Legal Commentary

Faculty Modesty Doesn't Help the Dean

Posted on June 01, 2010
This is the third installment in a series, asking how faculty can understand their deans better. Today's topic: faculty modesty. In most settings, modesty is truly a virtue. But a dean's job is to strengthen the law school, which means giving the students the resources to learn and giving the faculty the resources to teach and produce knowledge...

We pay you. You don't pay us.

Posted on June 01, 2010
Thank you, Prawfs, for having me back on board this month. My student evaluations for an upper-level class arrived last week in my mailbox. The evals were benign and unremarkable with two exceptions. One student wrote, "Nothing to improve, except for clothing...

Our New Center of Excellence

Posted on June 01, 2010
A big trend in higher education these days is the establishment of "centers of excellence." Close to my home and office in Grand Forks, North Dakota, we are lucky enough to have a new center of excellence, The Center of Excellence in Life Sciences and Advanced Technologies...

Happy Uniform Gauge Day! How a 3-inch nudge destroyed American federalism

Posted on May 31, 2010
Today is the 134th anniversary of one of our most important yet most unrecognized constitutional events: On May 31st, 1886, the operators of Southern railroads began their famous two-day conversion of all southern railroad tracks from the five-foot gauge that the South had hitherto used to the (almost) standard 4-foot, 9-inch gauge of the Pennsylvania Railroad...

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Judicial Review of New Governance Regulation

Posted on May 31, 2010
One of the topics of the conference I blogged about last Thursday was New Governance. In thinking about my admin law class this last semester one of the ideas that I kept coming back to concerned the availability of judicial review over New Governance activities...

Mark Your Calendars: Contract as Promise Symposium at Suffolk

Posted on May 31, 2010
My parting shot for my month at Prawfs is a teaser. Mark your calendars now for a dynamite symposium on Friday, March 25, 2011 to be held at the Suffolk University Law School in downtown Boston. We will commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Charles Fried's iconic Contract as Promise with a day-long program featuring a host of contract theory and jurisprudence luminaries (I'm assembling the lineup now - look for details over the coming weeks and months), and kicked off by reflections from Professor Fried himself...

Farewell Tidings and Gifts

Posted on May 31, 2010
Thank you to everyone at PrawfsBlawg for allowing me this month of public musing. I once again leave humbled by the creative and time demands of regular posting and with deep respect for those who do it not only more frequently but with far greater panache...

LawPrawfs on the Arizona Immigration Law

Posted on May 31, 2010
Carissa Hessick at Arizona State, and Toni Massaro, Marc Miller and I at the University of Arizona have written a summary and analysis of SB 1070, the new Arizona immigration law, available here. We welcome comments, suggestions and critiques of our views, particularly because the complexity of the statute necessarily makes our work preliminary...

Ach! Achilles Achin'...

Posted on May 31, 2010
Thanks to Dan and the clan for allowing me to run on here while my ripped Achilles tendon heals (a job-related injury, of course -- don't you all incorporate a physical, trial by strength component into your final exams?). Before I go, just a quick plug for the kickoff conference of our new Center for Law and Religion in Paris in about a week and a half, on the subject of "La?cité in Comparative Perspective...

Signing Off

Posted on May 31, 2010
I'm outta here. Thanks, as always, to Dan for lending me a soapbox. And thanks to everyone who commented on or even just read my posts. It makes blogging a whole lot more fun when I know that smart people are giving some real thought to what I throw out there, and it's appreciated...

Thoughts triggered by Law & Society

Posted on May 30, 2010
That was a great couple days in Chicago for Law and Society; I wish I could have stayed an extra day or two, but family calls. Otherwise, I was able to run along the lake, eat Chicago-style pizza (in the pleasant company of Dan, Wendy, and Ben), and spend an almost-perfect afternoon at the Place Where God Intended Baseball To Be Played (even if the Cubs lost because, well, they suck)...

Congratulations to my Colleagues

Posted on May 29, 2010
A short, but heartfelt, shout out and congratulations to my colleagues Anne Bloom, Omar Dajani, Marjorie Florestal and Paul Paton for the University of the Pacific?s recent decision to grant them tenure and promotion to full professor. I was pleased that we all obtained this distinction in the same year...

Is This Legal?

Posted on May 28, 2010
I used to work for a CEO who would regularly observe some oddity in the world and then walk into my office with the question: "is this legal?" Yesterday, I flew from Traverse City, Michigan to Chicago for the Law & Society meeting via United Express on a regional jet...

Tebbe and Widiss on Equal Access to Marriage

Posted on May 28, 2010
My colleague Nelson Tebbe and my erstwhile colleague (as a Brooklyn VAP, now at Indiana) Deborah Widiss, have written an article that has an interesting take on the debate about same-sex marriage. Their basic thesis is that claims to marriage rights should be evaluated against a rule of "equal access," which derives from the fundamental interests strand of equal protection...

Test Drive: Why Governments Use Social Media and Why They Should

Posted on May 28, 2010
I'm heading to the Law & Society conference in Chicago tomorrow morning. I've been working on the paper I'm presenting Sunday morning, which is currently titled "Petitioning in a Public Forum: The Case of Government Sponsored Social Media." I fully expect this title to change before publication, but I can't seem to come up with a catchy title that invokes the concepts of public forum, petitioning, and social media...

Ivan Illich: "Radical Nemesis"

Posted on May 28, 2010
Signing off today as a guest blogger, posting from the Law & Society Association meeting in Chicago, where many prawfsblawg alum are presenting. As I sign off, I want to plug an upcoming event at my home institution, Western New England College School of Law (WNEC)...

Reminder: Crim Prof Conference at Law and Society Today thru Sunday in Chicago

Posted on May 27, 2010
Note: Bumped to the front from last month. Friends, those of you coming to Law and Society in Chicago should note that the following 12 panels will be part of the "shadow CrimProf" gathering that Alice Ristroph and I have tried (somewhat ineptly) to assemble in the face of the staggeringly odd Law and Society panel rules...

Last minute call for David Simon fans

Posted on May 27, 2010
Fans of the Wire and Treme who are also attending Law & Society may want to check out "Roundtable -- And All the Pieces Matter . . . Thoughts on 'The Wire'". It's chaired by Susan Bandes, and the panelists are Alafair Burke, Bennett Capers, Jeffrey Fagan, and David Sklansky...

Conference Formats

Posted on May 27, 2010
Dan's post referencing the conference format at Law & Society brings to mind a thought that I've had over the last couple of days, as I've attended a conference of Administrative Law scholars at Laval University in Quebec. The two-day conference here is in the manner of a roundtable, where a few weeks prior to gathering the participants (about 15 of us) exchange short papers on pre-determined admin law topics...

Civil Law and the Law School Curriculum

Posted on May 26, 2010
Last week, I attended a meeting of Pacific McGeorge's International Board of Advisors. This group includes a number of judges and lawyers based outside the U.S. During one of the meetings, the discussion turned to the degree to which U.S. law schools provide students with exposure to Civil Law legal systems...

Shaming Three Strikes

Posted on May 25, 2010
If we are to ever escape the gravitational pull of mass incarceration, we are going to need not just more jeremiads against our current regime, but positive accounts of pathways out. Emily Bazelon in the Sunday New York Times Magazine provides just such an optimistic account of an emerging challenge to the hegemony of California's toxic "Three-Strikes" law which is rapidly filling its prisons with expensive to manage (because largely hopeless) and permanent prisoners...

More on Kagan and News Photos

Posted on May 25, 2010
I was away from the Internet this weekend, largely because I couldn't watch Lost until last night and wanted to avoid spoilers, so let me finally get around to disagreeing with Dan's post about Elena Kagan and the selection of news photos. Dan argues that photos of her, especially in the Times, seem designed to present her in a bad light, and urges photo editors at the major papers to "exercise more taste when selecting photos of people who have served or are serving their nation with commitment and honor...

Graham & "Preventive" Juvenile Justice

Posted on May 25, 2010
Thursday morning at Law & Society there will be a book panel on Christopher Slobogin & Mark Fondacaro's forthcoming book "Juveniles at Risk: A Plea for Preventive Justice." (A precursor article in appeared in the Iowa Law Review and is available on SSRN)...

Me on Balkinization on the War on Lawyers and the 2011 NDAA

Posted on May 25, 2010
Over at Balkinization, I have a guest post up about the extremely troubling anti-lawyer language in the current draft of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2011, and Congress's attempt to chill the work of the Guantanamo lawyers...

Beyond the Double T-Squared Class Schedule

Posted on May 25, 2010
As part of a series meant to help faculty understand their associate deans better, today I'll talk about negotiations over class schedules. After you and the associate dean negotiate the courses you will teach for the next academic year, you will need to reach some agreement about the timing of courses...

Of Carts, Horses, and Climate Change

Posted on May 25, 2010
I teach an introductory Environmental Law class as well as two seminars on environmental topics, Global Climate Change and U.S. Law and International Environmental Law. Figuring out how to apportion climate change coverage between these courses proves a challenge...

Professors' Revenge: Surfing Through Commencement?

Posted on May 25, 2010
We did commencement on Sunday at Suffolk in the Bank of America Pavilion out by the Seaport, highlighted by a speech from the remarkable and charismatic Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey (and an alumnus of Stanford and the Yale Law School)...

Law & Society: Judges as Umpires, Umpires as Judges

Posted on May 25, 2010
For those of you attending Law and Society this weekend: On Thursday morning at 8:15, I will be doing a roundtable discussion called Judges as Umpires, Umpires as Judges: Rethinking the Metaphor. We will explore the silly judge-as-umpire metaphor, instant replay, the nature of judging and sports officiating, and other links between judging and sports...

Did They Run This By the Lawyers?

Posted on May 25, 2010
I was opening up a new box of Cetaphil soap (I need to baby my very tender skin) and I noticed a couple of odd things. First, the soap is "non-comedogenic." I thought that meant it wouldn't make me grow into a comedian (or make me any funnier than I am, which would be unbearable)...

LSA Happy Hour, Thursday May 27th @9pm. Bar Novo @Renaissance Hotel.

Posted on May 25, 2010
Just to follow up on the post from last week, we will be having one of our happy hours with friends from other blogs and law schools this coming Thursday in Chicago. The fun starts at 9pm at Bar Novo, which is conveniently located in the Renaissance Hotel, the host site for the Law and Society Conference...

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