Legal Commentary

Staying Squarely within the Law, Part 2

Posted on September 08, 2009
Earlier today I started blogging about a teaching technique for a Public International Law course: playing four square. The problem: student resistance to the idea that international law is law. The solution: the game of four square as a classroom exercise...

VC Blogger Ilya Somin Disagrees With the Vast Majority of VC Commenters

Posted on September 08, 2009
At least that's how I read this (see the fourth full paragraph, beginning "To the extent that..."). Ilya, I feel safe in saying you've got a lot of company on this one.

Cash for Kids

Posted on September 08, 2009
One of the first moves of Japan's new ruling party has been a proposal to pay Japanese families to have more children. The proposal would pay families approximately $3,400 per child per year, but it is unlikely to work. Although Japan's falling birthrate is one of the lowest in the world, 1...

Will the Senate Parliamentarian decide how to reform health care?

Posted on September 08, 2009
I sort of hope so, just because it might persuade my students that I have not been wasting their time for the last three years: Since I joined the NYU faculty, I have included a couple of classes on the House and Senate procedural rules in my course on the Administrative & Regulatory State, including arcana like the "amendment tree," "Calendar Wednesdays," sequential referral to committees, etc...

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A Truly Radical Idea: Van Jones and the Greening of Criminal Justice

Posted on September 07, 2009
The midnight resignation of Obama environmental adviser Van Jones is being treated in the media and the blogosphere [read Fred Barbash and Harry Siegel's summary on Politico] as yet another turn in Washington's ideological gang war ("Washington's a tough place that way," noted Howard Dean in one of the more sympathetic comments)...

Interesting Times in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Posted on September 07, 2009
With Pfizer's $2.3 billion payment last week to settle fraud charges for marketing practices relating to its drug Bextra, it must be an interesting time to be in the pharmaceutical industry. On the international front, last summer the European Commission completed a study of competition in the pharmaceutical sector in Europe...

Staying Squarely within the Law

Posted on September 07, 2009
Although I am not teaching it this year, I have regularly taught Public International Law, which in my opinion is one of the most interesting and important courses in the law school curriculum. (Kudos to those law schools that require students to take at least one international or trans-national course in law school...

How We Decide What to Write About

Posted on September 07, 2009
Many thanks to Dan for allowing me to stay on an extra week; a nasty bug plus the start of classes necessitated a rather extended absence from blogging during the last week of August. I've always been rather fascinated with exactly how (and why) we as prawfs decide to write about certain topics over others...

How Kurt Lash cured me of originalism

Posted on September 06, 2009
I am a great admirer of Kurt Lash's work on the Ninth Amendment. His series of articles on the subject has convinced me that, if one focuses on its "original public meaning," the Ninth Amendment is best understood as a federalism-protecting measure -- that is, a rule requiring a narrow construction of Congress? powers to protect the right of the people to collective self-government through their state governments...

Law School Hiring Thread, 2009-10, Thread One

Posted on September 06, 2009
NB: This thread will be moved to the front every ten days or so. This thread is for both law professors and people who are on the market this coming year for becoming a law professor. We invite those on the market and those who are prawfs to leave comments (anonymously if they prefer) regarding a range of things: a) whether they have received a call from a particular school inviting them to an interview at the AALS meat market, and/or whether they accepted it; also whether the school has asked for a candidate's scholarship yet b) whether they have...

How I Cured Rick Hills of Original Intentions Originalism

Posted on September 06, 2009
Rick Hills? recent post honored my work as providing an example of originalism ?in its best light? and providing an acid test regarding the originalism as a workable theory of constitutional interpretation. Given the outstanding nature of Rick?s own work, I?d hate to be the one responsible for his concluding that originalism is a ?dead end...

Another View on Obama's School Speech

Posted on September 05, 2009
Thanks to Dan for another stint at Prawfs. Paul Horowitz raises the interesting question of the reaction to the President's upcoming speech to school children. I see it a bit differently. I am certainly a political conservative, but I have no objection to the President addressing school children and talking about the importance of education...

The Ninth Amendment and the Original Bill of Rights

Posted on September 05, 2009
In my last post, I provided a brief sketch of original public meaning originalism. A number of scholars have contributed to the development of this more sophisticated form of originalism, but no one has done more work to explain the theory of originalism than Illinois law professor Lawrence Solum...

An Unusual (and Uncomfortable) Appointments Question

Posted on September 04, 2009
One of the many joys of serving on a hiring committee (which I've been privileged enough to do three of my five years in the academy, including this year) is the chance to see familiar names (and, eventually, faces) among the massive stacks of resumes...

Pocahontas's Family Tree

Posted on September 04, 2009
In my family law class yesterday, we began our discussion of the fundamental right to marry with the case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's anti miscegenation laws as unconstitutional. As an Indian law scholar, one of the things that has always struck me about the case is the footnote regarding the Pocahontas exception...

Garrido, Long Prison Sentences, and Parole

Posted on September 04, 2009
The continuing media frenzy over the saga of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard and repeat sex offender Philip Garrido is coming to focus heavily on the fact of Garrido's "early release" from his federal 50 year to life sentence for kidnapping and raping Katherine Calloway...

Obama's School Speech and the First Amendment

Posted on September 04, 2009
I'm sorry more folks in the legal blogosphere haven't written more about some of the more perfervid reactions to President Obama's upcoming speech to school children, although Jim Lindgren has an oddly composed, if somewhat be-suspicious-but-verify in tone, post on it today...

Another (Slightly Less) Innocent Question for AALS Interviews

Posted on September 04, 2009
So in my first installment in the gripping series "Innocent Questions in AALS Interviews," I suggested the question: "At [Your School], what percentage of the job are the different pillars of research, teaching, and service?" But the commenters were right that it's probably not the best question to ask...

Thank you for the welcome, Dan!

Posted on September 03, 2009
This is my first blog post ever, anywhere, although blogs have been around for over ten years. I'd like to thank Dan and Prawfsblawg for generously allowing me this opportunity to experiment. This post arrives at an extremely busy time. I'm being considered for tenure at my home institution, Pacific McGeorge, as well as coming to closure on a book project for West's Global Issues Series (in my case, Global Issues in Intellectual Property Law) that I'm working on with co-authors Peter Yu, John Cross and Michael Mireles...

On Schauer on Brain-Based Lie Detection

Posted on September 03, 2009
Over the last several years, researchers have been trying to develop brain-based methods of detecting lies. The overwhelming consensus among neuroscientists is that such techniques are unreliable, particularly in real-world settings. That hasn't stopped at least a couple of companies from marketing functional magnetic resonance imaging ("fMRI") lie detection services...

Another wrinkle in the vaccine debate

Posted on September 03, 2009
Last week I took my daughter to the pediatrician to receive her MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella). The trip to the doctor?s was spurred by two factors, the first was age, my daughter was now at the recommended age for receiving the vaccine but the second was the fact that she was about to enter daycare and state law requires the shot as a condition of enrollment...

Originalism and the Fourteenth Amendment

Posted on September 03, 2009
Cases like D.C. v. Heller illustrate the importance of historical analysis and argumentation as legal skills for constitutional lawyers. Where Heller focused primarily on the original understanding of the Second Amendment, the anticipated follow-up case to Heller will inevitably focus on the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment?particularly the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the issue of whether that Clause incorporated some or all of the first eight amendments...

Simple Things

Posted on September 03, 2009
I want to sign off on my guest stint (thanks PrawfsBlawg!) with a simple thing that could make a big difference to the classroom: looseleaf casebooks. One of the best pieces of advice I got as a beginning professor was to order a looseleaf copy of my casebook...

Innocent Questions for AALS Interviews

Posted on September 02, 2009
Hello everyone -- good to be back for a guest stint, and thanks to Dan for inviting and the rest for tolerating. I'm going to mostly be posting about issues in legal education, but since everyone loves a good navel-gaze and people on the market are thirsty for anything related to hiring, let's start with a perennial favorite this time of year: what questions to ask interviewers at AALS or callback interviews? Here's one that I haven't seen so much, and is a moderately innocent, reasonable question to ask in a job interview, but also might tell you something about...

21st Century Pre-War Apartments

Posted on September 02, 2009
I'm pleased to be guest blogging again at Prawfs. Since I was last here, I've added another blogging gig to my repertoire. In addition to running the Neuroethics & Law Blog, I'm now a contributor at the recently relaunched CrimProf Blog. I'll have some more substantive posts soon...

Greetings, and some thoughts on teaching at a new institution

Posted on September 02, 2009
Hello, readers, and thanks to Dan and the gang at Prawfsblawg for the return visit. The last time I guest-blogged her, I was teaching at Iowa, but after seven years in the Midwest, I've just moved to Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. This was a straight lateral move, without a semester as a look-see visitor, so I really am moving into a new environment, which leads to my first post -- some thoughts about teaching at a new institution...

Goodbye!

Posted on September 02, 2009
I suppose old guest bloggers never die, they just peter out, stop blogging for a while, and then sign off. Thanks to Dan and the others for letting me hang out here for the month of August.

More on the "Uncasebook Project"*

Posted on September 02, 2009
* (H/T for the term: James Grimmelman and Hillel Levin) Some further thoughts on the idea of dumping the casebook for unedited or self-edited cases and a treatise, including responses to comments both here and in private e-mails. First, there are two separate components that must be made to work and they raise distinct issues...

Childhood Obesity is Child Abuse?

Posted on September 01, 2009
First, I want to thank Dan Markel and everyone at Prawfsblawg for the opportunity to blog about family law and Indian law issues. Second, I want to jump right in with a case I have been thinking about. A few days ago, a student came to speak with me about supervising an independent research paper on the issue of childhood obesity and child abuse...

On the Pleasures of Guest Blogging

Posted on September 01, 2009
I can think of three pleasures of guest blogging on Prawfsblawg: 1) One can say pretty much anything 2) People will respond 3) One's commitment lasts for just a month I'm sure there are other pleasures, and maybe a few readers will suggest some. Right now, I'm up to pleasure Number 3, so to borrow from The Sound of Music, so long, farewell, adieu, adieu to you and you and you.

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