Legal Commentary

With the onset of the new month, we're thrilled to welcome (back) a new group of guest bloggers. Representing the crop of rookie voices on Prawfs, we have Evan Criddle from Syracuse, Michael Waterstone from Loyola Law School in LA, and Paul Ohm from Colorado. Returning to the conversation, I'm excited to welcome back Hadar Aviram (Hastings), Sasha Natapoff (LLS), Austen Parrish (SW), Rick Esenberg (Marquette), Colin Miller (JMLS), and Kurt Lash (LLS en route to Illinois). 

February was a wonderful month for the blog and I'm grateful to all the strong contributions from our guests as well as Matt Bodie's excellent book club on Anders Walker's historical study of the civil rights era. Some of the guests might linger for a while before they say goodbye; I'm especially pleased that Lyrissa Lidsky has agreed to stay on for a few more months. Perhaps Jack will try to distinguish himself by frittering away his research leave here on the blog!

One last thing: the next Prawfsfest! (#7?), our roving legal theory/public law workshop for early works in progress, will be in NYC from the evening of July 5 and on July 6 and 7th. We have room for a few people both as presenters, who don't really present, and non-presenting participants (readers). The conference will take place at Brooklyn Law School on July 6/7. If you're a former or already slated current guest on Prawfs, and interested in having a manuscript of about 10,000 words (geared for a generalist law review and vaguely related to public law and/or legal theory) critiqued by about 10 other people, then please let me know if you can commit and what your likely paper will cover. BLS is generously paying for meals but participants have to pay their own airfare/hotel, or subway fare. I've included a bit more about the tentative schedule/ground rules after the jump. If you're interested, please let me know by March 15th with an abstract, and we'll reach a decision by later this month. If we're not able to include you this time, we might be able to do so at the next one in Phoenix in December. Thanks.

Here are the rough dates and requirements.



Dinner is on Monday the 5th of July (probably around 730-8pm);

it is obligatory. The meal will be covered by BLS.

Tues and Wed after, we'll be holed up in a nice

seminar room from roughly 9-5 at BLS. We'll have meals

together those days. We will be done by 430pm on Wednesday

afternoon and those of you interested in staying around for another

dinner are welcome to do so. Please contact __.



You are responsible for paying your own airfare, hotels, etc. However,

we will plan on getting a good rate at a nice hotel (or using BLS'

visitors' apts??) that preferably all the out of towners will stay in so we can cab/carpool together. So please don't book a hotel until you've heard from me after you've

confirmed you're interested.



In terms of papers, please pay careful attention:

The paper you will workshop must satisfy several conditions: i) it

must be pre-SSRN, pre-submission for publication, and therefore also

pre-publication; ii) when it does get submitted, the piece you present

will be going to a general student edited law review. We plan on this

as a largely generalist affair and the theme of the workshop is

largely legal theory and public law, which encompasses a lot but we

want to make sure that generalists will feel comfortable reading and

critiquing the paper to help facilitate its entry into the student law

review sweepstakes/lottery...if it was a peer reviewed piece, it could

risk going over the heads of too many of us.

iii) Participants will be expected to read no more than the

10,000 words that you assign; if you circulate something longer,

that's ok, but please be exceedingly clear about what is expected to

be read.  The circulation date deadline is only five or seven days before the

actual conference gathering; the words limits are designed in such a

way b/c we want to make sure that these are really works that are

quite early in progress; quarter-baked to half-baked at best. If

people stick to the word limits, your reading prep for the conference

can be done readily in about a day or two.



If your paper will satisfy all these requirements and the dates work

well for you--then yay! we can't wait to have you join as a presenter.

If you'd rather come for this time simply as a reader/critic and not a

writer/presenter, then that's also ok, but please let me know so I can

make sure we allocate the scarce presenting slots properly. There are

only 8-9 presenting slots and many of them are already claimed. Those of you who have done this before know it's a great experience; if you're a rookie, I hope you'll take

the plunge. If you think you won't have the right paper for this venue

right now, let me know and we'll try to put you in the rotation for the next

one.

Bear in mind also that when you present your paper, you'll only

actually talk for about 5 minutes. The hour devoted to your paper is

really for you to hear the comments and feedback of the audience; it's

not to engage the comments or defend the paper. It's for you to

listen...everyone in the room will have read your paper and so the

most valuable thing for you is to sit quietly after five minutes and

withstand the fusillade...of course everyone is very nice, but

directness is the norm. As most of you know, there's a no foreplay

rule to avoid taking valuable time (so if you have something nice to

say about the paper, say it privately to the person!)