The Faculty Lounge

Why is Grading so Aggravating?

    Over the last few days, I have been considering the twice-a-year obligation that we have to grade examinations. (Thinking about grading exams is certainly more enjoyable than actually doing it). I have yet to meet any colleague who enjoys grading; indeed, most of us seem to treat it as the most loathsome part of our jobs. Why?

    For those of us who teach larger classes, I suspect some of the dread stems from the idea of having to read the same answer (or at least what should be the same answer) time after time after time. Certainly, in the years where I’ve had over a hundred students in my Introduction to Property course, this has been a significant factor. How many of us would go to the same movie or read the same novel a hundred times? But repetition cannot be the only explanation — I also teach much smaller classes and don’t enjoy the grading any more.

    Grading can also expose the fact that there is a difference between teaching and learning. I have not found it uncommon to read an answer and wonder whether the student ever came to class or read the materials. “Executory vested remainder” can never be the correct answer to any question on a Property exam as no such thing exists. At the same time, all of us know that not everyone who attends law school should be doing so. Finding the occasional failure among the examinations should be unfortunate, but should not trigger such dread. Also, you would expect this to be more relevant for introductory classes rather than more advanced ones whose members have already shown some competence. Fearing student failure cannot be the full reason, for our grading discomfort, therefore.

    The last reason I’ve come up with is one of potential misdirection. When we grade an examination and find it wanting, are we also saying something about our inability to teach? While, like most other professors, I can articulate many reasons why students’ failures are their own responsibility, maybe the dread of grading we feel originates with a feeling that it is our failing not the student’s.

    So, assuming that you also dislike grading, do you have a reason?

Courthouse Trivia

Well, it's been a long time since we've had a courhouse trivia question.  Maybe that's been because it's been a long time since I've visited a new courthouse!  But on the road today I detoured for about an hour to get this picture.  It's at an oblique angle because the front has the county name in huge letters and so a picture head-on would be a complete give-away.  I think the only part that goes back to before the Civil War is the center part.  The wings look like a twentieth-century addition.  And might I add that I'm not a fan of the gray paint on this building.  

Once we get this identified, I want to talk about the World War I monument in the foreground.  It's unexpected in two ways.

Jocelyn Benson Named Interim Dean At Wayne State Law

Wayne State University Law School has named Jocelyn Benson as its new interim dean.  Benson, who holds a JD from Harvard, joined the Wayne State faculty in 2005.

Ranking the Amendments

Earlier today, sports blog Deadspin posted a list ranking the amendments to the Constitution. According to editor-in-chief Tommy Craggs’ algorithm – which is not explained in the blog post – the Fourteenth ranks first, followed by the Fifth and Fourth, respectively. The Second ranked dead last.

I’m sure we all have our favorite amendments (“favorite,” in terms of our scholarship and “favorite,” in terms of our personal constitutional politics); where would you rank the Second? Or any of the others? Given the choice, I’d probably rank the Fourteenth and the Second close together; both are ambiguous enough to remain subject to highly-contentious judicial construction. I’d probably rank the Third somewhere near the top, since the prospect of quartering a slew of soldiers in our NYC apartment seems particularly unsavory to me.

Are there others?

 

Elizabeth Van Lew Biography

I see that Elizabeth Varon's biography of Elizabeth Van Lew is on sale (I misread the OUP sales catalog this morning and though this was forthcoming).  Cribbing now from the OUP webpage:

Northern sympathizer in the Confederate capital, daring spymaster, postwar politician: Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most remarkable figures in American history, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South. In Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, historian Elizabeth Varon provides a gripping, richly researched account of the woman who led what one historian called "the most productive espionage operation of the Civil War." Under the nose of the Confederate government, Van Lew ran a spy ring that gathered intelligence, hampered the Southern war effort, and helped scores of Union soldiers to escape from Richmond prisons.
Varon describes a woman who was very much a product of her time and place, yet continually took controversial stands--from her early efforts to free her family's slaves, to her daring wartime activities and beyond. Varon's powerful biography brings Van Lew to life, showing how she used the stereotypes of the day to confound Confederate authorities (who suspected her, but could not believe a proper Southern lady could be a spy), even as she brought together Union sympathizers at all levels of society, from slaves to slaveholders. After the war, a grateful President Ulysses S. Grant named her postmaster of Richmond--a remarkable break with custom for this politically influential post. But her Unionism, Republican politics, and outspoken support of racial justice earned her a lifetime of scorn in the former Confederate capital. Even today, Elizabeth Van Lew remains a controversial figure in her beloved Richmond, remembered as the "Crazy Bet" of Lost Cause propaganda. Elizabeth Varon's account rescues her from both derision and oblivion, depicting an intelligent, resourceful, highly principled woman who remained, as she saw it, true to her country to the end.

And you know what?  She has a pretty cool gravemarker in Richmond's Shockoe Hill Cemetery.  That's the illustration of this post.  There's also a school on the site of her house on Church Hill, which I ought to post about at some point.

The Passing of Robert Bork

Robert Bork, Yale law professor, Solicitor General, the man who fired Archibald Cox, Circuit Court Judge, and most notably, failed Supreme Court nominee in 1987, has died at age 85.  He tried to engage the Senate and the nation in a real discussion about constitutional law.  Once rejected, no later nominee has ever dared to offer anything but the most bland assurances and comments.  Had he been confirmed, Roe might have been junked in Casey and Lawrence  might have gone the other way.  But Obama would now have another appointment.  What one hand gives another takes away.  It's a pity that he will be remembered more for his failed nomination and the "Saturday Night Massacre" than he will for his intellect. 

Costco Prepares For Armageddon

Way back in the stone age, as a young pup, when I was blogging at Concurring Opinions, I was intrigued by Costco's entry into the casket business.  Now those crafty marketers are back, staking out that intermediate space between death and life (as we presently know it): the world that requires a 1 year emergency food kit for a family of four.  

And here's a hint for those of you considering ordering those 30,144 servings of delicious dried food ("simple to prepare without electricity") as a Christmas present: wait until December 27 and Costco is going to hack $500 dollars off the price.  

Of course, it's hard to perfectly time these things and you don't want to get it wrong.  Perhaps its best to pay full price and stock up today.  You'll probably want to order the 2000 pounds of Organic Valley dry milk to go go with it - one gets thirsty underground.

Cornell on the Second Amendment's History

Check out Saul Cornell's piece at the Daily Beast on the history of the second amendment.  Here is a short excerpt:

If the Heller court had simply said, “Look, most Americans think the Amendment is about an individual right, and no one really cares what James Madison or the average man on the street in 1791 thought”—then the case would be pretty uncontroversial. Instead, Scalia produced a pompous, error-filled opinion that has done more to discredit his beloved originalism than a generation of liberal academics ever could.

I'm sure Saul's Well Regulated Militia and the rest of his body of work of applied legal history will be getting renewed attention in the coming months.

Hofstra Names New Law School Dean

Hofstra is removing the "interim" tag from Eric Lane's title, naming him the law school's ninth dean, effective January 1, 2013.  Story here.  Lane joined the Hofstra law faculty in the 1970's.  His areas of expertise include constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and legislative process.

Redemption Songs: Courtroom Stories of Slavery

Browsing the spring/summer Oxford University Press catalog I see that Lea VanderVelde's Redemption Songs: Courtroom Stories of Slavery will be out next year.  Cribbing now from the catalog description:

There is no more legendary case in American legal history than Dred Scott v. Sanford. An extraordinary example of a slave suing his master for freedom, it led to a devastating pro-slavery ruling by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Supreme Court and helped precipitate the Civil War. But was it so remarkable? Did others fight for liberty in court?

In Redemption Songs, legal scholar Lea VanderVelde unearths the astonishing history of how slaves challenged the "peculiar institution" with that most American of weapons, litigation. The author, together with Missouri's state archivist and other researchers, found roughly 300 "freedom suits" filed in St. Louis between 1814 and 1860. More than 100 ended with the words, "Plaintiff be liberated and entirely set free from the defendant." Slaves based their claims on four grounds: they were Native Americans, previously had been free, had lived in free territory, or had a free mother. VanderVelde selects a dozen lawsuits from across this period for close examination; each opens a window on a closed world of oppression-and defiance. Here, for example, is the saga of Moses Shipman; freed by Revolutionary War veteran David Shipman, he fled from Kentucky to Illinois in the 1820s, was kidnapped with his family, and dragged back to St. Louis. Here, too, is the story of Leah Charleville, a wily survivor living in a shadowy world of illegality, playing off two free black men as her lovers and hosting a ring of thieves at her boarding house. Savvy in the ways of the law, she went to court four times, securing freedom for herself and her children.

With deep appreciation for the courage required for a slave to challenge a master in court, VanderVelde reshapes our understanding of border-state slavery and the impact of the seemingly powerless on American law. 

 

Oops. Wrong Hook For His Lede.

That's got to be how Glenn Reynolds is feeling.  He opens his pro-gun USA Today editorial with this:

After a shooting spree," author William Burroughs once said, "they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." Burroughs continued: "I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

Burroughs shot and killed his 28 year old wife, Joan.  He was convicted of manslaughter and there are good reaons to think that when he shot his wife, he was  drunk and/or playing a William Tell game, attempting to shoot a glass of gin off the top of her head.  

For a different law professor's view on guns,  my colleague Lisa McElroy offers this.  

H/T to a far less delicate Brian Leiter.   

The 150th Anniversary of General Orders 11

One hundred fifty years ago today, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued the following order:

1. The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department [of the Tennessee] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
2. Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters.
3. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.

President Lincoln soon overturned the order, but General Orders 11, as it is known, dogged Grant through the rest of his career, and long thereafter.  As a kid growing up in New Jersey in the 60s and 70s, I heard many people (including my dad)  mutter nasty things about Ulysses S. Grant -- that he was a drunkard, a fool, and an anti-semite.  I never heard about the basis of the antisemitism charge, though.  Turns out it was General Orders 11.

Just this morning (appropriately!), I finished Jonathan Sarna's new little book When General Grant Expelled the Jews.  It places the order expelling the Jews in the context not only of the war but of Grant's larger career, which turned out to be a trajectory towards commitment to human rights.  Grant's sorrow over General Orders 11 was part of the engine of that, and it led him to champion Jewish causes both at home and abroad in ways I never knew about.

It's a good, quick read.  Check it out.

Dean Parham Williams Makes It Four

Lincoln Memorial University has named Parham Williams its new Interim Dean of the law school.   LMU is making another run at ABA accreditation after the ABA rejected  its application last year.  It is bringing in Williams to serve as interim dean for the next year, guiding them through the accreditation application process.  Sydney Beckman recently stepped down as LMU's law dean.  

My co-blogger Tim Zinnecker noted, a couple of years back, that Williams was one of only a small cohort of academics who have served as dean at three or more law schools.  (He was law dean at Chapman, Mississippi and Samford.)  Now Williams joins the four-or-more club, along with Nell Newton at Notre Dame and Tom Read (who leads with five different deaning gigs.)  

Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History ... coming soon

I'm delighted to report that Sally Hadden and Patricia Minter's co-edited volume, Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History will be coming out from University of Georgia Press soon.  Cribbing now from the UGA Press website for the book:

In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's pathbreaking 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.

Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.

The contributors are Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden, and me.

It will not surprise faculty lounge readers that I'm very much looking forward to this volume.  My essay asks that intellectual historians of the pre-Civil War South more fully integrate lawyers and judges into their story.  In particular I argue that because the law (in this case treatises and appellate decisions) was closely linked to economic and demographic reality that legal thinkers show how people who truck in ideas were closely related to their society, rather than distinct from it.  This is a point of substantial contention among historians of southern intellectual history.  Though my dataset in this chapter is largely drawn from appellate cases, I develop some of these themes about how lawyers and judges reflected the ideas of their era in a recent article on addresses by judges and lawyers here at UNC before the Civil War.  (And in an earlier essay on addresses at the University of Alabama before the war.)

I must add that I suggested they use a picture of Blackhead Signpost Road in Southampton as the cover art.  I thought it fit so perfectly with the legal history of the South -- the road, after all, gets its name from the slave who was executed there and whose head was left on a post as a warning to others.  Wow. About this I will have a lot -- lot -- more to say in the spring when I start talking about the Nat Turner rebellion trials.  Obviously wiser (or maybe it's calmer) heads prevailed in this case.