Legal Commentary

How Do You Build a Nation of Law: One Fortified Court at a Time

Posted on August 02, 2007
A fascinating story by Michael Gordon in the July 26th edition of the New York Times details the efforts of the American occupation authorities to create a series of "legal green zones" in this country wracked with terror and violence.Touring the Rhine Valley on a family vacation this summer, I feel like I've seen it all before...

What do PhDs Bring to the Teaching of Law?

Posted on July 10, 2007
Changes in the hiring approaches of prestigious law schools have opened the door to two apparently quite different sorts of teaching candidates. One is in the direction of more JD/PhD candidates who come to the appointments process with a substantial research project already accomplished...

The PHD and the Path to Law School Teaching

Posted on July 09, 2007
For reasons I will elaborate in future posts, I think a PhD in a social science, or humanities, or interdisciplinary program is an excellent pathway for law school teaching with benefits for the both the scholarship and the teaching they will produce...

Does the Rule of Law Require Complete Control of Borders?

Posted on June 30, 2007
The recent battle over immigration reform has revealed a profound anxiety among many portions of the American polity over the apparent porousness of the border. On the right vigilantes self-styled as "minute men" have taken to patrolling portions of the Mexican border...

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

Facts or Narratives: What influences policy?

Posted on June 03, 2007
I'm participating this weekend in a fascinating discussion about race and the criminal justice system with a number of other scholars of race and/or crime as well as members of the Open Society Institute's "After Crime Initiative" and the Aspen Institute's "Roundtable on Community Change...

Why No Other JSP's

Posted on May 17, 2007
Since its founding in 1978, JSP's version of interdisciplinary, policy relevant but theoretically driven scholarship has become far more central to legal knowledge production in US Law Schools and elsewhere. So why so few imitators?Read more from my guest posting on PrawfsBlawg

Professor Petersilia and the Governor: a New Deal for Socio-Legal Research in California Governance?

Posted on May 11, 2007
If you want to get a feel for how promising and dangerous the space of empirical socio-legal research in at the present conjuncture, keep your eye on UC Irvine criminologist Joan Petersilia. Professor Petersilia, one of the nation?s leading experts on parole and reentry, has become Governor Schwarzenegger?s main policy advisor on reforming California?s behemoth and crisis ridden prison system...

Empirical Legal Studies Hits the NBA

Posted on May 07, 2007
Last week brought yet another demonstration of the range and relevance of socio-legal discourse to the practice of everyday life in the United States at the end of the 20th century. The New York Times featured a sports story on the front page of its May 2nd, 2007 edition...

Are Law Reviews Irrelevant? A Partial Reply to Adam Liptak

Posted on March 20, 2007
New York Times lawyer/reporter Adam Liptak's recent "sidebar" article in the Times ("When Rendering Decisions, Judges Are Finding Law Reviews Irrelevant", New York Times, Monday March 19, 2007, A8 (click to read if you have Times Select privileges), develops the theme that judges today do not rely on legal scholarship published in law reviews, at least not nearly as much as they did in the 1970s...

Murder and the City

Posted on March 02, 2007
As the Bay Area is being cinematically haunted by the ghosts of serial killers past (Zodiac, the movie based on the 1960s SF serial killer, was released March 2), a more recent local murder presents in alarming and moving terms why homicide, above all other crimes, can be so rattling to a community's fundamental sense of security...

Gov to Consider Early Release...Not

Posted on February 23, 2007
To get a feeling for how dangerous it is in California politics to even appear to be talking about releasing inmates from our impossibly swollen prisons, just consider that by the time I went upstairs this morning to show my wife the front page of the SF Chronicle (I like to get up early and read the paper) with a headline above the fold "GOVERNOR TO CONSIDER EARLY INMATE RELEASE", the morning public radio news was already reporting that the Governor's spokesperson denied there was any possibility at all of a release...

Gov's "Emergency" Prison Plan Stumbles in Sacramento Superior Court

Posted on February 22, 2007
When Sacramento Superior Court Judge Gail Ohanesian blocked Governor Schwarnegger's emergency plan to transfer thousands of inmates out of state to private prisons, her ruling and the responses it triggered revealed a great deal about California prisons and the political order they help sustain (read the SF Chronicle story)...

Fixing Broken Windows or Breaking Fragile Networks: Dilemmas of Fighting Violence in New Orleans

Posted on February 05, 2007
The terrible suffering of New Orlean's during the flood of 2005 and its difficult path to recovery are now edged in a frame of red, a raging murder rate that continues to produce corposes and headlines (well summarized in a NYT story by Adam Nossiter and Christopher Drew)...

Governor Schwarzenegger's Prison Reform Initiative: The Launch Video

Posted on January 17, 2007
My colleague Charles Weisselberg had called my attention to the online video of Governor Schwarzenegger's press conference announcing his prison initiatives on December 21, 2006. He had used it in his criminal law class to illustrate the multiplicity of purposes around punishment in contemporary society (he also pointed out that with the tall and broadly built governor standing near to an equally tall police officer and another man wearing a cowboy hat, you could mistake the video for a performance of YMCA by the famed "man" band The Village People)...

Schwarzenegger's New Deal

Posted on January 12, 2007
As Jennifer Nelson points out in the January 12, 2007, SF Chronicle (read her op-ed piece) , Arnold Schwarzenegger has emerged as California's first "New Deal" governor arguably since Pat Brown (1959-1967). Nelson, an aide to Republican governors Deukmejian (1983-1991) and Wilson (1991-1999), identifies the New Deal as the core values of liberal Democrats...

The Power Effects of Public Executions

Posted on January 08, 2007
The enormous and still gathering backlash against the manner of Saddam Hussein's execution last month recalls Michel Foucault's famous analysis of the power effects of public executions and the reason for the shift away from public use of the death penalty across most of Europe and its satellite socities in the course of the 19th century...

What is a Prison? Who is a Prisoner?

Posted on December 30, 2006
In the recent dystopian film by Alfonso Cuaron, The Children of Men (2006), [read the New York Times review by Manohla Darghis] viewers are taken into ?Bexhill Refugee Center? a massive detention facility for ?illegal immigrants? in the United Kingdom...

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