The Faculty Lounge

Truly Useful Law School Courses

As a faculty advisor, one of my jobs is to approve the courses my first-years plan to take next fall. Law students are fairly conservative and risk-averse in their choices, so usually I see the standard set of courses:  Evidence, Bus. Org., Crim Pro, Admin, and the like.  But the fabulous E. Noakes of McSweeney's has provided a list of *truly* useful courses that law schools should offer:

Classes My Top-Tier Law School Should Have Offered As Warnings About The Profession

Cutting and Pasting Legal Lingo

Explaining Business Associations to the People Who Are Running Them

4 A.M. Word Processing and the Law

Ethics of Conspicuous Consumption

Forwarding E-mails: Theory and Practice: Seminar

Arbitrary-Deadline Negotiation Strategies

Crying Quietly: Clinic

Jeans-Friday Advocacy Workshop

Cutting and Pasting II: Plural to Singular

************

I'd like to add a few of my own:

Document Production:  Theory and Practice

Windowless Document Warehouses--Practicum

and for the public-interest minded:

Finance and the Law:  When Salary Doesn't Even Cover Loan Repayment

Cross-posted at Prawfsblawg.

A Gift For The Husband Who Has Everything: Daily Sex (For A Year)

Like Kathy, I like to troll newspapers from around the country and find out what's news.  Normally, I focus on things related to law.  But sometimes you can't ignore a great story - even when there really is no legal angle.  So look what I found in the Charlotte Observer: Charla Muller, a Charlotte "wife, mother and public relations professional"  wanted to give her husband a 40th birthday present "so fabulous, over the top, something so special 'that my husband would never have to pause and say, What did Charla give me for my 40th birthday?'” 

Naturally, she gave him 365 consecutive nights of sex (give or a take a few.)   She was nervous about the gift.  According to the Observer, Muller wondered: "if this gift could turn into 'a mistake that ranked up there with my mustache-bleaching incident.'"   

And Brad, the husband, apparently wasn't so hot on the idea at first.  Ultimately, they decided to try it. (Perhaps he was worried about the time commitment.  Never fear: the ever-frugal Charla explains that "quickies often are preferred if you’re doing this daily.”)  Like any good public relations professional,  Muller then spun the tale into a book  - 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy (out this summer from Berkley Books and only temporarily ranked around 416,000th on Amazon).

How did the present work out?   I suppose the Mullers' picture is worth a thousand words. My money says this woman is soon going to be all over the TV talk show circuit.  Sometimes she'll be the featured guest; other times she'll just be part of the opening monologue. 

Brad will never forget Charla's magical birthday gift.  And soon, neither will America.

Don't Flush, Get Arrested

Did you know that it is illegal to sell beer in Nebraska unless there is a simultaneous pot of boiling soup on the stove?  Or that  butter substitutes are not allowed in state prisons in  Wisconsin?  (Hm on that one.) Or that men commit a crime when they knit during fishing season in New Jersey?  You probably didn't but that's the point.  I love to cite such odd laws when I teach, and ask students what authority such legal restrictions have.  Most often, enforcement is left up to the officer, leaving a cursing man in Michigan straight to jail/court for using profanity in the proximity of women and children--and also an unsympathetic cop.

Some other good ones:

-Kentucky:  "No female shall     appear in a bathing suit on any highway within this state unless she be escorted by at     least two officers or unless she be armed with a club".

Nebraska: The owner of every hotel in Hastings, Nebraska, must provide each     guest with a clean and pressed nightshirt. No couple, regardless of marital status, may sleep     together in the nude. Nor may they have sex unless they are wearing the special nightshirts.

A collection of these laws, state-by state, can be found here.

Penn To Build Faculty Prison

In light of the high conviction rate among Penn faculty (including neurosurgery professor Tracy McIntosh and marketing prof Scott Ward), the University has decided to build a new prison for its faculty criminals. 

"This is a great opportunity to have the best and brightest minds of the federal and state correctional systems right here on campus," said Penn President Amy Gutmann. "It will be an exciting, interdisciplinary, high-security facility where inmates and visitors alike can create knowledge."

Or so says the joke issue of today's Daily Pennsylvanian.

Image: panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham.

There Is Hope In Research And Praxis

  At least that proved true for Brian Donovan.  Sociologist of law, author of  White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917, enabler of NCAA basketball champions, and now producer of what is probably the first, and surely one of the best, albeit the too-longest, but nonetheless most theory-basedest, YouTube tenure celebration video ever.  It's here. 

H/T Paul Secunda (who deserves general kudos for helping with all my aggregation projects) and Belle (who deserves general kudos for creating the first academic law blog that I read just cuz I liked it.) 

Just Desserts, And Tasty Too

Drexel students held their first public interest auction last week.  These events are always a fun part of the law school experience but the first time was particularly special.    (As a new law school, we have a lot of first-times.)    The Drexel Law exuberance, which faculty have come to love and dread, was on full display. In this clip, two students provide just desserts to my colleague Barry Furrow and me.  The pie was delicious and I revelled in the sweet creamy fragrance for several days. (This is the risk of owning and operating a beard.)  Barry and I must have generated some student hostility in our first 20 months - these pastry deliveries raised a ton of money!  Beware a slightly raucous soundtrack.  Not suitable for hospital waiting rooms or cell-free cars on Amtrak.

We're Not in Kansas Anymore . . .

The Tennessee Chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster received permission to erect a statue of "His Noodly Appendage" on the grounds of a local courthouse.  Not familiar with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?  Check out the website here. 

Its actually a great teaching tool for those who teach First Amendment - and its good for a few laughs!

More on the statue from C-Net News.

-Kathleen A. Bergin

cross-post First Amendment Law Prof Blog

The Russian Army Sings A Love Song To Alabama

Call me hyperbolic, but it simply does not get much better than this.  Watch the Red Army Choir (alongside Finnish rockers The Leningrad Cowboys) express their heartfelt love for the State of Alabama.   I've always thought that folks like Jeff Sessions and Troy King have a lot more in common with Vladmir "look in my eye and sense my soul" Putin than people recognize.  It's that old horseshoe theory of politics: at some point, the right and the left converge.  And what better place to come together than in concert (sans Neil Young, to be sure...)   H/T to To The Point.

Lawyers, Hookers, and Parasites

From the NY Times article on the Mayflower Hotel (Washington, DC), describing the historic hotel most recently known as Eliot & Kristen's place:

Perhaps, but scandal’s brush occasionally touches many businesses serving the city’s power elite.     One Carter administration hand who has prospered here pointed out that the number of lobbyists had skyrocketed to 35,000 from perhaps 3,000 when he arrived.

“All of the parasitic industries — lobbyists, political consultants, lawyers and hookers — have gotten bigger and more sophisticated,” he said, though his matter-of-factness was belied by his reluctance to be named in print. “It makes the city more interesting.”

The article can be found here.

Graffiti As A Gateway Crime

Call it a blogger confessional.   I know that I haven't been putting up hugely substantive posts of late.  Those entries take more time and concentration than I can currently muster - in part because I am teaching my entire year's teaching load during one intense 9 week quarter.  But that doesn't mean I don't have fleeting thoughts I'd like to share...or interesting links that I' ve discovered during the 60 minute decompression period between classes.  This morning I had a good laugh watching this clip from the Colbert Report - a gotcha segment on a 6 year old girl who is headed down the wrong path.