The Faculty Lounge

Money Matters

Interesting juxtaposition of two articles out of the ABA Journal this week.   

Justice Kennedy, speaking to a House Subcommittee yesterday, called for an increase in judicial salaries to keep the nation's best judges from fleeing to private practice.  According to the ABA Government Affairs Office, district judge salaries stand at $165,200 per year, much less than some big firm salaries for even junior associates. 

But judges looking for a salary bump should think carefully before jumping ship, at least if they're considering a move to O'Melveny & Myers.  The Journal reports that the international mega-firm made a temporary buy-out offer to partners over age 50.   The offer is "voluntary," and an earlier report says it is not aimed at partners with self-sustaining client lists, but those no longer interested in billing 2,000+ hours a year. 

Only a few blog comments  to the report so far this morning, but I tend to side with the bleeding hearts.  No-one wants unproductive partners draining the salary pool, but I wonder what characteristics the deciders at O'Melveny look at to determine if a colleague is worth keeping.  Sure money matters, but I would think the firm itself would benefit from a partner who actually has the time to mentor, tutor and support a junior associate.  And that's not going to happen as often as it should if everyone's trying to top 2000 billables a year.   The intangibles matter, even if we cant bill them to a client at $750 an hour.

And besides,  isn't 50 the new 30?

-Kathleen A. Bergin

One Cheer for One Person, One Vote

    The details of a proposed plan to deal with the Democratic snafu in Michigan and Florida has emerged, and it causes me to wonder whatever happened to the franchise.  Michigan's delegates would be split equally between Clinton and Obama and Florida's delegation (as determined by the Jan 29 primary) would be seated but each delegate would only get half a vote.  Even if party primaries are not state action for equal protection purposes, shouldn't the major political parties pay attention to the fundamental rules governing the franchise?  You're only half a person in Florida if you're a Democrat, and your vote doesn't seem to matter at all if you are a Michigan Democrat.

Image from bumperart.com

Skittles - The Crunchy Candy Contraband

We used to think my brother loved pickles.  I'd hear him in the morning while our Mom was packing our lunch for school, "two cups, Mom, don't forget!"  We found out later, about 20  years later, that my brother didn't really like pickles at all  - he only liked peddling pickles, a dime a pop, to the pickle fiends he knew from class.  He didn't break the bank, but always had extra change for Gatorade after practice.  Gatorade he liked.

My brother's known for being financially savvy, very entrepreneurial, so when he confessed his business on the side I wasn't too surprised.  I'm not sure the teachers or administrators knew about it, but I'm not sure they would have cared too much either.  But it wasn't 2008, and we didn't go to school in New Haven, Connecticut. 

Apparently, in New Haven, you can be tossed from the student council, barred from an honors reception, and suspended for a day of school if you're part of a pickle-peddling scheme, well, maybe not pickles, but a special kind of contraband nonetheless.  Findlaw reports this is precisely what happened when an 8th grade honors student was caught dealing Skittles with a classmate in violation of the district's health and wellness policy.  Skittles, the crunchy, candy contraband. 

I'm 100% behind nutritional education and curing our addiction to high fructose corn syrup.  Especially among kids.  I remember well the Reagan Administration's absurd attempt to pass off ketchup as a vegetable, and now live in a district that serves "frito pie" for lunch.  Recipe here for those so inclined.  But (arm chair quarterbacking, here) I'm not sure this was the best use of school resources, especially at time when New Haven, according to the report, was in the middle of student testing.  Ultimately the boy's disciplinary record was expunged and he was reinstated to his VP post, but only after his parents complained, and the district Superintendent became involved.  For Skittles? 

Maybe there's more to the story than we know.  Surely there's some merit in teaching kids to follow the rules, sometimes, whatever they happen to be.  And maybe there's something other than nutritional wellness at play.  Hey, if graffiti can be  a gateway crime, maybe Skittles is a gateway drug?   

All I know is my brother's more financially stable than I can ever hope to be, and I attribute that to some pretty innovative business ventures he took up in the 8th grade.

-Kathleen A. Bergin

Graffiti As A Gateway Crime

Call it a blogger confessional.   I know that I haven't been putting up hugely substantive posts of late.  Those entries take more time and concentration than I can currently muster - in part because I am teaching my entire year's teaching load during one intense 9 week quarter.  But that doesn't mean I don't have fleeting thoughts I'd like to share...or interesting links that I' ve discovered during the 60 minute decompression period between classes.  This morning I had a good laugh watching this clip from the Colbert Report - a gotcha segment on a 6 year old girl who is headed down the wrong path. 

It's Always the Politicians, Rebublicans, and Evangelists

Personal guilt of a self-articulated crime has become common parlance of contemporary political life. Gov. Spitzer’s recent allegations of involvement with a prostitution ring, high-class or not, only prove this truth further.

The most righteous of public figures have the farthest elevation to fall. The velocity only accelerates as the candidate approaches final ground. Thuds are much louder when the person holds the weight of fame.

Extremism, or even avowed profession, establishes a historical touchstone for deviance. Even in the most understandable and believable declarations of fortitude or disgust, nonconforming behavior can exist. As early as the seventeenth century, British author Samuel Johnson asked “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Very public enunciations run in tandem with very private transgressions.

The Cure for Bad Writing Skills?

  Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, has written an essay challenging the full-time, tenured professoriate to take on the tough, unrewarding task of teaching basic grammar and composition skills to college freshman.  I have no quarrel with that proposition, but I wonder what all those elementary and secondary school teachers are doing.  Why aren't fourth graders learning the basics of grammar, fifth graders constructing paragraphs with topic sentences, and so on?  Could it be that these teachers are too busy defending their union turf?  Or maybe the teachers can't write either, having themselves been educated by television-addled teachers.  Perhaps a bit more choice in the K-12 education market would improve matters, as another essayist urges here.  Both essays are from the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and are posted on Minding the Campus.

Kansas Supreme Court Uses Separation of Powers to Nix Funeral Picketing Ban

    When Kansas enacted its Funeral Privacy Act, it prohibited picketing, defined as "protest activities," "before or about any cemetery, church, or mortuary" at any time from an hour before a funeral to two hours after the start of the funeral.   But the provision was not effective until after a state or federal court had ruled that it was constitutionally valid, and another section of the law directed the state attorney general to file suit to obtain such a judicial declaration.  Instead, the attorney general challenged the validity of the so-called "judicial trigger" provision as a violation of the separation of powers principles of the Kansas Constitution.  The Kansas Supreme Court has agreed, holding in this opinion that the judicial trigger requires the state courts to deliver an advisory opinion, which the Kansas Supreme Court says does not constitute a case or controversy under the Kansas Constitution.  Fine.  The elephant in the room is the Westboro Baptist Church, whose upstanding members think that funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq should be picketed because America tolerates gays and lesbians.  See here.  (Warning: It's ugly.)  Assuming that the Kansas legislature repeals the judicial trigger, and makes the substance of the funeral picketing ban effective, is the ban valid?  The definition of picketing that limits that term to "protest activities" appears to be content-based, thus triggering strict scrutiny.  Is preservation of the sensibilities of grieving family members a sufficiently compelling purpose to which this ban is necessary?  I would be inclined to think so, except for the greased incline that conclusion implies:  Why not other sensibilities?  Free speech doctrine is pretty clear that offensiveness, by itself, does not justify content-based regulations.  If picketing were to be defined without reference to protest, would the ban fare better?  It would probably be valid, especially if it tracked the valid, time, place and manner restrictions that characterize abortion-picketing bans that have been held to be valid.  The next step is up to the Kansas legisalture.   

Amusing Comments to Blog Entries

In keeping with my theme of stupid things that bloggers do to mess up our careers (with apologies to Dr. Laura Schlesinger--haven't heard her in years, but what entertainment I'm missing) I thought that I'd post a couple of links to comments that I've found amusing.  Actually, I like these comments, but this is part of my theme that people are likely to read what you write on a blog--and remember it, for good or bad, long after you've forgotten about it.  (Just like students who come up to me and recite a conversation I had with them in class a dozen years ago.  Sometimes I can't even remember them, let alone the conversation.)  And here are a couple that I've enjoyed.  I'm most interested in hearing ones you've liked....

We've worked most of the "x is like Hilter" stuff out of our national character (more or less).  But the Hitler analogy keeps cropping up every now and then--and the Stalin analogy as well.  So here's to you Mr. Diablo, whoever you are, for calling out the commentators to one of Orin Kerr's posts a couple years back on whether academics have a politically based grading system:

If liberal professors are so bad and so biased and so detrimental to education, then don't go to those schools. The reality is people don't actually believe this crap, they just want to use it as yet another GOP red herring -- this time to try to pass bills as reckless as that of the Arizona legislature. It's another card in the "every environment must have two giant yelling heads who disagree" school of thought. It's so anti-academic freedom it's absurd.

And while I feel bad for whoever got a C on here, the anecdote proves nothing. And time and time again these silly arguments about the bias in universities are nothing more than that: Anecdotes that are less than completely unverifiable.

...

Are we really using the word 'Leninist' and expecting to be taken seriously? That too easily bandied word should be thrown into the 'Nazi' pile.

Eliot Spitzer: Commentary And Primary Materials

Belle Lettre has a good list of interesting posts on Eliot Spitzer here.

As always,  sometimes, the Smoking Gun has the primary documents here and here.

Update:  I'm behind the curve.  The "sealed" complaint is here.

A Different Sort of Law Firm Promo Video

   The San Francisco law firm of Hanson Bridgett has a different way of promoting itself.  Check out the accompanying You Tube video, and if it grabs you, check out their web site.

The Community's Right to a Jury Trial

Despite the fact that a good 95% of criminal indictments are disposed through guilty pleas, the jury trial--and the right to a jury trial--still looms large in the American imagination.  For better or for worse, our nation is obsessed with the criminal jury trial.  And it's been a focus since the founding of the country:  the right to a jury trial is codified twice in the Constitution, once in Article III and once in the 6th Amendment. 

But whose right is it, exactly?  Currently, we understand it as the defendant's right--that's certainly how the 6th Amendment seems to read.  But what if that's wrong?  What if, originally, the jury trial right was a community right , and was never intended as an individual right? What if we had spent the last century misunderstanding and misreading the Bill of Rights, contrary to the original historical meaning?  What would that mean for the individual jury trial right today?

That's the premise of my latest article, sent out to law reviews last week (and available here in draft form).  Full abstract after the jump.

Who Knew College Teachers Had To Sign Loyalty Oaths?

Apparently they do in the California State University system.  This from the SF Chronicle:

As a Quaker, [Cal State East Bay teacher] Kearney-Brown is committed to nonviolence and was unwilling to sign the state oath of allegiance that required her to "swear (or affirm)" that she would "support and defend" the U.S. and California constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." She tried inserting the word "nonviolently" in front of the word "support," but was told by university officials that altering the oath was unacceptable.

Is this more a story about the inappropriate use of loyalty oaths or a massive bureaucracy that processes an incredibly personal (and powerful) personal affirmation like a HIPAA waiver at the doctor's office?  In the end, lawyers with the state AG allowed her to append the following statement:  "Signing the oath does not carry with it any obligation or requirement that public employees bear arms or otherwise engage in violence." 

Saddest of all is that the rare person who actually read and cared about the oath was the one who got rolled under the bus.

New York Review of Books: A Way to Think About Eating

My favorite librarian was excited to see a Walker Evans photograph used to illustrate a story in the most recent issue of NYROB.  It appears with Jason Epstein essay on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.  The story (entitled "A Way to Think about Eating) is about eating habits and how people throughout the world are now adopting the (self-destructive) eating habits of the west.  The illustration (at left) is of a roadside stand.  The caption reads "A roadside store between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, Alabama, 1936; photograph by Walker Evans."  Now, it isn't every day that national magazines print Walker Evans photographs, though perhaps they ought to do so more often, because there are some really, really beautiful scenes.

Hmm, I thought; I travel the road between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro a bunch and I don't remember seeing anything that might be a remnant of that store--I'll have to look for this next time I'm down that way.  There are, though, quite a few remnants of stores along the way--and that's worth a post at some point.  So that set me to looking through the Library of Congress' website for more details, which might be helpful in locating the building.  You can imagine how pleased I was to find an entry for "Roadside store between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, Alabama"!      Of course, when I clicked on it, I found not the picture above, but the one on the right.  A little more digging demonstrated that the NYROB caption was wrong.  The picture above is actually "Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama."  Ah well, what the heck--they're both really great photographs and, as I say, it's awesome that either of them as presented to readers today. 

I think you'll love the Library of Congress' website with photographs from the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information Collection.  They provide hours of entertainment.

Alfred Brophy