Legal Commentary

The PrawfsBlawg Interview: Tenure and Termination from the Perspective of a Practicing Lawyer

Posted on March 03, 2010
Jason Ehrenberg is a partner at Bailey and Ehrenberg PLLC, a Washington D.C. firm with a specialty in employment, benefits and higher education law. He regularly advises individual faculty members and administrators. A 1999 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, he was raised in an academic family...

Entry Level Hiring Survey is up at LTB!

Posted on March 03, 2010
It's that time of the year. Larry Solum is beginning to collect information on entry level hiring over at the Legal Theory Blog. Please fill out the forms via Survey Monkey.

Leaniency: The Criminal Process in Times of Scarcity

Posted on March 03, 2010
I've been thinking a lot about the many ways in which the financial crisis has shaped changes in the criminal process. Most of my energy was devoted, recently, to thinking about its impact on the correctional apparatus (much of this was covered in the California Correctional Crisis blog)...

Legally Blind Grading, Take 1: Do You Dock Students' Grades For Insufficient Class Participation, And If So, Why?

Posted on March 03, 2010
In most classes in law school, professors (must) engage in what is often referred to as "blind grading," i.e., "we intentionally deprive ourselves of information that would match exams with names." Christian Turner, The Burden of Knowledge, 43 Ga. L. Rev...

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Copyright and the (hopefully) end of drive-by jurisdictional rulings

Posted on March 03, 2010
A basically unanimous Supreme Court yesterday decided Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick, holding that the statutory requirement that a copyright holder register her copyright as a precondition to filing suit was not a limit on the jurisdiction of the courts, but only a filing prerequisite that, while defeating a claim, does not deprive federal courts of jurisdiction...

Law School and the Bar Exam: A Snapshot from 1898

Posted on March 02, 2010
My thanks to Dan and the rest of the Prawfsblawg community for the invitation to join the conversation this month as a guest blogger. As an initial foray into the prawfsblawgosphere, I thought I would follow Colin?s lead and offer a couple of quick observations on the changing character of the law school curriculum...

OK, Here's a Really Old Case that is Still Pending

Posted on March 02, 2010
In recent a recent post, Aaron Bruhl discussed a mysterious GVR of a five year old decision; I responded with a post about some cases that hung around even longer. It turns out that there are cases even older than that: The New York Times recently reported that the Appellate Term ruled that Lance International v...

Bleg: Why Did the Court Hold Three Cases for Over Thirty Years Until the People Involved Died?

Posted on March 01, 2010
Aaron Bruhl had an interesting post on a recent GVR of a case decided five years ago, raising the question of how the appeal could have been sitting around for so long. I recently posted an SSRN draft co-authored with a former student on three cases that the Court held on the "Special Docket" from the 1960s to the 1990s...

What Class Should be Added to More Law Schools' Curricula? My Suggestion: A Class in Plea Bargaining. What's Yours?

Posted on March 01, 2010
I would like to thank Dan Markel for inviting me back to guest blog on PrawfsBlawgfor the month of March. I last guest blogged here in April 2009 and posted entries about ungraded midterms, the law school case method, "open everything" exams, backwards, forwards, and sideways exam grading, exam word limits, biased exams, exam reading periods, blind grading, uncurved classes, flex credit classes, exam conferences, and oral exams...

Solicitor General confessions of error

Posted on March 01, 2010
It has been a pleasure guest-blogging here for the past month. I thank Dan and the other perma-Prawfs for inviting me. And thank you, readers, for your thoughtful comments. I had thought that my previous post, on "controversial GVRs," would be my last one...

Some Critics Weigh In on Privilege or Punish (Version 1: NCLR)

Posted on March 01, 2010
Over at SSRN, I've just posted a bundle of essays that comprise the New Criminal Law Review's symposium on my recent book with Jennifer Collins and Ethan Leib, Privilege or Punish. We are grateful to Professors Doug Berman (OSU, sentencing guru); Naomi Cahn (GW, family guru); and Jack Chin (UArizona, general guru) for their insightful and sharp reactions to our book...

"Best"; "Kind regards"; "Warmly"; "Cautiously"...

Posted on March 01, 2010
I struggle with goodbyes. And I also struggle with concluding salutations, particularly in emails. What's appropriate? Too friendly? Too cold? I don't know... In any case, it was a pleasure and a privilege to post here this month, and I want to thank you for your tolerance and your feedback...

Documentary Galore!

Posted on March 01, 2010
Hello, Everyone, It's good to be back for a month-long blogging stint. As some of us are spending more time indoors in this cold weather, I thought I'd start off by recommending some terrific law-related documentaries I've seen lately. Most, but not all, are criminal-justice-related...

Rotations and the next Prawfsfest!

Posted on March 01, 2010
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...

What happened when Hitler got rejected by the Stanford Law Review?

Posted on February 28, 2010
Not normally sympathetic to the genre of Hitler parodies, I make an exception for this one. Take a look at the results in the attached video. (H/t:a colleague working through hir recent disappointment in the submission season)

The Third Year: A Post by Kristen Holmquist

Posted on February 28, 2010
Walter Kirn today endorses a Utah state senator?s proposal to do away with the senior year of high school. The proposal?s strong form met with such public resistance that it?s already been watered down ? an optional senior year, a get out of jail free card, for the interested...

Religion, Jurors, and Ash Wednesday

Posted on February 27, 2010
For law and religion devotees, here is a story from the ABA Journal, in which a defense attorney objected when a prosecutor returned to a murder trial after lunch on Wednesday (Ash Wednesday) with ash on his forehead. The judge indicated his agreement with the objection and the prosecutor, finding that the judge's reasons stemmed from an abundance of caution, removed the ashes...

What about curling?

Posted on February 26, 2010
As the Olympics wind down, I found myself thinking about the "What's a Sport?" question as applied to one of the darlings of these Games--curling. Curling seems to have been discovered in Vancouver, as the public has learned of the game's rhythms (somewhat comparable to baseball), its shot-making and strategy (comparable to golf, with collision physics thrown in), and the attractiveness of many of the female curlers (several European curlers posed nude for a fund-raising calendar)...

Do You, or Someone You Know, Want to be a Law Professor?

Posted on February 26, 2010
Then the Society of American Law Teachers conference for prospective law teachers on March 21, 2010, at Golden Gate in San Francisco may be of interest. Details here.

It's Madonna's Constitution. We're All Just Living Under It.

Posted on February 26, 2010
Orin Kerr has a very interesting commentary on the Supreme Court's recent opinion in Maryland v. Shatzer (that's Shatzer, not Shatner; sorry), which held that where a Miranda warning has been given, the presumption that any subsequent custodial interrogation is involuntary will last for 14 days from release from custody...

Some Bleak Encouragement About Writing

Posted on February 26, 2010
If you need some encouragement to write that article you've been thinking about for years, consider the dying thoughts of the narrator of Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro: "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well...

Book Club on "Ordering the City"

Posted on February 25, 2010
Many thanks to Al, Chris, Willoughby, Anders and the commenters for a terrific book club on "The Ghost of Jim Crow." You can find these posts by looking under the PrawfsBlawg "Books" Category. Next month Prawfs will be hosting a book club on Nicole Stelle Garnett's "Ordering the City: Land Use, Policing, and the Restoration of Urban America...

Why Professors Shouldn't Talk About Their Vacation Homes

Posted on February 25, 2010
Exhibit A: Michael C. Jensen was an early inventor of bigger-than-life compensation packages for corporate chief executives, and nearly 20 years later, he still believes passionately in the concept of ?pay for performance? that he championed. But along the way more than a few things went wrong, Mr...

Controversial GVRs and the "degradation" of the GVR

Posted on February 25, 2010
The Supreme Court's GVR practice has traditionally been a sleepy backwater of appellate procedure. The GVR (i.e., grant, vacate, remand) is most commonly used when a lower court decision might be affected by a recent Supreme Court case that came down after the lower court ruled (though there are other types too)...

Connick v. Thompson and the (changing?) scope of prosecutorial immunity

Posted on February 24, 2010
One of the petitions for certiorari the Supreme Court considered at last Friday's conference was Connick v. Thompson, No. 09-571. Prosecutors in the Orleans Parish (La.) DA's office violated a defendant's Brady rights. Years later the office was held liable under the Monell doctrine, which allows municipal liability when government policy causes a constitutional wrong...

Which Books Should Be Reviewed in the upcoming Mich LR Books Issue?

Posted on February 24, 2010
Well, I have one suggestion. (Thanks, btw, to all those good people who helped us gin up the PoP website!) Actually, the question of the post is not in jest and not simply a way to sell Privilege or Punish. The other day we received a note from the folks in the Books Dep't of the Michigan Law Review...

The Plusses and Minuses of + / - Grades

Posted on February 24, 2010
At the University of Arizona, the story goes, the venerable computer software used to maintain student records is incapable of recording anything other than a letter grade. Accordingly, we have only A, B, C, D and F grades, no A+'s, or B-'s. We may soon gain the technical ability to record plus/minus grades, and we have been discussing whether it is a good idea...

?Assume A Small Boat?: Or, What?s So Funny About The Epistemological Objection To Originalism?

Posted on February 24, 2010
I?m sure most people recognize the punch line of a joke usually told at economists? expense. I?ve sometimes felt, though, that the joke could just as easily start with ?A philosopher, a politician, and an originalist are stranded on a desert island??...

What's Wrong with Women's Rights

Posted on February 23, 2010
Following Paul Horwitz?s advice for writing incendiary blog posts, I?ve decided to come out with a point of mine that?s been incendiary in some quarters. My forthcoming piece, ?Unsex CEDAW: What?s Wrong with Women?s Rights, which I?ll present at U.S.C...

The Gunner Problem

Posted on February 23, 2010
If I didn't hate the word "problematize" so much, I'd begin this post by inviting us to problematize the gunner problem. The venerable Urban Dictionary defines the gunner as "a person who is competitive,overly-ambitious and substantially exceeds minimum requirements...

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