Legal Commentary

"We're on a mission from God!"

Posted on June 18, 2010
If you recognize that line, you must be a fan of the 1980 movie "The Blues Brothers" starring John Belushi and Dan Akroyd. I must confess that It is one of my guilty pleasures -- one of those movies I like to watch from time to time. But now, as a good Catholic, I guess I do not have to confess it...

A Compendium of Media & Entertainment Law Materials

Posted on June 18, 2010
I've put together a compendium of materials for courses on media law and entertainment law, and I've put it up on the web so that other teachers can make use of it. These are materials that I've used, or plan to use, in my own courses. There are some judicial opinions in there...

A Summer Reading List on Teaching

Posted on June 17, 2010
I believe I have two things in common with most of the law prof readers of PrawfsBlawg. First, whenever I want to learn to do something new or better, I read a book on the subject, whether the subject be racquetball or travelling in Greece or cooking Italian food...

Best practices v. student-centeredness

Posted on June 17, 2010
There are two competing trends in the academy right now. One is the issue of "Best Practices" (a presumptuous, non-neutral term if every there was one) from the Carnegie Report, etc., which urges us to get beyond the historical Socratic class and introduce professionalism, "experiential learning," and other devices throughout the curriculum...

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Speaking of Summer Reading

Posted on June 17, 2010
Thomas Baker?s post A Summer Reading List on Teaching got me thinking about summer reading lists in general. Every year I make a list of books to read during the summer months. Some of the books are purely for pleasure. Other books on the list are books that I figure I ought to read...

Separated at Birth?

Posted on June 16, 2010
We may not yet know how many barrels are spewing into the gulf each day, but at least we know who will play Hayward in the movie version.

Governing through War

Posted on June 16, 2010
When I talk to people about how the "war on crime" transformed American politics and law since the late 1960s (the subject of the book Governing through Crime) one of the most interesting questions I get is whether the problem is more with making "crime" such a privileged target of national anxiety and identity, or whether the problem isn't with the "war on" metaphor itself, whether it attaches to cancer, poverty, terrorism, or crime...

Sharron Angle and What's Good for the Goose

Posted on June 15, 2010
On the New Republic's blog, Jonathan Chait has a short post that is overdone but makes a valid point. He notes that Sharron Angle, the tea-party-backed GOP Arizona senatorial candidate, in an interview with the National Review, credits God (and Mark Levin) for her primary win, saying that "[m]ost everything has a providential side in American history...

President Garvey

Posted on June 15, 2010
My friend and former colleague -- also Dean of Boston College's law school and former President of the AALS -- John Garvey has been named President of the Catholic University of America. This is, I believe, a truly (i.e., "literally") inspired choice...

AALS Mid-Year Property Meeting -- Property, Morality and Climate Change

Posted on June 15, 2010
I am just back from, among other places, the AALS Mid-Year Meeting of the Property Section in NYC. I was on the planning committee, which was an experience worthy of its own blog post, but I'll leave that to side for the moment. I really enjoyed the meeting, and thought that the panels were terrific...

On RuPaul's Drag Race and the Legal Academy

Posted on June 14, 2010
Given my interest in cross dressing?my scholarly interest, to be clear; one of my articles is even titled Cross Dressing and the Criminal?it perhaps comes as no surprise that I?m a fan of RuPaul?s Drag Race, the campy, loopy, and entirely addictive reality show on the Logo Network and VH-1 in which drag queens compete to see who will be America?s next top drag superstar...

President J. Edgar Hoover?

Posted on June 14, 2010
The NYT just ran a piece about the release of Sen. Edward Kennedy's FBI file. The file contained a host of disturbing death threats, rumors about strange plots involving Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra, as well as assorted mundane items. The article buried what I viewed as the most novel piece of history, an exchange between Ted Kennedy's famous / infamous father, Joseph P...

Thoughts on realignment: The Basketball Effect

Posted on June 13, 2010
To pile on Matt's post, an interesting side issue to college-sports realignment is the effect on, and role of, college basketball. Basketball (men's basketball, that is) clearly is in the same boat as football in terms of being essentially professional...

What We Think of Family Men Who Land in the Pen...

Posted on June 13, 2010
When I undertook the project of revising my dissertation on the impact of McVeigh's capital trial and execution on Oklahoma City family members and survivors into a book, I never thought of it as a creative project, per se. I thought that it would be a pleasant experience, kind of like playing in the same sandbox that you've played in for the past several years, with the same toys...

FYI: A Flawed Decision re Alcohol Ads Aimed at College Students

Posted on June 13, 2010
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently announced a deeply flawed decision upholding the constitutionality of restrictions on alcohol advertising in "college student publications" in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I'm willing to concede that some college students in Virginia may drink too much, based at least in part on the anecdotal evidence related to me by my husband, a University of Virginia grad...

Spencer Roane in the SG's Office? The United States denies that SCOTUS has jurisdiction over Puerto Rico

Posted on June 12, 2010
In opposing a petition for certiorari to the supreme court of Puerto Rico, the Solicitor General has adopted a truly odd reading of the relevant jurisdictional statute: The SG's brief argued that the SCOTUS lacked any jurisdiction over the Puerto Rican supreme court's orders denying discretionary review under 28 u...

A Bad Week for Amateur Athletics

Posted on June 12, 2010
If there was any doubt that college sports are now all about money, rather than students engaging in wholesome and character-building extracurricular activities, this week should put that to rest. First, we had the spectacle of schools leaving their traditional rivals to get better deals with other conferences...

Advertising Brothels: A Novel "Commodification" Theory

Posted on June 12, 2010
Nevada has partially legalized prostitution, but it has stringent restrictions on brothel advertising. Specifically, brothels cannot advertise at all in those Nevada counties that make their activities illegal by local ordinance or state statute, and in the counties where the brothels are legal, they cannot engage in "public" advertising, that is, advertising in "any public theater, on the public streets of any city or town, or on any public highway...

Card Games

Posted on June 11, 2010
Credit-card campus "affinity programs" are nothing new, and they survived the legislative reforms that took effect this year. Affinity marketing has been the rage in many arenas since the 1990s. Consumers are more likely to purchase a commodity if it is associated with their college or favorite baseball team...

O'Connor v. Hellman on Arizona's Public Campaign Finance Law

Posted on June 11, 2010
Over at Concurring Opinions, Deborah Hellman makes an interesting First Amendment argument in defense of Arizona's system of public finance of political campaigns, called "Clean Elections." The Supreme Court just lifted a Ninth Circuit stay of a U.S. District Court injunction against Arizona's grant of matching funds...

Today's Story From the Kagan Archives

Posted on June 11, 2010
As a follow-up to my last post, today's Times has a story on a memo written by Elena Kagan while she was in the Clinton administration on a California case involving the religious freedom of landlords to refuse to rent apartments to unmarried cohabiting couples...

Forgivable and Unexceptional, Yes -- But Callow

Posted on June 11, 2010
At the VC, Eugene Volokh has a post discussing the reaction of Senators Kyl and Sessions to memos written by Elena Kagan while she served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall. Volokh tries to rescue Kagan from the charge that she somehow acted improperly by offering what appeared to be personal opinions on the cases she discussed, and by basing cert...

The Best Law School Architecture

Posted on June 11, 2010
Part 1 of a series: Architecture & Law Schools This will be the first post in a series of posts about law schools and architecture. I have a few things to say about the topic. But first, I want to open it up for comments in asking this question: Which law schools have the most outstanding architecture? What law schools have the building environments that you would most like inhabit as a student or member of the staff or faculty? Here are some possible contenders: Loyola Los Angeles University of Michigan Harvard University Penn State University University of Chicago Yale...

Law and Society Boycott Resolution Gets Arizona Immigration Law Wrong

Posted on June 10, 2010
Arizona's new immigration law, SB1070, is complex, vague, long, larded with drafting errors, and designed by its creators to test the limits of a dozen or more legal principles. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that it is difficult to parse. It also raises strong opinions (and, possibly more importantly, strong feelings) on both sides...

Belated thoughts on Relating Back

Posted on June 10, 2010
The Supreme Court decided Krupski v. Costa Crociere on Monday; I was traveling with my daughter earlier this week, so this is my first chance to write about the case (which I discussed after argument). A unanimous Court (through Justice Sotomayor, with Justice Scalia concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) held that relation back under FRCP 15(c) should have been allowed where the plaintiff sued the cruise line rather than the similarly named (and related) ship owner/carrier, which was the properly liable party under the terms of the ticket...

Hurt Locker Lawsuit

Posted on June 10, 2010
Per Sam Adams, Nicolas Chartier, the producer of the Hurt Locker has filed a lawsuit against a number of file sharers who downloaded the movie using BitTorrent. Very interesting to me was Adams's discussion of an email exchange between Chartier and a user calling himself Nicholas: Apart from calling Nicholas a "moron," and adding "I hope your family and your kids end up in jail," Chartier characterized downloading as a cross between physical theft and home invasion: "[P]lease feel free to leave your house open every time you go out and please tell your family to do so, please invite...

AALS Mid-Year Meeting(s)

Posted on June 10, 2010
I am off to New York today for the AALS Mid-Year Meeting's Workshop on Civil Procedure: Charting Your Course in a Shifting Field. This will be running at the same time as the Workshop on Property and the Workshop on Post Racial Civil Rights Law, Politics and Legal Education: New and Old Color Lines in the Age Of Obama...

I Just Miss the Classics

Posted on June 10, 2010
Salon has a great re-review of the original Karate Kid.

"Twelfth Night" and "Active Liberty"

Posted on June 09, 2010
Tony Mauro's discussion, in the Green Bag Almanac & Reader 2010, includes this item: In a mock trial based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito assessed the merits of Malvolio's suit against Olivia for false imprisonment, ultimately siding with Olivia...

Time delayed sentencing gets off the ground!

Posted on June 09, 2010
Thanks to Tony Sebok, my attention was just adverted to United States v. Bueno, a recent opinion by Judge Baer (SDNY) involving the sentencing of an irreplaceable caregiver. Bueno has 3 young kids and her husband was also convicted and sentenced, leaving no other available and willing caregivers...

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