The Faculty Lounge

Governor McDonnell's Statement about the University of Virginia BOV

I'm taking a little break here from blogging about UVA alumnus Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia cemeteries, and my work on University, Court, and Slave -- in which UVA, William and Mary, Washington College, Randolph Macon College, and VMI figure prominently -- to inquire about Governor McDonnell's letter telling the UVA Board of Visitors to, in essence, settle everything on Tuesday.  I'm guessing that's his way of saying "rehire President Sullivan," because that's the only way to settle everything on Tuesday.  They can't possibly hire someone else (though I guess they could decide not to rehire her and say that's a permanent decision regarding her).  And I'm also guessing Sullivan's going to be rehired -- will be very surprised if she's not.   But I -- like everyone else  -- am confused by the letter.  As Valerie Strauss writing at the Washington Post blog says:

You can say this for McDonnell:  He sounds decisive — or at least, as decisive as he can sound after waiting nearly two weeks for things to get completely out of hand, with protests, resignations and the interim president tapped to replace Sullivan saying he doesn’t want to prepare for the job quite yet.

I want to talk now about McDonnell's threat to fire the entire BOV.   His letter includes this statement: "Let me be absolutely clear:  I want final action by the board on Tuesday.  If you fail to do so, I will ask for the resignation of the entire board on Wednesday.  Regardless of your decision, I expect you to make a clear, detailed and unified statement on the future leadership of the university."  

Is this a serious threat about firing/"resignation"?  I guess asking for a resignation and firing are two separate (though closely related) issues.  But that seems like a very thinly vieled threat to fire the BOV members.  How would that work?  That led to me the Virginia Code to see what, exactly, it says about the Governor's power to remove members of the Board of Visitors.   As I was searching the Code, one of the first pieces of it that I saw relates to subjects that shall be taught at UVA.  Wasn't one of the supposed strikes against President Sullivan that she wasn't moving fast enough to can departments like classics and German?  This part of the Virginia code is relevant to that discussion:

The following branches of learning shall be taught at the University: the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Anglo-Saxon languages; the different branches of mathematics, pure and physical; natural philosophy, chemistry, mineralogy, including geology; the principles of agriculture; botany, anatomy, surgery, and medicine; zoology, history, ideology, general grammar, ethics, rhetoric, and belles lettres; civil government, political economy, the law of nature and of nations and municipal law.   

While I know that it's McDonnell who's threatening action right now, I suppose that the General Assembly is familiar with this provision of the Virginia Code: "The rector and visitors of the University of Virginia shall be at all times subject to the control of the General Assembly."

The part of the Virginia Code that McDonnell would rely upon to fire the board is this:

 the Governor may remove from office for malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence, or gross neglect of duty any member of the board of any public institution of higher education or other educational institution in Virginia, and fill the vacancy resulting from the removal. Each appointment to fill a vacancy shall be subject to confirmation by the General Assembly.

No one wants to see this drag out any further.  There's no way that Governor McDonnell's going to want to use his AG's office's energies to remove the BOV.   Can you imagine a hearing regarding whether there's been  "malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence, or gross neglect of duty"?  Perhaps we could all use a little less talk of firing and decisive action.  Isn't that how we got into this situation in the first place?  (Though I must say that if the decisive action is putting Sullivan back in the President's office, I'm 100% behind that.)

Ok--back to work on antebellum legal thought....

Justice Thomas and Frederick Douglass

Justice Thomas starts off his Grutter dissent with this quote from a Frederick Douglass speech. 

In regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us . . . . I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! . . . And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! . . . Your interference is doing him positive injury.

Here, Thomas appropriates these words of a venerable leader to argue that he, like Douglass, opposes affirmative action in higher education.

There are a few problems. 

First, Douglass was a great champion of the Freedman’s Bureau Act which actually did help black people on the basis of race in various ways, most successfully in building schools for freedmen. But that’s a relatively small problem. 

A bigger problem is that Thomas leaves out this crucial portion of the quote:

Let him alone. If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don't disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot box, let him alone, don't disturb him! If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone, -- your interference is doing him positive injury.

That is, Douglass was not telling whites not to assist blacks, but instead not to harm them.  Douglass, a well-read and intelligent man, understood the zeitgeist of his time.  Something akin to affirmative action in higher education was not on the table in 1865, the year the speech was made.  The white masses were not itching to redistribute the benefits of American democracy.  It’s nonsensical, then, to argue that Douglass was imploring whites to not enact policies similar to that of University of Michigan when whites of that era never were predisposed to do as such.  Who argues against a position that no one is taking?  Rather, Douglass appreciated that whites, particularly in the South, were willing to disfranchise, discriminate against, threaten and even kill scores of blacks to maintain white supremacy. 

The biggest problem , however, is that Douglass mentions the sort of policies that he deemed to be causing blacks “positive injury,” former Massachusetts Governor General Nathaniel Banks’ black labor policy.  Once Gen. Banks assumed control of Louisiana he instituted a black labor policy in January of 1863.  According to the plan, “Blacks, unless they had a job in town, must work on a plantation. They could choose their own employers but were required to sign a contract and work for one year with whomever they signed....  Other benefits included rations, medical treatment, schooling for their children, quarters, fuel, and a garden plot of at least one acre. Furthermore, the regulations outlawed physical abuse of any kind and established the work period as dawn to dusk."  Banks’ policy was instituted as some sort of paternalistic effort to prepare ex-slaves for freedom.  The plan, in other words, was implemented with supposedly beneficial purposes for blacks.  It is completely unreasonable to compare the Banks plan to University of Michigan’s admissions policies.

My problem with Thomas’ citing of Douglass is that it’s completely ahistorical and perhaps disingenuous.  If Thomas thinks that affirmative action is a bad idea, that’s fine.  But don’t take a quote completely out of its historical context, exclude important parts of that quote, and distort the memory of a man who can no longer speak for himself.  What was done here is almost as bad as those conservatives who similarly turn Martin Luther King Jr. into some anti-affirmative action superhero.

 

Ann Scales

I am very saddened to hear that beloved University of Denver Professor Ann Scales suffered an accident and was taken off life support last Friday, according to this article (thanks to Bridget Crawford for the pointer).  On Monday evening the University of Denver held a candlelight vigil for her at 8 pm.  I wish that I could have attended.

I have been a fan of Ann since my first year of law school when she spoke on a Myra Bradwell Day panel -- I only dimly recall the talk (we're pushing twenty-five years on the memory) but it's stuck in my mind as one of the most refreshing moments in first year, along with the fabulous courses in constitutional law, taught by (now Judge) Gerry Lynch, and property, taught by Eben Moglen.   Ann spoke about her work on feminist jurisprudence and about making law practice (and scholarship) relevant to issues we believe in.  (As I've been sitting here reading her scholarship, I see that she published a paper based on the Columbia talk, "Surviving Legal De-Education: An Outsider's Guide," in the Vermont Law Review in 1990.  It's a wonderful read.) Her Legal Feminism: Activism, Lawyering, and Legal Theory is a wonderfully accessible volume.  Ann told me that she wrote it so that federal judges could understand feminist legal thought and why it matters.  In that she succeeded magnificently, as with everything she did.  I have it on the coffeetable at home; I leave it there so visitors will think I'm sophisticated and cool.

The year I moved to Chapel Hill, Ann was visiting with us and I had the chance to get to know her substantially better -- as a remarkably perceptive reader and a fabulous teacher and an all-around fabulously energetic person.  I always treasure meeting people in the academy who can read someone else's scholarship, take the work on the author's terms, and make offer a critique to make it substantially better.  Those are Ann's talents exactly.  And I also got to hear a little bit of Ann's family -- she's from Oklahoma,  a place I have deep fondness for, and grew up in North Carolina.  Her father was president of Oklahoma Baptist University and then, for nearly two decades (1967-83) of Wake Forest.  Ann's descended, as I recall, from Alfred Moore  Scales, who was governor of North Carolina after the Civil War.  Just so happens when I was up in Reidsville -- to take a picture of the place where the Confederate statue had been (on Scales Street) -- I passed his mansion and so was thinking about her and how I needed to email her a couple weeks back.

Ann, her family and many friends, the University of Denver, and the entire feminist legal community are in my thoughts.  Once I've had the chance to digest this sad news, I want to talk more about what Ann has meant to me and to the community of activist scholars.

Update as of June 24:  I am sad to report that Ann passed away this morning.  When I have my thoughts together I want to talk some more about Ann as a mentor and scholar.

I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that Ann made a cameo appearance or two in Scott Turow's One Law. She was what she calls "a disruptive influence" in the book.  Ann commented about this and her very different idea about legal education from Turow's at the end of Surviving Legal De-Education.  She asked readers to "Consider this description of [Turow's] first-year classmates: 'We are men and women drawn to the study of rules, people with a native taste for order.'"  Ann's response to this -- and her conclusion to the article -- was:

Scott was right about some of us, but I believe that his version of law school is becoming obsolete.  The day is comming soon when some right-minded successor to Scott Turow can write about her first-year classmates: We are women and men drawn to the living of life, people with a native taste for survival, for diversity, and for freedom.

Ann was a very good predictor of how law and law students were changing.  And to the extent that we're now able to spend more time in law school working on other issues -- like freedom -- I think it is because of the leadership Ann and people like her.

Update as of June 26:  Ann was so much more than her publications that I don't want to focus all my attention on them, but I do think you might enjoy this essay,  "Disappearing Medusa: The Fate of Feminist Legal Theory," which appeared in the Harvard Women's Law Journal in 2004.

Update as of June 30: Here is the Albuquerque Journal's obituary and here is the University of Denver's announcement, which Bridget Crawford posted at FLP.

UNLV Dean John White Kicked Upstairs; Nancy Rapoport Named Interim Dean

Dean John Valery White, of the UNLV School of Law, proved too good at his job.  He has been named the new vice-president and provost of the University.  He joined UNLV in 2007 and is only the second dean in the school's history.  UNLV Law Professor Nancy Rapoport - who previously lead the law schools at both the University of Houston and the University of Nebraska -  will take over as the interim dean effective July 1. 

Susan Duncan Named Interim Dean At Louisville Law

Susan Duncan, the current associate dean of academic affairs at the University of Louisville law school, has been named interim dean effective next month.   She has been on the school's faculty since 1997.  She replaces Jim Chen, who is stepping down.

Today's Constructionist Puzzler

What is the essential woman's breast and when is it dangerous? Read this article and comment.

UVa As The Next Southern New Hampshire University? And Other Commentary Worth Reading

If you've had a chance to read the emails among leaders of the UVa Board of Visitors, you'll know that spin control was on their minds early on.  That, and all those thoughtful articles in the Wall Street Journal and Wired regarding online education.  (It is curious to think that Southern New Hampshire University and its online strategy struck UVa Board members as a nice template for the school's future.)  

But there is other UVa-related material worth reading today as well, including a delicious parody of the Declaration of Independence by Duke sociologist Kieran Healy, a nice essay by David Karpf at HuffPost  and a thoughtful meditation on how this battle isn't between corporate values and university values...but rather between two competing corporate models of education.

H/T to Leiter and Lister.

What Comes to Mind When You Look at This Shoe?

Kurt Schmoke Leaving Howard Law Deanship

Kurt Schmoke, who currently serves as Dean of Howard University School of Law, will be stepping down next month to take the position of Vice-President and General Counsel of the University.  Schmoke has been Dean since 2003, previously served as the Mayor of Baltimore.  He will be replaced on an interim basis by the school's current associate dean, Okianer Christian Dark.  

Given that the biennial ABA Associate Dean's Conference starts in mere hours, I'm glad to provide a bit of upbeat news to chat about as we kick off the evening's festivities.  Then we can all return to pondering the implications of the year's grim application and employment statistics.

That Book About .... ?

Here's a new online community for folks who want to re-connect with books they've read in the past, but can't remember the author or title.

What Was That Book?  is a livejournal community where people can describe a book they've read and can't remember fully, and others try and identify the book for them.  Maybe law profs could set up a similar community for forgotten law review articles?

Sterilization Compensation Unlikely This Year

Thanks to a pointer from Danny Goldberg I see that it's now very unlikely that victims of the North Carolina's Eugenics Board's sterilization program will be included in this year's budget. 

I have blogged extensively about the case for payments this spring.  There posts are collected here.  Perhaps next year will bring a more positive -- and I might add -- more just result.

The image is of the bridge to nowhere at issue in the Luten Bridge case.  It's my image for the "end of the road."

Study Shows Significant False Conviction Rate In Virginia

Even with all the usual caveats about such studies, it remains troubling that a new Urban Institute study shows between 8 and 15 percent of those convicted of serious sexual offenses in Virginia, from the early 1970's until the mid 1980's, were innocent.  It suggests, among other things, what we already know from laboratory studies: people don't do a great job identifying perpetrators.  Given the stakes in these cases - long prison bids or death, plus a lifetime of community notification for those who complete their sentences - this error rate is quite consequential.  Then there is the other matter: in each case where an innocent person was convicted, a guilty person remained free.

 Some people will surely argue that this is within the tolerable zone of error for a "beyond a reasonable doubt" paradigm.  While I don't share that view, anyone should be troubled by the possible allocation of this error.  Nobody would be surprised if erroneous convictions were more frequent in cases involving defendants of color as well as defendants with limited financial resources.   

Others may dismiss this study as an artifact of old DNA testing technology.  I hope this is true.  But this only means that as a society, we may have a duty to double check our old convictions in light of new technology.  And it should also sound a cautionary note: when these convictions occurred, we were quite confident of the accuracy of then-modern science.  Perhaps new technology is moving us closer and closer to "accuracy" in verdicts.  Indeed, this is the promise of our new high-tech surveillance society.  For now, however, you'll just have to color me a skeptic.

CFP: Transactional Law and Skills

AALS Section on Transactional Law and Skills

Call for Papers

January 2013 Annual Meeting

            The AALS Section on Transactional Law and Skills will meet during the AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1:30 pm – 3:15 pm on Saturday, January 5, 2013.  Please note this program in your calendar.  We hope to see you there.

            We are soliciting papers for presentation at the Annual Meeting.  The topic for this year’s session is: Researching and Teaching Transactional Law and Skills in an Increasingly Global World.

Two presenters will be chosen on the basis of paper summaries submitted in response to this Call for Papers. The topic encompasses the scholarship and teaching of international and comparative transactional law and cross-border transactions. The Executive Committee encourages submissions on a broad range of transactional law and skills issues related to this year’s topic. Paper proposals focused on the teaching of international and comparative transactional law and skills are welcomed, but the Executive Committee is especially interested in papers that explore international and cross-border transactions from an empirical, doctrinal, or theoretical perspective.  The Executive Committee specifically encourages submissions from junior scholars.

            If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit a summary of no more than three double-spaced pages, by e-mail, on or before Monday, July 30, 2012. You also may submit a complete draft of your paper. Send your submission to Joan Heminway at The University of Tennessee College of Law (jheminwa@tennessee.edu). Papers will be reviewed and selected for presentation at the program by members of the Executive Committee of the Section on Transactional Law and Skills:
 

Afra Afsharipour, Treasurer (U.C. Davis)

Eric Gouvin, Chair-Elect (Western New England)

Joan Heminway, Chair (Tennessee)

Lyman Johnson (Washington and Lee/St. Thomas)

Therese Maynard (Loyola Los Angeles)

Gordon Smith, Secretary (BYU)

Tina Stark, Past Chair (Boston University)           

            Authors of accepted papers will be notified by August 31, 2012.  Please pass this Call for Papers along to any colleagues who may be interested.

The Allans of Richmond

This has been the year of Edgar Allan Poe for me -- I had the pleasure of seeing his dorm room at UVA last April and now I want to post a photograph of the graves of his foster parents, Frances Keeling Vallentine Allan and John Allan, from the Shockoe Hill Cemetery in Richmond. 

Richmond is a great place for fans of Poe, which -- for reasons I' m not entirely sure I understand -- I am.  There's the Poe house, a rather modest home near the James River; he edited the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, and he spent a lot of time growing up in Richmond.  He worshipped with the Allans in the Monumental Church (which you may recall was a trivia question from last spring).  His mother is buried in the St. John's Churchyard on Church Hill.

I guess Shockoe Hill Cemetery is sort of ground zero for Poe connections in Richmond.  In addition to the Allans, his last love (Sarah Elmira RoysterShelton -- gonna get a picture of one of her houses next time I'm in Richmond -- minorly frustrated that I didn't take it when I was over on Church Hill in March) is buried there, as is Jane Stanard, who was the inspiration for his poem "To Helen."

I've been meaning to talk about Poe for a while.  I've learned a lot from him, particularly from the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.  And I've enjoyed a lot of his short stories -- "The Domain of Arnheim" is based, for instance, on a trust case (Thellusson v. Woodford).   (I wrote about some of this in "property and progress.")  But I'd also like to add that some of it is really weird.  Anyone ever read "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains"?  I think that's the result of Poe's drug use -- not sure how one who's thinking linearly could come up with a story like that.

Rockdale

Close readers of the faculty lounge may recall that I love the opening of Anthony F.C. Wallace's Rockdale.  The book, published in 1972, is a great example of blending social history, based often on quantitative sources, with ideology.  It begins in this way:

There is a village in American called Rockdale where the people used to manufacture cotton cloth.  It lies along the banks of Chester Creek in Delaware County, in southeastern Pennsylvania, between Philadelphia and Wilmington.  None of the people who worked in the first cotton mills is alive anymore, but some of their children's children still live there, and the ruins of stone factories, as well as stone tenements and fine stone mansions, are yet standing.  Nearby are remains of the other hamlets that made up the Rockdale manufacturing district--Lenni, Parkmount, West Branch, Crozerville, Glen Riddle, and Knowlton--where cotton yarn was spun on mules and throstles and cloth was woven on looms powered by water wheels. ...

As I leave my house on the outskirts of the village, drive the car along the roads, stroll along the paths in the cemetery at Calvary Church, I sometimes feel that I can almost reach out and touch the people I have come to know from their letters and diaries and ledgers, that they are near, behind a thin veil of time.  It was just yesterday, just down the road.  And it was so far away, so long ago. ... In a certain mood of elegiacal sentimentality I can see old Rockdale glimmering through a golden haze, where the spinster Sunday School teacher Clementina Smith and her sister Harriet are still sweetly instructing the mill hands in the elements of Christian faith, and the nervous manufacturer John P. Crozer still sweats over preparing a report to the Board of Directors of the Delaware County National Bank, and John S. Phillips, that clever mechanic, still drives his horse Mazeppa in a Byronic fury down the hills and over the bridges to court the Du Pont girls on the Brandywine, fifteen miles away.

Stephen Davis and I modeled the opening of our article on probate in antebellum Alabama on Rockdale.  As I wrote last February:

Every time I read those words again, I recall that it's one of my regrets in life that I didn't take a class with him when I was in college.  Too soon old; too late wise.  But I do plan on making a trip by Rockdale next time I'm visiting Filler in Wallingford, because it's just down the road.

Well... I was briefly in the land of hoagies and Wawa (or should I say Wawas?) recently and had occasion to stop by Rockdale.  (Perhaps this post is part of my continuing series on law professor loose in public.)  It's not quite what I had in my mind's eye -- I was thinking it would be a little more like Ridley Creek State Park.  But it's what I should have had in mind, because its name says it all: rocks and hills.  It's shockingly easy to get to -- just off 452 south of route 1.  (Driving south on 452, make a right on Mount Road, in Aston.)  This quiet industrial village rises above the west branch of Chester Creek.  The Calvary Episcopal Church, which loomed so large in Wallace's Rockdale, is still there.  That's the picture I use for illustration -- and a lot of the houses that go back to the nineteenth century are there as well, along with some that look more early twenty-century-ish.  This is well worth a visit to see how much the village retains the signs of nineteenth century industrialism -- and some of its eighteenth century origins as well.  (According to a story in the Rockdale weekly newspaper, Cornwallis' troops camped here in the wake of the Battle of the Brandywine.)

What I love about Rockdale is that it combines social history with intellectual history -- it shows how the lives and work of the residents combined with the ideas of the market and Christianity, all topics of singificant interest to me these days.  (There are, I suppose, distant echoes of this linking in the missionaries in Hawaii who were operating at the same time, though I hadn't made those connections before.)

Next time I'm back in the land of hoagies I want to stop by the Newlin Mill Park, which is also on the west branch of the Chester Creek.  The Newlin Mill goes back to the early seventeenth century, so it's a substantially earlier site for historical study than Rockdale.  It's been beautifully preserved.  I also have an interest in it because Francis Daniel Pastorius included  a partenership agreement for a grist mill in the Young Country Clerk's Collection treatise.  So that mill can be a place where I can talk about forms of physical and intellectual technology at the same time.  More on this in July, I hope.

If Your Favorite Author Sent a Drunken Text

Check out the set of very funny drawings over at the Paris Review (here) by Jessie Gaynor. Here's a sample:

Next up...mock drunken texts by law prof bloggers? Anyone?

 

WHite House Briefing on DHS's Immigration Priorities..

Here is my Huff Post essay, which I suspect might pester more than a few, concerning the President's policy shift on immigration:

DREAMs, Dreams Deferred, and Potential Nightmares:

As the countless news reports have announced over the last few days, President Obama has changed the focus of our country's immigration priorities. Through a policy directive memorandum last friday by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, certain young people who were brought to this country as young children and meet certain criteria may avoid deportation or have their deportation proceedings suspended. Said eligible individuals will be eligible to receive deferred action for two years and will be eligible to apply for work authorization. While certain issues concerning this new policy will hopefully be resolved in the following weeks, some light was shed yesterday as immigration community leaders met with White House officials to address this new policy.

One matter nonetheless seems to be clear, as Time magazine's lead story highlights, America's narrative concerning immigration is changing. Evidently, Americans realize the young people affected by this new policy (those that arrived here before the age of 16, have been here for five years, are in school or served in the military, and do not pose a national security threat) are innocents. Consider the dramatic political shift in less than a week: (1) President Obama, who repeatedly suggested he could not help these youngsters absent legislation, after protests around the country from thousands, and a legal opinion signed by dozens of leading immigration scholars/experts (I had the great honor to be a signatory), followed the opinion and refocussed his immigration priorities. (2) the apparent republican presidential nominee, Gov. Mitt Romney, who previously proclaimed his solution for immigration was self-deportation -- a policy of making life so unbearable for immigrants that they would deport themselves, has now flipped or flopped, so to speak. As HuffPost's Sam Stein recently reported, Romney now has a different tone: In response to questioning on Face the Nation, Romney stated "with regards to these children who came here brought in by their parents who came in here illegally, how we deal with them is something. I think that deserves a long term solution and I don't think we go jumping from one solution to the other." Evidently now even Mitt Romney supports DREAMers?

While some xenophobes may try to continue to propagate hate, the facts are that facts and morality are carrying the day. As Secretary Napolitano stated yesterday (an event I had the honor to attend) this new policy directive focusses immigration priorities on criminals not on the innocent -- in order to be a criminal one needs an act as well as intent. As a law professor, I too have made the above argument in the past, and was more than relieved the administration is assessing DREAMers in the same fashion.

Before ending, I want to mention not only my appreciation for the leadership of our president on this matter and the reported 64 percent of voters likely to support his decision, but I also want to thank others as well. Kudos should be given to U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, who has received his fair share of criticism, some critiques in my own previous essays, for his leadership in asking his party to change its rhetoric on immigration, and for his promise to propose a republican version of the DREAM Act. Last but not least, let me introduce the largely unsung iconic and selfless heroes in this debate: Carlos A. Roa Jr., Gaby Pacheco, Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez, and his partner Juan Sousa-Rodriguez. These amazing young souls started the change in our country for immigrant youth -- they raised national attention issue when a few years ago they walked from Miami, Florida to Washington, D.C. Their actions were followed by thousands of other courageous souls that took to the streets, state capital, and scores of other locales in order to change our hearts and minds.

Yet, we must be wary of potential nightmares associated with this issue, as ICE Director John Morton and Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division for the Department of Justice, warned yesterday, the implementation of of this process begins on August 15, and no one should respond to the unethical notaries or attorneys that are already soliciting clients and claiming they can prepare applications on this matter. There will likely be no formal applications, and furthermore, my home institution is in the process of partnering with various other immigrant rights advocacy groups such as Americans for Immigrant Justice and Catholic Charities to provide free services to eligible individuals. While much has been achieved in the last few days, let us not forget that absent legislation to address this issue, the recent announcement is only a step in the fulfillment of a DREAM.

Vice-Rector Of UVa, Mark Kington, Resigns

Mark Kington, Vice-Rector of the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors, has resigned.  His letter is here.  Kington is a Darden Business School graduate and co-founded Columbia Capital with Mark Warner.  Warner went on to become Governor and Senator and appointed Kington to the Board in 2002.  He was not reappointed by Governor Kaine, but then rejoined the Board after being appointed by current Governor McDonnell.  The man knows how to give to political campaingns and he's ecumenical.  He donated $131,000 to Warner's Democratic gubernatorial campaign and $75,000 to McDonnell's Republican campaign.

UVa Names Interim President; Embarrassment Frees Talented President

We now know that the members of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors don't like incremental change.  They wanted dramatic change and they got...drama.  Apparently, after pondering the matter, they're sticking with the strategy.  Theresa Sullivan is still gone and they haved named Carl Zeithaml, the current dean of the undergraduate business program to the interim post.

Thanks to the Richmond Times-Dispatch we can find a draft of Sullivan's strategic plan for the university.  Others may disagree, but I found it to be honest, clear-eyed, and smart.  She sees the school's strengths and challenges.  I suspect that some at UVa might have found her to be too clear-eyed, calling, as she did, for reallocation of resources from frosh/soph courses.  But in an era of interdisciplinarity, it's hard to imagine a better candidate for university president than a person skilled at bridge building and a strongly committed to the academic enterprise. 

Wouldn't it be ironic if Sullivan got hired to lead a university with - God forbid - a higher US News ranking than UVa?

“Once again, we see that Scalia’s originalism is a charade"

So says Professor Adam Winkler here.  I agree with Professor Winkler.  I particularly enjoyed Scalia's Ricci concurrence intimating that disparate impact theory might violate the Equal Protection Clause. Good times.