The Faculty Lounge

ALI Elects 41 New Members

The American Law Institute has announced (here) the election of 41 new members, including these professors:

• Lara Bazelon, University of San Francisco School of Law
• Jennifer Gerarda Brown, Quinnipiac University School of Law
• Eric Charles Chaffee, University of Toledo College of Law
• Elizabeth Chambliss, University of South Carolina School of Law
• Sarah Rudolph Cole, Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law
• Meera E. Deo, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
• Christopher S. Elmendorf, UC Davis School of Law
• Paul A. Gowder, Jr., Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
• Hillary M. Hoffmann, Vermont Law School
• E. Lea Johnston, University of Florida, Levin College of Law
• Andrew W. Jurs, Drake University Law School
• Cathy Lesser Mansfield, Case Western Reserve University School of Law
• John A. E. Pottow, University of Michigan Law School
• Darren Rosenblum, Pace University, Elisabeth Haub School of Law
• Ben Trachtenberg, University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law
• Bret Wells, University of Houston Law Center
• W. Bradley Wendel, Cornell Law School

Congratulations to all!

I Don't See How I Can Pass This Up

The only drawback to this amazing offer, which recently arrived in my inbox, is that I would first have to write a book about "Self-Help and Shamanism." But how hard could that be?

Hello,

I hope this email finds you well today!

I am J***  of *** Publishing, the company who received this great recommendation from our partner vendor Amazon of your book “Wow! Scammed or Not Scammed!”. They were both found and got evaluated by our Senior book critics, and they are now part of the top 15 books in the Self-Help and Shamanism categories of books that we will represent at the London Book International Book Fair 2021.

Your books were carefully selected to be showcased at this international event as we are positive that these books are educational and informational. The event is expected to have attendees from all over the world, and they are university students and professors, school librarians, bookstore owners, traditional publishers, and etc. The event will take place in London, United Kingdom for three days from June 29th through July 1st, 2021.

Your presence is not necessary as we will send out a team of book representatives who will be able to effectively represent your books. They can answer questions from your readers, talk to them about your books’ contents, your inspiration of writing them, and most especially, advise readers where to find your book for purchases.

Aside from that, we will create extensive marketing materials for you and your books. They will include bookmarks, flyers, business cards, postcards, and etc. Your books’ information will be on these materials so readers can get back to you whenever they like to send in their feedback about you and your book. They will also see all links to your book for purchases.

A week after the event, you will receive photo documentation as a report. A photo of your books along with our book representatives, and statistical reports as to what transpired during this event.

The investment is $1,599 which you can break into TWO payable installments.  

What could possibly go wrong?

I Shall Be Released

Michael Kaufman Named New Dean of Santa Clara Law

Santa Clara University has announced that Dean Michael Kaufman of Loyola- Chicago Law will be moving out west.  He will become the dean of Santa Clara Law on July 1.  Kaufman has been dean at Loyola since 2016.  He holds a JD from the University of Michigan.

Call for Papers: Journal of Regulatory Compliance

From an email message that I received earlier this week:

Journal of Regulatory Compliance - Call for Papers

As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the legal community has ramped up efforts to identify challenges and manage risks. In recognition of the employment implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Journal of Regulatory Compliance invites original submissions for publication in our Spring 2021 issue. 

The official Journal of Regulatory Compliance is a bi-annual digital publication exploring broad themes and challenges facing regulatory compliance from a wide-range of perspectives. The journal seeks to advance academic dialogue on managing regulatory risk in a commercial enterprise, the experience of the regulated actor, and analysis of regulations in the context of organized efforts to comply with law.  

The Spring 2021 edition is seeking articles about developments in the regulatory landscape during the COVID-19 Pandemic. We seek manuscripts of broad interest covering policy, regulation, and risk management. These topic areas may include but are not limited to: 

Workplace Safety 

• OSHA guidance and compliance  
• State and local orders and guidance  

New Employers’ Obligations  

• Families First Coronavirus Response Act 
• Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act 
• Emergency Family and Medical Leave Expansion Act  
• CARES Act 

Remote Workforce Issues 

• Department of Labor guidance for remote work compliance  
• Accommodating high-risk workers 
• Remote workers’ expense reimbursement, wages and hours, and tax issues 
• Reductions in force, furloughs, and other cost-saving measures 
• Unemployment insurance flexibilities

Submission Guideline: For interested participants, please send a 400 – 500 word abstract via email to yli45@luc.edu with subject line JRC Spring 2021 Submission. The deadline for abstract submission is Sunday, January 3, 2021. JRC will notify those who submit abstracts whether their proposal has been accepted for publication within two weeks of receipt of submission. Full article will run 7,000 – 10,000 words. The deadline for article submission is Monday, February 1, 2021. We welcome submissions from professional disciplines other than law and encourage submissions from authors whose voices are traditionally underrepresented in legal scholarship. 

Questions: Please email any questions to Publication Editor Yunge Li at yli45@luc.edu. 

CFP ASAP: Junior Scholars, Grad Students for ClassCrits

This just in:

ClassCrits is pleased to announce this call for papers for its Online Junior Scholar Workshop, to be held virtually via Zoom on Friday, January 22, 2021 from 5 p.m.-6:30 p.m. EST.

Junior scholars (i.e., graduate students, aspiring faculty members, or faculty members with less than two years of experience in a full-time position) may submit work-in-progress (WIP) papers that have not already been accepted for publication for presentation and discussion at the workshop. A senior scholar as well as other scholars will comment upon each work in progress in a small, supportive working session. We currently anticipate selecting a total of eight WIP papers on a first-come, first-served basis.

We invite WIP paper presentations from any field or discipline that, in one way or the other, speak to general ClassCrits themes, including:

The legal and cultural project of constructing inequalities of all kinds as natural, normal, and necessary.
The exploration of power in all of its manifestations (race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, global inequality, etc.) and the relationship of law to power.
Challenging the assumptions, methods, omissions, and commitments of legal and economic thinking to emphasize the role of institutions, morality, politics, and social or historical context in shaping power relations.
The relationships among economic, racial, and gender inequality.
The development of new methods (including the interdisciplinary study and development of such methods) with which to analyze and criticize economics and law (beyond traditional “law and economics”).
The relationship between material systems and institutions and cultural systems and institutions.
The concept and reality of class within the international legal community, within international development studies and welfare strategies, and within a “flattening” world of globalized economics and geopolitical relations.

For more information on ClassCrits, please visit www.classcrits.org. For any questions regarding the workshop, feel free to email the workshop organizers, Danni Hart, Southwestern Law School (dhart@swlaw.edu), and René Reich-Graefe, Western New England University School of Law (rene.reich-graefe@law.wne.edu).

Proposal Submission Procedure and Deadline

Please submit a completed draft of your WIP paper by email to classcrits@classcrits.org no later than December 28, 2020, together with the following details:

Completed draft of the WIP paper, including a title and short abstract, author’s name, contact information, institutional affiliation (if any), and short author bio (1-3 sentences, also identifying current status as junior scholar in accordance with the eligibility criteria set forth above).
WIP paper authors invited to present at the workshop will be notified by December 30, 2020.

The "Disappearing" of Joseph Epstein

Many readers are no doubt aware of the obnoxious Wall Street Journal oped that Joseph Epstein wrote about Jill Biden. You may not know that Epstein's name was then scrubbed from the English Department's website at Northwestern. Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education, my colleague Andy Koppelman explain why the English Department's retaliation violated academic freedom. Here is the gist:

That Op-Ed About Jill Biden Is Awful. Northwestern’s Response Might Be Worse.

No, it’s not OK to scrub an emeritus faculty member from a university website.

Last week the essayist Joseph Epstein provoked an uproar by writing a silly Wall Street Journal piece saying that Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education — formally, an Ed.D. — should stop using the honorific “Dr.” The essay was rude and condescending to the next first lady, referring to her as “kiddo” and calling her dissertation “unpromising.”

But what happened next is also “unpromising.” Northwestern University’s English department’s website published a poorly composed denunciation, obviously intended to retaliate for Epstein’s loutish opinion. A spokesman for the university saw fit to announce that “while we firmly support academic freedom and freedom of expression, we do not agree with Mr. Epstein’s opinion.” Most alarmingly, Epstein’s name abruptly disappeared from the department’s website. Epstein was a visiting lecturer at Northwestern from 1974 to 2002, and as late as last week he was listed on the department website as an “emeritus lecturer.”

As current law-school faculty members at Northwestern, specializing in constitutional law (Koppelman) and professional responsibility (Lubet), we believe that it is a serious violation of academic freedom to penalize a faculty member, including an emeritus one, for expressing unpopular views.

You can read the entire piece here, paywalled but with free registration.

Super Heroes Battle the Coronavirus

In 1960:

 

Mary Davis Named Dean of Kentucky Law

The University of Kentucky has announced that Mary Davis will be the dean of its law school.  Davis has been serving as the school's interim dean.  Davis, who holds a JD from Wake Forest Law, will transition to the permanent position on January 1.

How Lawyers (Ought to) Think

I have lately been doing some work on cognition errors, prompted by a rereading of Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think (2007). That put me in mind of a chapter I wrote for my own book, The Importance of Being Honest (2008). It is posted on SSRN, but I figure that enough time has passed for me also to post it here.

HOW LAWYERS (OUGHT TO) THINK

Shortly after 7 o’clock on the morning of April 16, 2007, campus police at Virginia Tech University received word of a shooting in the West Ambler Johnson dormitory. Arriving at the scene, officers found that a resident advisor named Ryan Christopher Clark had been killed, and a freshman named Emily Jane Hilscher had been fatally wounded. The police immediately “locked down” the dormitory, but neither they nor the university administrators took additional steps to secure the campus. Classes were not canceled, no perimeter was set up, and students were not notified of the shooting (or warned to stay home) for almost two hours. Even the lockdown at West Ambler Johnson was apparently lifted within about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, a 23 year old student named Seung-Hui Cho was reloading his weapons and mailing a chilling videotape to NBC News. At about 9:30, Cho entered Norris Hall, a large classroom building, armed with two semi-automatic handguns and 17 magazines of ammunition. He began shooting, murdering 32 people, and wounding another 28, before he committed suicide.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the campus authorities made an awful mistake. Knowing that a killer was on the loose, they failed to take relatively simple precautions that almost certainly would have limited the carnage. Cho would have found many fewer victims if only Norris Hall hadn’t been so full of students and teachers, yet university administrators allowed classes to convene as though nothing had happened in the Ambler Johnson dorm.

Tragically, however, the investigation followed a blind lead, causing the Virginia Tech leadership team to believe that no one else was in immediate danger. In fact, the police initially turned their attention away from campus, tracking down an innocent man, while Cho continued to make his deadly preparations. Among the first potential witnesses questioned was Hilscher’s roommate, Heather Haugh. She told the police officers that Emily had spent the weekend with her boyfriend Karl, a student at nearby Radford University who lived in off-campus apartment, and that he presumably had brought her back to the dormitory earlier that morning. Although the police knew nothing else about Karl (whose last name I am omitting for obvious reasons), that immediately made him a “person of interest.” Further questioning revealed that Karl was an avid gun owner and had recently taken Emily to a shooting range That that was enough to turn him into the prime, indeed exclusive, suspect. Despite Haugh’s insistence that Karl was not a violent person, the police went racing off to find him – they later stopped his car and searched his home for a murder weapon – leaving the campus essentially unguarded and the unfortunate students uninformed.

How could experienced detectives make such a fatal misjudgment? Far from being irresponsible or negligent, they were in fact pursuing established investigative procedures. Sadly but not inexplicably, their training and instincts took them in precisely the wrong direction because they succumbed to a series of well-documented “cognition errors.”

"Erring Sisters, Go in Peace"

Horace Greeley, 1861.

Republican Party of Texas, 2020:

 

Route 66

Route 66 was opened in 1926 as part of the original U.S. highway system. Connecting Chicago to Los Angeles via Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, it was known as the Will Rogers Highway and America's Main Street. It was eventually replaced by the Interstate Highway System -- mostly I 55 and I 40 -- and ultimately decommissioned in the 1980s. While it was in service, Route 66 was both romantic and poignant, as it was traveled by pleasure seekers, vagabonds, and dust bowl refugees.

The delights of Route 66 were immortalized in a 1946 song "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," first recorded by Nat King Cole. I hitch-hiked along a portion of Route 66 in November, 1966, but I never told my parents. Musical paean aside, they would have been appalled at the risky behavior of a 17 year old would-be hippy.