The Faculty Lounge

End of Summer Reads

There's still a few weeks left of summer technically, even though we're supposed to be doing class prep and polishing off those articles for law review submissions, so I guess I'll post some ideas for 'end of summer reading' and would be happy for anyone to add their own thoughts.

I'm going to start with The Night Circus by first-time novelist Erin Morgenstern.  In particular, I would recommend the audio book narrated by Jim Dale.  I remember from a discussion a while back that a number of Loungers are fans of his from the Harry Potter audiobook series.  This is a Potter-esque fantasy for a slightly older audience set in a magical circus where two magicians are competing in a dual and ultimately fall in love.  It's written as a series of word-paintings and the narration really makes it come to life, although I'm still not thrilled with the way Dale narrates female voices.

I'm also enjoying Ready Player One by Ernest Cline which is a great throwback to the 1980s and all things geeky - computer games, movies, comics etc.  It's basically a massive easter egg hunt in a virtual world based on 1980s trivia and the audio book is narrated by Wil Wheaton.  Perfect casting.

In the computer games arena, I enjoyed Reamde by Neal Stephenson even though the ending was a bit dragged out.  But the plot and dialogue were extremely clever and snappy.

More of a disappointment, although still a decent read, was Robopocalypse by Daniel Wilson which pits humans against artificial intelligences in a battle for the planet.  It was a good idea and there's some great concepts, but it could have used a little editing.

I guess I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books in July/August so I should probably change gears and try something else now.  I blame Amazon personal recommendations!  What's on your 'end of summer' list?

 

Reboot City

I must admit to having succumbed to seeing the new Spiderman movie and enjoying it although I still don't think it beats the Toby Maguire version.  And of course the Total Recall reboot is imminently upon us and I've heard rumors of a Jumanji reboot as well.

Why are there so many reboots of relatively recent films coming out at the moment?  I understand that the Spiderman franchise was shaken up by various creative disagreements with the team involved in the previous series of movies.  But what about the others?  Is it cheaper to rewrite a relatively recent script than come up with new material? 

And if the studios are going down the 'reboot the 80s and 90s' path, what other movies would you like to see rebooted?

And are there any that definitely should be left alone?

Antebellum Literary Address Trivia

Digging deep into my stock of photographs.  What's the building at right and what famous pre-Civil War literary address was given there?  (Not the best job of cropping the photo either, huh?)

Spotsylvania County Courthouse ... in Spotsylvania Courthouse

I was going to use this as a courthouse trivia question, but if you look closely at the gold lettering on the front of the building you'll see "Spotsylvania County Courthouse."  So I figured it wouldn't be much of a question!  I took this recently on a trip through the county.  I actually hadn't planned on making this side-trip, but an accident on I-95 caused me to get off I-95 and onto Route 1.

It is located in the town known as "Spotsylvania Courthouse."  The name says what it is.  This building goes back to the 1850s -- and is a sign of the extraordinary prosperity that existed at the end of the old South.  Even today it's a beautiful and impressive brick building.  Makes me think that one of these days I'd like to take a look at some of the probate records there from the antebellum era.

Buck v. Bell Trivia

Seeing Dan Ernst's note at legal history blog about Victoria Nourse's article, "Buck v. Bell: A Constitutional Tragedy from a Lost World," reminds me that I want to ask a trivia question related to Buck.  When and by whom was Buck most recently was cited as a valid case?  I think the answer will not just surprise you; it will shock you (at least to timing it shocked me).

The illustration is the hospital building at the what was then known as the "State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded," where Carrie Buck was sterilized in the wake of Buck v. Bell.

Over the Borderline

I generally refrain from posting on work that I don't have at least some expertise in, but I've been reading Greg Duhl's courageous (that's one of the words for it, and I might add powerful and haunting) essay, "Over the Borderline — A Review of Margaret Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability in Academic Life."  It's partly a memoir and I think you may also want to read it.  Here is Duhl's abstract:

This essay is about “madness” in higher education. In Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability in Academic Life, Professor Price analyzes the rhetoric and discourse surrounding mental disabilities in academia. In this essay, I place Price’s work in a legal context, suggesting why the Americans with Disabilities Act fails those with mental illness and why reform is needed to protect them. My own narrative as a law professor with Borderline Personality Disorder frames my critique. Narratives of mental illness are important because they help connect those who are often stigmatized and isolated due to mental illness and provide a framework for them to overcome barriers limiting their equal participation in academic life. 

You can download the paper from ssrn.  Close followers of the blogosphere will recall that I wrote some about Greg's paper on food trucks in Philadelphia back in 2006.

In the Shadow of the Gallows

University of Toronto English Professor Jeannine DeLombard's most recent book, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity, has just appeared from the University of Pennsylvania Press.  Cribbing now a little from the Penn Press website:

From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why, Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon from the far more revealing perspectives of publicity and personhood. When the Supreme Court declared in Dred Scott that African Americans have "no rights which the white man was bound to respect," it overlooked the right to due process, which ensured that black offenders—even slaves—appeared as persons in the eyes of the law. In the familiar account of African Americans' historical shift "from plantation to prison," we have forgotten how, for a century before the Civil War, state punishment affirmed black political membership in the breach, while a thriving popular crime literature provided early America's best-known models of individual black selfhood. Before there was the slave narrative, there was the criminal confession.

Placing the black condemned at the forefront of the African American canon allows us to see how a later generation of enslaved activists—most notably, Frederick Douglass—could marshal the public presence and civic authority necessary to fashion themselves as eligible citizens. At the same time, in an era when abolitionists were charging Americans with the national crime of "manstealing," a racialized sense of culpability became equally central to white civic identity. What, for African Americans, is the legacy of a citizenship grounded in culpable personhood? For white Americans, must membership in a nation built on race slavery always betoken guilt? In the Shadow of the Gallows reads classics by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, George Lippard, and Edward Everett Hale alongside execution sermons, criminal confessions, trial transcripts, philosophical treatises, and political polemics to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging.

One discerning critic says of the book, "I have long thought that DeLombard is at the absolute top of the scholars working on law and literature in North America, and In the Shadow of the Gallows confirms her status."  Though what really stood out for me when I read the manuscript was how capacious Jeannine's grasp is -- how this is about crime and literature and race in early America.  There's little in our nation's eighteenth and early nineteenth century history that escapes her observation.

 

SLU's Interim Dean

There's been extensive coverage already of the happenings at St. Louis University over at Brian Leiter's shop (and also at Paul Caron and Legal History Blog).  I did, however, want to point out two things that I think people have not yet focused on.  First, quoting from a news story:

[Interim Dean Thomas Keefe] says he wants to focus SLU's curriculum on teaching students to be lawyers, "not how to become law students, not how to write learned law journal articles, not how to espouse all kinds of legal theory." He says he's also looking forward to being the first dean to wear shorts and T-shirts in the office.

I'm going to be most interested in what changes Keefe makes.  Also, here's a link to Thomas Keefe's law firm website.  As one of my colleagues observed about this, being a very successful PI lawyer, which Okeefe obviously is, is exceptionally difficult and draws on a lot of skills.  It's not clear to me that he has a lot of management experience, at least experience managing lawyers; nor is there any evidence of experience with legal education, other than as a law student 34 and more years ago.  And I'd add that my friends on the SLU faculty -- indeed the entire SLU community -- are in my thoughts.  I'm hoping things settle down quickly so everyone can get back to the work of educating students and doing service and scholarship.

Faculty Hiring: DePaul Law

Here's another announcement:

The DePaul University College of Law, located in the heart of Chicago, invites applications from both entry-level and lateral candidates for full-time, tenure-track faculty positions to start Fall 2013. We welcome applications from candidates in all fields of legal study. Although our curricular needs are subject to change, recruiting priorities are likely to include criminal law, trusts and estates and related areas of taxation, and international human rights law. We are also accepting applications for a clinical position.

Candidates should contact Vice Dean and Associate Professor David Franklin, who is the chair of DePaul Law’s Faculty Recruitment Committee (dfrankl2@depaul.edu). The other members of the Faculty Recruitment Committee are Professors Andrew Gold, Zoe Robinson, Julie Lawton, and Max Helveston.

How Good Are Students At Picking Law Review Articles?

As my friends and colleagues know, I'm not a huge fan of law reviews.  In fact, as you'd know if you'd been subjected to serve on a faculty with me at any time over the past eighteen years, I'm quite critical of them.  Some years ago I set out to write a short piece, "law review editorship as training for hierarchy" -- which took its inspiration from Duncan Kennedy's "legal education as training for hierarchy," obviously and also from Fred Rodell.  Though in some ways of late I've been a defender of law reviews.  I think they provide some training for the students -- they give the 3Ls a chance to get some management experience and some editing experience, they provide an opportunity for both 2Ls and 3Ls to do some writing and research.   I think law review can be a meaninful intellectual experience for people who take it seriously.  There's something anti-hierarchical about law reviews in that students rather than people more directly connected to the  hierarhcy are picking articles.  Are there better systems that could be devised for these purposes?  I'm sure there are; but I'm not sure law reviews are the complete and utter disaster that so many people make them out to be.  I know that doesn't sound like a resounding endorsement of the educational and scholarly value of law reviews -- but in context around here, it is.

One of the questions that I've had for a long time is how good are students at picking law review articles?  I think it's pretty hard to evaluate an article's quality -- I struggle with this with some frequency when I do peer reviews for history journals, for instance.  And I actually know a lot about the fields I'm reviewing in.  The students seem to think they can do a pretty good job with this -- and maybe they're right.  You may recall the words of one student editor at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review who wrote a response to Judge Posner's critique of law reviews a few years back:

The issue is not whether students are competent to select only the “best” articles, but whether student editors are able to determine whether a given article meets a basic threshold of validity, thereby creating a portfolio of valid articles for dissemination to the legal community. . . .  [B]ecause the article selection process is complex, anyone young and inexperienced will have difficulty with it.  The truth is, however, that article selection is not too difficult a task for law students.  Deciding whether or not an article is desirable is not an elusive process requiring a refined professional judgment, honed through years of apprenticeship and experience.  It is not even like wine tasting or art-gallery visiting, where a certain kind of “taste” or “eye” is needed.

How can we judge the quality of student decisions?  Well, one way I guess is to ask the experts.  Often when I read an article in a truly elite law journal that's in my area of expertise I'm surprised that it was selected -- this is because I can see and identify problems with it.  Of course, I have no idea what the other articles under consideration were, so the fact that I think a particular piece isn't great (and that I'm familiar with better pieces published in "lesser" law reviews around the same time) isn't a great judge.

Another way of looking at this issue is to use citation data.  As I wrote about a couple weeks back in the context of Theodore Eisenberg's and Martin Wells' latest on citations, a study of citations also has a lot of problems.  But if we would just suspend objections for a moment, I want to talk about a simple study I published a few years back, which looked at citations to articles in a thirteen leading law journals over a 15 year period.  The study found that many articles in our nation's most elite journals did substantially less well than articles published in very good, even if not the most elite journals.  There are a lot of things to be said about this -- including that, wow, there's not a lot of space in those journals and some articles do great -- absolutely fantastic in citations -- but a lot don't.  But I think it also suggests that a lot of judgements, even by editors of the best journals, may not be the best decisions they could have made.  This is hindsight -- and it poses all kinds of problems related to field bias in citations -- but it also reminds us that some articles in the best journals may not be as good as many other articles published in other journals.  And I think that's an important caveat, especially this time of year as hiring and promotion and tenure committees are gearing up.

The illustration is a graph in the article that shows the citations to each article published in the journal in 1992, over the next fifteen years.  I blogged some more about this a while back.

Sisk Study of Scholarly Impact, 2012

Back in September 2010 when Greg Sisk and his colleagues published their first study of citations to faculty at the top 70 schools I blogged extensively about it.  I compared the Sisk rankings of recent citations to the schools' tenured faculty members to other indicators of quality, such as LSAT scores of entering students and U.S. News peer assessment scores.  I was also interested in the relationship between the Sisk rankings and recent law review citations; I re-ranked his data according to the mean and median of citations to to schools' tenured faculty members (rather than combined 2*mean + median formula that he and Brian Leiter use).  I concluded with some fun with scatterplots of that data -- never a dull moment around this place, that's for sure!

This summer I've been so busy with other work I haven't had as much of an opportunity to comment on Sisk's most recent study, "Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties in 2012: Applying Leiter Scores to Rank the Top Third. "   Lots of people are talking about this, of course.  Over at prawfs some people are talking about the study and about expanding it -- I like the idea that schools outside of the top 70 just use the Sisk-Leiter methodology and then post them.  Making the subjects of study do the work has the virtue of reducing the cost to the investigors -- sort of Tom Sawyer-like, no?  Anyway, it would be one way of getting the data compiled quickly.  Paul Caron collects a lot of the discussion here.  Vic Amar has weighed in here with a robust defense of the rankings here.

I want to focus for a moment on the relationship between the Sisk-Leiter scores and other indicators of law school quality.  As long time readers will recall, I'm an advocate of adding variables to the U.S. News rankings -- recent citations to a school's main law review is one of them.  At the beginning of the summer I posted a paper that begins the process of investigating other factors, such as percentage African-American student enrollment -- or maybe even percentage African-American faculty.  And I think Sisk's score is another likely candidate.  In fact, it's highly correlated with a lot of existing measures of school quality.

The Sisk weighted score correlates .85 with U.S. News peer assessment, .74 with the U.S. News lawyer/judge assessment, .84 with LSAT 75th percentile, and .74 with number of citations to the school's main law jouranl for 2004-2011, as reported by John Doyle's Washington and Lee Law Library site..

Cribbing now from a post back in September 2010 ... I'm now thinking that Sisk's faculty scholarly impact scores and recent citations to a law school's main law review (and perhaps secondary law reviews, too), may be used together to help give a good measure of the academic quality of law schools.  When used together with U.S. News peer assessment scores and data on student quality, we may begin to refine our picture of  a school's academic quality.

What Law Review Problem?

As Dan’s previous post alludes to, in light of recent developments, many law prawfs might now be convinced that drastic changes need to happen within the law review submission process.

I, however, think the problem lies elsewhere. The issue for many seems to be that their particular article was better than its placement. And high placement for articles is connected with various benefits, including perhaps higher pay, more mobility options, prestige, recognition, tenure, etc. But that’s the problem. 2Ls have power that they should never been given.

Here’s my solution: read the articles. If it’s good, recognize it as such. If it’s not, well, do what you’d like. But there’s no reason why intelligent people should give automatic respect to an article that they haven’t read simply because 2Ls at a top school thought it was a great piece of scholarship.

I understand the need for qualitative ranking. If that’s the case, perhaps scholars in the various fields should rank the top, say, 20, articles each year. If your article appears on the list, then you have shown to your colleagues that your work is well-respected by your peers.  I'm sure others can devise other ways of ranking articles.  But the legal academy must simply get beyond giving placement intrinsic value.

Bookstore Trivia

Well, inspired by Dan Filler's post asking for nominations of our great independent bookstores, shall we have a trivia question related to them?  What's the bookstore at right?  Where is it?

Rachel Van Cleave Named Interim Dean At Golden Gate

Professor Rachel Van Cleave has been named interim dean at Golden Gate University School of Law.  Van Cleave joing GGU in 2004 and became Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in 2008.  She replaces Drucilla Ramey who recently stepped down.

Is Now the Moment to Re-jigger the Law Review Submission Process?

As I noted here, the University of Chicago Law Review and California Law Review are no longer accepting submissions from ExpressO.  They now accept articles submitted for five dollars a pop via Scholastica.  The Stanford Law Review and Yale Law Journal only accept pieces submitted through their proprietary submission systems.  The anachronistic law review publication system has always been problematic - both because law students with limited knowledge make the big decisions and because, given multiple submissions and an expedite bid system, those student editors are asked to read vastlymore articles than they are ever going to have a shot at publishing. (Of course the two are related; you could never find enough faculty volunteers to referee one article seventy-five times per submission season.  And efforts to create a referee bank - like this - have had limited success.)

I strongly suspect that the volume generated by the low-cost convenience of ExpressO might literally be breaking this camel's back. If ever there was a time to get journals on board for some sort of rationalization, it might be now.  After all, we mock law students for choosing the #53 law school over the #79 law school when the difference is rarely consequential - and when the #79 school might be a better fit that more effectively propels the student into practice.  Yet the same is true of law reviews. In a world where 75 mid-market law reviews operated a consortium, pooled resources and made single offers, who would really be worse off?  And let's be honest: couldn't the top 5 or 10 journals easily do the same thing?  (I put antitrust considerations aside here, particularly in light of my total ignorance of the topic.)

There is  another possibility as well: journals could themselves charge for submission.  Why shouldn't the Stanford Law Review get the five bucks, rather than a middle-man?   And while they're at it: charge twenty bucks for expedites!  That might reduce strategic expediting with law reviews an author isn't even interested in considering.  To be sure, the top journals would have an easier time with this - everyone would pay the tariff to have a shot at a fabulous placement.    Things could get more challenging mid-market because if one group of mid-market journals charges for submission, and another does not, volume might flow towards the free journals (notwithstanding my comments about preferences above).  On the other hand, faculty with deep institutional pockets might prefer the costlier journal - all the better the odds of acceptance!  

Market research anyone?

Narrative History and Multivariate Analysis

I'm delighted to see that the summer 2012 issue of Green Bag is up on the net; hard copies will be arriving soon.  I have a short review of the first volume of G. Edward White's Law in American History in the issue.  

Close readers of faculty lounge will recall that I'm a huge fan of White's work -- and that I wrote a little bit about the first volume earlier this year.  Anyway, the essay is titled "Multivariate Analysis Through Narrative History," which alludes to how White depicts law as interaction with many variables -- like economy and political ideology -- and how it sometimes alters the trajectory of our nation, too.  One of the things that White does that's particularly interesting is show how law is a part of culture -- and where many histories of law focus on law as the center piece of analysis, White shows that law is often the dependent variable or an incidental independent variable.  Thus I toyed with the idea of calling this something like "embedded legal history" -- as in law embedded in culture.  

A lot of people are going to be engaging the book and White's methodology for a long time to come.

Ok -- now back to work on another review of a very important book that's coming out soon from Cambridge, David Rabban's Law's History: American Legal History and the Transatlantic Turn to History.  It will surprise no one (at least none of you who follow my writing closely, which may be none of you!) that I'm deeply interested in Rabban's story of the post-Civil War turn to history in American jurisprudence -- or that I see this as related in significant ways to the controversy over slavery.  This is a major, major work of intellectual history and you should all be eagerly awaiting its appearance in December 2012!

Dept. of Pedagogical Hype: Teaching Collaboration

    From many quarters one hears that law schools must alter their pedagogical model to teach students to work collaboratively because that is how law is practiced today.  Proponents of this approach generally seem to prescribe replacing some substantial portion of what would otherwise be individual assignments with group projects and exercises.  I find myself skeptical of these claims, for reasons that are both pragmatic and conceptual.

    Let’s start with the practical objections.  First, in my experience, students don’t really collaborate when they do a substantial group assignment, in the sense of working together on any great proportion of it.  Instead, quite understandably, they tend to divide up projects and go off to work alone on their own pieces.  Second, no matter how students work, group work poses serious problems of fair evaluation.  Group members rarely put in exactly the same amount of work or produce contributions of identical quality.  Shirking is always a risk, and sometimes it erupts into a serious problem that is difficult either to head off or to manage after the fact. 

    Third, when students work with each other and with material produced by other students, problems inevitably arise of variation in the quality of the working materials and consequently of the overall educational experience.  My own encounters with this latter problem led me long ago to move in the opposite direction.  In my litigation class, I provide each student with the same package of material, and every student moves to dismiss the same complaint, moves for summary judgment on the same set of papers, and so on.  Comparisons are much easier and fairer, collective post-mortems are equally valuable to everyone, and I can be confident of the quality of the materials since they are provided by me, not by other students of varying motivation and ability.

    More fundamentally, though, I wonder about the pedagogical soundness of the collaborative approach.  If a team drafts a contract, one student might draft the force majeure clause and another the indemnification clause, but aren’t both students better off taking a whack at both clauses?  Shouldn’t every student coming out of a litigation class have drafted the introduction to a brief, and a couple of argument sections, and the conclusion, and the statement of undisputed material facts?  I’m not sure what is gained by the team concept here if it means that everybody does something, but nobody ever gets the experience of doing the whole thing.

    Finally, I am skeptical that lawyers actually practice law collaboratively in any meaningful sense, even when they say they do.  Teamwork certainly exists, but surely in legal practice good teamwork means a well-coordinated division of labor.  A law firm isn’t Google (or at least the Google of our imagination), where a bunch of software engineers sit around playing Nerf basketball while brainstorming about pure ideas.  In a law firm, will the whole team collectively draft every interrogatory and attend every deposition?  Surely not – team members divide the work among themselves.  Will clients pay for multiple staffing and brainstorming sessions?  I doubt it.  Nor does the “ability to work collaboratively” seem to me like a highly marketable skill.  What is the hook?  “My own work is mediocre, but I have a friend who is really good, and we work very well together, so hire us both?”  No thanks, but can I have the name of your friend?  Moreover, surely in many cases client privilege will preclude sharing information with other lawyers even informally and without billing.

    It seems to me that what a lawyer needs to be able to say is something like this: “Hire me because I am really, really good at every aspect of what I do, and I will handle your problem from beginning to end, personally and skillfully.  To the extent some issue should arise that exceeds the scope of my personal expertise, I have colleagues with the necessary knowledge and skills, and I will make sure every aspect of your problem is addressed by the best possible person.”  But that’s not collaboration, that’s intelligent subcontracting, isn’t it?

Faculty Hiring: University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Pitt Law's faculty search announcement just came through:

Tenure Stream Position(s). The University of Pittsburgh School of Law invites applications from entry-level or junior untenured faculty for one to two tenure-stream positions beginning in the 2013-2014 academic year. The appointment(s) is expected to be at the rank of assistant professor, but appointment at the rank of associate professor may be possible for a candidate who has achieved that rank at another institution. This recruitment seeks to fill particular curricular needs in Bankruptcy, Corporate Law, Energy Law, Patents, and Property. However, serious consideration will also be given to strong candidates who teach in related areas.

Contact: Haider Ala Hamoudi, Chair, Faculty Appointments Committee, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, 3900 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Email: hamoudi@pitt.edu. Email submissions are preferred. Other members of the committee are Tom Ross, Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Stella Smektanka, and George Pike. Clinical Position (Immigration).

The University of Pittsburgh School of Law also invites applications for the position of Clinical Assistant Professor of Law/Director of the Law School’s Immigration Law Clinic. This full-time position is not in the tenure stream, and is part of a system of contracts progressing to renewable long-term contracts. The position will begin on July 1, 2013. The Clinic’s primary mission is to serve the educational needs of our students and to provide legal services to individuals involved in asylum cases or in removal proceedings before the Immigration Court. Duties of the Director and Clinical Professor include classroom teaching, supervision of second- and third-year law students as they represent clients and participate in community projects; community outreach and fundraising; and administrative duties relating to the Immigration Law Clinic. The Director may also be expected to assume responsibilities involving the oversight of immigration-related legal services provided by pro bono attorneys and by the legal staff of Jewish Children and Family Services of Pittsburgh. These responsibilities, which will not exceed eight hours per week, may be separately contracted for and compensated by Vibrant Pittsburgh or other funders. Qualifications include admission to practice in Pennsylvania or willingness to seek admission to the Pennsylvania bar; experience in the field of immigration law (specifically, asylum and removal cases), and, preferably, clinical pedagogy; and the ability to work effectively with students, clients and other constituents.

Contact: Professor Martha Mannix, Chair, Clinical Appointments Committee, University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Email: mmannix@pitt.edu. The deadline for applications for the clinical position is September 14, 2012.

Univ. of New Hampshire Seeks New Faculty

Here is an announcement from the University of New Hampshire Law School, located in beautiful Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, the only state in New England that thrives without income or sales taxes. 

The University of New Hampshire School of Law is looking to fill several faculty positions beginning in the fall of 2013. We seek in particular scholars and teachers in the doctrinal areas of patent law and taxation (particularly business taxation), and a director for our nationally renowned externship program.  We seek only lateral candidates for the patent law position.  The successful candidate will occupy a newly created chair and will be encouraged to take advantage of the resources of the Franklin Pierce Center for Intellectual Property.   In addition, we welcome applications from all candidates who have demonstrated a potential for scholarly and teaching excellence and would embrace the opportunity to join our small and collegial faculty. Lateral and entry level candidates are encouraged to apply. Doctrinal faculty will be hired on the tenure track. The externship director will hold a secure status position whose ultimate classification – tenure track or other form of secure status – will be negotiated.

UNH Law is an equal opportunity employer.  The law school is situated in Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, and is approximately an hour from Boston, the beautiful New Hampshire Seacoast, and the White Mountains.  To apply, please send a letter of interest and a CV (with references) to Professor Kimberly Kirkland, Chair, Appointments Committee, UNH School of Law, 2 White Street, Concord, NH 03301. If you should wish to apply by email, please send your materials to faculty.appointments@law.unh.edu.

Putting a Humanities Dissertation On-Line

For years Dan Filler and I have talked about the benefits (and pitfalls) of putting papers on-line before publication.  I am more skeptical of this than Dan, but he's won me over, more or less.  There is, however, a vibrant debate -- I think especially in the humanities -- about the wisdom of putting a dissertation on-line.  Here's a statement, entitled "Princeton’s Online Dissertation Submission Policy and How it Affects Humanities and Social Science Graduate Students," from Princeton humanities Ph.D. students from 2011 about this issue.  The document makes for interesting reading for a bunch of reasons, including the views about what's required for tenure in the humanities, how much manuscripts are revised from dissertation to publication, and the widsom of staking out territory vs. keeping hard-won research and insights under wraps.