Legal Commentary

AALS, Happy Hour, FSU Recruiting, etc.

Posted on December 15, 2009
Thought I'd share a few points related to the AALS conference coming up in January in New Orleans. First, PrawfsBlawg, along with our mates over at Concurring Opinions (and other blawgs), will be hosting a happy hour for all prawfs attending the conference...

The Most Significant Case, Statute, or Regulation This Decade?

Posted on December 15, 2009
Last week?s discussion of the decade's most significant developments in legal academia generated some really interesting response. The overall tone of the comments suggests that, unsurprisingly, the 2000s were a mixed bag for legal academia. Brian Leiter?s poll on which of these developments was the most significant closes tomorrow, so get your votes in now...

Illegal Motion?

Posted on December 15, 2009
My wife loves this clip and it has grown on me. But I must ask the football-rules question: Is this Illegal Motion?

A Quick Thought on Thomson, Padilla, and Ex parte Endo

Posted on December 15, 2009
With today's news that some large percentage of the individuals still detained at Guantanamo are going to be relocated to a federal prison in Thomson, Illinois comes the obvious (if geeky) jurisdictional question: Does this mean that all of the habeas petitions in these cases currently pending before the D...

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More on Tax and Good Cards

Posted on December 15, 2009
Over at The Conglomerate, Christine Hurt discusses the tax treatment of "The Good Card," available from Network for Good: You...give someone a gift card, which they can then use to donate to the charity of their choosing. It's not quite like a universal gift card -- it has to be used for a charitable donation...

Whither Law Professor Salaries: Let's Talk Money

Posted on December 14, 2009
As so many lament the sky-rocketing cost of a legal education (tuition has increased far ahead of inflation), the debt students have to incur to obtain their law degree, and the pressure that the tanking economy has placed upon financial aid and public interest support, is this the dirty little secret no one is talking about: law professor salaries are largely responsible for this state of affairs? Recently, headlines like this one screamed that law school tuition has run amok for a very bad reason: due in major part to the U...

The Meaning of Life

Posted on December 14, 2009
Carol Williams reporting in the LATimes does a superb job of describing California's Lewis Carroll like parole system for those sentenced to life in prison for murder, with the possibility of parole; a topic which has given the California Supreme Court cause for psycho-therapy and now looms over the 9th Circuit (Hayward v...

Great new issue of Ohio St. J. of Criminal Law

Posted on December 14, 2009
I am continually impressed with the great and creative conversations hosted in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. Via the good folks at Tarlton Library at U of Texas, I just found out there's a new issue of the Journal with what looks to be 2 really interesting exchanges, one having to do with what criminal law can learn from criminology, and the second having to do with an article by Anders Walker (SLU) about the political history of the criminal law casebook and its relation to legal education...

Fix the Senate, Part II

Posted on December 13, 2009
Professors Kerr and and DeGirolami have graciously responded to my somewhat silly post knocking the Senate with serious comments. Specifically, professor Kerr cites Federalist Papers #62 and #63 for their defense of the Senate, and Professor DeGirolami remarks that the desire for a younger and less obstructionist Senate is one of "the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians...

Super Behavioral Law and Economics

Posted on December 13, 2009
Levitt and Dubner have super-sized their hit. And in the legal academy, behavioral law and economics is entering the next generation. Avishalom Tor, at the law faculty of Haifa University, organized this week a fantastic and intense conference, Behavioral Analysis of Law: Markets, Institutions, and Contracts...

Advice for Undergraduates?

Posted on December 13, 2009
Massachusetts is, by my rough count, one of only six states without a public law school. But not for long, it seems. The public University of Massachusetts (UMASS) has recently approved a proposal to acquire the private Southern New England School of Law (SNESL), a move that will create the state's first public law school...

Fix the Senate

Posted on December 12, 2009
This comment by Steven Hill in the Financial Times aptly sums up my feelings about the U.S. Senate: "This powerful legislative body debating healthcare for the entire country is a patrician gerontocracy more closely resembling the ancient Roman Senate than a New England town meeting...

Another Angle on Instant Replay

Posted on December 11, 2009
Speaking of truly significant developments in legal academia, the instant replay argument rages on at the Wall Street Journal law blog, in a thorough treatment by Josh Patashnik at The New Republic, and in another incisive post from Ilya at VC. The most strident (though by no means the only) argument commenters have made against de novo review is essentially that folks like football the way it is, and we don?t need anyone lawyering it up...

(Don't?) Look Back in Anger

Posted on December 11, 2009
Our discussion of the most significant development in legal academia this decade has turned up some thought-provoking answers on this blog and others. Most nominees seem to fall into three categories?(1) changes in hiring (e.g., more VAPs and PhDs); (2) changes in the communication of ideas (e...

Dear Judge: No Glory Days For You

Posted on December 11, 2009
If you're a judge with a Facebook page...and if any of your old high school friends are lawyers...and if they may appear before you...then no "friend"ing on Facebook to relive those high school days of youthful prowess. At least according to Florida's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee, because "[t]he Committee believes that listing lawyers who may appear before the judge as 'friends' on a judge's social networking page reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer 'friends' are in a special position to influence the judge...

Could OLC be the Second City of Law?

Posted on December 11, 2009
I just finished reading a new book on Second City called The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World's Famous Comedy Theater, by Mike Thomas. It was great fun to read. For one thing, it made me nostalgic for Chicago, my favorite city in the U...

All the Pretty Pictures

Posted on December 11, 2009
Sarah Lawsky's post of a chart showing how the FCC allocates spectrum reminded me of one of the many reasons I like teaching environmental and natural resources law: We're never at a loss for dramatic pictures. I've recently been doing some writing about wilderness areas, which have some of the most beautiful pictures around...

Plus, All the Pretty Colors!

Posted on December 10, 2009
I'm sure this is common knowledge for people who are interested in communications law, but for me, this was a useful and straightforward explanation of the science behind bandwidth--how it works and why it's limited--and some of the issues that face the FCC as it allocates the spectrum...

Congress and the BCS

Posted on December 10, 2009
Yesterday, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce passed H.R. 390, which prohibits the "promot[ion], market[ing], or advertis[ing]" of a post-season Division I college football game as a national championship game unless it is the final game of a single-elimination post-season playoff tournament rather than the current BCS system...

A Morning with David Ben-Gurion, or Where did all the Spiritual Leaders Go?

Posted on December 10, 2009
One of my favorite yoga teachers tells us that if you are struggling with a problem, a puzzle, or a challenge, stand on your head. You will see the world upside down and you will find a way. I often practice her teaching in my office instead of staring at my computer screen trying to figure out where I want to go with my analysis or a normative argument...

Will SCOTUS finally get rid of prosecutorial discretion to write anti-corruption law?

Posted on December 09, 2009
That's what today's oral argument in Weyhrauch v United States, No. 08-1196 sounded like to me and others as well. If that's the accurate read of the justices' views, then the news is Christmas come early for me. I've been inveighing against the corruption of allowing federal prosecutors to define corruption inveighing against the corruption of allowing federal prosecutors to define corruption since the cert...

Senator Orrin Hatch (aka Hanukkah Harry)

Posted on December 09, 2009
Those of you who have already checked your Facebook accounts the last couple days have probably seen this already on the wonderful Tablet site, but the inimitable Jeffrey Goldberg has somehow importuned Orrin Hatch, the Mormon songmeister/senior senator from Utah, to write a catchy new Hanukkah tune, co-written with Madeline Stone, a liberal NYC Jewish songwriter specializing in Christian music, and sung by ...

The Development of the Decade in Legal Academia?

Posted on December 08, 2009
I?m usually not a huge fan of ?Year in Review? lists. I don't even watch ?I Love the 70s/80s/90s.? But over the past few weeks, decade retrospectives have become about as consciousness-permeating as holiday music, and somehow I find that I can?t resist the urge to look back...

What are the good bad books today?

Posted on December 08, 2009
The term ?good bad books? originates with George Orwell, I think: He used it to refer to low-brow books that lacked the academic or cultural pretension of great literature but nevertheless were irresistibly fun for intelligent people to read. At the time that Orwell coined the phrase, Kipling?s work counted as good bad books, as did Sherlock Holmes stories, Bram Stoker?s Dracula, and a bunch of others...

Death Be Not Proud

Posted on December 08, 2009
In the aftermath of Ohio's latest execution (read Ian Urbina's reporting in the NYTimes; this one was the first to be done with a single shot of a powerful narcotic ), I was cheered to read my colleague (and teacher) Frank Zimring's column in yesterday's National Law Journal, noting the decision by the American Law Institute earlier this fall, to withdraw it's much cited standards for capital sentencing...

Dorf on Christian Legal Society (and FAIR?)

Posted on December 08, 2009
Mike Dorf has an interesting post on Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, in which the Court just granted cert. Here's one paragraph I found particularly interesting: The Hastings opp cert relies on district court findings showing that until a few years ago, CLS had no problem with openly gay and lesbian members...

Convexed

Posted on December 08, 2009
For all these years, I've thought that a curve was concave if it looked like it wouldn't be able to hold water. But it seems that, at least in some disciplines, whether something is concave or convex is a matter of perspective. Something is concave if it curves away from you; something is convex if it bulges toward you...

Eric Barron named new President of FSU

Posted on December 08, 2009
Well, as promised/threatened by the relevant powers that be, the FSU presidential search committee has acted very expeditiously from the time that all nominations were in to the time the selection was made--approximately 3 weeks! Eric Barron will be replacing TK Wetherell at FSU's helm...

Marbury in Introductory Constitutional Law

Posted on December 08, 2009
I am currently completing my syllabus for Constitutional Law I, the first of two required constitutional law courses at Boston College. The first, which we teach in the second semester of the first year, covers structural constitutional law while the second, which students may take in either their second or third year, focuses on civil and political rights...

Federalism as Creating a Minor League for Democracy: The Case of South Africa

Posted on December 07, 2009
Roger Myerson, a Nobel Laureate in economics, has proposed an interesting justification for federalism as a device to promote democratic accountability in new democracies. I am wondering if the Democratic Alliance's recent success in the West Cape elections in South Africa might provide a case study of the Myerson theory in action...

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