The Faculty Lounge

How to cheat on any test

Ahh, those savvy, savvy millennials!  Household Hacker posted this public service message to his peers with helpful advice on "How To Cheat on Any Test:" 

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Not sure how long it took to come up with the strategy, but surely it was enough to learn a thing or two about physics.   The problem for him, of course, is that while his generation may have a jump on us in all things technological, some of us at least know how to find YouTube.

That said, it did take me about 10 minutes to decipher TVKID999's comment that: "u people got to be like ninja to cheat n if ur smart u no how to cheat with out teacher knowing u."

God save us.

-Kathleen A. Bergin

Can Congress Authorize the President to Ignore Law?

   That provocative question lies at the root of the recent decision by Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, to waive (i.e.,  ignore) environmental laws that might delay or impede the construction of the border fence along the Mexican border.  A New York Times article on the subject is here.  Chertoff derives this authority from a law enacted by Congress that authorizes him at his complete discretion to dispense with "all legal requirements" that might inhibit the fence construction.  Defenders of Wildlife has challenged the validity of this authority in an action,  Defenders of Wildlife v. Chertoff,  in which a cert. petition is now pending.   The petition can be read here.    SCOTUSblog has a posting on the case here.

  The two questions posed are 1) Is this a forbidden delegation of legislative power because the Secretary's discretion is wholly unbounded?  2) Does this authorization amount to a grant to the executive of the power to repeal laws?   These issues echo the line item veto case.  If the delegation doctrine has any life at all, one would think that an absolute unbounded grant of discretion to the executive to ignore law when he thinks it's a good idea to do so in order to facilitate execution of some other law would be such an impermissible delegation.  What is the intelligible standard to which the executive must conform?  If a line item veto was an impermissible power to repeal a law why isn't this authority vested in Secretary Chertoff an equally impermissible power to repeal laws?  Subversive minds would like to know.  

Departures: Law Faculty Lateral Moves By School Of Origin

For those of you unsatisfied by the current list of lateral faculty moves organized by school of arrival, here is the the list by school of departure. 

American

Dennis Ventry to UC Davis

Arkansas-Little Rock

Zak Kramer to Penn State

Arizona

Darian Ibrahim to Wisconsin

Ave Maria

Lee Strang to Toledo

Barry

D. Aaron Lacy to SMU
John Watts to Texas Tech

Cardozo

Susan Crawford to Michigan

Catholic

Heather Elliot to Alabama
Helen Alvare to George Mason

Chapman

Matt Parlow to Marquette

We're Not in Kansas Anymore . . .

The Tennessee Chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster received permission to erect a statue of "His Noodly Appendage" on the grounds of a local courthouse.  Not familiar with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?  Check out the website here. 

Its actually a great teaching tool for those who teach First Amendment - and its good for a few laughs!

More on the statue from C-Net News.

-Kathleen A. Bergin

cross-post First Amendment Law Prof Blog

Law School Visitors List 2008-09 - Seeking Information

I fear that I am setting off on a fool's errand, but here goes... As many of you have discovered by now, I am a fan off data aggregation.  And I see one use for this blog as a site to gather law faculty news.  A couple of professor friends  have suggested that there would be value in assembling a list of full-time law faculty who will be on the road as visiting professors next year.  Independently, there is probably substantial value in identifying those individuals who will be serving as Visiting Assistant Professors (VAP's) next year prior to obtaining their first full-time job in the academy. 

Here's the rub.  Unlike the situation with both lateral moves, and dean searches,   I don't have enough independent knowledge to present a credible first cut at these lists.  Paul Caron has a list of tax profs and Paul Secunda one of workplace profs who will be on visits next year - and that's a good start.  But I'll need much more help.  So this is my offer: if  readers  send me information about visitors - full-timers and VAP's - I will create and post the respective lists.  Send the info to danielmfiller@gmail.com

Rape In The Military: The Other Inbound Wounded

Representative Jane Harman has a disturbing post up at Huffington (which is also an LA Times op-ed) discussing the frequency of rape in the military - and particularly the extent that woman soldiers are sexually assaulted.  Everyone knows I'm a crime data skeptic.  Still, I was particularly troubled by some Department of Defense stats she cites for 2007.  Here's a snapshot:

Only 181 out of 2,212 subjects investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts-martial.... Another 218 were handled via nonpunitive administrative action or discharge, and 201 subjects were disciplined through "nonjudicial punishment," which means they may have been confined to quarters, assigned extra duty or received a similar slap on the wrist. In nearly half of the cases investigated, the chain of command took no action; more than a third of the time, that was because of "insufficient evidence."  This is in stark contrast to the civilian trend of prosecuting sexual assault. In California, for example, 44% of reported rapes result in arrests, and 64% of those who are arrested are prosecuted, according to the California Department of Justice.

The Huffington Post's provocative homepage teaser for the post - women in the military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire - turns out to be a wild understatement.  For whatever reasons - everything from institutional culture around gender and sex to a healthy does of troop omerta - the military seems unable to safely support a co-ed force.  Moreover, if Harman's analysis is anything close to right, we have a whole other cohort of injured soldiers coming home - and one that I fear nobody in Washington, at the VA, or pretty much anywhere else, is taking seriously.   

Movement in US News Peer Assessment Scores, 2008-09

Bradford Hardin's comment on my first takes on the US News law school rankings led me to look at the difference between 2008 and 2009 Peer assessments in the 104 Tier-1 schools.   As the table below shows, most schools (55) went up .1, though 3 went down .1 and 5 went up .2.

(2009 assessment - 2008 assessment)

Difference          N

-0.1                3
0.0              41
0.1              55
0.2                5
            ----
            104

Who went down and who went up .2?  Look below the fold.

Some more takes on US News, Peer and Lawyer/Judge Assessments

While I should be working on my comments about Justices Catron and McLean for a conference on "neglected justices" I'm going to at the end of the week, I'm thinking about the US News peer and lawyer/judge assessments.  (Yeah, there may be good reasons why Catron and McLean are neglected--more the former than the later.  More on this next week, perhaps.)

My first take was focused on the top 104 schools.  Let's look at this a little more, with some descriptive statistics on peer assessments and lawyer/judge assessments for each U.S. News tier.  (I divided Tier 1, as U.S. News used to do, into two categories, with the new Tier 1 consisting of the 50 top-ranked schools and Tier 2 consisting of the remaining 54 schools in the official Tier 1.)  Check out the this this table .

Assessments are negatively related to Tier.  That’s no surprise, because U.S.News uses assessments as a determinant–in fact, a major determinant–of Tier. 

Don't you love ranking season?  Lots of stuff to blog about.   But don't get too used to seeing me; I'm about to leave the faculty lounge, to go back into my office.

Alfred Brophy

Dith Pran: New York Times Photojournalist

This morning's New York Times brings the sad news that Dith Pran, the photographer portrayed in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields has passed away, at age 65, in Woodbridge, New Jersey.  His obituary is a compelling story, detailing his harrowing life in southeast Asia, especially after the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia.  (Dith Pran , ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65)  It's an amazing story of resilience and humanity amidst the most horrific of circumstances. 

Dith worked with Sydney H. Schanberg, a Times correspondent and

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.”  (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.)   The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news.

But after Dith saved Schanberg, Dith was sent to a rural labor camp.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith, on Oct. 3, 1979, escaped over the Thai border. Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

This paragraph I found particularly moving:

Having learned French at school and taught himself English, Mr. Dith was hired as a translator for the United States Military Assistance Command. When Cambodia severed ties with the United States in 1965, he worked with a British film crew, then as a hotel receptionist.

Ah, what a reminder that people with astonishing gifts and resilience are found in many, many  places.  We have been fortunate to have been the beneficiary of Mr. Dith's talents.  We also ought to remember that there are many other people, who have much to contribute, whose names we will never know.  It's often by reading obituaries that I recall this lesson.

Alfred Brophy