Legal Commentary

Is "Intellectually Vacuous" the Right Expression for Veil-Piercing Doctrine?

Posted on February 22, 2011
Over at his blog, Steve Bainbridge endorsed a view, inspired by comments from Steve Bradford (Nebraska) at Business Law Prof Blog to the effect that every time he got to teaching "veil-piercing," he was reminded again how "intellectually vacuous" the doctrine was...

Law Review Submissions: Superstitions and Expeditions

Posted on February 22, 2011
A nascent thread is forming on an earlier post, but I thought it might make sense to create a new one to get more folks on board. I know I have a number of thoughts/concerns/fears about the submission season this year. Maybe other profs and law review editors might want to fill us in on topics like this: Are ExpressO submissions still increasing? Are reviews making deadlines on offers to publish earlier? Are articles still in the 25K-30K word range, or are they creeping up in size? Are law review editors using the special theory of relativity to create more...

Did UI Funding Contribute to the Recession?

Posted on February 21, 2011
In response to (cough) overwhelming demand, coverage of the unemployment insurance system will now resume. The Great Recession has staggered state UI funds; projections are that more than 30 will go broke and have to turn to the federal government for aid...

Professionalism and Student Complaints About One's Colleagues

Posted on February 21, 2011
I know that it is almost never professional nor wise to listen to student complaints about my colleagues. Yet students often want to tell me, indeed seem compelled to tell me, how bad a teacher Professor X is or what a terrible thing Professor Y said in class...

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Tiger Mother Book Club

Posted on February 21, 2011
I was delighted to be one of the participants in Conglomerate blog's book club on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. My contribution is here.

Book Club on the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Posted on February 21, 2011
Our friends at the Conglomerate blog are having a book club today about Amy Chua's defense of tough love. You've read Rob Howse's penetrating review of it here. Head over to the Glom to see what a gaggle of other wonderful folks (including our own Lyrissa Lidsky, my co-author Jennifer Collins, and visiting prawf Shima's sister Mehrsa Baradaran) think about the challenges of prawfing while parenting...

Depravity -- or, Legal Moralism's Protective Dimension

Posted on February 21, 2011
Criminal law teachers and scholars know that an unintentional killing evincing a "depraved mind" (or "heart") historically has constituted murder -- one whose culpability is generally on a par with an intentional killing. As part of my efforts this year to learn and teach more New York law to my criminal law students, I have been greatly enjoying the rich local doctrine in this area...

Perfectionism is the Enemy of Productivity

Posted on February 21, 2011
Here is some excellent advice from The Chronicle of Higer Education on writing and productivity. The short version is this: perfectionism is the enemy. Why did I have to learn this lesson the hard way? And why do I have to keep relearning it?

Sticks and Stones

Posted on February 21, 2011
I don?t know Judge J. Phil Gilbert of the Southern District of Illinois personally, but I?m pretty sure he dislikes sex offenders. A lot. So much so that his remarks at sentencing in at least two recent sex cases have earned rebukes from the Seventh Circuit...

Some Mid-Afternoon Whining, I Mean Observations, About Class Preparation

Posted on February 20, 2011
I just Googled my name and "class preparation" to see if I had ever blogged on this subject before, and found an entry from July 2006 on this very blog, posted only a few days before I hit the road to take up my visiting post at Tulane. I was thinking about class prep because I'm into about the eighth hour of preparation for what will ultimately be about 120 minutes of class on mistake doctrine in contract law (with still two of the three cases yet to go), and I feel like procrastinating by whining about it...

Nollan-Dolan's Lessons for Governor Walker's Anti-Union Proposals

Posted on February 19, 2011
Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has raised a major ruckus by proposing draconian limits on the scope of collective bargaining with public employees. As the two or three people who regularly read this blog know, I am no fan of public employee unions...

Should libertarians applaud the Individual Mandate as a matter of policy?

Posted on February 19, 2011
Set aside the constitutional argument against the PPCACA's individual mandate. (I've already offered horse doctor's doses of my opinions on that score). I've got a different question: Shouldn't libertarians like Randy Barnett applaud the individual mandate as good health care policy that, if somehow precluded to the feds by Article I, ought to be pursued by the states? I ask, because the leading libertarian book on health care seems to embrace the mandate...

Judge Randolph Pulls Another Fast One--But Will Anyone Notice?

Posted on February 19, 2011
Tuesday's decision by a D.C. Circuit panel (Henderson, Williams, Randolph) to vacate and remand the grant of habeas relief in Hatim v. Gates is hardly surprising. As the per curiam opinion notes, there have been a number of D.C. Circuit decisions since the district court ordered Hatim's release that call at least some of the trial court's analysis into question...

Tough and Not-so-Tough Solutions

Posted on February 18, 2011
I was thinking yesterday morning as I was listening to NPR, how difficult it will be for Congress and the President to agree to a solution to our medicare/medicaid and social security problems. With all of the vested interests involved (particularly the type who vote: ie, older people who rely on their medicare and social security), it will be extremely "tough" (Obama's word) to come to some sort of compromise on badly needed budget cuts--particularly as we approach an election year...

The New Habeas Revisionism: Shameless Plug (and Overdue Thanks)

Posted on February 18, 2011
In the Friday afternoon shameless self-promotion department, my essay reviewing Paul Halliday's Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire is finally out, in the February 2011 issue of the Harvard Law Review. Because HLR's (silly!) policy wouldn't allow me to say the following in my author footnote, let me take this opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks to Zach Schauf, Jaime Eagan, and David Caldwell, who made this about as productive and enjoyable an editing experience as I've ever experienced--and whose substantive contributions to the final product cannot be overstated.

Kiss Me I'm Irish: Is Dual Citizenship an Endangered Species in America?

Posted on February 18, 2011
By Evelyn Cruz, ASU Proponents of Arizona HB 2561 argue that the 14th Amendment was enacted to bestow citizenship only to individuals who did not owe allegiance to any other country. And since a dual citizen has rights in more than one country, then his or his off-spring does as well...

Public employee Ann Althouse

Posted on February 18, 2011
I've always found it an interesting wrinkle that five of the top conservative/libertarian law prof bloggers are public employees: Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Eugene Volokh, Stephen Bainbridge, and Larry Ribstein. I would imagine this status would create some ripples between one's ideological beliefs and personal economic interests...

You Wouldn't Hit a Guy With Glasses, Would Ya?

Posted on February 18, 2011
This story from a few days ago reports the distinct sense of criminal defense attorneys that juries are less likely to convict defendants who wear glasses, with some support in a study finding that, especially for African Americans, glasses impart some sort of benign, non-threatening quality...

The Endurance of the Used and Rare Bookstore

Posted on February 18, 2011
A long time ago, I was fortunate to work part time for about a year at a used and rare bookstore called McIntyre and Moore Booksellers (they were on Mt. Auburn Street back then, not way off in Porter Square). Present circumstances excepted, it was the best job I ever had...

The ASU SW Junior Conference is neither SW nor Junior. But it is really good.

Posted on February 18, 2011
The beloved friends of Prawfs over at ASU in Phoenix are putting together their ostensibly regional conference for works in progress ostensibly by juniors. Juniors are defined capaciously: if you were there last year or you have been teaching for 10 or fewer years, you are invited to come for a spring training ball game, dinner, lunch, and a chance to present a work in progress or a half baked idea to folks in your area of interest...

What to do about accused athletes?

Posted on February 18, 2011
FIU has decided to allow Garrett Wittels, its star baseball player who enters this season riding a 56-game hitting streak (three shy of breaking the college record), to play to start the season, despite Wittels facing sexual assault allegations in the Bahamas...

All Dogs Go to Harvard

Posted on February 18, 2011
The sun came out and the temperature hit 60 degrees F. The faculty meeting was yesterday. Unbelievably, the students attending the SPILG auction last night bid the contribution of dinner with Alene and me at a nice restaurant in the North End up to somewhere between $550 and $675 (I heard both numbers in the hall today; my guess is that if it had been dinner with just Alene and not me, it would have broken $1,000...

So many options for a title, so little time...

Posted on February 17, 2011
Now that the Redyip has been sighted, we can distract ourselves with this unfortunate story regarding a UC-Hastings law prof (Clark Freshman) over at SF Weekly. Short version: warrant was inaccurate b/c insufficiently specific, and cops mistakenly came to Prof...

Klass on "Contract as Promise"

Posted on February 17, 2011
I was delighted to see the first piece to be presented at our (Suffolk's) "Contract as Promise at 30" symposium hit the cyberwaves (HT: Larry Solum), Greg Klass's Promises, Etc. Here's the abstract: This essay, written for "Contract as Promise at 30" at Suffolk Law School, examines the moral obligations contractual agreements generate...

Redyip has been sighted

Posted on February 17, 2011
(artist's rendering)

KenJen on Watson

Posted on February 17, 2011
Ken Jennings offers his thoughts on losing the Jeopardy exhibition to IBM's "Watson" supercomputer (KenJen hung-in in the second game, although he and Brad Rutter got crushed in the first game). So, Paul: as the one among the Prawfs group to have appeared on Jeopardy, what did you think of Watson and the whole man-v...

Fluency

Posted on February 16, 2011
Sometimes one sees on a CV a line about foreign languages stating "fluency." How competent in the language must one be to claim fluency? The ability to read and write the language is not something that is likely to be tested at an interview, but the ability to speak might be...

Evaluation of Teaching for Tenure

Posted on February 16, 2011
As I noted in a post last week, some colleagues and I are reevaluating our law school's tenure standards and procedures. We've just begun to talk about teaching evaluation. Our current practice is to rely primarily on three sources of information: (1) student evaluation scores (derived from forms students fill out in class near the end of the semester), (2) classroom visits by tenured colleagues, and (3) written evaluations from one or two dozen randomly selected former students...

The Persistence of Legal Error

Posted on February 15, 2011
When I was in my first semester of law school, I was given a short memo assignment involving some principle of Connecticut contract law. I quickly found a case stating the relevant rule of law--every contract needs consideration, or something. But it quoted an earlier case...

Reply to Jack Chin

Posted on February 15, 2011
Professor Chin gets the conversation started, but there are several places where I think he begs the question under considersation. We're trying to ascertain what the meaning of the 14th Amendment was to those who drafted and ratified it, and in particular whether it was intended to confer automatic citizenship on the children of those who are in this country illegally...

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