian Mound In Alabama
Posted on July 05, 2009From this morning's Mongtomery Advertiser comes this sad story. A development in Oxford, Alabama for a new Sam's Club is going to use earth from a Native American mound, constructed perhaps 1500 years ago, for fill. Dan Whisenhunt's article (longer...
Rogue Broker Causes Oil Price Spike
Posted on July 04, 2009The Financial Times is reporting that Tuesday?s spike in oil prices to their highest level this year was caused by a rogue broker who placed a large bet in the Brent oil market, triggering almost $10m (?7m) of losses for...
The Landlord Game: Or, Who Owns American Folk Culture? Parker Brothers, Apparently
Posted on July 04, 2009Well, it's our nation's birthday and that means it's time for some celebration -- and some fun. Because I'm in the midst of edits on Integrating Spaces, I'm going to have to recycle a July Fourth post from a few...
Luckiest Man
Posted on July 03, 2009Readers may recall this post during my stint in March as a guest blogger, when I discussed Michael Goldsmith (one of my BYU law profs, and pictured), his battle with ALS, and his Newsweek editorial that prompted (at least in...
Slavery Apologies in the UK
Posted on July 02, 2009Fast on the heels of the United States Senate's apology for slavery and Jim Crow comes news that two firms in the United Kingdom (Rothschild, the merchant bank and the Freshfields law firm) have expressed great regret for their connections...
Lawrence Goes To India Perhaps
Posted on July 02, 2009A New Delhi court ruled that a statute criminalizing gay sex was a violation of fundamental rights under India's constitution. Section 337 imposed a 10 year jail sentence for "carnal intercourse against the order of nature." The law's a remnant...
"We All Contribute In Our Own Ways" Is Not A Valid Institutional Goal (or, My Tenure?s For Sale: The Final Installment)
Posted on July 02, 2009In this four part series on law school culture, incentives, and dysfunction, I reviewed some of the arguments in favor of and against the tenure system and maintained that moving away from the tenure system is unlikely to be the...
From Tax Professor to State House? Hamill Announces Bid for Legislature
Posted on July 02, 2009This morning's Tusacloosa News brings news that my former colleague and friend Susan Pace Hamill, a law professor at the University of Alabama, is running for the Alabama state legislature. Hamill's scholarship on tax equity. She received national attention --...
The Power of Nickelodian Abroad
Posted on July 01, 2009Posted by D. Daniel Sokol This month, we are going to Chile, where I will be teaching at the Catholic University of Chile (mostly in Spanish) and giving working paper presentations. Given the hot and muggy summer weather of Gainesville,...
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Contract Terms
Posted on July 01, 2009Thanks to Dan, Al, and the folks at The Faculty Lounge for letting me spend some time with them. I?m looking forward to hanging out here for a bit. One of the areas I teach and write in is contracts,...
Religious Universities In the News
Posted on July 01, 2009BYU: revises university's internet network block of Youtube website. Story here. Liberty University: issues new policy to regulate on-campus political clubs. Story here.
"Don't you know that it's different for girls...?"
Posted on July 01, 2009I just started reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and was struck by the second paragraph of the acknowledgments. Anderson expresses tremendous appreciation for the support of his family during the writing process (see below). I wondered while reading...
The Nine
Posted on July 01, 2009I'm way behind on my pleasure reading, so it?s only been in recent weeks that I have read Jeffrey Toobin?s book, ?The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.? The book is written in a manner that will...
University of Miami Law School To Defer 1L Admittees
Posted on July 01, 2009The weak economy seems to be yielding exceptionally positive admission results for one law school. According to ATL, The University of Miami School of Law has sent a letter to its newly admitted 1L students inviting them to defer the...
The White Firefighters Case -- How Accurate Is the Test?
Posted on July 01, 2009I know much has been written about the Ricci v. DeStafano case, both pro and con. In this post, though, I want to focus on the test. Full disclosure: I'm a test skeptic. I think test results are overvalued for...
The Thick Skins of Bloggers . . . And Academics
Posted on July 01, 2009From Felix Salmon: The Cajun Boy hits the nail on the head when he describes one of the biggest upsides to opening oneself up to the crazies of the internet by blogging: After a while, writing on the internet thickens...
More Live Sperm, Dead Donor
Posted on June 30, 2009Last week, I blogged about the Ninth Circuit decision in Vernoff v. Astrue, which upheld the Social Security Administration?s (SSA) denial of child survivor benefits to Brandalynn Vernoff, a 10-year-old Los Angeles girl conceived from the frozen sperm of a...
Weidemaier Blogging With Us
Posted on June 30, 2009It's my great pleasure to welcome my colleague Mark Weidemaier into the faculty lounge. Mark's going to be sitting with us for a spell. Mark writes on a bunch of things, including sovereign debt and arbitration. He usually uses numbers...
Signing off as a guest blogger (and reprise of U of Edinburgh's conference)
Posted on June 30, 2009I've really enjoyed posting this past month (thanks again, Dan et al.!), and as I sign off, I wanted to spend just a bit of time talking about my impressions of the Beyond Text conference (to which I've already referred...
Illinois Law Deans, Past And Present, Speak Out On Admissions Corruption
Posted on June 30, 2009The University of Illinois admissions scandal, documented everwhere from Leiter's Law School Reports, to TaxProf, from ATL to WSJ Law Blog continues to reverberate. Now the past and present dean are speaking out, each with their own goal. Former Dean...
Villanova Law Dean Mark Sargent Resigns
Posted on June 30, 2009Yesterday, Villanova Law School Dean Mark Sargent resigned his position. According to the information we've received, he stated that he stepped down for personal and medical reasons. Professor Doris Brogan, who has been the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at...
Sunny Samaritans or Entrepreneurs? New York Allows Egg Donor Payments For Stem Cell Research
Posted on June 29, 2009In a sharp divergence from the guidelines of some scientific organizations and the laws of other states, such as California, which forbid such payments, New York last week became the first state to allow taxpayer-funded researchers to pay women for...
Two Stats From The Most Recent Season of Manuscript Submissions
Posted on June 29, 2009I submitted two articles to numerous journals earlier this year in March/April using the Expresso service. Two statistics: Percentage of journals that took action triggering the ?confirmation of receipt? response at my Expresso account: 39%. Percentage of journals that have...
Legal Skills In Doctrinal Classrooms
Posted on June 29, 2009They're talking about the value of practice skills to the law school curriculum over at the Conglomerate. Here's my take on it: Though I'm a doctrinal prof fond of critical theory, I side with those who think that US law...
Like New Confederate Cash Found in Alabama Courthouse
Posted on June 29, 2009Now who says that no one cares about nineteenth-century southern legal history? According to the AP, $493 in confederate currency was found in a Morgan County [Alabama] court file containing documents about the estate of slave owner Riley S. Davis,...
Justices Rule for Firefighters in New Haven Bias Case
Posted on June 29, 2009The NYT reports that the Supreme Court has decided in favor (5-4) of the white firefighters in the New Haven bias case, where the city threw out the results of a promotion exam to avoid a lawsuit. The exam resulted...
Demotivational Messages for These Troubled Economic Times
Posted on June 29, 2009My brother just alerted me to a series of "demotivational posters" available online from Despair, Inc. While my technological prowess is failing me, and I'm having trouble downloading the images, I'll set out some of my favorite taglines below and...
Brown on Racial Aspects of Subprime Lending
Posted on June 28, 2009My colleauge Carol Brown has a new paper, Intent and Empirics: Race to the Subprime, up on ssrn, which turns to FHA filings to dissect the racial disparities in subprime lending. She links that empirical evidence with qualitative evidence of...
The UCC Goes To Prison
Posted on June 27, 2009Tim's dry wit makes the UCC seem far more appealing than I remember if from law school, and now a recent federal appeals decision makes me realize that I've got to start integrating more of the code into my First...
How to Make Americans Save More? Get Rid of the Women.
Posted on June 27, 2009Much has been made during the recent economic crisis of the vast difference in household savings rates between the United States and China. The difference has led to the somewhat incongruous outcome of massive lending from an emerging economy to...
Michael Jackson's Will
Posted on June 26, 2009In case you didn't know, or are pretending not to, Michael Jackson, who was a singer of popular music, died yesterday. Fans worldwide have mourned the death of the musical superstar, and news of the death clogged the internet yesterday....
More on the Beyond Text conference at the University of Edinburgh
Posted on June 26, 2009Here's the conference schedule from last weekend: Saturday 20 June ? Theoretical Perspectives Opening Panel ? Zenon Bankowski, The Space to See ? Maksymilian Del Mar, Breaking the Spell: The Education of Attention and Encounter in Law Schools and Law...
Admissions At Illinois: Corrupt Pols Meet Snarky Law Dean
Posted on June 26, 2009News is exploding out of Champaign-Urbana in the last day or so as a series of admissions-related emails were just released by the University of Illinois. The state's rough and tumble political community appears to have targeted the U of...
Packing the Court
Posted on June 26, 2009Publisher Penguin Press is releasing a new book on the United States Supreme Court this month titled Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court. Information on the book is available here,...
Why June drives your dean crazy
Posted on June 25, 2009First of all, thanks to Al and Dan for inviting me to sit in the Faculty Lounge. It?s a great pleasure to me to join the community. For faculty members, June is usually a wonderful month. Grades are turned in...
American Financial Scandals are Boring
Posted on June 25, 2009Forget Bernie Madoff. Meet James Amburn, 56, a financial advisor who runs the investment firm Digitalglobalnet, who was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured by four middle-age investors after Mr. Amburn lost £2 million of their savings in Florida real estate investments...
Supreme Court Finds Strip Search Unconstitutional
Posted on June 25, 2009This morning the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion in the so-called strip search case, Safford Unified School District #1 v. Redding, finding that the search violated the student's 4th Amendment rights. The opinion is available here.
More Gladwell Brainteasers
Posted on June 25, 2009So I've just finished reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. Here's a puzzle from page 159 for readers' amusement... "Suppose I give you four cards labeled with the letters A and D and with the numerals 3 and 6....
Faculty Salary Data From Twenty State Universities
Posted on June 24, 2009Paul Caron recently noted that faculty salaries from Illinois state universities - including the law schools at Illinois, Southern Illinois, and Northern Illinois - are here. I've now added this link to my prior post, which provides links to sources....
FAR and Away!
Posted on June 24, 2009Recent posts here and elsewhere have started to address the topic of faculty hiring and the upcoming AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference. For the candidate who will be attending the Conference for the first time, helpful information is only a click...
Texas Governor Perry Approves New State Law School
Posted on June 24, 2009Dallas is getting a new law school. After much waiting and watching, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed new legislation authorizing and funding the creation of a new law school at the University of North Texas. UNT Law is expected to...
Virginia's Ban on Partial Birth Abortion Upheld
Posted on June 24, 2009The Fourth Circuit issued its en banc opinion earlier today in the case of Richmond Medical Center for Women v. Herring. Readers can find the opinion here, with a nice summary here.
Nothing like Edinburgh in the summer (the Beyond Text conference at the University of Edinburgh)
Posted on June 24, 2009I just returned (hello, jet lag!) from the Beyond Text in Legal Education conference at the University of Edinburgh, and it was a marvelous reunion. (The first part of the conference was in December 2008, and if you want to...
When It Comes To Law Faculty, We?re All Post-Modernists (Or, My Tenure Is For Sale: Part III)
Posted on June 24, 2009A few days ago, I argued that, even assuming that the costs of the tenure system outweighed any benefits, law schools would derive few benefits from abolishing tenure. Most schools show little willingness to implement less extreme measures designed to...
Visiting Assistant Professor List (VAP) 2009-2010
Posted on June 24, 2009Thanks for all those who submitted information. Updates and corrections should be emailed to thefacultylounge@gmail.com, with a subject line of "VAP Tip." Thanks! Visiting Assistant Professors are one or two year fellowships for new scholars looking to enter the teaching...
Welcome Eric Chiapinelli To The Lounge
Posted on June 24, 2009We're very pleased to welcome Dean Eric Chiapinelli, from Creighton University School of Law, as a guest blogger here at the Faculty Lounge. Eric received his BA from Claremont McKenna and his JD from Columbia University. Prior to becoming dean...
Rogue Hedge Funds?
Posted on June 23, 2009The rogue trader story is one that is now all too familiar. A trader appears to be making phenomenal profits, garnering respect, high bonuses, and power within the financial institution. Eventually, it is revealed that the profits are illusory, the...
The Angry Student
Posted on June 23, 2009Now that exam season has ended, it is now time for grade conferences. As expected, there are many students that are surprised by the grade on their exam or paper, and would like to talk about it. Entirely fair. We...
P& T Prep 101
Posted on June 23, 2009While a number of us have started posting advice and information on the soon-to-be-in-full-swing fall hiring season, we should also spare a thought for those poor oft-forgotten-until-the-last-minute folks going up for promotion or tenure in the fall. So what are...
Visiting Professor List, Version 1.0
Posted on June 23, 2009Thanks to everyone who submitted information. Please send updates and corrections to thefacultylounge@gmail.com. Many schools have not reported so please keep up the new tips. Thanks! Visiting Institutions are in bold, home institutions are in italics...
Obama Nominates Alito's Replacement
Posted on June 22, 2009OK, so the title of the post is perhaps just a bit misleading. Maybe it should have read "Obama Nominates Alito's Replacement on the Third Circuit." But that phrasing was less likely to get the lefties salivating! On Friday, President...
Law Faculty Hiring And The Article Placement Timing Problem
Posted on June 22, 2009A recurring challenge for candidates entering the AALS meat market relates to an unfortunate timing quirk. FAR biographical forms are due during the summer, a couple of months before the August law review submission cycle. Law school hiring committees then...
Golf Trivia
Posted on June 22, 2009With Lucas Glover's win earlier today at Bethpage, the following trivia question comes to mind: Name a multiple-time winner of the U.S. Open Golf Championship who attended a "tier one" law school.
DePaul Names Warren Wolfson Interim Dean. Associate Dean To Resign In Protest.
Posted on June 22, 2009Today DePaul named 76 year old Illinois state appellate judge Warren Wolfson the interim dean of its law school. The university fired Dean Glen Weissenberger last week after he alerted the ABA accrediation committee that the University was not -...
Commerce Clause and Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders
Posted on June 22, 2009The United States Supreme Court today granted certiorari in United States v. Comstock, 08-1224, in which the question presented is whether Congress had constitutional authority to enact 18 USC 4248. That section purports to give the federal government power to...
On Immoral Markets
Posted on June 22, 2009Harvard Professor Michael Sandel presents the Reith lectures ? the topic, ?A New Citizenship? -- this month on the BBC. (HT: Al Roth via Tim Harford). You can listen to a podcast of the lectures (a series of four, of...
Congratulations to Robert Post and Yale Law School!
Posted on June 22, 2009What great news that Robert Post is the new dean of Yale Law School! Many congratulations to Dean Post and to Yale, too. They're most foruntate to have one another. We'd been hearing these rumors for a while. I've been...
From the people who brought you KGC ...
Posted on June 21, 2009After rebranding Kentucky Fried Chicken first as "KFC" and more recently "KGC" (for Kentucky GRILLED chicken), Yum! Brands Inc, the parent company of KFC and Taco Bell, is also moving towards a rebranding for Pizza Hut. Some restaurants will now...
Sunday Baseball News: Another Triple Crown
Posted on June 21, 2009Inspired by co-blogger Tim Zinnecker's post on Yaz and other triple crown winners, I am moved to report that yesterday the Deer Isle-Stonington Mariners (the high school in my summer community) won the Maine state baseball championship for their class...
Live Sperm, Dead Donor . . . No Case
Posted on June 21, 2009From the L.A. Times (June 18, 2009): Court denies benefits for girl conceived from dead father's sperm ?A 10-year-old Los Angeles girl conceived from the frozen sperm of a dead man will not receive his Social Security benefits, a U.S....
Global Free Speech Update Turkey:
Posted on June 20, 2009Global Free Speech Update Turkey: Nadim Sener, author of "The Dink Murder and Intelligence Lies," faced anti-terrorism charges this week in an Istanbul court. Sener's book accuses law enforcement officials of negligence and a cover-up in failing to thwart the...
Baseball Trivia
Posted on June 20, 2009I am the son of a potato farmer. I attended Notre Dame University. I was the last player to achieve one of baseball's rarest accomplishments. I was a first-ballot electee into MLB's hall of fame. Oh, and Tim Zinnecker's initials...
One Law Student's Extraordinary Summer Stipend
Posted on June 19, 2009Every law school career planning office wants to help students find summer work. For many 1L's, a summer internship - albeit unpaid - is a good choice. So it was for Leo Wolpert, law student at UVa. He's doing a...
Clash At DePaul Law. Provost Sacks The Dean. Stay Tuned.
Posted on June 19, 2009Brian Leiter and ATL are both reporting that DePaul Law Dean Glen Weissenberger has been ousted by university provost, Helmut Epp. From a quick and dirty review of available materials (available in more complete form from the blogs above), it...
Celebrity Drug Habits: Public or Private?
Posted on June 19, 2009With thanks as usual to Patricia Sanchez Abril for drawing this case to my attention, I was intrigued by a small issue when reading the 2004 British House of Lords decision in the Naomi Campbell case. This case involved the...
Fathers Day
Posted on June 19, 2009A big shout-out to fathers everywhere, as we honor you on Sunday. For many of us, our father is a hero, an inspiration, a teacher, a role model, a mentor, a friend. Long after our father may pass away, or...
Super Bowl Of Rock Redux: Birmingham Alabama Discovers 1977
Posted on June 19, 2009I was taking a look at this weekend's line up at City Stages in Birmingham. Lynyrd Skynyrd (such as it is.) REO Speedwagon. 38 Special. Hey, wait!! This is sounding suspiciously like one of the most important musical events in...
Incentives And Institutions ? Why Stop With The Banks? (or, My Tenure's For Sale, Part II)
Posted on June 19, 2009A few days ago, in My Tenure?s For Sale. How About Yours?, I blogged about the purported costs and benefits of tenure, and the extra salary I would demand in exchange for giving up tenure (not that my dean has...
Coffee and Parking: A Misunderstood Relation?
Posted on June 18, 2009We've spoken before about the combination of beer and coffee. Now a new installment in the coffee series. This time it's about a thermos, coffee, and a parking space .... This seems like a little over-charging--and it's perhaps further evidence...
I Pay Dead People
Posted on June 18, 2009Tom Coburn (pictured) is a U.S. Senator from Oklahama. (We may become more familiar with him in days to come, given his membership on the Senate Judiciary Committee.) His online biography states that his Senate priorities include ?reducing wasteful spending...
Law School Hiring: 2009 Faculty Appointments Committee Chairs
Posted on June 18, 2009Dan Markel is doing his part to facilitate the law school faculty search process by compiling a list of faculty appointments committee chairs here. As I argued , a lateral candidate should do his or her best to make direct...
Wilkes Barre Law School Moving Ahead
Posted on June 18, 2009Wilkes University's board of trustees is moving ahead with plans to open a law school, according to this story from the Times Leader. We've previously mentioned that they hired Loren D. Prescott from Widener Law School as their initial dean....
United States Senate Slavery Apology
Posted on June 18, 2009Thanks to a pointer from Sally Greene, I learn this afternoon that the Senate has adopted a non-binding resolution that apologizes for slavery. The resolution passed via a voice vote. This follows on the heels of the Brown University's Steering...
More on Facebook and Friendship
Posted on June 18, 2009Further to a post I made the other day about the nature of "friends" on Facebook being more like imaginary friends from childhood than real flesh and blood people, I noticed an interesting article online last night from Newsweek. In...
Judges and Personal Feelings
Posted on June 17, 2009I know I'm probably a little behind the times on this one, but I saw in today's Philly Inquirer that Jeff Sessions is poised to give a speech decrying the use of "personal feelings" in judging. Because I am spending...
Becker And Posner On The Pay Czar
Posted on June 17, 2009This week, Becker and Posner take on the Obama administration?s ?Pay Czar,? with predictably critical reactions. Posner, in particular, discusses an issue near and dear to my own heart (see here, here and here) -- trading floor compensation and compliance...
Sex Offender Registration (SORNA) And The Tenth Amendment
Posted on June 17, 2009Doug Berman points to an interesting opinion from the Supreme Court of Missouri. It raises some complicated standing issues under the Tenth Amendment and begs the question of whether a state itself has an interest in enforcing state constitutional provisions...
Why Today I Joined Twitter
Posted on June 17, 2009Twitter's about the only way now that protesters inside Iran can funnel news to the outside. And though there's a real danger facing those who do, you can make it harder for authorities to find them. From Reunify Gally: Do...
Continental Airlines Loses Kid; Parent Gains Silver Elite Status
Posted on June 17, 2009Continental Airlines, which one study ranked as #5 for handling luggage, appears to have particular trouble with misplaced child passengers. This weekend was particularly problematic for the airline, according to press accounts: In one case, an 8-year-old Texas girl wound...
Harvard Board of Overseers Election Results
Posted on June 17, 2009This seems like a lot of inside baseball, but those following Harvey Silvergate's attempt to get on the Harvard Board of Overseers will be interested in knowing that his petition candidacy was unsucccessful. From the Crimson: Lawyer Morgan Chu, cardiologist...
Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism?
Posted on June 17, 2009(A) Attacking the Pentagon (B) IEDs (C) Hate crimes against racial groups (D) Protests "D" is the correct answer, at least according to folks over at the Defense Department who include the question on a written routine training exam. Good...
Law School Centers
Posted on June 17, 2009I posted a while back when I was visiting at Concurring Opinions about the role of academic Centers within the law school enterprise. That post didn't generate a lot of discussion, but I'd really be interested in whether anyone at...
Remarks from the Nominee
Posted on June 16, 2009Many thanks to President Filler for nominating me to an open position at The Faculty Lounge. No doubt President Filler considered many remarkable candidates for this vacancy. Critics will wail that I received this appointment solely because of my diversity...
Stigma? Laterals In The AALS Law Faculty Recruitment Directory
Posted on June 16, 2009Brian Leiter has a post up posing the recurring question of whether a lateral move candidate ought to sign up up for the AALS faculty recruiting conference registry. My co-blogger Tim commented in favor of using the book. When I...
My Tenure's For Sale. How About Yours?
Posted on June 16, 2009What?s the minimum that you would accept to give up tenure? Steve Levitt?s asking price is only $15,000, on the rationale that ?the value of tenure is inversely related to how good you are. If you are way over the...
Visiting The Lounge
Posted on June 16, 2009Many thanks to Al, Dan, and the rest of the Faculty Lounge gang for letting me hang out with them for a while. Here in Chapel Hill, I have the ability to hang out with Al not just virtually, but...
Facebook and Imaginary "Friends"
Posted on June 16, 2009While indulging in my usual conference-inspired USA Today-fest last week, I noticed an article by Craig Wilson effectively dealing with "friendship fatigue" on Facebook. Wilson likens Facebook friends to the imaginary friends of our childhoods ie people who help you...
Kimberly Krawiec Blogging With Us
Posted on June 16, 2009It's my great pleasure to welcome Kim Krawiec of Duke Law School into the faculty lounge. Kim's going to be sitting with us for a spell. Kim was with UNC for many years and she has taught law at the...
Heald on the Problems Confronting Law and Literature
Posted on June 16, 2009Paul Heald has a brief essay up on ssrn, "The Death of Law and Literature." It's a fast read and addresses the problems of relevancy and audience for law and literature. Here is his abstract: Thirty years after the publication...
Jacqui Lipton And Tim Zinnecker Officially Join The Lounge!
Posted on June 15, 2009We're very excited to announce that we have two new permanent bloggers here at the Faculty Lounge: Jacqueline Lipton and Timothy Zinnecker. Most of you are already familiar with these folks. They've been thoughtful visitors to the Lounge for some...
Monument Law: Tennessee Statehouse Version
Posted on June 15, 2009I'm back from a couple of days in lovely Tennessee, where I had the chance to talk a little bit about monuments and memory with Spencer Crew's students at Middle Tennessee State University. The extraordinary Jim Campbell was there to...
Be the kind of woman that when
Posted on June 15, 2009Be the kind of woman that when your feet hit the floor each morning the devil says "Oh Shit, She's up!" -Kathleen Bergin
Conference Formats...
Posted on June 15, 2009Thanks to Dan and the gang at the Lounge for inviting me stay on permanently - I feel like Heather Locklear on Melrose Place, the guest who just won't go away! [Probably dating myself there with that reference as usual.]...
2009 Lateral Moves List Updated. Last Call For News And Corrections!
Posted on June 15, 2009My almost-final update of the 2009 law faculty lateral moves list is here. I'd be very, very appreciative if readers would take one more look to make sure that I've got a complete and accurate picture. I'm confident there will...
Cravath Defers Start Dates. Stigma Ends. Judicial Clerkship Crush Begins.
Posted on June 15, 2009It took a while, but the Cravath ceiling has finally shattered.. On Friday, the firm announced that the incoming class (2009) would be offered a voluntary one year deferral of start date. That's the good news. The bad news is...
Ave Maria Replaced! Massachusetts Law School Targets Junior Colleges! UNT Law Sweats Gov's John Hancock!
Posted on June 13, 2009For those of you who don't scour the law school news feed daily - and God only knows what you do with your time - here are three items to contemplate over this pleasant June weekend. 1. Ave Maria has...
Czar Kenneth Feinberg: A Dynamic, Transparent Special Master
Posted on June 12, 2009Yesterday the Treasury Department announced that Kenneth Feinberg would serve as a special master - czar, to many media outlets - supervising executive compesnation for those companies getting tons-o-bux from Uncle Samuel. As many people probably know, Feinberg was the...
Texas Ends 81st Legislative Session
Posted on June 12, 2009The good news: lawmakers passed a bill to restrict the use of shackles on pregnant inmates during labor and delivery. The bad news: its 2009, and lawmakers just now passed a bill to prevent shackling inmates during delivery. HB 3653...
Pace Environmental Law Review Moves to Peer Review
Posted on June 12, 2009From our friend Prof. Bridget Crawford (Pace): Eablished in 1982, PELR was one of the first scholarly environmental law journals. As of August 1, 2009, Pace Environmental Law Review (PELR) will use a new Peer Review process to select articles...
Face(book)ing the New Cybersquatters
Posted on June 12, 2009This morning, the National Law Journal noted: "Starting Saturday, at 12:01 a.m. EST, Facebook will allow an estimated 200 million users to select any "usernames," which can include a trademark, brand name or personal name. And if the owner hasn't...
Loving v. Virginia: June 12, 1967
Posted on June 12, 2009Today, June 12, is the 42nd year after the Loving v. Virginia case, which ruled as unconstitutional Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws. The plaintiffs, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, lifelong acquaintances and residents of Central Point, VA, were jailed for cohabitating as...
Stranger in a Strange Land
Posted on June 11, 2009The subtitle of this post is "law professor in Target." (Or perhaps it should be "law professor loose in Target.") I delayed my trip to Philadelphia so that I could stay in North Carolina for today's memorial service for John...
Bing on da new search engine...
Posted on June 11, 2009So this week, Microsoft seems to have unveiled its new search engine, bing.com. I'm told it's supposed to rival and even surpass Google in popularity. I gave it a whirl and noticed that the search results are different than on...
Martha Minow New Dean Of Harvard Law School
Posted on June 11, 2009Martha Minow, a Harvard Law professor since 1981, has just been named the Dean of Harvard Law. She replaces Elana Kagan. She is a Yale Law School graduate. Her bibliography is here. Sorry Rutgers-Newark...this just wasn't your year. Based on...
Why Don't Law Students Choose the Cheaper Option?
Posted on June 11, 2009Posted by D. Daniel Sokol I am trying to write up an article in the next few weeks. In the meantime, some of my colleagues are teaching summer classes. One thing that I wonder is why there are not more...
On Grammar, Usage, and Style
Posted on June 10, 2009I cannot resist seconding Nancy Rapoport's observations about student literacy. I am tired of student inability to distinguish the possessive from the plural, with consequent butchering of the poor apostrophe. I bemoan the failure of students to understand the difference...
Crossing over into the world of the grouchy
Posted on June 10, 2009So, I've been reading my student evaluations (for a related post, see here), and one disturbing theme I've noticed is the desire of some students in my upper-level classes to have me "go over" the readings. Not "work more problems"...
Citation Counts - A View From Across the Atlantic
Posted on June 08, 2009Posted by D. Daniel Sokol At an all expenses paid conference two weeks ago in Santorini, Greece (isn't the life of an academic grand?) I chatted a bit with UK academic friends regarding the strengths and weaknesses of assessing both...
Are traditional state research universities the next Titanic?
Posted on June 08, 2009Now that the last Titanic survivor has passed away (see here), we're linked to Titanic's history only by comparison to other monumental and cumulative miscalculations. I've started to wonder whether traditional state research universities fall into the Titanic-sized blunder category...
Professor Sotomayor
Posted on June 08, 2009Among the many interesting documents that are now up on the Senate Judiciary Committee's website are syllabi for the appellate advocacy classes that Sonia Sotomayor co-taught at NYU (with Adjunct Professor John Siffert) and at Columbia (with at various times...
Visitor List for 2009-2010
Posted on June 08, 2009It's that time of year to put together a list of visitors for next year. To prevent any confusion, there will be two lists: 1. Visiting Assistant Professors (VAPS) 2. Lateral Visitors, both junior and senior. Please email your tips...
An Antebellum Painting of A Vermont Marble Quarry?!
Posted on June 08, 2009Why, why didn't I know about John Hope's 1851 painting, "A Marble Quarry," which is in the Boston MFA's collection? This would have been a great image to use in Property and Progress--what a great scene of an industry in...
Student evaluations I love
Posted on June 08, 2009Up until now, my favorite evaluations have included "Drinks too much Diet Coke" (not true any more) and (from an 11-year-old sitting with her mom in my class, when asked how I compared to other professors) "I don't know; I'm...
Word of the day: Ultracrepidarianism
Posted on June 06, 2009From Wikipedia, with happy disregard for the authenticity of it's sources. Ultracrepidarianism is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge. The term ultracrepidarian was first publicly recorded in 1819 by the essayist William Hazlitt...
Spelling Bee Champ
Posted on June 06, 2009Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kan is this year's National Spelling Bee champion, spelling "laodicean" as her final word. The look on the father's face in the background as she gets to the "-ean" part is delightful.
Helping The Innocent And Mentally Ill Plead Guilty
Posted on June 05, 2009When I teach the insanity defense in Criminal Law, I often talk about the strategic component of the defense. Before any (good) attorney raises this claim, she has to consider whether an insanity finding will actually be better or worse...
Governor Schwarzenegger Seeks To Defund Hastings Law
Posted on June 05, 2009According to the Daily Californian: In attempt to offset the state's $24 billion deficit, the governor proposed last week to eliminate all state funding for the UC Hastings College of Law, an action that could jeopardize the trust that established...
Now that your gallbladder is removed, I'd like to discuss my Grade...
Posted on June 05, 2009From today's Chronicle of Higher Education: Actual message from a chair of a department somewhere, to faculty members, names redacted: Fellow aging economists, In case you did not know, on Friday Professor X had his gallbladder removed. Students were immediately...
Political VIP Admits: Law School Admissions Veritae
Posted on June 04, 2009Last weekend's Chicago Tribune has an interesting story about how Illinois politicians pressure the University of Illinois - including the U of I School of Law - to admit comparatively less qualified applicants. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the...
Real Faculty Lounge News: Laura Appleman Is A Mom!
Posted on June 04, 2009We're thrilled to send congratulations and good karma to our co-blogger Laura Appleman and her law prof husband, David Friedman, who are now the happy (and soon to be perpetually tired) parents of a new son: Graham Allen Friedman. The...
Four Dean Finalists At Harvard Law School?
Posted on June 04, 2009When it comes to law school dean searches, you usually find two types: those that publicize their finalists and those that provide no information. At Harvard Law School, there is no official shortlist. There are, however, some industrious reporters at...
Fun while grading....
Posted on June 04, 2009As I wind up my grading (ETA of grades, next week), I've started keeping a list of my favorite lines from exams. Two so far from my bankruptcy exams: one student noted that "Ch 7 & 13 function relatively the...
Greene on State v. Mann, Ruffin, and Methods of Legal HIstory
Posted on June 04, 2009Over at the legal history blog Sally Greene--whom I frequently describe as our nation's most thoughtful politician--has a series of posts on Thomas Ruffin's 1830 opinion in State v. Mann. The posts explore the new evidence about the characters involved...
Separated at Birth - Law Prof Edition
Posted on June 03, 2009Posted by D. Daniel Sokol Over at the Antitrust and Competition Policy Blog, I have a list of people and pictures who seem to have been separated at birth.
Ernest May, 1928-2009
Posted on June 03, 2009A couple of weeks ago we had the sad news that David Herbert Donald has passed away. Now comes the news that long-time Harvard history professor Ernest May passed away on Monday, of complications following surgery. The Harvard Crimson's obituary...
Matthiessen LGBT Chair at Harvard
Posted on June 03, 2009We've been talking a lot about Harvard of late--particularly the belt-tightening in light of the recession. So it's a real pleasure to talk about an expansion there: a new chair in "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies." This morning's New....
Some advice for the new folks entering law school teaching
Posted on June 03, 2009My buddy Tim Zinnecker has suggested that I start off my guest blogging with some advice for folks new to legal academia. (Thanks, Tim!) So here are some ideas, and I hope that lots of you will pitch in with...
When Should A Law School Accept Applicants With Criminal Records?
Posted on June 03, 2009Members of law school admissions committees face lots of challenges each year. Can they hit LSAT and GPA targets? What kind of yield can they expect? How can they best allocate discounts? But one of the trickiest questions can be:...
Domain Names in Politics
Posted on June 02, 2009Yesterday, the National Arbitration Forum handed down a decision in a domain name dispute involving three domain names corresponding with former President Bill Clinton's name - williamclinton.com, williamjclinton.com, and presidentbillclinton.com. The UDRP arbitrator held that although President Clinton does have...
And They Said the Bush Adminstration was Incompetent
Posted on June 02, 2009According to the New York Times, the federal government has mistakenly released a highly confidential report that provides details of the nation's nuclear facilities and programs. Read it here.
US Airways Baggage Fee Soars 33%. Think Of All The Money You'll Save!
Posted on June 02, 2009Today, over at usairways.com, I learned that now I could save money on checked baggaged fees by paying online. Checked bag fee change - lower fee online, the website announces in its News column. But when I clicked through, I...
Welcome Guest Blogger Nancy Rapoport
Posted on June 02, 2009We're very pleased to welcome Nancy Rapoport as a guest here at the Lounge. Nancy is the Gordon Silver Professor of Law at UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law. She previously served as the dean at the University of...
Jeffrey Rosen (GW): The Case Against Sotomayor--the Responses
Posted on June 01, 2009I have been asked to repost Prof. Rosen's article on Sotomayor, along with some responses. Excerpts from Rosen's Article in the New Republic: The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind...
Can Courts Save our Schools? New Jersey Supreme Court Alters Financing Scheme.
Posted on June 01, 2009Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court functionally ended almost 40 years of litigation concerning the funding of urban education in New Jersey. According to The New York Times: The New Jersey Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a new school...
Justice Goldthwaite and Anne Wilson Goldthwaite
Posted on June 01, 2009One of my areas of interest is multi-generational studies of families. Francis Daniel Pastorius to Jaco Pastorius, for instance; Theodore Sedgwick to Kyra Sedgwick for another (and Catharine Sedgwick, too). And, of course, I'm most interested in the intersection of...
Sotomayor And White Collar Crime
Posted on June 01, 2009Ellen Podgor's take on Sonia Sotomayor as it relates to white collar crime is here.
OpEd Writing Seminars for Women
Posted on May 29, 2009This is a great project: increasing the numbers of women who write op-eds. You can arrange for the seminar to come to your school, or you can take a webinar. Our Vision is to create a sea change in our...
Global Free Speech Update
Posted on May 29, 2009Venezuela: Regulators continue to investigate Globovision for inciting a "panic and anxiety" in reports that criticized the government's emergency response record. Two years ago, regulators pulled the license of a Radio Caracas Television, leaving Globovision the only remaining anti-Chavez station...
Remove that Bumper Sticker or Get Towed and Fined
Posted on May 29, 2009A Dallas homeowners' assocation has told a resident that he is in violation of the Association's CC&Rs for displaying several decals and bumper stickers on his car, each of which refer to his connection with the U.S. Marine Corps. The...
Alex Acosta New Dean At FIU
Posted on May 28, 2009As Howard Wasserman reports, Alex Acosta has been named the new dean of Florida International University School of Law. Acosta, 40, is the sitting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida and previously served in the Bush administration as....
Chris Guthrie Named Dean Of Vanderbilt Law School
Posted on May 27, 2009Chris Guthrie, 42, was named the new dean of Vanderbilt Law today. He served as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs from 2004-08. Guthrie has agreed to a five year appointment and will replace Ed Rubin who has been at Vandy...
Senior Theses (and other early scholarship) of the Now Famous
Posted on May 26, 2009Update: Neither of the following count as early scholarship, but ... in honor of her impending nomination to be Supreme Court Justice, a link to Judge Sotomayor's 2004 tribute to John Sexton, which appeared in the NYU Annual Survey of...
Law Prof Fun: The SouterSuccessor Picker
Posted on May 26, 2009The New York Times features an interactive game called "If You Were President" that allows you to "interview" candidates and then vote for them. There is even a write-in section, but you can only vote once--I already tried. (No I...
The Economics of Marriage Equality
Posted on May 26, 2009If the moral imperative favoring marriage equality won't sway the right, maybe $100 million will. That's how much gay marriage injected into the Massachusetts economy over the past five years. According to one study, "marriage equality resulted in an increase...
The Next Supreme Court Short List (or Long List)
Posted on May 26, 2009Many, many congratulations to Judge Sotomayor on her nomination to the United States Supreme Court. The confirmation hearings promise a robust debate on the role of empathy and on the role of experience in American law. Right now at Fox...
Will Religious Exemptions Accelerate Adoption Of Same Sex Marriage?
Posted on May 26, 2009New Hampshire's governor, John Lynch, has refused to sign a same sex marriage bill that does not include substantial protections for religious individuals and institutions who disagree with the law. He's received a couple of letters from legal academics supporting...
It's Sotomayor
Posted on May 26, 2009From NYT: President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court, officials said Tuesday, and has scheduled an announcement for 10:15 a.m. at the...
The Origins of America?s Love Affair with the Oversized?
Posted on May 26, 2009Ask a European to describe America and Americans and they will inevitably talk about size. Americans love big gas guzzling cars. They build ridiculous McMansions. They wear gigantic hats. They supersize their meals. They lift weights and inject steroids until...
Judge Sotomayor on "where policy is made"
Posted on May 26, 2009There's a very short slice of a speech that Judge Sotomayor gave in February 2005 at Duke making the rounds on the internet, in which she says something that some people think is scary, like the court of appeals is...
Sotomayor's Balanced Record
Posted on May 26, 2009Check out Scotusblog for a quick and handy overview of Judge Sotomayor's opinions. Loads of good reading here, and more of a balanced record than her opponents are likely to acknowledge. Here are a few notable First Amendment cases: Center...
California Supreme Court Upholds Prop 8 as a Valid Amendment
Posted on May 26, 2009The California Supreme Court, in Strauss v. Horton, has upheld the validity of Proposition 8 as a valid amendment to the state constitution. In doing so it stressed that Proposition 8, which added a new section to the constitution specifying...
Civil Rights, Cemetery Law. and Veterans' Day
Posted on May 25, 2009Yesterday's Birmingham News ran a story by Erin Stock about a most, most extraordinary case: that of Vietnam Veteran and hero Bill Terry. Mr. Terry died in 1969 in Vietnam, at age 20. His body returned home to Birmingham, but...
Memorial Day: Fredericksburg National Cemetery
Posted on May 25, 2009Since this is Memorial Day weekend, I thought that I'd dip into my stock of photos and post something from a National Cemetery. Close readers of the blogosphere (and my friends) will recall that one of my areas of interest...
Supreme Court Speculation and Diane Wood's Extra-Judicial Writing
Posted on May 23, 2009In Thursday morning's Washington Post, Robert Barnes and Shailagh Murray suggest that two former law professors, Diane Wood and Elena Kagan, are emerging are front-runners for nomination to the Supreme Court. Ann Althouse clued us in recently that the "conventional...
Street Justice: Police As Irrational Actors
Posted on May 22, 2009What you see in this troubling video may be perfectly understandable on a human level: irate cops finally catch up with an out of control driver (who may have targeted another officer) and beat the hell out of him. The...
Conservative Radio Host Gets Waterboarded, Lasts Six Seconds, Changes Position on "It's Not Torture"
Posted on May 22, 2009View more news videos at: http://www.nbcmiami.com/video.
Dance with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
Posted on May 22, 2009Today, President Obama signed a bill that holds the hope of significantly reigning in credit card companies. This legislation actually appears to have a bit of a bite, at least in comparison to the regulations that the Federal Reserve passed...
The Alternatives to Marriage Project: No to Judge Leah Spears
Posted on May 22, 2009AtMP, a nonprofit organization that advocates for equality and fairness for people who are not married, has issued this statement regarding the potential nomination of Leah Spears to the Supreme Court. Nicky Grist, the Executive Director of the organization, has...
Can a City tax Universities for enrolling Out-of-State Students?
Posted on May 22, 2009That's what Providence,R.I., proposes to do. It wants the Rhode Island legislature to authorize cities in the state to impose a tax of $150 per student who comes from outside Rhode Island. Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, has links to news...
The High Cost of Poverty: Washington Post
Posted on May 21, 2009Article here. (Thanks to Prof. Melynda Price (Kentucky)) Credit. The poor don't have it. What they had was a place like First Cash Advance in D.C.'s Manor Park neighborhood, where a neon sign once flashed "PAYDAY ADVANCE." Through the bulletproof...
Summer Conference Season ? Frustrations
Posted on May 21, 2009Although I?m usually one to see the glass as half full, Jacqueline?s post yesterday on the guilty pleasures of heading off to June conferences immediately brought to mind a hotel trend that has increasingly left me with a bitter taste...
Teaching Creates A Conflict Of Interest For Adjunct Law Professor
Posted on May 21, 2009According the New Jersey Law Journal, Rutgers is prohibiting Sheryl Mintz Goski, an adjunct professor, from continuing her gig teaching international mediation at Rutgers-Newark Law School because she represents a company in a dispute with Rutgers Business School...
Summer Conference Season - Guilty Pleasures
Posted on May 20, 2009As the summer conference season begins, and I sit in a hotel room in Chicago, I wanted to confess to some of the guilty pleasures that go hand in hand with being away from the family and the household chores...
The Coming Judicial Clerkship Application Crush
Posted on May 20, 2009Skadden Arps welcomed their summer associates this week. According to ATL, there was a lot of anxiety in this summer class as they learned that offers would be forthcoming to those workers who earned them. (Isn't it weird that, in...
Arizona State Seeks To Relocate Law School To Downtown Phoenix
Posted on May 20, 2009Say this about the folks at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law: they're a practical bunch. Every law school wants to make it easy for students to move in and out of the legal practice world while...
David Herbert Donald (1920-2009)
Posted on May 19, 2009As I'm sitting here doing a little work on things antebellum, I see the sad news that David Herbert Donald has passed away. Just so happens that his charming Lincoln is on the floor beside me. Donald's volume was the...
Should job creation favor men?
Posted on May 19, 2009A thought-provoking op-ed in today's San Francisco Chronicle by law profs Melissa Murray and Darren Rosenblum: The G.I. Bill offers important lessons for the present economic situation. Now, as then, policymakers seek to avert economic disaster. To do so, the...
Bankrupty Expert David Epstein Moves To Richmond Law
Posted on May 19, 2009David Epstein, a senior member of the Southern Methodist law faculty (as well as the former dean at Emory and Arkansas and a former colleague of mine at Alabama) is moving to the University of Richmond Law School to become...
Duke University Press to Publish Obama's Next Book
Posted on May 19, 2009Err, that's President Obama's mother's next book. The Duke Chronicle is reporting that Duke University Press--well known for its anthropology books--will publish a revised version of Ann Dunham's dissertation. From the Chronicle article: The book, which will be titled "Surviving...
Take the Jim Crow Quiz
Posted on May 19, 2009Over at Co-Op, Kaimi Wenger's polling about readers' knowledge of events during the Jim Crow era.
More Supreme Court Speculation
Posted on May 18, 2009Courtesy of Prof. Matthew Fletcher, via AP/TurtleTalk. WASHINGTON (AP) ? Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, one of President Barack Obama?s candidates for the Supreme Court, will be at the White House on Tuesday. An administration official says the Democratic governor is...
Supreme Court Grants Certiorari in Important Separation of Powers Case
Posted on May 18, 2009The Supreme Court has agreed to review the question of whether the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a nominally private enterprise created by Congress in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, is constituted in such a manner as to violate separation of powers...
Nora Demleitner & Joanne Epps Supreme Court Possibles?
Posted on May 18, 2009The Obama administration has been tantalizing us with suggestions that there are as-yet unidentified candidates for the David Souter Supreme Court seat. We've heard of a ton of usual and not-so-usual suspects but perhaps, perhaps, there remains a shooting star:...
Let Them Eat Cake
Posted on May 18, 2009In a previous post I discussed a recent marketing trend towards advertizing corporate responsibility and emphasizing corporate commitments to various stakeholders. I questioned whether the new wave of advertisements referenced a real shift in corporate behavior and a new responsiveness...
Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law
Posted on May 18, 2009As promised, now that I've seen the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, I have a few thoughts. First off, it's a wonderfully creative volume, with essays on all sorts of key figures in law--and law is broadly construed. You...
Student Activism for a Worthy Cause
Posted on May 16, 2009Lots of students are protesting these days--in Chapel Hill it was over former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was UNC Law School's graduation speaker; in Indiana, it's over President Obama's speech at Notre Dame. Save the energy for a useful...
Want To Be A Law Dean? No Need For A Top 5 JD.
Posted on May 15, 2009There's been a little buzz recently about the relationship between where you got your JD and your likelihood of getting a law teaching job. Kaimi Wenger offered up good advice (and valuable links) for folks with JD's from non-superelite law...
Syracuse Law Initiates Restroom Sweeps; Limits Potty Use
Posted on May 15, 2009I guess this is what happens when shit hits the fan at a law school. As a result of allegations of cheating during finals at Syracuse, the law school has been forced to regulate bathroom use during exams. 1L students...
Undergraduate Education Cut Backs at Harvard
Posted on May 15, 2009Coming on the heels of news that Harvard Law School's budget is being trimmed 10%, comes news that Harvard College will be increasing the size of sections taught by graduate students. The college is looking to save $2 million by...
Global Free Speech Update
Posted on May 15, 2009Lawmakers in the Philippines are debating a 'right of reply' bill, though one of the bill's original sponsors recently withdrew his support. Deputy Majority Leader Juan Edgardo Angara said that media groups already extend a right of reply as a...
Plugging New Faculty Scholarship...
Posted on May 15, 2009As I posted a while ago, many of us are about to welcome new junior colleagues into our ranks over the summer months. This might be a nice time to introduce them and some of their recent work, so I...
Michael Simons New Dean At St. Johns Law
Posted on May 14, 2009As the year comes to a close, more dean news: St. Johns Professor Michael A. Simons has been named dean of the law school. He is a graduate of Holy Cross and Harvard Law School and has been teaching at...
Kellye Testy New Dean At University of Washington
Posted on May 14, 2009As Brian Leiter notes, Seattle University's law dean - Kellye Testy - has been selected the new dean of the University of Washington School of Law. Brian notes her salary - $352,000 per year - as eye-catching, given the overall...
Just Thought This Was Pretty: Sunset Over The Dodgers
Posted on May 13, 2009Dodger Stadium at twilight, from the story here.
David v. Goliath
Posted on May 13, 2009As I have suggested in previous blog posts, there is reason to believe that the current project of divining Obama?s judicial nomination preferences and proclivities is, at best, likely to miss important nuances and, at worst, may be largely baseless....
Michigan Supreme Court Weighs Coutroom Limits on Religious Dress
Posted on May 13, 2009The Michigan state supreme court will decide whether a trial judge should have allowed a Muslim woman to testify in court while wearing a niqab, a religious head covering that leaves only a small opening for the eyes. In 2006,...
Stephen Easton New Dean At Wyoming Law
Posted on May 12, 2009University of Missouri law professor Stephen Easton has been named the new dean at the University of Wyoming College of Law. Easton is a graduate of Stanford Law School and has been at Mizzou since 1998. He is a trial...
2009 Lateral Moves By School Of Departure
Posted on May 12, 2009Here is the law school lateral faculty move list, as of the 4/7/09 update, organized by the school where the professor left. The original list, organized by school of arrival, remains here. Larry Solum's Entry Level Hiring Report is here....
Is the Supreme Court like a Corporate Board?
Posted on May 12, 2009Let me throw out some misleading (but nonetheless provocative!) statistics. In 2001, 11.6 percent of the director positions at Fortune 500 companies were held by women. Today, 11.1 percent of the positions on the Supreme Court are held by women....
More on Writing Academic Books
Posted on May 12, 2009To return to my sometime obsession about academic book writing, here's another question I have for the blogging community. When people think about writing academic books, do they generally write the book first and then shop around for a publisher,...
Salon Obama? First-Ever Poetry Slam At White House
Posted on May 12, 2009This is no Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The Obama's are hosting the first-ever White House Poetry Slam and the guests include James Earl Jones, Michael Chabon, Mayda Del Valle, and Lin Manuel Miranda. I haven't wanted to be President since I...
Why I love Justice Scalia
Posted on May 11, 2009Justice Scalia tends to be a lightning rod for many people--either you love him or you hate him. Despite serious disagreement with some of his core beliefs, I must admit my delight in him. One major reason is his recent...
City By City Unemployment Rates
Posted on May 11, 2009File this under: we like knowing what's going on in the world, but in greater detail than everyone else. Each month we get the new unemployment statistics and one thing is consistent: unemployment rates are on the rise. But we...
Foster Auditorium
Posted on May 11, 2009The University of Alabama has announced plans to renovate Foster Auditorium (where Governor Wallace made his stand in the school house door) and return it to use as an athletic facility. Here's a really fine article from the University of...
The Clarence Thomas - Leah Ward Sears Friendship
Posted on May 10, 2009I have previously noted that Leah Ward Sears is a serious contender for Justice Souter's Supreme Court seat. According to the Washington Post, Justice Sears may need to worry that her friendship with Justice Thomas could undermine her bid to...
Law School Graduation Speakers
Posted on May 10, 2009Paul Caron has been compiling a list of law school commencement speakers for the May 2009 cycle. Not suprisingly, law schools tap a few attractive wells for their speakers. For example, ten schools selected a current (or recently defeated) justice...
Justice Souter Makes Lawyers Weep
Posted on May 09, 2009This was big local news in the Philly legal community, but in case others missed it: Amid Some Tears, Souter Bids Adieu to 3rd Circuit
Strook & Strook Manufactures Cold Offers, Shooting Self In Foot
Posted on May 08, 2009We've seen firms use various approaches to reduce the size of their new associate pool. Until now, however, I had not heard of any firms publically buying out offers. Well now Strook & Strook & Lavan is offering potential new...
Empiricists Or Intuitionists?
Posted on May 08, 2009The Chicago Tribune is reporting, or should I say crowing, that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley will be increasing the number of elevator inspectors. This move comes in response to a Trib exposé. This reminds me of a great sci-fi book...
Privacy and the Limits of the Law
Posted on May 08, 2009I am indebted to Prof Patricia Sanchez Abril for recently drawing my attention to the British High Court decision in Max Mosley v News Group Newspapers Ltd (July 2008). This decision proves the point that even when a jurisdiction adopts...
Dismantling Bush's Abstinence Programs
Posted on May 08, 2009From NY Post - The White House wants to get out of the business of telling youngsters "Just Say No to Sex." President Obama is putting his own ideological stamp on federal spending in his proposed 2010 budget by cutting...
Forget The DOJ. Now US News Is Doing Investigations.
Posted on May 08, 2009Various folks have been blogging about the LSAT data provided by Brooklyn Law, and used by US News, in its assessment of the school (as well as the magazine's failure to include Brooklyn's excellent part-time program in its otherwise exhaustive...
More Stupid Slogans About Souter And His (Possible) Successor
Posted on May 07, 2009From the New York Times, we learn that Sonia Sotomayer: Would not be reflexively liberal or "results-oriented" but would adhere to the law and the Constitution. That's good. Because I hate judges who don't adhere to the law and Constitution....
Howard Wasserman On The FIU Dean Search
Posted on May 07, 2009I shouldn't be surprised (and I should have been more skeptical in this post) that newspaper reporters captured an incomplete picture of the FIU dean search in news accounts today. As readers may recall, the FIU faculty has been voting...
Symbols of Our Times: The Court as ?Collector's Set?
Posted on May 07, 2009Over the last week, there have been dozens of articles, blog posts, and conversations that began ?Obama should choose a . . .? followed by some identity variable: governor, Latina, ?out? lesbian, non-lawyer, woman, law professor, empiricist. Today, District Court...
Tough Times for LSU Press
Posted on May 07, 2009This news from the Chronicle that LSU Press may lose its funding from the LSU system (which is in the neighborhood of $100,000 per year) is particularly hard because I was reading an LSU Press book at lunch today (Michael...
Corporate Influencea?
Posted on May 06, 2009Corporate America has been acting a bit out of sorts recently. Flip on the TV, open a magazine, walk down the street and you will see the symptoms. An oil company touting its investment in wind technology. An investment firm...
Cardozo Law Review on-line companion: de novo
Posted on May 06, 2009The Cardozo Law Review's on-line companion, de novo, is up, with an inaugural essay by Judge Jack Weinstein, "Preliminary Reflections on Administration of Complex Litigations." De Novo has a broad mandate. The editors there have a broad vision for the...
Towards the Right Side of History
Posted on May 06, 2009From Freedom to Marry: Today, Maine's Governor John Baldacci signed into law a freedom to marry bill overwhelmingly approved by the Senate and House. Maine now joins Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut in ending the exclusion of gay couples from...
HLS Budget Cut
Posted on May 06, 2009Here's some more sobering news. According to the Harvard Crimson, staff cuts are impending at Harvard Law School in the wake of a 10% budget cut at the law school. The law school is also holding off on filling staff...
FIU's Public Law Dean Search Continues; Faculty Nix Alex Acosta
Posted on May 06, 2009Most of us have seen sausage prodcued at our own institutions, but as a result of Florida's sunshine laws, we can watch it made at Florida International University law school as well. This from the South Florida Sun Sentinel: In...
St. John Fisher College School of Law?
Posted on May 06, 2009Have you been thinking that downtown Rochester, New York needs a law school? If so, here's some good news. St. John Fisher College may be willing to step up to the plate. There are at least three New York schools...
Judge McConnell from Tenth Circuit to Stanford
Posted on May 05, 2009From a press release from the Tenth Circuit today, comes this important news: Circuit Judge Michael W. McConnell, 53, of Salt Lake City, Utah, has submitted his resignation from the bench, effective August 31, 2009. At that time, he will...
Does Professor Obama = President Obama?
Posted on May 05, 2009In case you missed it, Jodi Kantor had an article in the New York Times over the weekend, in which she interviewed former colleagues and students of President Barack Obama in order to gain insight into his potential Supreme Court...
Welcome Guest Blogger Adam Benforado
Posted on May 05, 2009We're very pleased to welcome Adam Benforado to the Lounge. Adam is an Assistant Professor at Drexel Law. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, and is just finishing up his first year teaching here at...
Privilege or Punish? Family Status and Punishment
Posted on May 05, 2009Continuing in our occasional series that comments on newly released books (and some that are back in the news again), I want to call your attention to the latest from Dan Markel, Jennifer Collins and Ethan Leib: Privilege or Punish:...
Law Firm Pay Cuts: Large Shops Reduce Associate Salaries
Posted on May 04, 2009We've kind of been expecting this story, and I suspect that it's only beginning, but we're now seeing that three big firms - Seyfarth Shaw, Squire Sanders, and Nixon Peabody - are reducing associate pay. Nixon Peabody is reducing its...
Mentoring Senior Faculty & Post Tenure Review?
Posted on May 04, 2009So in my continuing obsession about faculty mentoring, I've decided to shift focus to senior faculty mentoring for this week and see if I can solicit any views/advice about what happens to mentoring and career planning post-tenure. I think as...
What Gender is Trusts and Estates?
Posted on May 04, 2009As I'm sitting here grading trusts and estates exams, I'm thinking again about an exchange from earlier in the semester.... Thanks to Jason Mazzone for raising important questions about the gender differences in faculty across the curriculum (in an aptly-named...
Ave Maria Law: One Client That's Still Spending Big On Legal Fees
Posted on May 04, 2009Ave Maria Law School has been through a lot of challenges in its young life. The good news is that it has a wealthy benefactor in the person of Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan. The bad news is that Ave...
World Press Freedom Day
Posted on May 03, 2009Today is World Press Freedom Day, and the state of affairs is bleak. Here are the sobering stats from the annual Freedom House report: 2009 marked the seventh straight year in declining press freedom worldwide; over 80% of the world's...
Justice Souter as legal historian ... or maybe just historian?
Posted on May 03, 2009The Washington Post has a charming portrait of Justice Souter ("Quiet N.H. Home Is Where Souter's Heart Has Always Been"), which includes these three paragraphs: "He never unpacked," said Thomas Rath, one of Souter's closest friends. "A few years ago,...
Supreme Court Justice Anita Hill?
Posted on May 02, 2009Nell Scovell at Vanity Fair has an interesting proposal: Nominate Anita Hill for the Supreme Court. Among the reasons she cites in support of her idea: "I want the still ranking member of the Judiciary Committee Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA)...
After Just 341 Years, Britain's Poet Laureate Is A Woman
Posted on May 02, 2009She is Carol Ann Duffy, a poet, playwrite, and children's author, originally from Glasgow, Scotland. From the New York Times: Ms. Duffy, 53, is known for using a deceptively simple style to produce accessible, often mischievous poems dealing with the...
Irma Russell New Dean at University of Montana
Posted on May 02, 2009Many congratulations to Irma Russell, who has just been named dean at the University of Montana's School of Law. The University of Tulsa's loss is the University of Montana's gain. From the Missoulinan story on Russell's appointment: We are confident...
US News Scores by Tiers, Quick Takes
Posted on May 02, 2009The last couple of years, I've looked a little at the aggregate data for peer and lawyer/judge assessments for each of the US News tiers. This time I'm interested in changes by tier over the last couple of years, so...
Justice Souter to Retire?
Posted on May 01, 2009Let the speculation over President Obama's first Supreme Court nomination begin. MSNBC has the story here.
History Month(s) and the Law
Posted on May 01, 2009In February, there were a spate of suggestions that with the election of President Obama, there was no longer a need for Black History Month. In the following month, some wondered whether Women's History Month was losing its luster. I...
US News Weighs In On...US News Rankings
Posted on May 01, 2009In his blog, Morse Code, Bob Morse - the US News Ranking Czar - addressed the swirling conversations in the blogosphere regarding the magazine's law rankings. He tossed roses to ATL and Paul Caron ("some of the best coverage") and...
Leah Ward Sears: A Values Nominee For The Supreme Court?
Posted on May 01, 2009In the next few days, I suspect we'll come to hear a great deal about retiring Georgia Chief Justice, Leah Ward Sears. Sears, who turns 54 this summer, was the first woman to be named to the Georgia Supreme Court,...
More History of the Book in the News
Posted on April 30, 2009Ok--I'm resurfacing briefly from grading trusts and estates exams. Been quiet of late because I've been busy. However, there are a series of history of the book posts that I'm combining into one. First, the most recent issue of NYROB...
Paul Caron Brews Up His Own (Modified) US News Rankings
Posted on April 29, 2009Over at TaxProf Blog, Paul Caron has taken the two components of US News that most folks think have some merit - the peer assessment survey number (reputation among academics) and the lawyer/judge assessment number. He notes that the overall...
Concordia University Delays New Boise Law School
Posted on April 29, 2009Who knew? Apparently Portland, Oregon's Concordia University had been planning on opening a new law school in Boise next year, and now it's putting that plan off to a later date. According to this story: Andrea Bruno, vice president for...
Senator Specter's Unbalanced Powers
Posted on April 29, 2009When Senator Arlen Specter decided yesterday to abandon the Republican Party to join the Democratic Party, he stated that ?I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.? In light of the legislative agenda he articulated...
I See England, I See France, I See Nino's Underpants
Posted on April 29, 2009This is a kerfuffle really worth watching. At a conference recently, Justice Scalia made comments suggesting that he has limited passion for the notion of privacy protection in an Internet world. "Every single datum about my life is private? That's...
Mentoring New Faculty
Posted on April 29, 2009Despite the hiring freezes this past year, many law schools, including my own, will be welcoming new tenure track faculty and perhaps some new visitors as well over coming months. So now might be a good time to think about...
Pity Poor Basketball Town: Litigation Reform Trailers Invade The Multiplex
Posted on April 28, 2009The WSJ Law Blog tells us that there are new previews coming to the local Regal Cinema (at least the local cinema in D.C.) and they're not going to be all laughs and explosions. Instead, they'll be litigation reform promos...
S#%&!: Supreme Court Upholds FCC's 'Fleeting Expletives' Rule
Posted on April 28, 2009In a 5-4 opinion written by Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court today upheld an FCC policy that prohibits the airing of one-time, unscripted expletives - you know, the kind of stuff we expect celebrities to say at awards shows. (see...
Specter's Switch
Posted on April 28, 2009Holy crap! Handing the Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate if Franken hold the lead in Minnesota. -Kathleen Bergin
Criminal Law Issue Spotter: Bueller? . . . Bueller?
Posted on April 28, 2009What crimes did Ferris Bueller commit on his day off? Comprehensive analysis here.
Adventures in Extreme Publishing
Posted on April 27, 2009Our friends over at HUP blog are talking about Judge Posner's forthcoming book A Failure of Capitalism on the crash of 08. It's due out in May and it's a non-technical explanation of the crash. Publishing in real time, so...
US News Rankings and the Data Disclosure Dance
Posted on April 27, 2009US News rankings week always leads to a major use of Internet band width. And The Faculty Lounge is no exception. As Dan Filler has already noted, some of the most thoughtful comments in this cycle come from Judge Pollak...
So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye
Posted on April 27, 2009Ben Franklin once remarked, ?Fish and visitors stink after three days.? My stint as a guest blogger started with my first post back on February 23, so I?m waaaaaaay past my expiration date. Today is our last day of class...
California County Stops Prosecuting Minor Crimes. Supposedly.
Posted on April 27, 2009The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Contra Costa County, located outside of San Francisco, is going to severly cut back on prosecution of smaller criminal offenses: Misdemeanors such as assaults, thefts and burglaries will no longer be prosecuted in Contra...
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Congressional investigation demonstrates Karl Rove lied about his active role in US attorney's firing
On 08-12 at 16:20PM
Family of New York City swine flu victim to sue city for failure to secure school #nyc #swineflu
On 08-12 at 12:59PM
Real Network's DVD copying software deemed to break DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions
On 08-12 at 12:57PM
Prepaid funeral operators indicted for $100 Million fraud
On 08-12 at 12:53PM
NY Jets join Cincinnati, Dallas, Green Bay, Houston & Seattle #NFL teams offering branded state lottery games
On 08-12 at 12:43PM
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