The Faculty Lounge

Advice I Wouldn't Give Most Law Students

The WSJ  had an interesting essay by Nathan Koppel the other day about whether folks should hide from this dreadful economy by attending law school.  The author's verdict: maybe.  (And this suggests that - at the last minute - lots of folks are taking cover.)  Koppel recommends that applicants should shoot for an elite school.  But he notes that graduates of almost any law school can have great recruiting experiences, if they work hard and do very well in class.  All of this seems right to me.  In the midst of  his very sensible ideas,  he adds this tip for students looking to be strategic in their law school experience:

Once in school, law students should take classes in legal specialties that are poised for growth, such as intellectual-property law and international arbitration, which often is used to resolve cross-border business disputes.

I've got nothing against taking international law courses, and I certainly recognize they're in vogue, but is it correct that these areas of practice are about to explode - creating tons of law jobs?    And I fear that the jobs that do develop will mostly go to the folks who would to score the $160K job in New York anyway.   But for the strategic student, the one who might not have the elite school or sterling transcript to land a top firm job but seeks a market edge...would you tell him or her to pursue international arbitration?  Maybe, if they're fluent in German or Chinese.   Otherwise: figure out how to win in litigation, write a will, or start a business.    Medical malpractice, real estate transactions, complex litigation, trusts and estates, bus orgs, crim pro - now there's some useful stuff! 

And hold off on converting to Euros.  You're probably going to be spending most of your time in Kansas City and Houston, rather than Munich or Bruges... 

Lateral Hiring List Updated. And Links To Old Entry Hiring Lists To Boot!

We're sweating towards the finish line in hiring this year, and we've again updated the 2009 lateral move list here.   

Wondering what happened last year?  That list is here. 

Suffering from serious procrastination?  Set yourself up for minutes, or even hours, of "what ever happened to..." by looking at Larry Solum's old entry level hiring lists from 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

John Hope Franklin (1915-2009)

It is with great sadness that I heard the news today that my hero John Hope Franklin has passed away.  His life began in Jim Crow Oklahoma and stretched far and wide--to Harvard, the University of Chicago, Duke, and the President's Commission on Race.  Along the way he wrote some of the most influential and important historical scholarship of the twentieth century.  (His best-known work is From Slavery to Freedom; I think legal academics will really enjoy My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, which gives a great picture of Franklin's father's law practice in Oklahoma in the early years of the twentieth century.)

Dr. Franklin was one of the tireless fighters for the victims of the Tulsa riot of 1921 in their decades-long search to have that riot remembered and to have some form of compensation.  Amidst all the tributes that will certainly come, I hope that we recall what a humane and caring man he was--and that he was a catalyst to the changes in the twentieth century, as way a chronicler of them.

The President's Schedule of Commencement Addresses

President Obama is scheduled to deliver commencement addresses at Arizona State, Notre Dame, and the U.S. Naval Academy.  Guess which one has stirred up some protests.

Story here.

Law Review Dreaming

After reading Tim Z's post, I just had to write my own - as a colleague dared me to share this (although to be precise, he dared me to write it in the form of a law review article rather than a blog post).

Like Tim, I too, had several articles out for review this season.  A few weeks ago, I had a dream nightmare that I became deathly ill in the middle of the submission season and was unable to continue expediting my pieces.  In the dream, I asked a colleague (the one who dared encouraged me to write this) if he would take over the expediting process for me.  He kindly did so and placed both pieces, but he couldn't remember where he had placed them and couldn't find any record of his communications with the journals.  He knew the articles were going to be published in the fall, but the doctors said I wouldn't make it that long.  So I was left knowing that I was going to die without ever finding out if I had finally cracked the Top 10.  Needless to say, I didn't crack the top 10 on this occasion, but I would like to thank the articles editors at both journals I placed with (they know who they are) for the truly thoughtful reviews of my work, particularly the editors who did a quick read over their spring break when they should have been otherwise enjoying themselves.  I have had plenty of those crazy rejection letters myself - my record this time was about 18 hours - but I do want to shout out to all those editors who have as crazy a time as we do in this ridiculous process.

"After Careful Consideration ..."

Many of us have submitted manuscripts to law journals this month.  I’m looking for good homes for two articles.  (Student editors, call me please!  Yes, my titles refer to the dreaded and oft-loathed UCC Article 9, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that your perusal will induce confusion, anxiety, nausea, or drowsiness.)   Rejection, on the part of both author and journal editors, is part of the process.

But sometimes the rejection leaves me ... speechless.

Case in point:  I submitted a manuscript to numerous journals via Expresso on Monday at approximately 11:40 a.m.  At 1:34 p.m. (less than two hours later), I received an electronic message from the ____________ Law Review (name withheld, but the men's basketball team lost a second-round tournament game), informing me that “[a]fter careful consideration," the editors had decided not to publish the article.

Wow!  I haven’t been rejected with such speed since I asked Wendy Featherstone to the senior prom back in the 70’s.  I gotta hand it to this group of student editors, though.  They must be graduates of the EW speed-reading course.  How else would one explain such a swift “careful consideration” of a manuscript that exceeds 60 single-spaced pages?

Can anyone beat the time of my expedited rejection?  Or shall I call the folks at Guinness (these folks, not these folks)?

The Latest on Thomas Ruffin

My colleagues Eric Muller and Sally Greene put together a wonderful symposium on North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin back in November 2007,  "The Perils of Public Homage: Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann in History and Memory."  They also spoke, along with Sandy Levinson, the symposium's keynote speaker, on the npr "The State of Things," about Ruffin.  The short version is that they wanted to reassess what to make of Ruffin and his opinion in State v. Mann, which became a focal point for anti-slavery writers who criticized slave law.  Ruffin freed a man from criminal liability who had abused a slave in his custody.  (The story's very long and is told in detail by Sally, who's done fabulous archival work on the context of the case, particularly before it went on appeal; Eric's recovered a huge amount about Ruffin, too, from his personal papers.  And some other people talk about what to make of Ruffin.)  Sally blogged some about it back then.  The papers from that symposium are about to appear in the North Carolina Law Review.  Some of them are up on ssrn already.

NYU Launches Takeover of Harvard & Yale Law. Schools Seen As "Weak" Under Interim Leadership

In what is seen as the most significant law school news story in several generations, NYU Law School has unexpectedly launched a hostile takeover of Harvard and Yale Law Schools.  For the first time in memory, both of these iconic schools are working under interim deans.  NYU President John Sexton moved aggressively to exploit this vulnerability.  He announced that current Harvard and Yale faculty would each receive a $4 million apartment, or a Purple ticket to the 2012 Obama inauguration, in exchange for swearing permanent allegiance to NYU.  In an effort to maintain the Harvard and Yale brand strength, the schools will remain separate departments at NYU, and will operate independent of NYU Law.  Much like IIT-Chicago Kent, the schools will be called NYU Harvard Law and NYU Yale Law.  NYU Law will be known as NYU NYU Law.  All three law schools will be housed in Olin Hall, a 105 story building to be constructed at 119 MacDougal Street, the current site of Mamoun's Falafel. 

Although he has not been formally named to the post, current Louisville Dean Jim Chen is expected to be named director of the three law school operation.  In addition to his work building up the Louis Brandeis brand, and demanding top quality work from even the most slothful faculty, Chen is famous for sitting two seats to the right of Barack Obama in the official 1990-91 Harvard Law Review photograph. 

A few months ago, such a takeover would have been unimaginable.  Yale Law School was riding high after 92 consecutive years as the #1 Law School in the U.S. News Survey.  And the Harvard Law faculty was basking in the gauzy afterglow of having stolen Cass Sunstein away from Clark University the University of Chicago.  But times changed, and very quickly.  Funded by extraordinary donations by NYU Law, and its alumni, an unknown Senator from Illinois was unexpectedly installed in the White House.  Shortly thereafter, the leaders of Harvard and Yale Law were recalled to the nation's capital.  And after a series of secret meetings between John Sexton, Ricky Revesz, Marty Lipton, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, held at the New York office of the Trilateral Commission, a decision was made to move forward on the acquisition. 

In the short term, the move will bring a great deal of reputational capital to NYU.  Professor Brian Leiter has rejiggered his law school rankings in light of this deal, combining the three highly reputed schools into what he titles The NYU Law Empire.  "These separate names are only a formal distinction", Leiter commented.  "Harvard and Yale Law are dead now.  It's all NYU from here on out."  Other law school experts agreed.  "Chen is only an interim manager, brought in to ferret out the dead wood and combine the units", noted one skeptical Columbia law professor.  "In the end, we all know that Kenji Yoshino will be brought in to run this show.  He's been waiting for years to run a major law school conglomerate.  This pomo stuff...it was just covering."

Legal Scholarship Is Dead. And Richard Posner Is On The Case.

The Georgetown Law Journal's got a nice little debate in its most recent issue, with Pierre Schlag declaring that: "American legal scholarship today is dead—totally dead, deader than at any time in the past thirty years. It is more dead, vastly and exponentially more dead, than critical legal studies was ever dead during its most dead period."  In response, Robin West, Daniel Ortiz, Richard Weisberg, and Richard Posner offer up their own assessment of Schlag and the legal scholarship world at large.  Law bloggers could (and perhaps will) ponder many of the issues surfaced there.  But I want to flag the discussion because...hey, I'd hate for everyone to miss it!

I was particularly intrigued by Posner, who found himself in far more agreement with Schlag than he ever expected.  Pondering the demise of traditional doctrinal scholarship, or perhaps the status accorded such scholars, Posner wrote:

Judicial Elections: Making Merit Matter

Texas is a state that elects its judges, so political affiliation and money can have a significant impact on the outcome.

Wallace Jefferson (pictured), Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, recently said:  "When a judge’s victory is based on party over principle, money over merit, cynicism over the rule of law, voters lose."  He favors "a system for judges that has two primary components.  Judges should achieve office by merit rather than whim, and voters should hold judges accountable, based on their records, through subsequent retention elections."

His remarks are part of this editorial, which appeared in the Houston Chronicle two days ago.

Congratulations to Kate Stith, new Acting Dean of Yale Law School!

As has been reported today in the NYTimes, current Yale Law School dean Harold Koh has been nominated as a legal adviser to the State Department.  Taking his place as Acting Dean is the brilliant Kate Stith, criminal law professor and sentencing guru.  As Rick Levin, the President of Yale, noted:

Professor Stith is a highly respected scholar, teacher, and colleague both at the Law School and in the broader University. ... Professor Stith teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, comparative criminal law, criminal sentencing, federal criminal prosecution, university governance, government ethics, and congressional budget law. The principal author of Fear of Judging: Sentencing Guidelines in the Federal Courts, which was awarded the Certificate of Merit by the American Bar Association, she is a leader in developing the field of sentencing law, which is at the intersection of substantive criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and comparative criminal law.

Her current projects include co-authorship of a textbook on federal criminal law and a textbook on criminal procedure. She is an Advisor to the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code: Sentencing project, and previously served, by appointment of the Chief Justice of the United States, on the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure of the U.S. Judicial Conference. She also serves on the board of advisors of several scholarly journals. In 2008 she completed a term of three years as a Fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center, the last two years on the Center’s Executive Committee. She was appointed by the Governor of Connecticut as a member of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, is a past president of the Connecticut Bar Foundation, and is the faculty sponsor of the non-partisan Women’s Campaign School at Yale. She is a member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations, and served as a Trustee of Dartmouth College for more than a decade.

Kate Stith came to Yale Law School as an Associate Professor of Law in 1985, after having served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where she prosecuted white-collar and organized crime. She previously was on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, a special assistant to the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, and a law clerk to Judge Carl McGowan of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and to Justice Byron R. White of the U.S. Supreme Court. She became Professor of Law in 1991, and the Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law in 1998. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Harvard Law School.

I believe this is the first time Yale Law School has had a woman serve as either Dean or Acting Dean.  It is a move that was long overdue.  Kudos to the Law School and Rick Levin for picking such an accomplished and capable woman for its first female dean!  I hope there will be many more like her.

Changing the Morning Commute?

This car may be just the thing I need to get to work: it doesn't go much above 40 mph, but, hey, there are no roads between my home and school where you're allowed to go above 45.  Just in time to save me from the bus.  I guess the problem here is that it'll push people out of buses and into cars....

Ruthann Robson on Robert Tsai's Eloquence and Reason

Check out Ruthann Robson's review of Robert Tsai's Eloquence and Reason, over at Law and Politics Book Review.  I've been working on an article that examines racialized metaphors in key First Amendment cases, so I'm looking forward to reading Tsai's take on metaphors such as "the marketplace of ideas," and the "wall separating church and state" which, in his view, help legitimize and even popularize foundational constitutional principles.

One misgiving Robson has about the book, however, is the scant reliance on female theorists (Hannah Arendt is apparently one notable exception).  This is unfortunate, not only because it overlooks the contribution of female scholars, but because it denies readers the benefit of their insight. 

And its not like women aren't producing quality work.  Josie Brown, my co-blogger at First Amendment Law Prof Blog, posts a scholarship update every week that includes countless contributions made by super-star women, including Joan Howarth (Dean, Michigan State), Ann Bartow (South Carolina), Helen Norton (Colorado), Elizabeth Glazer (Hofstra), Victoria Dodd (Suffolk), Caroline  Mala Corbin (Miami), and Njeri Mathis (South Texas), among many, many others.

-Kathleen A. Bergin

South Texas College of Law Names New Dean

South Texas College of Law has named Donald J. Guter as its tenth dean (and president).  He is a law professor at Duquesne and its former dean.  Congrats, Professor Guter, on the appointment, and I look forward to being your colleague!

University of Michigan Press' Shift to E-Books

My colleague Deborah Wieseman emailed me with this sobering news from Insidehigereducation.com: the University of Michigan Press is shifting to a model of primarily publishing its monographs electronically, rather than in print.  This is huge news, I think, for a press of the prestige and importance of Michigan to go in this direction is very significant.  I'm very busy this morning, but hope to have some more thoughts on this shortly.  A couple of initial reactions: this is going to lead others to take more seriously this possibility; it may lend credibility to electronically published books; it may signal a shift towards electronic publication for journals as well.

Update: Here's the University of Michigan Press' statement from their blog.

Alfred Brophy

10 Things the IRS Won't Tell You

1. ?
2. ?
3. "Fear is often our best weapon."
4. ?
5. ?
6. ?
7. ?
8. ?
9. "We may be a government agency, but that doesn't mean your data's safe."
10. ?

For the full list, with commentary, see Jason Kephart's article (by the same title) in the current issue of SmartMoney magazine.

Don't subscribe?  Don't worry.  Here's the article.

Revisiting Schools' Pasts

The Organization of American Historians' annual convention (this year it's in Seattle) is now almost upon us.  I'm really looking forward to the conference and to a round table discussion of revisiting universties' connections to slavery and Jim Crow there this Saturday.  Several of the speakers have had experience on their campuses with revisiting the past.  It'll be mighty interesting to see what Jim Campbell says about Brown University's experience with its steering committee on slavery and justice and what Leslie Harris has to say about her experience at Emory University with the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues' project.   A couple of other people will be talking about their work on the meaning of these projects.  Mark Auslander of Brandeis has been doing a lot of work on the public's memory of slavery and our monuments to it.  (He's working on a book on the memory of slavery in Georgia right now.)  Mark's been talking a little bit of late about a recent monument on the UNC campus, the monument to the forgotten servants on our campus.

My comments will probably focus more on history than the contemporary meaning.  That is, my work is mostly on schools' past, which we are now revisiting.  I'll talk a little bit about the college curriculum in southern colleges in the years leading into Civil War: what students learned, what college orators spoke about.

 I've been consumed much of late with work on T.R.R. Cobb's An Inquiry into Negro Slavery, especially with his understanding of the history of slavery.  Cobb occupies an important place in my thinking, because he was a lawyer, the co-founder of the Lumpkin Law School (the predecessor of the University of Georgia's law school), a historian, a leader of the secession movement in Georgia, and a general in the Confederate army.  He died on the battlefield at Fredericksburg, where a modest granite monument was erected in the early twentieth century marks the spot he was injured.  (See the monument below and to the right.)

But the panel is about connecting that past to the present; and I probably will want to talk some about monument law.  And maybe a little about my sense of the unsung  founders monument on the campus at the University of North Carolina.  And therein lies a story.

One of the key monuments on the UNC campus is "Silent Sam," a statue of Confederate soldier put up in the early twentieth century by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  A few years ago, the university added a monument near Sam--the unsung founders' table.  It's a marble table, which is held up by "little people"--literally little--they're about two feet high.   As one of my friends noted, "they're still serving!"  And while that's in some ways that says everything one needs to know.  (For instance, when we set out to honor the unsung heroes, instead of giving them a seat, we made statues that show them serving us yet.)  It's also in some ways appropriate.  It is a reminder that people whose names we'll never know have been here for a long time before us, holding the institution together.

And then there are other monuments around campus, which tell us something different.  There's the monument to William Hooper, a professor here from 1817 to 1829, who spoke against slavery.  (Though the monument does not mention that part of his life on our campus.)  Hooper, by the way, is the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

(I had some other sketchy thoughts on this last April when I visited at diverseeducation's blog.)

Alfred Brophy

Wolf Block About To Dissolve Partnership? Loss of Jobs, History

According to a breaking story in Philadelphia's Legal Intelligencer, Wolf Block - or WolfBlock, if you take their PR seriously - is about to dissolve.  If this story proves correct, and I can't say I'd be surprised, this would mark both a major blow to legal practice in Philly, and the loss of some local cultural history.  The firm is a big player in the city's legal marketplace today with roughly 300 attorneys, albeit not in the league of the Dechert or Morgan, Lewis.  But its history remains notable.  Wolf Block was the major "Jewish law firm" in town for many years.  In the days before many large firms were comfortable hiring Jewish law grads, Wolf Block was a go-to destination for well  credentialed Jewish lawyers entering practice in Philadelphia.  The firm has been struggling in recent years, it seems, having entered unsuccessful merger talks several times.

Are You an Internet Addict?

To take my mind off the spring law review submission season, I've been reading "Born Digital" by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser - a very good book particularly if you're interested in cyberlaw and emerging cybernorms.

One interesting factoid I have gleaned relates to current debates as to whether there is (or should be) a recognized psychiatric classification for Internet Addiction (or "Internet addiction disorder").  There is an interesting debate about this that is nicely summarized on Wikipedia.

Palfrey and Gasser list the emerging diagnostic criteria for Internet addiction:

1. Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet, anticipating the next session online?
2. Does the amount of time required online to feel satisfied seem to grow?
3. Do you lie about time spent online to deceive friends or family members?
4. Has the Internet jeopardized your relationships?

(See "Digital Natives", p 188).

As it's 10.00pm on a Saturday night and I'm blogging this, I guess it's pretty clear what my answers would be.  (Better check my email now before I turn in ...)

Where Were You ...

... on this date in 1980?

I'm guessing that most of us who are over 40 were witnesses to one of the most talked-about attempted murders in history.