Legal Commentary

Like a Poem?!? &!$%$@!

Posted on December 07, 2009
The folks at the WSJ Law Blog have a terrific item asking a number of leading law professors what constitutes a good law school exam answer. I'm in agreement with most of the answers, and find it interesting that they tend to break down into a few simple pieces of advice with relatively little contradiction -- but just enough to be interesting...

Breaking up is not always hard to do: The case of Czechoslovakia

Posted on December 07, 2009
Last month (November 17th, to be precise) was the 20th anniversary of Czechoslovakia?s ?velvet revolution,? the transition from Communist despotism to democratic rule that was extraordinary for its lack of violence. But January 1st 2010 will the eighteenth anniversary of an even more extraordinary event -- the ?velvet divorce? between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992, which took place by a peaceful vote of the Czechoslovakian Legislative Assembly...

Another Law and Religion Cert Grant

Posted on December 07, 2009
Via Howard Friedman's Religion Clause blog, this news: The U.S. Supreme Court today granted certiorari in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, (Docket No. 08-1371) (Order List). In the case, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of University of California's Hastings College of Law to impose its policy against discrimination on the basis of religion and sexual orientation on a student religious group seeking formal recognition...

Save the Date: Prawfs (and others) AALS Happy Hour in NOLA, Thursday Jan 7th, 2010 around 9pm

Posted on December 07, 2009
Please save the date/time for the AALS conference. We'll be having one of our traditional get-togethers with friends from elsewhere in the blawgosphere on Thursday, Jan 7th. Place to be announced in the next week or so. Watch here for this space. Please tell your friends in the meantime to "save the date...

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Why Declining Marginal Utility Matters

Posted on December 07, 2009
Before any more about declining marginal utility, let me explain why the assumption of declining marginal utility matters so much to tax policy. (This post will, I hope, begin to reply to some of the comments on an earlier post, which asked me to explain why I was talking about individual utilities at all...

Judging Scholarship, Or, Would You Kill For Blind Review?

Posted on December 07, 2009
Now that we?re in the middle of the law faculty hiring season, and so many of you out there are busily and conscientiously trying to gauge the comparative quality of candidates? scholarship, here?s a plea: don?t treat all law review placements the same...

How much time should a job offer be open to avoid being thought of as "exploding?"

Posted on December 07, 2009
A friend/prawf at another school writes: Do you know what is ?normal? in terms of how long most schools leave an offer open to a candidate? Is two weeks ?normal? or is that the equivalent of an ?exploding offer?? Seems to me back when I was on the market I got even less than two weeks...

Why I Love My Job

Posted on December 06, 2009
In the critically-acclaimed 1993 documentary The War Room, directors D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus chronicle Bill Clinton?s successful 1992 presidential campaign. The War Room follows Clinton campaign operatives James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala and others as they engineer one of the most surprising presidential victories in modern American political history, shepherding then-Arkansas Governor Clinton to victory over presidential incumbent George H...

Columbia Lions lose to the New Jersey Nets in NY "public use" case

Posted on December 04, 2009
In what might be 2009's most bizarrely underhanded defiance of the highest court's precedent, the New York appellate division just held that the New York State Urban Development Corporation's use of eminent domain to secure "Manhattanville" for Columbia University did not serve any public use under the federal constitution...

Amen, brother

Posted on December 04, 2009
Those who generally refrain from strong opinionating have more force when they step into that role for a moment. David Zaring provides one such example.

Getting Healthcare Federalism Right: Why didn't the Republicans embrace the Butler-Ribstein Proposal?

Posted on December 04, 2009
As I observed earlier, I do not think much of the Shadegg-DeMint Health Care Choice Act as a method of letting consumers choose among state regulatory systems. But there are other federalism-based proposals out there for promoting healthcare choice that make a lot of sense...

Declining Marginal What?

Posted on December 04, 2009
Yesterday I described some intuitive support for declining marginal utility. But commenter freight train demands that I back up: "What is the definition of marginal utility?" he asks. Is...[utility] measured across the desire or across the fulfillment of the desire? What's the measure of that "worth?" ...

Happy Repeal Day!

Posted on December 04, 2009
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the undoing of that famously flawed "progressive" effort at social engineering. Happy Repeal Day! (Please celebrate responsibly.)

Greetings Fellow Prawfs!

Posted on December 03, 2009
Thanks to Dan for the invitation to guest-blog at Prawfs for December. Once the email reminding me that the time for my gig arrived, I had a bit of trepidation about whether I'd have anything to say. After all, I'm stepping into the shoes of some insightful UGA colleagues and good friends at other schools who post here...

The Twombly/Iqbal Discovery Link

Posted on December 03, 2009
Those in the know about the Civil Procedure pleading world are well versed in the controversial reception that has greeted the Supreme Court's Twombly (2007) and Iqbal (2009) decisions, which imposed a new "plausibility" standard for the adequacy of stating a valid claim in a federal complaint under Fed...

Pre Crime: Why are we so confident that we can prevent acts of terrible violence?

Posted on December 03, 2009
As politicians and officials in Washington (state) and Arkansas battle over who should have stopped Maurice Clemmons before he apparently shot to death four Washington state police officers outside a strip mall coffee shop near Tacoma last weekend before being shot dead by Seattle police, we can observe a very enduring if not endearing American obsession-- our conviction that we might have stopped the tragedy (read William Yardley's summary of the blame game in the NYTimes)...

My Most Awesomest PrawfsBlawg Post Ever

Posted on December 03, 2009
?Why can?t we end a successful video game series at its peak? Here?s the problem: It?s hard to keep a property fresh and exciting over a long period of time. Memorable gameplay elements are joyful the first time they happen, but their allure wanes each time they are implemented?...

"What section are you in?"

Posted on December 03, 2009
Since joining the Boston College Law School faculty a few months ago in July as a first-year law professor, I've been asked that question on six occasions. And I don't like it. But I'm not quite sure what to do to prevent it from happening again. The first time was at our annual welcome reception for students in August...

Some Solace for Job Seekers?

Posted on December 03, 2009
I thought I would share this video I made with you folks on the job market this year. Just know that if you're trying to tell people about your article and they're looking at you like you're crazy or a doofus or, in the words of the Dean at the University of Chicago in my case, that there has occurred "a really poor topic selection on your part," perhaps you can take some solace in the fact that maybe, just maybe, you can use your article ten years down the road as part of a comedy routine.

Federalism and the healthcare debate: Should consumers be permitted to ?buy insurance across state lines??

Posted on December 03, 2009
There is no better example of how choice-of-law rules can conceal substantive policy choices than the current arguments over whether consumers should be able to buy insurance policies ?across state lines.? Defenders argue that permitting such purchases would increase consumer choice by allowing consumers to choose the package of benefits that they prefer...

Pleading and judicial-legislative conversations

Posted on December 03, 2009
A major criticism of Iqbal/Twombly (can we just start treating them as one case?) is that the Supreme Court functionally amended the pleading standard by judicial decision rather than through the required process of the Rules Enabling Act, with its greater opportunity for study, information-gathering, and deliberation...

Instant Replay: Let's See That One More Time

Posted on December 02, 2009
My post suggesting de novo review of instant replays led to typically insightful posts from Howard here and from Ilya Somin over at VC, and also to some very interesting comments. Since I write on constitutional law and am thus utterly incapable of leaving well enough alone, I?ll try respond to some of them...

On Writing "Simply" or "Incomprehensibly"

Posted on December 02, 2009
This is one of those evergreen topics for academics, and for those who love to hate academics. (Or, in some cases I suppose, who hate to love them.) Ann Althouse links to an article by an economist who confesses that he has deliberately written "to impress rather than inform," and writes, "I lost my patience with unnecessarily complicated writing a long time ago...

Academic Freedom-Palooza

Posted on December 02, 2009
The latest issue of the Texas Law Review contains three interesting book reviews, all of them centered on academic freedom. The reviews take on Robert Post and Matthew Finkin's recent book For the Common Good, and Stanley Fish's enjoyable book Save the World on Your Own Time...

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

Posted on December 02, 2009
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...

What Is This Thing You Humans Call Blogging?

Posted on December 02, 2009
Hello everyone, I am one of the December visitors here. Thanks to Dan and the Prawfsblawg crew for the opportunity. Possible subjects: law-review articles (I'm agin 'em), first-year teaching foibles (again, I'm agin 'em) and cheese (which I'm not at all agin)...

Standards of review and instant replay: A different take

Posted on December 02, 2009
Joseph asks a great question: Why is instant-replay review not subject to de novo review as opposed to a more-deferential standard. I have not been writing much lately, so I thought I would turn a comment into a separate post. First, let me say that long have hated replay in sports, so perhaps take this with a grain of salt and recognize that I would argue for any way to limit the full effect of replay...

Think You're Attractive? Then Run for Office!

Posted on December 02, 2009
In their new article "Beautiful Politicians" published just last month (a non-subscription draft is available here), Amy King of Oxford and Andrew Leigh of Australian National University pose a provocative question: "Are beautiful politicians more likely to be elected?" Their answer is emphatically yes...

Hard to believe

Posted on December 02, 2009
. . . it's only been six months since this:

There's a Pennoyer in My Foyer

Posted on December 01, 2009
Students studying for their Civ Pro exams and, perhaps more so, professors drafting their Civ Pro exams may want to take a break and surf on over to this article by Dan's colleague Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, just published in the Green Bag. The title I have given above...

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