The Faculty Lounge

To Barbeque or Not to Barbeque: Eating Our (nonhuman) Animal Brothers & Sisters

I can’t join Al in his celebration of barbeque, an enthusiasm for which I suspect is shared by not a few Faculty Lounge readers, barbeque being but the culmination of a barbaric ritual that commences with the industrialized slaughter and sacrifice of nonhuman animals. There are sundry religious, ethical, ecological, health, and economic arguments against the eating of animals and thus for adopting vegetarianism or veganism as an alternative diet (I’ll leave it to Professors Michael Dorf, Sherry Colb, and Neil Buchanan to argue for the merits of veganism over vegetarianism). A sample of some of the arguments are found below: 

• Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.
• Adams, Carol J. Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Handbook. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.
• DeGrazia, David. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Fox, Michael Allen. Deep Vegetarianism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999.
• Linzey, Andrew. Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Midgley, Mary. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983.
• Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2004.  
• Salt, Henry S. Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress. London: Centaur Press, 1980 (first published in 1892).
• Schwartz, Richard H. Judaism and Vegetarianism. New York: Lantern Books, revised ed., 2001.
• Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2nd ed., 1990.
• Sunstein, Cass R. and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

For Buddhist perspectives, see Shabkar.org, “a non-sectarian website dedicated to vegetarianism as a way of life for Buddhists of all schools. The site takes its name from Shabkar Tsodruk Rangdrol (1781-1851), the great Tibetan yogi who espoused the ideals of vegetarianism.”

For a Christian perspective, see the works of Andrew Linzey (above), the Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

For an Islamic perspective, see Islamic Concern.com.

One of my favorite blogs devoted to ethical and legal topics concerning nonhuman animals is Animal Blawg, “a blog [that] focuses on animal law, ethics and policy.  It provides a forum for community and collegiality as well as debate and the exchange of ideas.  Founded by Pace Law School professors, David N. Cassuto, Luis E. Chiesa and law student, Suzanne McMillan, the blog is now maintained by David Cassuto.  Contributors include academics, practitioners, and law students, as well as other interested members of the animal advocacy community.”

An early version (2008) of my bibliography for “animal ethics, rights, and law” is found here.

Bill's Barbeque and the Presidential Election

I was excited to hear Governor Romney's talking about Bill's Barbeque, which recently closed its doors in Richmond.  Back in 1990 and 1991 I ate at a couple of the Bill's locations.  This is yet another instance of how central barbeque is to American culture and in this case how close it is to politics.  All of which reminds me that I'm going to talk about a barbeque feast in George Tucker’s The Valley of the Shenandoah, just as soon as Doug Thie and I get our paper on probate in Rockbridge County in the pre-Civil War era finished.  The novel occupies a small but important place in that paper -- though more for what it says about trust law than barbeque.

Candy Caned (Or, The Outer Limits of Legitimate Property Security)

Two weeks ago, a man allegedly attempted to steal a Snickers™ bar from a 7-Eleven store in Brooklyn, New York. In response, three clerks accosted the man, tackled him, bit him, slammed his hand in the store’s doors, and stripped away his clothing, leaving him injured and nearly naked. The incident was captured by cameraphone video (warning: nudity, offensive language, and violence). The video shows the three store workers pushing, pulling, biting, and kicking the accused. (One can also see their faces when they realize that the incident is being recorded.) This incident has prompted a spirited discussion (at least among some New Yorkers) over whether the store clerks went “too far.” But what is “too far” in this context? Where does legitimate property security end and (illegitimate) violence begin?

Shoplifting is, admittedly, a major issue for the retail industry; theft accounts for billions of dollars in losses. And despite the economic effects of shoplifting, few shoplifters are ever caught. When shoplifters are apprehended, police intervention is not always available: Earlier this year, Dallas police announced that officers would not be dispatched for thefts totaling less than $50. Yet, while few people debate a retailer’s right to loss prevention, there is a line (in fact, a gulf) between loss prevention and brutality.

The 7-Eleven fracas has also prompted a conversation over whether the actions of the clerks were racially motivated. In recent years, New York City retailers have made news over their disparate treatment of suspected shoplifters of color. In 2006, Macy’s paid $600,000 to settle a case brought by former AG Eliot Spitzer over the retailer’s discriminatory treatment of black and Latino shoppers. In the Macy’s case, Latinos were five times more likely and blacks were three times more likely to be handcuffed than whites detained on allegations of shoplifting.

Troublingly, the 7-Eleven incident bears an eerie resemblance to another with which I have some familiarity. Imagine the scene: A girl visiting a chain grocery store allegedly puts a piece of candy into her pocket; before she leaves the store, the store manager detains her, binds her hands, and physically restrains her in view of passersby. The differences between this story and the 7-Eleven stripping are few: both involve national chains; both involve a single item of candy; both involve a retail employee responding to a suspected petty loss with disproportionate violence against a person of color. The primary difference between these incidents is that the 7-Eleven fracas occurred two weeks ago, while the situation involving the girl happened in 1930 in Jim Crow Georgia.

Charlie Mae Dowling, a twelve-year-old black girl, entered a Georgia A&P store, and picked up a single piece of candy from the floor. The store manager observed Dowling as she put the candy in her pocket; in response, he accosted her, forced her to pay for the candy, detained her, tied her hands together, physically forced her hands up above her head, and tied her to a rope suspended from the ceiling. The manager kept the girl in this position for two hours – during which time he threatened to kill her – until her mother arrived and paid the store $5 for the girl’s release. A civil jury later awarded Dowling money damages on the grounds that she had been "inhumanely assault[ed]" and "tortured" by the store manager (upheld on appeal at Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Dowling, 43 Ga.App. 549, 159 S.E. 609 (Ct. App. 1931)).

Research suggests that retail property security measures are differentially applied depending upon the race of the suspected shoplifter, with blacks and Latinos subject to physical restraints and criminal prosecutions more often than others. Without speculating over the motivations of these individual store clerks, I’d suggest that wherever violence is employed to protect property, we should be suspicious, as Daniel J. Sharfstein demonstrates in his brilliant article (on ssrn here) on the persuasive connection between property claims and violence against disfavored people. Sure, chasing down a thief may be an “expression of professionalism” (in Sharfstein’s words) for the store clerk, but I wonder how far a retailer should be allowed to go before liability attaches. In other words, are canings over candy ever within the bounds of legitimate property security?

Strictly Speaking, It’s Not Blaming the Victims for Our Economic Malaise, But Rather the Blaming of Those Who Support Public Policies that Help the Poor & Unemployed!

I admit to wondering if some arguments warrant any attention whatsoever, and not only because they emanate from the lofty perches of economics professors at the University of Chicago: “Casey Mulligan…claims that the continued weakness of employment in the US is due to policies introduced in 2008 and 2009, which ‘greatly enhanced the help given to the poor and unemployed — from expansion of food-stamp eligibility to enlargement of food-stamp benefits to payment of unemployment bonuses — sharply eroding (and, in some cases, fully eliminating) the incentives for workers to seek and retain jobs, and for employers to create jobs or avoid layoffs.’” This is actually a variation on an old and tired argument which rests on eminently contestable assumptions and silly but stubbornly persistent beliefs about human nature and moral psychology in the context of putative “economic efficiency” (I happen to believe these are historically associated with the Christian doctrine of ‘original sin’), well-illustrated by an infamous proposition from Charles Murray’s influential book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1984): “People are not inherently hard working or moral. In the absence of countervailing influences, people will avoid work and be amoral”(146).* Please see John Quiggin’s post at Crooked Timber.

* For a characteristically lucid discussion, see Robert E. Goodin’s chapter on “Efficiency” in his Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State (1988): 229-256. See too the section by Goodin, “The Morality of Incentives and Deterrence,” in David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against (1998): 172-189. As to the pernicious influence of at least one strain of Christian moral psychology—that is, one of Puritan provenance—see “The new medicine for poverty,” in R.H. Tawney’s classic but somewhat neglected study Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926): 253-273.

NYSBA *Will* Train Volunteers at Unspecified Date in Future -- Disaster Assistance Not Now, But Later

From a message sent this afternoon by New York State Bar Association President Seymour James, Jr.:

Throughout the affected areas, we anticipate a great need for assistance with legal issues related to FEMA applications, insurance, real estate matters, and other general legal matters, such as replacing missing wills and other documents. The State Bar is developing a training session for attorneys on disaster relief issues that will be webcast and archived for later viewing, in hopes that this resource will assist attorneys and local bar associations in their efforts to assist affected individuals.  I strongly encourage all of our members to consider taking advantage of this training, to become better equipped to provide pro bono services to people in need of assistance in the wake of the storm.  We will provide an update and additional details about the training as soon as they are finalized.

In addition, the NYSBA Lawyer Referral and Information Service has created a dedicated number (1-800-699-5636) for people in need of help, and is currently recruiting attorneys to provide free telephone consultations to individuals affected by the storm.  There is a particular need for attorneys with insurance, landlord/tenant, co-op and condo, or FEMA appeals experience, as well as those who can handle general practice matters.  If you are able to help, please visit www.nysba.org/DisasterVolunteerSandy and complete a volunteer form.

We are also providing a free non-accredited informational video on emergency preparedness strategies for attorneys.  The program – Disaster Planning and Emergency Preparedness: Best Practices for Solos – was designed to help attorneys prepare for unforeseen crises that can jeopardize their practices and includes helpful information and steps to take following a disaster.  The video will be available, free of charge, through the month of November.  You can view it at: www.nysba.org/DisasterPlanningProgram.

 

CFP: Northeast Regional Scholarship and Teaching Development Workshop

The Northeast Regional Scholarship and Teaching Development Workshop has issued an announcement and call for papers for its 2013 gathering for pretenured law faculty at Albany Law School.

From the Workshop website:

This workshop is intended for law faculty who do not have tenure and who seek an opportunity to develop their scholarship and discuss their teaching with other, similarly situated law faculty. This program will provide a forum for untenured faculty to present works in progress, solicit feedback from peers ahead of the February-March Law Review submission season, and network with other untenured faculty about teaching practices and related issues. 

The Workshop is free, but registration is required before November 16, 2012 (register here). Given its timing (in advance of the Spring submission cycle) and the chance to have senior faculty review and comment on works-in-progress, this looks like a great opportunity for juniors and VAPs.

 

The Economics of Well-Being & Unhappiness

The following (with apologies to Faculty Lounge readers who may have already read it) is my comment (with added ‘references and further reading’) to Maxine Eichner’s post at Concurring Opinions, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Massive Shift of Hours from Families to Work:”

The cornucopia of conspicuous consumption promised by capitalism and the material and psychological insecurities intrinsic to the labor market, particularly in a nation with a fragile history of organized labor and a prevailing neoliberal ideology unabashedly hostile to organized labor as such, does indeed hold out both the carrot and stick to account for an obsession with work. And in a political and cultural climate in which those on the Right are motivated to dismantle the weakest type of existing welfare regimes in the northern hemisphere (i.e., its ‘liberal’ variant, which is outperformed on any number of criteria by its corporatist and social democratic counterparts) and the corresponding economic philosophy that justifies its existence, namely, Keynesian (let alone neo-Keynesian) welfare economics, nothing should surprise us about the dominant ideologies of work and leisure (in which these two activities are conceived in pathologically polar terms such that work has precious little of the connotations of leisure as part of eudaimonia or human flourishing on the one hand, and leisure is afflicted with passivity, mind-numbing entertainment, escape from reality, or feverish hedonism on the other). It is Keynesian economics that heretofore has softened the periodic blows endemic to capitalist economic cycles: its manias, crashes, and panics, and calls to mind Ian Shapiro’s lament that

“[t]he ambiguous moral status of Keynesianism and welfare economics has always inhered in the fact that they appeal to the short-term interests of the disadvantaged (such as unemployed workers and firms on the verge of bankruptcy during recessions) by ensuring subsistence, creating employment, and expanding credit, yet these policies are geared in the medium term to sustaining the system which generates those very disadvantages—hence the ironic force of Joan Robinson’s quip that the one thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all.”

The majority of those politically well-positioned to lead us out of our current economic malaise into an economic world significantly different from the capitalist one remain infatuated with the “aristocracy of capital” and unperturbed by the utter commercialization or commodification of all social relations. Economic power remains hostage to the prioritization of the welfare of the wealthiest as both a necessary and sufficient condition to satisfying the general welfare and the generalizable interests of the many. Material uncertainty and psychological insecurity are part and parcel, the bone and marrow, of labor markets determined by the terms and conditions of private investment and the deleterious effects of finance capitalism. The distorted and artificial needs and the individually and socially harmful desires generated by hyper-industrialized casino capitalism finds the masses in a state in which they feel an overwhelming need to be psychologically indemnified by the possession and consumption of as many goods and services as possible, in a socio-economic world in which conspicuous consumption exists side-by-side with recalcitrant pockets and regions afflicted with inexcusable relative and absolute poverty.

Even before the latest precipitous economic downturn, there was a growing consensus among political scientists about the need to account, in Robert Lane’s words, for the “combination of growing unhappiness and depression, interpersonal and institutional distrust, and weakened companionship in advanced market democracies, in which people are, with important exceptions, reasonably well-off.” Or, as the philosopher Daniel M. Haybron notes,

“The United States is by a wide margin, among the most affluent nations in human history, and many Americans enjoy unprecedented freedom to shape their lives—for those individuals, a great success in moral and economic terms. Yet no one ever accused us of ‘knowing how to live.’ This is perhaps because, arguably, we don’t. Surveys find an overwhelming majority of Americans reporting that Americans have badly placed priorities. And there is no evidence that Americans grew any happier over the recent decades that witnessed astonishing growth in material standards of living. Self-reported happiness has remained essentially flat, while rates of suicide, depression, and other pathologies have soared.”

Latest on Penn State

Well, this doesn't relate to the JoePa Statue that was removed from the Penn State campus last summer (or Michael Bérubé's resignation of the Paterno family chair) -- and therefore it's outside of my expertise -- but I did want to call your attention to this Christian Science Monitor article on the indictment of Graham Spanier, Penn State's former president.  (Though Dan Filler did not mention this to me, I was excited to see that he is quoted in it.)

Ella . . . Ella

 

As I mentioned in my prior post, I spoke on Monday about “rogue trading” at a seminar hosted by the Autorregulador del Mercado del Valores de Colombia in Bogotá, Colombia.  Though this is a topic I’ve discussed before at risk management meetings and seminars, this was the first time that I’ve had sufficient information regarding the Kweku Adoboli case to include him as a part of my presentation.  As I’ve discussed before, Adoboli is the alleged UBS rogue trader currently standing trial in the UK on criminal charges stemming from unauthorized trading that first came to light in September 2011.

I should say at the outset that there are still a lot of open questions concerning the Adoboli case.  UBS has conducted (and, I believe, completed) an internal investigation and KPMG has an ongoing external investigation.  UK (FSA) and Swiss (Finma) authorities also have initiated enforcement actions, which are still in progress.  So most of what we know about the case comes from press reports regarding the trial testimony and evidence, including testimony from UBS employees and internal auditors regarding the UBS and KPMG investigations.

What we do know is that Adoboli was a trader on UBS’s four person ETF desk.  According to Adoboli, he began off-books trading in 2008 using an account nicknamed “umbrella,” which he used as a slush fund to hide profits until he needed them to cover a loss on some later, rainier, day.  As I’ll discuss in another post, such smoothing of profits and losses is a common element in other recent rogue trading cases, including Jerome Kerviel at Société Générale.

The umbrella account is the one element of the case that has finally convinced me of the possibility of an Adoboli made-for-television movie (note to networks: I’m willing to consult on the cheap in exchange for hobnobbing with movie stars . . . or just for free lodging).  I think that we’re due for another rogue trading movie.  Though Nick Leeson got a real (not TV) movie out of his ordeal -- starring Ewan McGregor, no less -- it was a real dud, which hasn’t prevented me from showing it in class about a dozen times. 

But the umbrella account has, perhaps surprisingly and most definitely entertainingly, turned out to be an important element of Adoboli’s defense.  Adoboli’s lawyer, Charles Sherrard argues that all three ETF desk traders, including Adoboli’s supervisor, John Hughes, knew about the umbrella account.  Sherrard has introduced numerous email and chat communications referencing Adoboli’s “umbrella,” “Rhianna,” and “ella ella,” in an attempt to establish that Adoboli, far from being a rogue agent, was part of a collaborative scheme in which other bank employees (again, including his direct supervisor) acquiesced. 

  Even the UBS internal investigation concluded that “there is strong evidence of collusion at local desk level,” and that the “local supervisor was aware of Mr Adoboli’s propensity to smooth the profit and loss and take unacceptably high levels of net delta [risk]”.   The traders who have testified (including Hughes) have mostly admitted their knowledge of the umbrella account, but claim to have misunderstood its purpose. 

 I’ll be back later with more to say about Adoboli and UBS, and how the facts compare to other major rogue trading incidents.  

In the meantime, make sure to watch the Rhianna video above – ella, ella comes at around 1:35.

Photo: view of Monserrate from the Fernando Botero museum, Bogotá, Colombia.

Prior related posts:

AMV Seminario De Control Interno Y Compliance: Bogotá, Colombia

Kweku Adoboli Trial Began Today

The Rogue Trading KISS

When $61bn Seemed Like Real Money

Denial: It Ain’t Just A River In Egypt

It’s The Stupid Culture

It’s The Culture, Stupid

Kerviel’s Fake Trades: Genius Or Copy Cat?

Kerviel’s Fake Trades: The Anatomy of A Cover-Up

On Warning Signs II: Follow The Money

On Warning Signs: You Can’t Get There From Here

Rogues Versus Scapegoats

Kerviel Trial Opens to Fanfare

Société Générale: Back In The Saddle Again

Jérôme Kerviel to Société Générale: Stand By Your Man

 

Where is the Red Cross? Not in Lower Manhattan

Most of Lower Manhattan heads into the fifth day without power, water or heat.  Electricity is expected to come on over the weekend in Manhattan, but some other parts of the tri-state area may be without power for weeks.  The National Guard was visible yesterday, handing out food and water at designated areas.  But the American Red Cross is nowhere to be found.  To be sure, much of "disaster relief" comes long after the disaster has occurred, but in the meantime, there are lots and lots of people with real, concrete needs. 

After September 11, people poured into Lower Manhattan wanting to help.  Now?  Nobody. 

Supreme Court Fellows Program

The deadline for applying for a U.S. Supreme Court Fellowship is November 30 (apply here). 

Over the past forty years, law professors have been well represented among the Fellows contributing to the work of the Supreme Court, the Federal Judicial Ctr., the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and (more recently) the U.S. Sentencing Commission. This is a great opportunity for a sabbatical/leave year for profs whose scholarship would benefit from the experience.

Good luck!

Clymer on Family Money

News of University of Kentucky Professor Jeffory Clymer's Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century has just reached Chapel Hill.  This is a book I'm very much looking forward to reading because it intersects several of my interests -- trusts and estates and slavery.  Cribbing now from Oxford University Press' website:

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Moneyreveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

This looks absolutely terrific.  It joins other recent work on this area, such as Jeannine Delombard's In the Shadow of the Gallows, which I mentioned last August.

Welcome Taja-Nia Henderson And Patrick O'Donnell

We're very pleased to welcome two new guests to the Lounge: Taja-Nia Henderson and Patrick S. O'Donnell.  Taja-Nia is an Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers-Newark, having joined the faculty in 2010.  She focuses on issues related to race, criminal justice, and legal history, among other things.  Regular blawg readers are very familiar with Patrick, who, in addition to being a philosophy prof,  is a regular at Ratio Juris.   We're excited to have them join us for a while!

CFP: Law & Society 2013 Conference

The Law and Society Association has issued a call for participation for its 2013 meeting in Boston (also known as "not Hawaii"). Proposals are due December 4. Here are the details:

Power, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Justice: Legal Challenges in Precarious Times

The meeting’s theme aims to incite debate on the challenges that will define law and society over the next decade. The financial crisis that struck in 2008 still rends the economy, politics, law, and society. How will polarized politics, rapid technological change, and global shifts in economic power affect law and society over the next years, domestically and transnationally?

To envision the future, we invite participants to extend and rethink law and society’s past insights to engage a new and changing context. The Program Committee has listed a series of sub-themes in featured sessions and other panels with the aim of spurring cross-cutting discussions.

Pretenured faculty and those planning to go on the teaching market in the next year might be especially interested in the LSA Early Career Workshop, to be held over two days immediately preceding the opening of the full conference. Details for the Workshop are here. 

Balloting Behind (Jail) Bars

Thanks to Al and Dan for inviting me to sit a spell in the Lounge! I have been an avid reader for years, and I'm super excited about the opportunity. As Al mentioned, I'm writing a dissertation on slavery and penal systems in the antebellum South - one might think that this credential qualifies me to regularly solve Al's Civil War trivia questions (and yet, one would be wrong . . . I've only gotten one of Al's trivia questions right (!)). In any event, I'm looking forward to talking race, prisons, and property with this group.

First up, jailed prisoners and the franchise. This week, the L.A. Sheriff's Department is bringing the ballot inside the county jail. As part of an initiative to facilitate jailed detainees' access to the franchise, the Department recruited volunteers to assist jailed inmates with registration forms and absentee ballots. While hailed by some as a laudable development, some are questioning whether law enforcement agents are qualified to accurately ascertain eligibility and administer ballots for this election. This is especially tricky in California, where AB 109 (last year's "realignment" bill enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court affirming the prison population reduction order in Coleman v. Plata) has shifted jurisdiction over thousands of convicted nonviolent offenders to local jails. The populations currently being held in the state's local jails, therefore, do not share the same status - some are awaiting trial while others have been convicted and are serving sentences- and many do not share the same eligibility, an issue that may give rise to ballot integrity problems down the road. Several years ago, the ACLU compiled information about the myriad challenges of custodial voting - let's hope LA County is familiar with this history and its relative successes.

As an aside, one of the "surprises" noted by department personnel interviewed for this article was that several of the jailees registering to vote signed up as Republicans. The characterization of this demographic tidbit as a "surprise" brings to mind the work of Professor Janai Nelson of St. John's University School of Law. Nelson has an article forthcoming in the Florida Law Review (on ssrn here) in which she argues that felon disenfranchisement laws "reflect a misguided perception" of how a criminally detained or incarcerated individual might vote. Although not limited to the partisan question of whether this population might vote a Republican or Democratic ticket, Nelson's analysis is worth a read. Have criminal disenfranchisement schemes persisted for so long in the U.S. because of a presumption of how members of this population might vote if given the opportunity? (Nelson suggests that the answer is yes.). I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Fact-Checking (Or Not)

Fact checking is mostly tendentious nonsense, but yesterday's George Will column invites this comment.  Will called for an apology from Syracuse Law for granting Biden a law degree, noting two egregious legal gaffes.  In the first, Will reminds us that in the 2008 VP debate Biden patronizingly informed Palin that Article I delineates the role of the Vice President.  The video is here at the 1:11 point.  Wrong, says Will, it's Article II.  Actually, it's both.  Article I, section 3, clause 4 states that the VP "shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided."  Article II deals with the election of the President and Vice President (as amended by the 12th Amendment), provides that the VP succeeds to the presidency in the case of the President's death, removal, resignation, or inability to discharge the duties of the office (as amended by the 25th Amendment).  While Biden was not quite the legal dunce Will claims, it is astonishing that in the same debate Biden characterized Cheney as the most dangerous VP in American history, in part for Cheney's contention that the office of the Vice Presidency was not part of the executive branch.  If Biden thought Article I controlled the office of the VP, then Cheney must not have been wrong.  So, a big rotten tomato to both George Will and Joe Biden on this one. 

The second gaffe cited by Will is Biden's assertion in the 2102 VP debate that if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade (actually Planned Parenthood v. Casey) abortion would be "outlawed."  You may see the video here, at the 6:15 point    One would think that then-Senator Biden, who raked Robert Bork over the coals on abortion back in 1987, would understand that overturning Roe and Casey would free the states to regulate abortion (or not) as they desire.  So, two big fat rotten tomatoes to Joe Biden on this one and thumbs up to George Will.  

But the most important fact-checking is the one that isn't happening.  Evidence continues to surface that our personnel in Benghazi begged for assistance and were repeatedly turned down.  But, as Jonah Goldberg reports, "last Friday, the president boasted that 'the minute I found out what was happening' in Benghazi, he ordered that everything possible be done to protect our personnel. That is either untrue, or he’s being disobeyed on grave matters."  Last week, Leon Panetta defended this inaction by saying "that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.”  As Jonah Goldberg observes, "If real-time video of the attack and communications with Americans on the ground begging for assistance don’t constitute 'real-time information,' what does?"  I don't know what to believe here, but this a major news story, so why aren't the army of self-appointed "fact-checkers" trying to ferret out the truth of this matter?  Where are the investigative reporters?

Full disclosure:  Chris Stevens was my student at Hastings.  I knew him well and he was a prince of a man.  I grieve for him and his family.   

Scenes from Lower Manhattan

Hurricane Sandy has caused severe damage and loss along the East Coast.  All of Lower Manhattan, where I live, has been without power since Monday.  For most of us, that means no heat or water (and definitely no elevator), either.

Here's a scene from the small pedestrian park right in front of my house. 

 

The Post-it Breakup: Finance Version

From the FT:

Some 100 of the Swiss lender’s [UBS] fixed income traders in London discovered at the turnstiles that their passes were no longer working when they tried to get to work on Tuesday morning. Other bankers had been contacted by phone or discovered that they might lose their jobs when their email repeatedly bounced back.

 

 

Henderson Stepping Into the Lounge

It's my pleasure to announce that Professor Taja-Nia Y. Henderson of Rutgers School of Law, Newark, is stepping into the faculty lounge to sit with us for a spell.  

Cribbing now from the her Rutgers website, I'll add that: Professor Henderson received her A.B. from Dartmouth College, her M.A. from New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and her J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Dean’s Scholar and senior notes editor of the N.Y.U. Law Review.  Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2010, Professor Henderson clerked for the Hon. Consuelo B. Marshall, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, was an associate in the litigation practice group of Arnold & Porter LLP in New York, and served as the Derrick Bell Teaching Fellow in constitutional law at NYU School of Law.  Her publications include “New Frontiers in Fair Lending: Confronting Lending Discrimination Against Ex-Offenders,” 80 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1237 (October 2005) and “Racial Fortuity, Rights Sacrifice, and the Promise of Convergence in Prison and Policing Policy,” forthcoming in the Columubia Journal of Race & Law.

Professor Henderson's teaching and research interests are in slavery, social control organizations, incarceration and prisoner reentry, law and society, and land use/property.  I will also add -- and this is where our interests really overlap -- that Professor Henderson is writing a doctoral dissertation on the 19th century emergence of Virginia’s state prison – the first penitentiary in the slaveholding American south – and its relationship to the institution of racial slavery in the state.  I'm really looking forward to her posts -- and hope to hear a lot about the latest on institutions in Virginia in the pre-Civil War era.

Justice Scalia Interview on "Reading Law"

The Hoover Institution has released an interview with Justice Scalia on his new book, Reading Law, co-authored with Bryan Garner.  It's 48 minutes of Justice Scalia holding forth on his interpretive philosophy in response to questions from Peter Robinson.  You may view it here.