Legal Commentary

Religious Pluralism and "The Office"

Posted on October 24, 2008
From last night's episode, via Dwight: "She introduced me to so many things -- pasteurized milk, sheets, monotheism...." Incidentally, is it at all disturbing that I identify most with Dwight?

Ritualistic Lawyering

Posted on October 23, 2008
Jeff Lipshaw has a great post on the value of lawyers in business deals. He posits (in part) that lawyers are not making the pie bigger in many cases, and that if lawyers always made the pie bigger then we would see them used more often on smaller deals...

350 Million Dr. Peppers Comin' At Ya

Posted on October 23, 2008
I would be excited enough at the news -- could it finally be true? -- that Chinese Democracy, by "Guns 'n' Roses," is finally going to be released in a few weeks. Appetite for Destruction is a classic. I also remember listening fervently to every song on Use Your Illusion -- for the few weeks until Nevermind and Ten came along and rewrote the map of rock music in the early 90s, putting Use Your Illusion in something of the position of the world's best horseshoe being released shortly before the first factory rollout of the Model T...

Sponsored Announcement: UPenn Law Invites Applications for Sharswood Fellowships

Posted on October 23, 2008
To encourage scholars who plan to enter legal academia, the Editorial Board of Volume 155 of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review established the first Sharswood Fellowship in 2007. Penn Law has since expanded the program so that now each year the School awards two fellowships that each fund two years of research, writing, and teaching...

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

Reflections on Doing an LRW Fellowship

Posted on October 23, 2008
This blog has many readers who are on the meat market. One path to law teaching careers is through an LRW teaching fellowship?Stanford?s program, the Climenko, the Bigelow, etc. This is the path I took, and if you are on the cusp of a law teaching career, but not quite ready, you might consider it...

Bringing LRW into the Doctrinal Classroom and Some Final Thoughts

Posted on October 23, 2008
This is the last post in my series on LRW. In it, I will share some of my own plans to bring LRW into the doctrinal classroom and offer some final thoughts for doctrinal faculty to keep in mind about LRW. First, some cautions against bringing practical lawyering into the doctrinal classroom: Doing so is difficult because it may require more time and effort giving feedback to students...

Writing Direction and Organizing Research

Posted on October 22, 2008
Last week at the Conglomorate, Gordon Smith asked how people keep track of their research. He then discussed how he ?writes backward? and thus doesn?t really use any tools to keep track of the research. It?s not clear to me why that should be the case ? even if you use research to footnote, justify, and modify a paper after you have written it, you still need to keep track of the research...

FIU College of Law in the Roger Williams Survey

Posted on October 22, 2008
FIU College of Law (which opened in Fall 2002) is not yet a member of the AALS, which meant we were not included in the Roger Williams survey of faculty productivity at non-Top-50 law schools. So, as St. Thomas (MN) did last month, we ran our numbers...

Globalization and Global Governance

Posted on October 22, 2008
In response to my post from earlier, Rob Howse referred me to his review article -- The End of the Globalization Debate: A Review Essay -- published earlier this year in the Harvard Law Review. It's nicely written, insightful, and well-worth the read...

Planet-Eating Black Hole vs. Maverick Scientists: The Ultimate Preliminary-Injunction Case

Posted on October 21, 2008
Now, on the other end of the scales is the Earth and everyone on it being devoured by a black hole. Result? Black hole wins. You can?t get more hardship than that.

Remember the CEO President?

Posted on October 21, 2008
The Bush-Clinton divide could be seen as, among many other things, a difference between business people and lawyers. The MBA versus the JD. The comparison caught a difference in attitudes about procedure and decisionmaking. If we wanted to frame the current contrast, Obama seems to be in the JD camp...

Signing out

Posted on October 21, 2008
I'd planned to keep posting, but I'm feeling pretty blogged out these days. Combined with lots of other stuff I owe co-authors, colleagues, my wife and dog, that means that I need to bid PB goodbye for this turn. As time permits and topics arise, I'll still do a bit of econ-blogging over at Economists for Obama, so you can find me there if you like...

The Effects Test and Transnational Litigation

Posted on October 21, 2008
Eric's post on the litigation from the Large Hadron Collider ("Could bad judging cause the earth to be sucked into a black hole? Maybe"), spurred this post on a slightly different issue. The Hawaiin case that Eric mentions -- although dismissed on jurisdictional grounds -- is part of a larger trend...

The Lowest Top-20 Schools on Student Satisfaction

Posted on October 21, 2008
Over at TaxProf Blog this week, Paul Caron is doing a great series of posts unpacking the data from the new The Princeton Review's Best 174 Law Schools. Today's post is on the "academic experience" rating, which Princeton Review describes this way: Academic Experience Rating: The quality of the learning environment, on a scale of 60 to 99...

Could Bad Judging Cause the Earth to Be Sucked Into a Black Hole? Maybe.

Posted on October 21, 2008
In a technological age of human-induced climate change, genetic engineering, and nuclear chain-reactions, the prospect of the courts confronting a real doomsday scenario is decidedly non-trivial. If and when the titans of science and industry find themselves at odds with bystanders about what constitutes acceptable risk to the environment and the human species, lawyers and judges are the citizens? bulwark...

Hiring thread update

Posted on October 21, 2008
There seems to be a minor glitch with the comments to the hiring thread. The comments for the last month are currently not showing up, but rest assured they are showing up somewhere in the typepad software, so they have not been lost permanently. I will find out from Typepad how to restore them...

The Supreme Court and Software Patents

Posted on October 20, 2008
This is a continuation of my series on patentable subject matter. The first post introduced my argument that judicial limits on patentable subject matter should be abandoned in favor of adherence to the statutory categories: processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter...

$ 150 million worth of speech

Posted on October 20, 2008
The Obama Campaign announced Sunday that it raised $ 150 million in September, an obscene, record-breaking figure that more than doubles the previous record (which was Obama's haul in August). This certainly justifies Obama's decision to opt-out of public financing...

The Judicial Process, Defined

Posted on October 20, 2008
Last week I bemoaned the fact that those of us who do work in the judicial process area have no organizational home of our own. My aim in this post is to talk a little bit more about what I've got in mind when I talk about the judicial process as a field of learning...

Teaching Research: Next in an Ongoing Series on LRW

Posted on October 19, 2008
Some readers have asked me to address teaching the research aspect of LRW head-on. Of all of the components of an LRW program, I found teaching research to be the most difficult. We had help from two resources on this score--librarians and Lexis/Westlaw reps...

Bounded Rationality and The Price is Right

Posted on October 18, 2008
I just read a really great paper by Jonathan Berk and Eric Hughson called "Can Boundedly Rational Agents Make Optimal Decisions? A Natural Experiment." The Berk and Hughson examine a sample of games on the game show The Price is Right to see whether contestants make optimal bidding decisions...

Malcolm Gladwell and Legal Scholarship

Posted on October 17, 2008
Gordon Smith and Orin Kerr have interesting posts up about their respective writing processes. I'm struck by the parallels with the two types of creativity - conceptual and experimental - that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his latest New Yorker piece (which in turn draws on the work of David Galenson)...

The Judicial Process, um, Movement(?)

Posted on October 17, 2008
One of the things that seems critical to establishing oneself as a scholar is becoming a part of a broader community of scholars. Six-plus years into my academic career, I feel only partially successful in this regard. Here's why: When people ask me what I write about, I usually say "the judicial process...

Penn's Rankings Problem

Posted on October 17, 2008
As U.S. News voters figure out what rating to give each school, and start focusing more on educational quality, Penn Law seems to be quite well-positioned -- sky-high student satisfaction ("academic experience" rating of 96 in Princeton Review), great bar passage rates, on curriculum, we'll have to see what they submit for their "Best Practices" survey today (thanks to all who have submitted so far!)...

Some thoughts on Greenawalt, judicial review, and underenforcement

Posted on October 16, 2008
As Paul was kind enough to mention, Notre Dame Law School hosted a roundtable conference last week dedicated to Volume II of Kent Greenawalt's "Religion and the Constitution." (I really like this format, by the way: No need to worry about having an audience for the various panels -- especially the dreaded last one -- and less of a problem of presentations passing like ships in the night...

Beyond the Traditional Syllabus: Using Narrative to Teach Torts

Posted on October 16, 2008
Last week, I wrote about one of the ways (using a Navajo court opinion and a Canadian case) that I have tried to expand my syllabus beyond the traditional state and federal appellate opinions. Yesterday, I had a tremendously energetic class based on a case reading that wasn't a judicial opinion at all...

Bloglines or Google Reader?

Posted on October 16, 2008
Eric Goldman laments that Bloglines randomly drops his feeds and for that reason (among others) he is switching to Google Reader. I am relatively new to online readers - I have always used Firefox bookmarks and/or Sage Extension for Firefox, both of which work quite well for what they are...

What can we learn from Nobel laureates in economics? According to Krugman: Listen to the Gentiles

Posted on October 16, 2008
For a while, I've been prone to skipping most of Paul Krugman's columns in the NYT, finding them a bit on the shrill side for my taste. Still, as he was basking in his recent Nobel-generated glow, I was directed, via Gordon Smith, to a great set of links by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution that describe Krugman's work in economics...

Churches as First Amendment Institutions: Of Spheres and Sovereignty

Posted on October 16, 2008
I'm very pleased to say that I've posted on SSRN a draft of a new paper, Churches as First Amendment Institutions: Of Spheres and Sovereignty. A slightly different version is forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, which has been a pleasure to work with...

Bar Passage: A Key Factor to Look To in USN Voting

Posted on October 16, 2008
For those filling out the U.S. News survey rating the academic quality of JD programs across the country, one logical question is what kind of information one ought to look at to make such determinations. Here's one key piece of data: bar passage rates relative to entering credentials...

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