Academic

Lists

Posted on August 11, 2009
Lists, 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, 2009
From 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Anwar 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...

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The Death at Hot Springs and the Exhumation of the Slave Child

Posted on August 10, 2009
Now 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
So 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Andrew 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, 2009
Perhaps 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, 2009
Robots 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, 2009
Like 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, 2009
SU 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Senator 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, 2009
Tulane 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, 2009
So 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, 2009
Given 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Most 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
By 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, 2009
Well, 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, 2009
Following 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, 2009
Just 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, 2009
Perhaps 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, 2009
Obviously, 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...

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