Legal Commentary

Will this post get me disbarred?

Posted on January 12, 2010
The Florida Bar has a new attorney advertising rule that aggressively regulates attorney speech on the Internet. Florida Bar Rule 4-7.6 Indeed, the new rule regulates attorney speech so aggressively that it might even apply to this blog post. Until recently, the Florida Bar considered all attorney websites and web communications as information provided upon the request of a prospective client and did not apply its attorney advertising rules to them...

Alphabetical advantage

Posted on January 12, 2010
Yesterday I received a phone call from a reporter working for my university's student newspaper. She wanted to ask me about a report arguing that there has been declining minority enrollments in law schools over the last 15 years. (The report itself is here...

Vice President Biden's Eulogy to his Mom

Posted on January 12, 2010
Having briefly met the late Mrs. Biden, I personally thought it appropriate to pass along this wonderful tribute. Though I spent only a few minutes talking with her, it was immediately apparent that she was a class act. From Iowa, Biden's sister called her mom so that a voter could explain to their mother why he wasn't voting for her son...

Harry Reid and the Third Rail of Race

Posted on January 11, 2010
Having just returned from a lovely time in New Orleans, I was reflecting on Harry Reid's latest gaffe and an adventure I had when I was a resident of the Crescent City. First, it is interesting to me how thoroughly Reid is being slammed for his comments...

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

Law Professors En Masse Are Scary

Posted on January 11, 2010
The AALS Conference reminded me how scary law professors en masse can be. I was 26 years old when I attended my first AALS conference. The only other law professors I knew when I arrived at AALS were my UF colleagues and my UT professors. Although most of my students and many of my colleagues would be surprised to hear it, I'm an introvert and find it very hard to go up and talk to strangers unless I have a very well defined role to play...

AALS aftermath and sundry

Posted on January 11, 2010
Happy Monday all. It was great to see so many of you (around 200 or so across the course of the evening) at the Co-Op/Prawfs Happy Hour this past Thursday in NOLA at the Whiskey Blue Bar at the W. Special thanks to Lane MacDougall, the bar's general manager, and his crew, including Brett and Madison, for helping the evening succeed...

CELS conference announcement

Posted on January 11, 2010
While I'm guessing that many readers of this blog are "conferenced-out" from AALS, I did want to note that the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies recently announced its 2010 details. Below is the short version: CELS 2010 The Conference on Empirical Legal Studies 2010 will be held in New Haven, Connecticut at Yale Law School from Friday November 5 through Saturday November 6, 2010...

Governor True Lies

Posted on January 09, 2010
The biggest disappointment in my six years back in California has a name, Arnold Schwarzenegger. When he rousted Gray Davis in the recall I was amused (Davis was as stalwart a supporter of the penal state in California as it ever had, I was glad to see him go)...

Apple, Google, and Nexus One: The Role of Eric Schmidt

Posted on January 08, 2010
If you stopped reading fake steve jobs when he went on hiatus as Dan Lyons for a while, it's time to go back. Perhaps "Operation Chokehold" was not as successful as fsj had hoped, but it did point up AT&T's weaknesses with its network. There was even some interesting discussion of shareholders vs...

Whale Wars and Extraterritorial Jurisdiction

Posted on January 08, 2010
All right, a student asked me about this, and I couldn?t resist, and I?m trying to fit my grades into the curve and this was a great distraction, and maybe now I?ll get to be on t.v. finally: Here for your enjoyment is my initial take on the possibility of prosecuting Japanese whalers in U...

AALS Happy Hour in NOLA: Thurs Jan 7th, 9pm at the Whiskey Blue Bar, W Hotel

Posted on January 07, 2010
Reminder: We'll be meeting tonight with other prawfs and sigs at the Whiskey Blue Bar, which is in the W Hotel, located at 333 POYDRAS ST NEW ORLEANS LA 70130. The Tel # is 504.207.5016. We've been able to orchestrate a few good drink specials, which you can see after the jump...

An AALS smackdown on philosophy of language?

Posted on January 07, 2010
As I complained in an earlier post, I'm a bit disappointed by what I take to be the dearth of interest in the philosophy of language at law schools. But Larry Solum's work is an exception that proves the rule: Larry has defended a dense and rigorous brand of "semantic originalism" using Gricean semantics...

Schwarzenegger Calls for Prioritizing Higher Ed over Prisons in the State Constititution/9th Circuit Strikes down Washington's Felon Disenfranchisement Law

Posted on January 06, 2010
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger used his annual state of the state address to call for a constitutional amendment to guarantee that at least 10 percent of the state's general fund revenues go for higher education, while prison expenditures are limited to 7 percent...

Strategic use of Robert's Rules and the true cost of faculty meetings

Posted on January 06, 2010
On the Moneylaw blog, Tom Bell has a very interesting post reminding us to employ Robert's Rules of Order to help keep faculty meetings from becoming ridiculous wastes of time. My favorite passage from the post concerns 'question of order pertaining to decorum' - Roberts Rule's provides, in § 34, that "no member shall speak more than twice to the same question ...

Prosecutorial immunity case settled

Posted on January 06, 2010
The Supreme Court has dismissed the appeal in Pottawattamie County v. McGhee following the settlement case for more than $ 12 million. (H/T: SCOTUSBlog). The appeal, argued last fall, considered the scope of absolute prosecutorial immunity against allegations (by two actually innocent men who spent 25+ years in prison) of fabricating evidence and coercing witnesses prior to bringing charges or presenting the State's case in court...

Terrorism Trials and the Constitutionality of the Religious Insanity Defense

Posted on January 06, 2010
Will any terrorism defendants raise a religious insanity defense? If so, courts may have to squarely address the constitutionality of such a defense. I have written about this in the past, and have a forthcoming article in the Journal of Law and Religion with more discussion of the problem that will hopefully come out just in time to be completely mooted by exciting developments in the coming year...

When to Flunk

Posted on January 05, 2010
How do you decide whether to flunk a student?, asks Andy. I write comments on truly terrible exams while I'm grading them to shore me up later when contemplating whether to assign the "F." For example, I might write a comment such as, "This paper shows no understanding of black-letter law...

Laycock on faith-based hiring by publicly funded religious organizations

Posted on January 05, 2010
My friend Tom Berg posted this over at the Mirror of Justice blog: An important question for both religious-freedom law and civil society is whether religious organizations can receive funding to provide social services without having to compromise their religious character in doing so...

Farewell, and May All Your Dreams Come True

Posted on January 05, 2010
That is, unless one of those dreams is a nightmare, in which case I hope that particular dream does not come true. Anyway, thank you again to the Prawfsers for letting me do a little blogging here this past month. I'm sorry I didn't have more to say. It's actually been a busy month, as I'm getting ready to teach our new 1L class in Legislation and also trying to finish up the Weights and Measures Clause chapter in my new book, The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions, before disappearing into teaching for...

Cyberbullying/Cyberboorishness

Posted on January 05, 2010
If you?re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you?re a law professor, every social problem seems to call for a legal solution. ?Cyberbullying? is this decade?s hate speech. Like ?hate speech,? "cyberbullying" is a label, not a legal definition...

Al-Bihani, "Common-Law" Habeas, and a Plug for an AALS Panel

Posted on January 05, 2010
If you have a chance, it's worth reading today's D.C. Circuit opinion in Al Bihani v. Obama, by far the most important decision vis-a-vis Guantanamo from a federal court in the almost 19 months since Boumediene. Lyle Denniston already has a thorough summary here, and Deborah Pearlstein has some thoughts on, inter alia, the hard-to-follow (if not non-sensical) international law discussion here...

DOJ dynamics and the unlikelihood of retaliatory political prosecutions

Posted on January 04, 2010
Back in November, Paul Horwitz blogged here about a paper he's working on called Democracy as the Rule of Law, and linked to it at SSRN here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=150280. Paul makes a sophisticated argument that the concept of the "rule of law" is more nuanced than it is often taken to be in public discourse about the possible criminal prosecution of senior members of the previous administration...

Law School Hiring Thread, 2009-10, Thread Three: The Next Phase

Posted on January 04, 2010
This thread will be moved to the front every ten days or so. Please add comments to this thread, not Threads One or Two (where comments are now closed). This thread is for both law professors and people who are on the market this coming year for becoming a law professor...

Can exam-taking be fun?

Posted on January 04, 2010
Or at least "fun"? In my post about using a one-frame cartoon as the jumping-off point for an essay (which yielded a range of good comments), one commenter argued against the idea because taking exams is not fun (the commenter likened it to a colonoscopy--a vivid metaphor, to be sure) and that when professors try to do something "different" or "clever," it gives the impression that we do not take the process seriously...

Greetings.

Posted on January 04, 2010
Happy 2010 to Prawfsblawg readers. Starting this week, I have a number of substantive posts planned. In my next post I will initiate a dispute with Paul Horwitz on the question of whether criminal torture prosecutions (such as John Durham's, if it comes to that) undermine or strengthen democracy...

Exam Trials and Errors

Posted on January 04, 2010
I just finished grading 150 essay exams. While grading, I always swear I'll give a multiple choice exam the next time, but I never do. I know there are law professors out there who claim that an appropriately drafted multiple choice exam will test analytical skills as well as an essay, but I don't believe them...

"Freedom for Faith, Freedom for All"

Posted on January 04, 2010
Here is my First Things review of David Novak's recent book, In Defense of Religious Liberty. A bit: [T]o mount a serious defense of religious liberty, one must understand what that liberty is and why it is worth protecting. But reaching such an understanding has proved, for more than a few contemporary scholars, harder than it sounds...

Ethical Robots

Posted on January 03, 2010
I like this nyt selection of 2009 great ideas. The robots are supposed to actually morally outperform humans in some situations. The robots are not only programmed to know the international laws of war and rules of engangement, they have been given the emotion of guilt [better according to the roboticist than remorse, compassion or shame].

"Liberals from the realms of theory . . . "

Posted on January 03, 2010
Today, many Christians celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany. (Interestingly, this Feast commemorates different events in the Eastern (i.e., Christ's baptism in the Jordan River) and Western (i.e., the visitation of the Magi) churches). At my parish, mass closed with the classic, "Angels from the Realms of Glory" (written in 1816 by James Montgomery)...

Whither law firm prestige?

Posted on January 03, 2010
With the economic and law market downturn we are hearing a lot about shifts in the legal market paradigm - the end of the billable hour, changes in associate recruitment and training, etc.. I recently came to find out about a web entity that made me thing about potential changes in the way clients choose and manage their law firms...

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