Legal Commentary

Lesley Wexler is turning me green with envy with her hip, ironic pop culture references.  I can just imagine what her students think: "Gee, Wexler is so cool! She makes me want to learn!  I'm going to spend the weekend reading note cases!"  I do the best I can, but my references to scenes from Matlock, or whether a certain encounter between Officer Dibble and Top Cat amounted to a Terry stop generate more confusion than enlightenment, and playing the episode in class if anything, makes the situation worse.

When I feel this way, I sometimes repair to the never-ending faculty water cooler that is the Chronicle of Higher Education Forum; any academic problem or issue you can imagine has been vetted at length.  There's a vigorous thread now on References Students Don't Get. I can't tell how many law profs hang out there, but it is fascinating.  Plagiarism, entitled students and tenure fights are favorite subjects, although Shoe Options for Female Faculty in the Humanities has hundreds of posts.  A few interesting aspects of Forum culture: 1) There are posters with tens of thousands of posts.  2) Some use gender-neutral pronouns like "hu", "hir" and "hus" which I had never seen before. 3) They often to refer to needy students as "Snowflakes", i.e., kids who think they are uniquely special.

The Free Money for You part is this thread on state abandoned property registries.  After reading the thread, I searched www.missingmoney.com and found some money for a relative.  If you look and find something, I think in fairness you should give me a comment.  If you don't think you have forgotten some security deposit or bank account somewhere you should look, because that's the precise cognitive error shared by everyone whose abandoned property is in the hands of the states.