The Faculty Lounge

To Love Somebody

"To Love Somebody" was the Bee Gees second single, written by Barry and Robin Gibb and released in 1967. Barry once told Piers Morgan that it was his favorite of the songs they'd written because it has "a clear, emotional message." I first heard it by Janis Joplin in 1969. Not being a Bee Gees fan, I had no idea that they'd written and recorded it first. (Don't miss the anagramic guest star at the bottom of this post.)

Georgia State Law Seeks Community Development/Entrepreneurship Clinic Faculty

This just in:

Georgia State University’s College of Law seeks highly qualified applicants for a full­time clinical faculty position to serve as Co-Director of a new Community Development and Entrepreneurship Law Clinic (“CDELC”) to be launched in the Fall of 2023. The CDELC will provide legal assistance to cooperative institutions, entrepreneurs, and grassroots coalitions organizing to build economies and communities rooted in solidarity in Atlanta, including efforts affiliated with Georgia State University. Clients will receive transactional law services, such as entity counseling and formation, contract drafting/negotiating (e.g., service contracts, financing agreements, commercial leases), limited labor law advice, limited intellectual property, and limited tax law advice, among others. In addition, employing a movement lawyering framework, the CDELC may provide research, policy analysis, advocacy, and popular community education to grassroots organizations and campaigns in Atlanta, building collective economic power.

Appointment could begin as early as Summer 2023. The position is a non-tenure track twelve-month clinical faculty appointment, with faculty status, a renewable contract, and job security commensurate with tenured faculty. Clinical faculty have voting rights and serve on faculty committees at the College of Law. Clinical faculty also teach non-clinic courses consistent with their expertise and interests.

 

Ethics & Legal Studies Doctoral Program at Wharton

The Ethics & Legal Studies Doctoral Program at Wharton invites applications for a course of study that would begin in Fall 2023. The program focuses on the study of ethics and law in business. It is designed to prepare graduates for academic careers at leading business schools, law schools, and other programs. 

  

Our curriculum crosses many disciplinary boundaries and offers flexibility in course offerings and research topics. Students take a core set of courses in ethics and law in business, along with courses in an additional disciplinary concentration. Students may take courses in other Penn departments and pursue joint degrees.  

  

We encourage applicants who already possess a JD, LLM, or other non-doctoral advanced degree. 

 

Learn about the broad range of our faculty’s scholarly interests here: https://lgst.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/faculty-list/ 

 

Learn about the program requirements here: 

https://doctoral.wharton.upenn.edu/ethics-legal-studies/ 

 

  

Application Information 

One may apply online for the Ethics & Legal Studies Doctoral Program by going to: https://doctoral.wharton.upenn.edu/. The application deadline is December 15th. Strong GRE or GMAT scores are required; GRE scores are preferred. The last possible test date for the GRE and GMAT is December 15th. Official results must be available by mid-January. 

  

Contact & Resources:  

Professor Amy Sepinwall, Faculty Coordinator
sepin@wharton.upenn.edu 

Tamara English, Department Administrator 

englisht@wharton.upenn.edu 

 

Kathleen Boozang Stepping Down as Dean of Seton Hall Law

Kathleen Boozang, who has served as dean of Seton Hall School of Law since 2015, will step down on January 1, 2023 and will return to the faculty.  Professor John Kip Cornwell will serve as interim dean while the university conducts a search for its next dean. 

 

 

Long-Form Essay on Judge Ho's Unethical Boycott

I have a long-form essay  in The Daily Beast about the unethical judicial boycott of Yale Law School (written before Yale announced that it would no longer cooperate with the U.S. New rankings).

Here is the gist:

Yale Law School Needs to Stand Up to This Bullying Judge

 Nov. 19, 2022 

This is a story about a confrontation between a prominent federal judge and the nation’s top-ranked law school. Neither comes away looking very good.

The judge has unethically attempted to bully the school into tightening its control over student protests in conformity with his own policy views, and the law school meekly moved to placate the judge, without objecting to (or even mentioning) his blatant abuse of judicial power.

Far from resisting the boycott, or even criticizing the violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct, Gerken rewarded Ho and Branch with an invitation to speak at the law school, implicitly committing to keep student protests at a level acceptable to the judges.

There is little reason to think that Gerken or other faculty members will address the looming ethics issue, but it might well arise if the judges agree to take questions from students. If so, it is likely that Ho will resort to an argument that he raised in the published version of his Federalist Society lecture.

“Suppose a law school discriminates on the basis of race,” he posited. “Could a judge publicly refuse to hire from that school, in hopes of spurring a change? Surely a judge could do so.” The analogy seems compelling, but it is ultimately misplaced. The Code of Judicial Conduct does not make exceptions for honorable intentions, and it is easy to understand why.

Ho’s comparator to promoting non-discrimination is “freedom of speech,” but other judges might have different priorities. Under Ho’s theory, a judge could ethically boycott clerks from Liberty University to coerce a change in its policy of punishing students who engage in “sexual relations outside of a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman.” Likewise, a judge could refuse to hire clerks from Brigham Young University until the Mormon school agrees to serve alcohol. As conservative judges are fond of complaining about liberal initiatives, there is no limiting principle.

Someone among the deans and faculty at Yale must surely understand that federal court clerkships were designed to help judges decide cases, not for use as collateral in the culture wars. The administration’s inexplicable silence, however, confers legitimacy on Ho and Branch’s unethical boycott.

You can read the entire essay at The Daily Beast.

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy

"Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" was written by Don Raye and Hughie Prince in 1941, and first performed by the Andrews Sisters in the Abbott and Costello film Buck Privates. Their recording reached number six on the pop charts the same year. It was nominated for an Academy Award, but did not win. "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" has been covered numerous times, usually by female trios, and mostly with arrangements similar to the Andrews Sisters', if not outright imitations right down to the uniforms. Possible inspirations for the trumpeter have included Clarence Zylman (1906-88) and Harry Gish (1922-2005), both of whom had played "out Chicago way." Of course, there needn't have been a single inspiration for the song.

The sisters' other hits, though none as closely associated with them as "Bugle Boy," included "Beer Barrel Polka (Roll Out the Barrel)," "Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar," "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me),” "Rum and Coca Cola," and  "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön (Means That You're Grand).” It might seem odd that the Minnesota-born, Greek-Norwegian Andrews Sisters popularized a song originally written in Yiddish, but the lyrics were translated for them by Sammy Cahn and the arrangement was by the appropriately named Vic Schoen, a couple of Jewish guys from New York.

Don't miss the Patty Andrews solo at the bottom of the post.

In Memoriam: Mitchell Engler

In very sad news, Mitch Engler, Professor at Cardozo  Law, passed away on November 4.  He served on the Cardozo Law faculty for 23 years.  Engler was 58.

 

 

 

Don’t Be Late

This is the sixth guest post by Steven Epstein from his book, Extreme Punishment:  The Chilling True Story of Acclaimed Law Professor Dan Markel’s Murder.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 8, Ivory Tower:

Law professors typically employ the Socratic method to impart their wisdom in the classroom, rather than the lecture style that predominates in undergraduate education.  Students are called on randomly—drafted without their consent—and are asked a series of questions about the assigned reading.  “Mr. Jones,” the questioning might begin, snapping the unfortunate soul in the back row to attention in an instant.  “Why did the court consider the gun the fruit of the poisonous tree?”

The initial question is nearly always followed by progressively more difficult ones even seasoned attorneys would struggle to answer.  The professor will often toss hypotheticals into the questions designed to flesh out how malleable legal principles are to different factual scenarios, the student on the hot seat merely a prop to illustrate the law in action.  For brand new law students, being on the receiving end of a professor’s rapid-fire interrogation can seem intimidating, even fear-inducing.  That was especially true when the intense gaze of Professor Dan Markel was locked on a 1L who wasn’t thoroughly prepared.

Dan desperately wanted his students to succeed, but expected their complete buy-in in their own education.  Which left him bitterly disappointed when they showed up late or unprepared, or when he detected them surfing the internet on their laptops or texting instead of focusing on him.  On occasion he’d lock the classroom doors the moment class began; when he didn’t, he’d berate students who sauntered into the classroom a few minutes late, instructing those who arrived even later to leave.  Because he was such a stickler for punctuality, it wasn’t uncommon to see students racing through the hallways to make it to his class on time.

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: Mary Anne Case on A Post-Dobbs Right to F*$#

In today’s episode, UVA Law 3Ls Reidar Composano and Bryan Blaylock join me to continue our discussion with University of Chicago Law professor, Mary Anne Case, about her forthcoming paper, Donorsexuality. The f-bomb is dropped (but for reasons relevant to the paper) and I emphasize (again) that all this Con Law talk is not welcome on my podcast. No one listens to me. 

 

 

Case litigated for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and was professor of law and Class of 1966 Research Professor at the University of Virginia before joining the Chicago Law School faculty. Her scholarship has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and family; and the early history of feminism.

Mary Anne Case faculty bio: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/case

 

SCOTUS Made Reasonable Gun Control Almost Impossible

My new column is posted at The Hill, explaining the disastrous consequences of the Supreme Court’s recent Bruen decision. As three lower courts recently discovered, it makes reasonable gun control almost impossible.

Here is the gist:

The Hill

The Supreme Court’s bad history

by Steven Lubet, Opinion Contributor - 11/16/22

According to Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion, a gun control statute can be upheld only if there is an “American tradition justifying” its specific provisions, meaning similar laws in force around 1791 (when the Second Amendment was adopted) or 1868 (when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, which made the Bill of Rights applicable to the states).

It is unsurprising that poor history leads to unmanageable law. Three lower court judges recently discovered that the Bruen standard is almost impossible to apply reasonably to contemporary circumstances.

District Judge Joseph Goodwin, sitting in West Virginia, determined that he could not enforce the federal criminal law against knowing possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number, despite “the usefulness of serial numbers in solving gun crimes.”

Mississippi District Judge Carlton Reeves faced a similar problem in a prosecution under “the federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms.”

Even domestic abusers get a pass under Bruen, as Texas District Court Judge David Counts ruled in U.S. v. Perez-Gallan. With “historical analysis being the only tool” permitted, Counts determined that the Second Amendment required him to dismiss charges against a gun-carrying defendant who was under a restraining order for “threatening . . . domestic violence.”

Under Bruen, a silent historical record disables the courts and law enforcement from protecting the population from mayhem. Ghost guns, armed felons and domestic abusers may be shielded by the Constitution in ways that vulnerable school children are not.

Many observers have characterized Thomas’s approach as cherry picking, but that is too generous. Cherry picking, after all, at least yields something worth having. Bruen’s holding, on the other hand, just leaves a dangerous mess.

You can read the entire essay at The Hill.