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Well, we've just passed another anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march -- the 47th (not the 49th, as Rolling Stone might have us believe). So perhaps it's time for some Civil Rights trivia related to it. The building at right is connected to what I like to refer to as the deep history of the march. What is it, where is it, and how's it connected to the march?
A couple of years back Gregory Sisk's study of law faculty scholarly impact received a lot of attention. You may recall that the methodology was largely based Brian Leiter's previous study of the top 25 faculties. It created a weighted score by multiplying the mean citations of the tenured faculty over the past five years by 2 and then adding the median.
Here at the facutly lounge I blogged about a bunch of the correlates of Sisk's data on citations to tenured faculty scholarship with such variables as law review citations (and here) and student LSAT scores. There was much fun to be had with the scatterplots of Sisk's data and other variables. Sisk and Company are now getting geared up for another study. The details are here.
Sisk and Company are putting schools on notice here that they need to carefully check the names of their faculty roster before the study is run; I seem to recall there were some issues with that last time around.
One request that I'd make -- and I think this is pretty serious -- is that schools provide, so that Sisk's data collectors can search under, all the names that each faculty member uses. Many women have published using more than one last name; similarly, many faculty of both genders are identified in articles by nick-names instead of our full first name. People take these sorts of studies seriously and it's important to make sure that this is as correct as possible.
NPR's "Morning Edition" today featured a fascinating book, Fragile Beginnings, about medical care for very premature infants. Written by a physician, the book traces the history of treatment, the remarkable progress that has been made in recent decades, and the ethical dilemmas that parents and physicians face. The book should do much to raise awareness about some of the most difficult moral questions in health care.
Yet as I listened to the author describe his experience with his own daughter, I wondered whether book-writing parents are too quick to divulge the private matters of their children. In this case, the child apparently is doing very well despite a rocky start. But should the whole world know about her medical history?
It may be that on balance the benefits of telling her story outweigh any harms, but shouldn't that be a decision for her to make when she is mature enough to decide? Divulging a child's medical information may be particularly worrisome, but similar concerns are present when parents discuss other details about a child's life. I'm not sure where lines should be drawn on this issue, but I do think it's an issue that needs more consideration.
[cross-posted at Health Law Profs blog]
Yesterday’s release of The Future of School Integration and the presentations at the National Press Club brought some sorely needed and detailed analysis to the topic. The most important question answered was whether it makes more sense to increase resources and "improvement programs" in high poverty schools or integrate them. Surprisingly, prior to this book’s release, almost no research offered a serious comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of integration versus resource and programmatic strategies. Two different chapters in the book demonstrate that integration is both cheaper and more effective. The best example is in Montgomery County, Maryland. Its school district implemented integrative strategies in some schools and increased resources in others. Both strategies improved achievement for low-income students, but integration produced larger achievement gains and at a lower cost. A national dataset produced similar findings.
The policy implications of these findings are significant, but they also carry serious legal implications. In my forthcoming article in the Boston College Law Review, I focus on constitutional mandates of efficiency in school finance litigation. In several states, courts either explicitly acknowledge a mandate of efficiency or the state constitution itself includes it. Based on the empirical findings in this new book, driving additional resources to segregated schools in the attempt to remedy quality deficiencies is an inefficient/wasteful exercise when integration strategies are otherwise available. As such, I would argue they are generally unconstitutional. I would concede that, in wealthy districts like Montgomery County, trying to compensate for segregation through additional funding might be permissible. After all, if they have money to waste, they ought to be free to do so. But on the statewide level and in most school districts, there is rarely money to “waste” on education. Thus, the practical choice is to underfund segregated education (and thus deliver an inadequate education) or to pursue integration strategies. (full text of article)
The Future of School Integration also goes a long way toward disproving the notion that integration is not practically or politically feasible. It documents several districts that are currently pursuing voluntary integration plans and the ways in which they have built a political constituency for the policy. A feasibility study also reveals that approximately half of the segregation in our nation’s schools could be eliminated through a combination of intra- and inter-district policies, including magnet schools, transfer agreements, choice programs, and progressive student assignment policies.
Here's a link to a panel discussion of G. Edward White's Law in American History: From the Colonial Era Through the Civil War, which was held at UVA Law School back on February 22. The speakers are Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Fred Konefsky, and John Witt. Tomiko and Fred have a number of observations about White's methodology (in particular his contrast with Lawrence Friedman's law and society approach and Tomiko is particularly interested in Native American ideas about law and their contact with European Americans and also the role of the law in the development of capitalism) and John asks some meta questions about why we do legal history (and he hypothesizes what White might be doing here). All of this reminds me that I want to talk soon about what why I write legal history and also about what we're increasingly calling applied legal history. And also what role law has as a form of technology that's used to implement basic desires and why others see law as more of an independent variable that controls us and what we do. There's a lot to talk about here and I hope that at some point Tomiko's, Fred's, and John's papers appear somewhere, to extend the conversation.
I blogged some about the book back in January.
One thing that I brought with me from practice to the academy is a fondness for charts in helping me decode complex rules. I'm especially loyal to charts that route tax compliance, like this one (details not that interesting to the general reader, but you get the idea):
But really, Tim Murphy's chart over at Mother Jones (here) is much, much better than any chart I've ever made:
Eureka!
I'm working away on a paper on what I like to refer to as the ideological origins of secession -- the constellation of ideas about the centrality of slavery to Southern life and how slavery was threatened by Lincoln's election -- and events in the North more generally. It's the bookend of University, Court, and Slave, which tries to tie together the ideas and economic and demographic reality of slavery that gripped the south in the decades leading into war with their role in the coming of war. I'm very much looking forward to talking with my friends at the University of Florida about this on March 21. I guess I might have called it the constitutional origins of secession but I didn't want to seem to be legitimizing the southern constitutional arguments or making it seem as though I thought that secession was constitutional. So instead I'm cribbing the title of one of my favorite works of history -- Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
Little bit of background here -- there's a really important question about just what would have happened to slavery had war not intervened -- would slavery, as many in the south after the war said, have ended pretty quickly? In some ways this lets the south off the moral hook rather easily -- as in it suggests that slavery was on the way out (both economically and morally) and it calls into question the need for the enormous sacrifices of war.
....Or would slavery have continued for decades, just as Jim Crow did. Part of this question turns on how people think about the economics of slavery; it used to be assumed that slavery was inefficient. This is partly due to the pre-war southern argument that slavery was hindering the growth of industry in the south (this was employed by anti-slavery southerners and also by some proslavery southerners who wanted to make it appear that they were making sacrifices for the benefit of their enslaved property). But more recent investigations -- for instance Gavin Wright's Political Economy of the Cotton South -- points to a rather different picture -- one of a healthy institution of extracting labor at a relatively low cost. I'm on the side of this would have continued for a long while -- though I suppose that eventually the North would have stopped it.
For this purpose, though, I want to go back to the time in the fall of 1860 when white southerners were thinking that their way of life was imminently threatened. What interests me about this is that Southerners spoke often in terms of a series of ideas -- the centrality of slavery to southern life; the constitution's protection of slavery; and the North's violation of the South's constitutional rights. A couple weeks back I wrote about why historians haven't focused so much on the constitutional rhetotic. But whatever the reasons for overlooking the constitutional arguments, I think there are some important reasons to spend some time with it now -- for the constitutional arguments help us understand what Southerners were thinking and they point out some of the ways that the Supreme Court and public constitutional arguments added to the South's claims.
There always have been good reasons to doubt the cost-containing impact of Obamacare. While the Affordable Care Act will do much to ensure access to health care coverage for the uninsured, it will do far less to address the high costs of health care in the United States. Just as with Medicare and Romneycare, Obamacare largely left cost containment for another day. A recent study suggests that even the limited cost savings expected from the new law may not materialize. Many experts have touted electronic medical records as a way to reduce spending, and proponents frequently cited an estimate of $80 billion in annual savings. However, researchers found that electronic medical records can encourage physicians to order more tests for their patients, resulting in greater spending. As the authors recognized, the jury is still out on the effect of electronic records. Still, the results are consistent with the view that the greatest threat to the health care law lies not in the constitutional challenges but in the law’s design defects.
[cross-posted at Health Law Profs]
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