Legal Commentary

The Cult of the Wireless Clicker

Posted on December 04, 2008
For those in need a holiday gift idea for a law prawf... Look no further than the wireless "clicker." This handy gadget has changed my life. Gone are the days when I was tethered to a laptop computer by the need to hit return to advance to my next powerpoint bullet or slide...

Woops!

Posted on December 04, 2008
I really enjoyed Jay's post about the scariest moment of any class meeting. I've always thought of those first few minutes as deliciously awkward but not scary. For me, the scariest moment is the first time one of your students points out that something you said in class was completely wrong...

Signing Off

Posted on December 04, 2008
I'm off: jury duty, grading and packing for our move to New York await. Thanks as always to Dan for providing me a platform, and to everyone who provided interesting, thoughtful comments to my posts. Have a fun and safe holiday break.

Awkward But Interesting

Posted on December 04, 2008
Imagine you are a labor/employment law prof. with interests in, among other things, gay/lesbian rights, employment discrimination rules, religion, public employment, and the First Amendment. Imagine further that a very interesting case with all these issues involving a public university as an employer has just hit the court system (and blogosphere)...

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Steven Pinker on Gollywaddles

Posted on December 04, 2008
For a while now, I have been obsessed with Supreme Court oral argument humor. Ever since the Court Reporter starting identifying the questioning Justices by name a few years ago, I've been keeping track of which Justices have gotten the most "(laughter)" notations in the oral argument transcripts...

Thanks, ABA Journal

Posted on December 03, 2008
Yes, we too are part of the ABA Journal's Blawg 100. You can find us under the "Professors" link. Here is their description:Less sidetracked than most by the bailout and the election, Prawfsblawg stayed true to its focus: ?prawfs.? It posts about books and papers, law school job openings, and concerns of working professors...

Kmiec on the Obama Administration and Civil Rights

Posted on December 03, 2008
Joseph asked how the incoming Obama Administration, and its change of policies and politics, will affect the courses we teach. Doug Kmiec has a FindLaw column on this week's oral argument in Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee, which considers whether Equal Protection claims under § 1983 are precluded by Title IX...

Long-Time Listener, First-Time Caller

Posted on December 03, 2008
Hi everybody. As Dan mentioned a couple of days ago, I'll be guest-blogging here for the next month or so. Having never done this before, I find myself experiencing a mix of curious eagerness and stomach-churning anxiety. Though I told Dan months ago that I'd do this in December, it more recently has struck me that "four months before my tenure vote" might not be the ideal time to start posting my half-baked thoughts online for the world to see...

"Laughter"

Posted on December 03, 2008
I'm always coming up with excuses not to blog -- back surgery, hip surgery, writing, toenails need clipping, etc. But my latest excuse is a doozy. I am happy to welcome Isaac Nathaniel Horwitz to the world. As with our daughter, our first child, Isaac was an impatient lad, born at 29 weeks and 2 days (at that, he held on longer than his sister) and weighing in at the fighting trim of 3 pounds 1 ounce...

So, how will Obama Affect YOU/What You Teach

Posted on December 03, 2008
Thanks to Dan and the gang for having me back again. I?ll start with a question that I?m asking my colleagues. How do you think the Obama administration will affect/change the area of law that you follow most closely? I want to start this as a descriptive, not normative, exercise: predicting the most likely things to happen, rather than hoping for or bemoaning possible changes...

The hangman's noose and whither R.A.V.

Posted on December 03, 2008
Great, another post where I get to defend egregious expression. David Hudson has this essay about attempts in several states to prohibit the display of nooses with the intent to intimidate or harass. (H/T: First Amendment Law Prof Blog). Apparently incidents of noose displays are on the rise...

Does it matter "what we can expect" from persons with disabilities?

Posted on December 03, 2008
Here is an interesting exchange (read also the comments) between Peter Singer (Princeton) and Michael Berube (Penn State), whose child has Down's Syndrome. The exchange grew out of Berube's blogged comments about a recent conference called "Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy...

The Scariest Moment of any Class Meeting

Posted on December 03, 2008
. . . is always the very first one. I love teaching, and the interaction I have with students is without a doubt the most satisfying part of the job for me. Once a class gets going, I almost always really enjoy it. But the very first second--that moment where I am forced to say "ahem" or whatever--where I make the transition from private guy, standing there thinking about whatever it is I'm thinking about, maybe it's pizza or a crush I had in eighth grade or last night's House, to public guy who is in charge of running a...

Cass Sunstein: The Harvard Lampoon Years

Posted on December 02, 2008
Long before he was a top advisor to Barack Obama . . . long before he was on the short list for any possible Supreme Court vacancies . . . long before he was the most prominent law professor in the world, Cass Sunstein was a member of the Harvard Lampoon, the nation's preeminent college humor magazine...

The Silent Constitutional Crisis?

Posted on December 02, 2008
I recently wrapped up my Con Law II (civil liberties) course here at Georgia. We ended the semester by spending a couple of days discussing the religion in schools cases including Lee v. Weisman (prohibiting clergy-led prayer at public school graduations) and Santa Fe Indep...

The No-Longer Reluctant Blogger Says Good-Bye

Posted on December 02, 2008
Like a rude guest at a party, I fear I've stayed past my welcome by a few days. I really want to thank Dan and everyone at PrawfsBlawg for having me. But before I go, a few more thoughts. When I first joined PrawfsBlawg at the beginning of the month, I posted that I was trying my hand at blogging for the first time with both curiosity and hesitation...

Glad to Be Here

Posted on December 01, 2008
Hello everyone. I'm delighted to be blogging here this month, and I want to thank Dan for the invitation to jump aboard. I should say that it's taken me a long time to warm up to the blogging idea. I think the first time Dan and I discussed my possibly doing a guest stint here a couple of years ago, I said something like, "what would I talk about, this rash I've got?" (incidentally, it was quite an interesting rash--pityriasis rosea--marked by the arrival of a single and relatively large "herald patch," which disappears after two weeks only to be...

Responses to "Excluding Religion"

Posted on December 01, 2008
(Prawfsblawg alum) Nelson Tebbe's new paper, "Excluding Religion", is well worth a read. As are, I hope, the responses to the paper that Tom Berg, Steve Smith, and I have posted at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review's "PENNumbra" site. Here's the abstract for my own response (available here): In a thorough and thoughtful article, Excluding Religion, Prof...

Rotations

Posted on December 01, 2008
Today is World AIDS Day. You can get involved here. It is also December 1, and thus the onset of a new month where we thank our prior guests and welcome our new ones. Many thanks to our October and November crew--some of them may linger a bit longer. I also want to welcome the new voices joining the Prawfs conversation for the month of December: Susan Kuo (USouthCarolina); Michael Cahill (Brooklyn); Rick Esenberg (Marquette), and Jay Wexler (BU)...

Law School Hiring Thread, Part II: Callbacks/Offers Phase

Posted on December 01, 2008
Here's some of the info agglomerated so far from here. Please use the comments to this thread as a place to share info about callbacks and offers for the law teaching market. And feel free to note any errors and omissions. updated 12/1 American (health)Baltimore (IP)Barry UBoston CollegeBoston University (offer and multiple callbacks) (health)Brooklyn (health)Buffalo (offer and callbacks) (property, environmental)CapitalCardozo (IP)Case WesternCatholic (multiple, more scheduled) (criminal)CharlotteChicago-KentCincinnati (multiple) (comparative, crim)Cleveland-Marshall (2) (health, crim) Colorado (environmental, property)Cumberland (IP)CUNY (B-list letter)Detroit-MercyDrexel (multiple) (business, tax, IP)Duke (at least one offer made, multiple callbacks)Elon (health, IP)Emory (multiple)Florida (2) (family law)Florida CoastalFSU (multiple offers made, multiple...

(Mis)education, Part Two

Posted on December 01, 2008
Many thanks to commentators on my last post about education and education-related policy. The points made are not necessarily antithetical; it?s true that most employers won?t inquire, in an interview, as to one?s knowledge of various works if that knowledge isn?t central to the carrying out of the position sought...

Question on entry-level titles

Posted on December 01, 2008
Here is a question that might be answered by current prawfs as well as those who are or have been on the market and looking at different set-ups: Are there schools that designate their entry-level (no teaching experience or maybe just out of a fellowship of VAP program) faculty as Associate Professor rather than Assistant Professor?

Change We Can Recoil From

Posted on December 01, 2008
I greet with horror the news that MTV is going to host an inaugural ball for President-elect Obama in January. Happily, if it doesn't involve teen reality drama involving backstabbing frenemies, probably no MTV viewer will watch it. I think Obama's charisma, and his ability to reach out to what we in the South call "yutes," is an important and valuable quality...

Creeping consequentialism, part IV

Posted on December 01, 2008
My stint as a blogger is drawing to a close, so I ask readers' indulgence as I inflict one further set of thoughts concerning the danger of unreflective consequentialist (especially utilitarian) thinking, in both morality and law. 3. Even when consequences matter, maximizing the net value of consequences is not always the best moral or legal approach...

So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish...

Posted on November 30, 2008
My time here too has come to an end. There are so many interesting things that I wanted to find the time to post on -- I really wanted to add some thoughts, for example, about Proposition 8 and religious liberty. But such marriage-related posting had to be put on hold because of my own impending nuptials, which are now only six days away...

The (Mis)education of America (Lauryn Hill not included)

Posted on November 30, 2008
I hope that the Prawfs community, bloggers and readers alike, are enjoying a lovely holiday weekend. I?ve been offline for a while, but I have been collecting a few topics of interest, about which I?ll post in the next few days. The first is a report by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) chronicling the seeming incompetence of Americans, college educated and not, in relating basic facts in American history...

A Thanksgiving Story

Posted on November 27, 2008
A story in Tuesday's L.A. Times recounts a controversy in a suburb of L.A. about two grade schools' longstanding tradition of the students dressing up as Pilgrims and Native Americans, visiting each other and reenacting the classic Natives-meet-Pilgrims story...

Giving Thanks

Posted on November 26, 2008
Just wanted to take a moment to welcome the holiday tomorrow by giving thanks to all the wonderful people who help make up the Prawfs community--readers, writers, and sponsors. It's hard to believe that we've generated over 4 million pageviews in the last 3 years, and indeed that our traffic has spiked over 30% the last six months or so...

Prof. Stone, Prop. 8, and church-state separation

Posted on November 26, 2008
An item from the "debates not likely to be resolved anytime soon" file: In this piece, Prof. Stone contends (among other things) that California's Proposition "was a highly successful effort of a particular religious group to conscript the power of the state to impose their religious beliefs on their fellow citizens, whether or not those citizens share those beliefs", and that "[t]his is a serious threat to a free society committed to the principle of separation of church and state...

Framing Arguments, an Update, and Good Bye

Posted on November 25, 2008
The time has come for me to bring my guest stint to a close. Before I sign off completely, I want first to note that I've posted an updated, and incrementally more complete, version of my Judicial Process Course Materials here. The new version includes sections on judicial ethics, as well and federal and state judicial selection...

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