Legal Commentary

Religious Arbitration and the New Multiculturalism

Posted on November 10, 2010
In my previous post, I floated my thought that there's been a rise of a "new multiculturalism," which focuses less on symbolic recognition and more on jurisdictional differentiation. Put differently, many minority groups are less concerned with their integration into the public sphere and are increasingly concerned with their own law-like autonomy...

Religious Tests and a Committee Chair Candidate

Posted on November 10, 2010
Fans of the relationship between religion and public dialogue, and of issues concerning the Religious Test Clause, may enjoy this story about Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill), who has announced that he is running for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee...

Economic citizenship?

Posted on November 10, 2010
Perhaps I mean "economic theories of citizenship?" No matter, while I realize that I promised another installment of my online education series, I thought I'd take a brief break and try to see if we can find a way to connect current legal theory and constitutional history...

License to Vote?

Posted on November 10, 2010
Last week I promised I would share some of the more provocative comments made by students in my State and Local Government seminar. Here is one. As part of our discussion on allocating the right to vote in local elections, I cited some statistics demonstrating that many US citizens lack a basic understanding of our governmental structure...

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Governance v. Property

Posted on November 09, 2010
So in my previous post I paid tribute to Richard Nagareda and, in particular, his contribution to the ALI's Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation. I tried to show that the Principles reflect two major themes of Nagareda's scholarship: (1) mass torts and similar complex litigation all share a common problem of "governance," and (2) correcting this problem requires primarily corrections to the "design" of existing procedures...

The New Multiculturalism

Posted on November 09, 2010
I just got back from a wonderful conference at St. John's on Religious Legal Theory: Religion in Law, Law in Religion put together by Mark Movsesian and Marc DeGirolami. As announced at the conference, next year's Religious Legal Theory Conference installment will be held at Pepperdine Law School to be run by Robert Cochran...

Symposium: Cure, Botch, or Opiate?

Posted on November 09, 2010
This Friday, November 12, FIU Law Review and FIU College of Law will sponsor Cure, Botch, or Opiate? Law, Politics, Policies, & the Constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a comprehensive discussion of the law and politics of health reform legislation...

Setting High Expectations

Posted on November 09, 2010
I am not a touchy-feely type, and when someone says they believe the universe is sending them messages, I am likely to question their sanity. Nonetheless, I kept facing the same issue today over and over again in every imaginable context: how should I set my expectations--for my students, my colleagues, faculty candidates, my children, and myself--so that they are high but not unrealistically so? I will spare you the full rundown of my day...

"Speech and Harm"

Posted on November 08, 2010
The Times ran today this interesting essay, "Speech and Harm", by Ernie Lepore, in which the author reflects on the fact that "there are certain words that can not be uttered without causing shock or offense." It's worth reading for the author's own points but, for me, it was a reminder of something that (I think) it is important to remember about the freedom of speech and First Amendment doctrine: It is a mistake (I think) to allow our thinking and doctrine to be shaped by a perhaps comforting but still mistaken assumption either that "speech" does not cause "harm",...

Online teaching, Part II: What is it good for?

Posted on November 08, 2010
Last week I promised a further post about what I thought online teaching might be good for. I thought I'd start with explaining what I hoped to accomplish with my foray into an online webinar this academic year. As I've mentioned, I'm on leave this year and nowhere near Florida...

Jurisdictional confusion in unexpected places

Posted on November 08, 2010
One of my future writing projects is to take all my writing on jurisdictionality confusion, rework it with a whole bunch of issues I have not yet considered, and turn it all into a book-length project. Part of that project is going to involve checking through all the possible, but unexpected, areas in which the issue could arise...

Are we ready for Nuclear Power?

Posted on November 08, 2010
Two nuclear power plants, one in New York and one in Vermont, were temporarily closed yesterday due to ?emergencies;? a leak in one case and a transformer explosion in the other. These accidents are likely to reignite the debate over developing nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels...

Antibullying Curricula and "Agenda" Debates

Posted on November 08, 2010
The New York Times yesterday had an interesting story about anti-bullying curricula in public schools, specifically concerning the GBLT community. Some educators believe, understandably, that it is difficult to guard against bullying of students for reasons of sexual orientation without actually discussing sexual orientation and teaching a positive acceptance of LGBT orientations...

A connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition

Posted on November 08, 2010
To teach MGM v. Grokster in my Copyright class, I adopted a technique from Doug Lichtman, who taught Copyright at Chicago when I was a student. As a class, we worked through the audio recording of the oral argument before the Ninth Circuit, stopping the recording each time one of the judges on panel asked a pertinent question...

CAIR Challenges Constitutionality of Sharia Ban

Posted on November 07, 2010
For those following the story of Oklahoma's vote last week to ban state courts from "considering" sharia law, these developments are not particularly surprising. CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) announced the filing of a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction against implementation of the sharia law ban passed in Oklahoma (see previous post for more info)...

Happy birthday, Rick!

Posted on November 06, 2010
I don't remember to do this enough, but please join me in extending warm birthday wishes to one of the most magnanimous souls in all of prawfdom: Rick Garnett! Looking fine for a 29 year old!

Good morning, here's some coffee, let's hear your job talk

Posted on November 05, 2010
Tim Zinnecker asks for thoughts on how the job talk and lunch should be coordinated--Should lunch be before/during the talk? Shoud the talk come first, then lunch? Should lunch be at the school or at a restaurant or somewhere else afterwards? Small group or large group for lunch? Interesting stuff...

Online teaching?

Posted on November 05, 2010
OK, I'm back. I'd like to talk today about a topic that's floated around a bit on the blog over the past year or so, for example here, and is the subject of a timely (and institutionally relevant!) NYT article here: online teaching. This year I got a small start up grant to run an online seminar in constitutional history for advanced graduate students, and so I thought I'd spend this post reflecting a bit on what it's been like...

The "story"

Posted on November 05, 2010
Paul has written before, here at Prawfs, about the "Yale 'So'". Because I am, as a rule, slow to pick up on things, I am just now starting to notice (what strikes me as) the pandemic-speed spread of the use by legal scholars, and also entry-level candidates, of the word "story" to replace, say, "account"...

Humans and Econs, read by a robot

Posted on November 05, 2010
I am, I suspect, the last law professor in America to actually "read" (as opposed to "get a good sense of what the book's about by listening to NPR and reading a few relevant magazine articles") the Sunstein and Thaler "Nudge" book. I listened to it, actually, while running...

Teachers' Manuals

Posted on November 04, 2010
One sign that you are an experienced teacher is that you don't care whether the book you adopt has a teacher's manual or not. If you are teaching a subject for the first time, however, the teacher's manual can be a lifeline. I've been thinking about TMs because I am going to be writing one for a casebook that is in its eighth edition...

Students and blogs

Posted on November 04, 2010
I make extensive use of blogs of the classes I teach; basically, it is a TWEN site, but without the proprietary software. I use it for multiple purporses: I post course materials and assignments and I post the audio for each class the recording is the quid pro quo for banning laptops)...

The Varnum Effect?

Posted on November 03, 2010
To me, one of the more interesting stories arising out of yesterday is Iowa voters' dismissal of three of the seven justices of the state supreme court in their retention election. (See story here.) I think it's safe to attribute this result to the concerted campaign to oust the justices in response to the court's unanimous 2009 decision in Varnum v...

School choice in the Supreme Court

Posted on November 03, 2010
Today (in a few minutes, actually) the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a school-choice and church-state related case out of Arizona, called Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn. (To learn more about the case, check out this helpful summary at SCOTUSBlog, and this argument preview by Lyle Denniston...

Dual Resident Voting

Posted on November 03, 2010
I am excited to be guest blogging this month because it gives me a chance to think and post a bit about voting rights and election law. I teach a course in State and Local Government Law and we spend a fair amount of time discussing the right to vote in local elections...

Richard Nagareda and the ALI's Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation

Posted on November 03, 2010
Like many (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), I was shocked and saddened by the recent passing of Richard Nagareda. I had only spoken to him once, at a conference this past March, but even in our brief encounter he displayed a grace and kindness that I admired...

Shinar on When Governments Break the Law

Posted on November 03, 2010
Over at the CoOp, Adam Shinar, a Clark Byse Fellow and JSD candidate at Harvard, has a review of the new book edited by Austin Sarat and Nasser Hussain, When Governments Break the Law: The Rule of Law and the Prosecution of the Bush Administration. Fellow blogger Steve Vladeck and I both contributed chapters to this book, so I'm doubly grateful to Shinar for his kind review...

Law School Hiring Thread, 2010-11, Thread Three

Posted on November 02, 2010
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) whether they have received a callback from a law school and/or accepted it and b) whether they have received an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer or info about teaching loads, research leaves,...

No one had 26.2 interviews

Posted on November 02, 2010
Like Elizabeth, I am also spending the first week of November on the road, so substance will follow in subsequent posts. For now, I?m glad to enter the Blogosphere from this side of the screen for the first time, and I look forward to your insights and comments to future posts...

Prawfs and the Hiring Conference

Posted on November 02, 2010
Like Sergio, I too am a long-time Prawfs reader, first time guest blogger. And, after all these years of reading, it's really exciting to be doing a bit of the blogging. Now that I got a quick post on the Oklahoma referendum out of the way before today's vote, I wanted to thank the Prawfs for having me here for the month...

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