The Faculty Lounge

Summer Conference Season – Frustrations

Although I’m usually one to see the glass as half full, Jacqueline’s post yesterday on the guilty pleasures of heading off to June conferences immediately brought to mind a hotel trend that has increasingly left me with a bitter taste in my mouth (perhaps that was a glass of IPA): the $13.95 per day internet charge.

In some ways, it is a feat of genius: (1) when the consumer is pricing out a trip, it doesn’t get factored in; (2) it is high enough that it provides a very hefty profit margin; and (3) it is low enough that it isn’t worth it to most people to leave the hotel in search of a café. 

That said, I find it incredibly annoying when, inevitably, on the morning I have to fly home, I have to shell out an extra fourteen dollars to send an email, which will take no more than ten minutes to write, that I absolutely have to send before I head to the airport. 

If hotels want to go the route of “use” charges, then let’s go whole hog.  Charge me by the minute for my time on the internet.  You can do the same for the shower, air-conditioning, and lights (we can help mother earth while we're at it).  Also, you can have ten of the pillows back from off the bed; I only need two, thank you (please subtract $2 each).  And I won’t need the coat-hangers, or the extra set of towels, or the mysterious array of body lotions ($10).  Finally, there are loads of channels on the TV that I’ll never watch (please remove them and reduce my bill accordingly).

Now we're getting somewhere.  I feel like, maybe, it’s time for that drink.  

Teaching Creates A Conflict Of Interest For Adjunct Law Professor

According the New Jersey Law Journal, Rutgers is prohibiting Sheryl Mintz Goski, an adjunct professor, from continuing her gig teaching international mediation at Rutgers-Newark Law School because she represents a company in a dispute with Rutgers Business School.   She is being treated as an employee of Rutgers in the same a full time professor would:

A memo by John Wolf, the university's deputy general counsel, explained that schoolwide ethics rules prohibit faculty members from representing or negotiating on behalf of anyone outside the university in a matter pending before the university. The regulations mirror conflict-of-interest rules for all state employees, Wolf noted. "Rutgers legitimately may view Ms. Goski's representation of [the client] as interfering with her loyalty and commitment to the University," Wolf wrote. "Certainly, a member of the public with knowledge of her dual roles could reasonably believe that in representing [the client] Ms. Goski is violating her duty of trust to Rutgers by representing, presumably for personal economic benefit, a client with claims adverse to Rutgers." "Moreover, [the client] might believe that her employment by Rutgers gives it an advantage in securing a favorable resolution of its claim against the University."

Professor Goski kept the client and dropped Rutgers-Newark:

Goski argues that while she receives a check from the university and is therefore an employee, the rule is too broad. She says the relationship between an adjunct professor at the law school and a matter before the business school is too tenuous to create a conflict or even the appearance of one. "As an adjunct, I don't feel I represent Rutgers when I teach, I feel I teach at Rutgers," she says. "I'm not representing Rutgers in any sense. Adjuncts have no confidential access at all." "Rutgers is disserved because people may think they don't want to be bothered to spend all the time and effort to take an adjunct position, which is time-consuming, not just a couple of hours a week, for almost no money," she says. "People may just say forget it, they don't want to be bothered," she says. About 30 adjuncts are hired each semester at Rutgers Newark and the current salary is $1,325 per credit.

The High Cost of Poverty: Washington Post

Article here.  (Thanks to Prof. Melynda Price (Kentucky))

Credit. The poor don't have it. What they had was a place like First Cash Advance in D.C.'s Manor Park neighborhood, where a neon sign once flashed "PAYDAY ADVANCE." Through the bulletproof glass, a cashier in white eyeliner and long white nails explained what you needed to get an advance on your paycheck -- a pay stub, a legitimate ID, a checkbook. This meant you're doing well enough to have a checking account, but you're still poor.

And if you qualify, the fee for borrowing $300 is $46.50.

That was not for a year -- it's for seven days, although the terms can vary. How much interest will this payday loan cost you? In simple terms, the company is charging a $15.50 fee for every $100 that you borrow. On your $300 payday loan -- borrowed for a term of seven days -- the effective annual percentage rate is 806 percent.

The cashier says that what you do is write First Cash Advance a check for $345.50 plus another $1 fee, and it will give you $300 in cash upfront. It holds the check until you get paid. Then you bring in $346.50 and it returns your check. Or it cashes the check and keeps your $346.50, or you have the option of extending the loan with additional fees. You'll be out $46.50, which you'd rather have for the late fee on the rent you didn't pay on time. Or the gas bill you swear you paid last month but the gas company swears it never got.

Summer Conference Season - Guilty Pleasures

As the summer conference season begins, and I sit in a hotel room in Chicago, I wanted to confess to some of the guilty pleasures that go hand in hand with being away from the family and the household chores and being able to immerse oneself in the scholarly endeavor divorced from the distractions of home.  Scholarly endeavor notwithstanding, there's a couple of other guilty pleasures in which I indulge while on the road.

First, I have to say that sitting in a hotel room in another city is the only time I read that paragon of popular news culture, the USA Today.  I have to give a shout out to the editors of this morning's edition with the cover story showing a picture of President Obama greeting Governor Schwarzenegger at the White House juxtaposed against a photo in the top right hand corner of Christian Bale in the  new Terminator movie.  The placement of the pictures says so much - the Terminator franchise (which is another guilty pleasure of mine) still goes on, despite Arnold's permanent move to politics.  I love it!

I also have a question related to another guilty pleasure - the airport lounge (which I've just discovered in my old age).  How come you can take food out of the lounge, but not bring food in?  Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Anyone else have any favorite traveling-related perks they want to admit to?

The Coming Judicial Clerkship Application Crush

Skadden Arps welcomed their summer associates this week.  According to ATL, there was a lot of anxiety in this summer class as they learned that offers would be forthcoming to those workers who earned them.  (Isn't it weird that, in this business, the notion that one would need to earn an offer sets off alarms?)  To quell anxiety, partners reassured the summer staffers that there were plenty of offers to go around.  With one caveat: the jobs won't open until 2011.  That means these eager members of the Class of 2010 will need to find something else to do for a year.  And if the Skadden folk won't start until 2011, something tells me that there will be a ton of summer associates receving similar offers. Hundreds of the best and brightest law grads from top law schools who will graduate directly into a one year sabbatical. 

You know what that means: today's brillian rising 3L needs a one year long job that starts immediately after graduation.  And there's one position that fits that requirement perfectly: the (one year) judicial clerkship. 

True enough, many of the folks headed to the elite firms were already planning on seeking a clerkship.  Many - but probably not most.  There are the older grads who just want to start their careers already.  The poorer grads who need to start dealing with loans.  And all of the transactional types - corporate, tax, and T&E folks, to name a few - who accept clerkships at far lower rates than their litigation colleagues.  But you can be sure of one thing: most of these individuals would rather take a moderately-paid, high-status job for a year than sling lowfat bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches at the local Starbucks.

Come this fall, federal and state judges are going to be flooded with highly qualified law graduates seeking both a learning experience and a chance to burn the clock.  This will have a number of consequences.  First, I imagine that the surge will  make it much tougher for students at non-elite law schools to score clerkships.  Like it or not, a large number of judges prefer to hire strong graduates of elite law grads.  If this cohort doubles in size, that's inevitably going to burn up some of the slots typically allocated to regional law grads.  (In fact, it may put even more presure on strong - but not superelite - law schools because judges may feel particular pressure or motivation to hold slots for grads of their preferred local schools.)

Arizona State Seeks To Relocate Law School To Downtown Phoenix

Say this about the folks at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law: they're a practical bunch.  Every law school wants to make it easy for students to move in and out of the legal practice world while they're 2L's and 3L's.  And it's a lot simpler for students to do that when law firms, government agencies, and public interest shops are only steps from the law school. 

Thus this news: the folks at ASU Law are asking Phoenix voters to fund the law school's move from suburban Tempe into the heart of America's 5th largest city.  It's hard to know how popular this provision will be among Phoenix residents.  It's hard to imagine that a moderately sized law school would do much to transform a neighborhood or create jobs.  But it would surely help ASU in its job placement battle with regional rival, the University of Arizona.  

Image: the Tempe law campus.

David Herbert Donald (1920-2009)

As I'm sitting here doing a little work on things antebellum, I see the sad news that David Herbert Donald has passed away.  Just so happens that his charming Lincoln is on the floor beside me.  Donald's volume was the first, I think, to make extensive use of the fabulous Lincoln Legal Papers.  At least it was one of the first; those papers have been mined well more recently by Mark Steiner.  

 Mr. Donald had retired by the time I entered graduate school, so I did not have the privilege of studying with him, but I have been his student in a more remote way: as a reader of his books.  I am a student of his ability to convey difficult ideas in elegant and understandable prose.  And one of the first biographies that I read when I got out of law school was the first volume of Donald's study of Charles Sumner (Charles Sumner and the Coming of Civil War).  Amazing how that volume, published in 1960, continues to repay historians' study--and how, despite nearly fifty years of intervening scholarship, it continues to bring insight and I would add joy.

Here is the New York Times obituary.  He was born in Mississippi in 1920, educated at Millsaps College and the University of Illinois, then went on to teaching positions at (among others) Columbia and Johns Hopkins, before moving to Harvard in 1973.

Should job creation favor men?

A thought-provoking  op-ed in today's San Francisco Chronicle by law profs Melissa Murray and Darren Rosenblum:

The G.I. Bill offers important lessons for the present economic situation. Now, as then, policymakers seek to avert economic disaster. To do so, the United States has initiated the fastest budgetary expansion since the end of World War II. Stimulus monies are intended to fuel infrastructure projects and construction, creating jobs and encouraging spending. The banking and automotive bailouts may prevent mass unemployment.

But the bailouts and other stimulus measures aim to bolster the economy by bolstering men. This is perhaps unsurprising. Those most imperiled by the recent economic downturn have been men, who have lost their jobs as the markets plunged. The two flagging industries targeted for bailouts are ones in which men play an outsize role - the automotive and financial services industries. The slump in construction has directly affected men, who make up the bulk of workers in this sector.

*     *     *

Thus, the bailout and stimulus measures warrant additional scrutiny - from the perspective of gender equality. It is important to correct our economic course. But it is also important that we not repeat past mistakes by ignoring women's economic status. We must recognize that the traditional model of male breadwinner and female homemaker has given way to a new division of labor in which women may support themselves or, if coupled, participate equally in bearing the family's economic load.

Bankrupty Expert David Epstein Moves To Richmond Law

David Epstein, a senior member of the Southern Methodist law faculty (as well as the  former dean at Emory and Arkansas and a former colleague of mine at Alabama)  is moving to the University of Richmond Law School to become the George E. Allen Chair.   Epstein has taught at a number of institutions both as a tenured professor and a visitor.  He got his start at UNC, where he was hired by Dean Dickson Phillips - who later became a  Fourth Circuit Judge (and for whom I clerked.)

And no.  George E. Allen is not the the football coach and Senator, but rather a Virginia trial lawyer of some note.

Duke University Press to Publish Obama's Next Book

Err, that's President Obama's mother's next book.  The Duke Chronicle is reporting that Duke University Press--well known for its anthropology books--will publish a revised version of Ann Dunham's dissertation.

From the Chronicle article:

The book, which will be titled "Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia," is focused on the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of Kajar and their position as a possible economic alternative in an area that traditionally depends on rice for survival.

The dissertation-at the request of Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng-was edited by Alice Dewey, Dunham's graduate adviser, and Nancy Cooper, her fellow graduate student in anthropology.

Here's the DUP press release about the book.

I can't wait to get my hands on this.  And if you can't either, you can read the dissertation here --click on the link at the right of the screen that says "Full Text Copy" (at least as long as you're coming from an institution with a subscription).   It takes a long time to download--it's more than a 1000 pages long.  Here, btw, is the abstract:

This dissertation is a socio-economic study of peasant metalworking industries in Indonesia. The emphasis is on traditional blacksmithing, but data is also provided on copper, brass, bronze, silver and gold industries.

Since the late nineteenth century, economists and administrators have been predicting the demise of village industries in Indonesia. Despite such predictions, the number of persons employed in these industries has steadily increased, the rate of increase accelerating during the last two decades. Social scientists working in Indonesia have tended to view this increase negatively, as a sign of crisis in the agricultural sector. However, their models of rural change have been based almost entirely on studies of lowland wet-rice villages. This dissertation contends that these models need revising because they start with the false assumption that agriculture always generates more income per labor hour than non-agricultural occupations. It describes a number of villages where, for a variety of historical, ecological and demographic reasons, metalworking tends to be more profitable than agriculture. Villagers accordingly give metalworking priority in their strategies of resource and labor allocation, and consider agriculture to be a secondary occupation.

Part One of the dissertation draws on data from the fields of archaeology, history, metallurgy and cultural anthropology to describe metalworking industries as they existed in the past, and as they are viewed by the smiths themselves. This view, which includes a strong cultural dimension, is very different from the view of modern development planners.

Part Two presents current ecological data on metalworking industries. An overview describes their socio-economic organization, including patterns of resource allocation, intra-industry stratification, and the use of capital by village-based entrepreneurs. There follows a detailed study of Kajar, a large and well-stratified blacksmithing village in Jogjakarta region, and shorter descriptions of five other metalworking villages.

Part Three presents the development view of metalworking industries and raises questions about their future. It discusses the available macrodata from national surveys, and the possible impact of changes in protective import and licensing regulations. Extension programs carried out by the Department of Industry in metalworking villages are critiqued, and some recommendations presented.

Not sure why I hadn't thought about looking at Dr. Dunham's dissertation before.  (According to worldcat, it's in about twelve libraries--pretty good for a dissertation!  Wonder why, amidst all the talk of the senior theses of Presidential candidates and their spouses during the last election, no one talked about this.  Hey, it's about industrial development and getting peasants out of fields and into manufacturing.) This book may open up some more room for speculation on the President.  

And it'll get a lot more attention than the usual work in anthropology, I'd imagine.  Meanwhile,--note to self--I need to get back to my paper on Obama's race and law syllabus, so I can contribute to the growing genre on "Obama and __."

Take the Jim Crow Quiz

Over at Co-Op, Kaimi Wenger's polling about readers' knowledge of events during the Jim Crow era. 

Bitter Lawyer Turns US News Rankings Into A Movie

Via Paul Caron.

More Supreme Court Speculation

Courtesy of Prof. Matthew Fletcher, via AP/TurtleTalk.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, one of President Barack Obama’s candidates for the Supreme Court, will be at the White House on Tuesday.

An administration official says the Democratic governor is coming to the White House for an event unrelated to the Supreme Court. It is not clear whether Granholm will be meeting with Obama about the upcoming vacancy on the court.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because details of Tuesday’s event have not been announced.

Granholm is among more than six people Obama is considering for the seat on the court now held by Justice David Souter, who is retiring this summer.

The 50-year-old Granholm is a former federal prosecutor and Michigan attorney general.

Nora Demleitner & Joanne Epps Supreme Court Possibles?

The Obama administration has been tantalizing us with suggestions that there are as-yet unidentified candidates for the David Souter Supreme Court seat.  We've heard of a ton of usual and not-so-usual suspects but perhaps, perhaps, there remains a shooting star: a lawyer who will emerge suddenly to take his or her rightful, albeit unexpected, place on the bench.  Shortly after last week's hint that there were potential nominees waiting to be discovered, reporters confirmed that California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno "had been mentioned" as a potential nominee.

This weekend, however, a dean of of the Supreme Court reporting pool - NPR's Nina Totenberg - offered up her list of undiscovered candidates for the Supreme Court.  For those of us who follow legal academia closely, Totenberg's list included two particularly intriguing people: Hofstra Law Dean Nora Demleitner and Temple Law Dean Joanne Epps.  Both are relatively new deans and neither has been mentioned anywhere else I know of.  Though they are new to the Supreme Court radar screen as well, I suspect that both would be highly valuable additions to the Court.  This points up a broader reality: there are actually hundreds, if not thousands,  of lawyers who would be excellent appointments.   We expect the nominee to come from a pre-existing shortlist, but might there be other highly qualified, unexpected candidates?  In the spirit of Nina Totenberg, let me add four more:

1. Madhavi Sunder, law professor at UC Davis.  She's brilliant, lives far outside the beltway, and wouldn't be off the Court til I'm pushing up the daisies. 

2. Artur Davis, U.S. Representative from Alabama.  Another outsider who is both smart and savvy.  He'd see the political implications of the Court's rulings.

3. Joia Johnson, executive vice president and general counsel of Hanesbrands.  She's a Penn JD and MBA and lives in North Carolina - a nice state for Obama to tap.  And she'd bring a real-life perspective from the corporate point of view.

3. Lisa Rau, judge on the Pennsylvania state trial court.  She's a Stanford Law graduate and former civil rights lawyer who would offer a critical perspective on how Court decisions might play out in real life in real courts.

Let Them Eat Cake

In a previous post I discussed a recent marketing trend towards advertizing corporate responsibility and emphasizing corporate commitments to various stakeholders.  I questioned whether the new wave of advertisements referenced a real shift in corporate behavior and a new responsiveness to public concerns or whether it was simply the most effective way to sell products and services in the wake of the economic debacle.

Staurt Elliot provides part of the answer in an interesting New York Times article on a “a spate of angry advertising campaigns that seek to channel the outrage, frustration and fear felt by consumers hit hard by what some are calling the Great Recession.”

Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law

As promised,  now that I've seen the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, I have a few thoughts.  First off, it's a wonderfully creative volume, with essays on all sorts of key figures in law--and law is broadly construed.  You don't have to be a lawyer to be in here.  Herman Melville and Dred Scott are both here.   So is O.J. Simpson and so are Julius and Ethel Roseberg and Ulysses S. Grant.

 This is going to be in every law library and lots of other libraries; the entries are fantastic--concise, well-written; they highlight why we care about these people and place them in the context of their times.  This is great legal history, because there are themes and legal thought and practice is connected to the surrounding culture.  This may be the most important single volume published on legal history since I entered teaching--and there's a lot of competition for that honor.

Second, the list of contributors is really broad.  I do wish that the list of contributors listed what they contributed, but perhaps it's too "inside legal history" to justify the extra paper.  Also, I wish there were an index--but again, that might be asking too much.

Third, what about the subjects who inhabit this volume?  Obviously, when you're dealing with a field like American legal history from the colonial era to the present, the possibilities for people to include is effectively endless.  Jeremy Bentham's in here--which is a little odd.  Now, I recognize he's a huge figure and a great person, but....  As for other unusual entries, William Blackstone's in here, too. I didn't know that he ever set foot in the Americas.  There's a reasonable justification for including Bentham and Blackstone, for sure.  The volume is heavy on the twentieth century, also for good reason.  

And because it's legal history, it's obviously going to be a candidate for Ann Bartow's question, "where are the women?"  (And the question that more people should be asking, "where are the black people?")  Since Melville's in here, I would have included some other nineteenth century figures in literature--and would have used that as a way to integrate this volume.  They did include Harriet Beecher Stowe, who said a few things about law.  I'd have included, too, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (I know, some of you may think her rather cliched, but encyclopedias are filled with cliches).   To integrate the volume some more in terms of race, I'd also have included Ralph Ellison and Nat Turner, but these are decisions that are idiosyncratic, perhaps.  When you've got to limit it to 700 entries, well, it makes for some tough choices.

If you love (or even enjoy) law, this volume will provide a lot of entertainment.  I see this as a great gift for a lawyer.  It's the best $65 you're going to spend in a while.  (Unless, like many of the rest of us, you're back to your graduate school habits of eating raman noodles, and you eat for a couple months on $65.)  But it's certainly a beautiful volume and well, well worth the read.

Student Activism for a Worthy Cause

Lots of students are protesting these days--in Chapel Hill it was over former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was UNC Law School's graduation speaker; in Indiana, it's over President Obama's speech at Notre Dame.   

 Save the energy for a useful project. ...  Like this one ...  getting a better looking diploma!  From Christopher Francese's op-ed in the New York Times:

I know that getting rid of the Latin diploma will not be easy. While most  colleges and universities now issue English diplomas, some prominent holdouts — including Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania — still use Latin. Many students and alumni cherish the tradition. In 1961,in the “diploma riots,” when Harvard switched to English diplomas, about 4,000 students protested and criticized the new documents as “Y.M.C.A. certificates."

Gotta love it--a protest because my diploma was going to be in English rather than Latin. Oh, my friends who work on class issues in the academy would just love this--Harvard students looking down their noses at the YMCA. An important reminder that we dispose of tradition at the risk of a high cost.

You want a diploma in Latin? Here's an image of James Madison's diploma.

Update: This is a lot better than I'd imagined. Going back to The Crimson's on-line archive, I see that four people received five day jail sentences over the Diploma Riot. (One for drunkenness--the others, apparently, for disturbing the peace.) Apparently, discussion of the shift had been going on for some time--back at least to the mid-1950s. There was opposition not just from students, but from faculty, too. According to one pre-riot story, Elliott Perkins '23, a master of one of the undergraduate houses said "I think it's very bad  .... The new diploma's not as dignified as the old."  

So this is a story of elite people rioting to maintain their privilege. Great story in there, I'm sure. And I also see that Pete Seeger sang there that spring--so perhaps there is a connection between Seeger's activism and the students? A story of transferred issues, perhaps? Hard to know--and very speculative.

But this is the best: a greeting-card company made a print to commemorate the riot. From a Crimson story:

Avant Gardes--the company issuing the etchings--destroyed the printer's plate after making only 1000 copies in an effort to turn the etchings into "real collectors' items." The students involved in the company estimate that all the cards will be sold by this weekend. Several local bookstores, newsstands, and photographic stores are carrying the prints. 

The original for the prints was drawn by George Haling, a graduate student in Fine Arts at Boston University. Dennis L. Milford '63, a Loweb House classics major, supplied a Latin caption engraved in diploma script.

God, I love America: a riot to keep Latin, then one of our businesses commemorates the riot!   This has all the makin's of an undergraduate honors thesis.

Undergraduate Education Cut Backs at Harvard

Coming on the heels of news that Harvard Law School's budget is being trimmed 10%, comes news that Harvard College will be increasing the size of sections taught by graduate students.  The college is looking to save $2 million by reducing the number of section leaders by 8 to 10%.  That's part of a plan to save $220 million from the Arts and Sciences budget.

The Crimson discusses the way this pain is trickling down to graduate students:

With the average section increasing in size, there will be fewer sections overall, which will translate into fewer teaching positions. 

Many graduate students’ primary source of income is their salary from leading sections, [Assistant Dean of the College Logan] McCarty said. Graduate students earn roughly $5,000 per course they teach. Many graduate students teach two courses a semester, earning them about $20,000 per year. 

To make matters worse, a lot of graduate students won't know until the fall whether they'll be able to get sections:

In the past, administrators did not enforce the section enrollment target. As a result, departments hired more section leaders, rather than redistributing them to classes where enrollment was higher. 

But McCarty said he hopes with additional oversight from University Hall, departments will reallocate section leaders more efficiently. 

“I don’t think that many students will notice the change in section size,” McCarty said, who said he foresaw only a small increase in the average enrollment. “It is really about bringing our section sizes in line with our policy goals.” 

Read the entire, sobering article here.

Alas, this is not the end of the bad news.  "House" (what the rest of us call dormitories) budgets are being reduced 25%.  And the news from the Yale Daily News isn't much better.  The school is laying off as many as 100 staff and reducing department budgets by 7.5% (at least I think that's what the article means when it speaks of departments cutting costs by 7.5%).

The image needs a little explanation.  It's Thomas Cole's Voyage of Manhood, from the National Gallery of Art.  I'd gone looking for an image from the New Deal of smokestacks,--that used to be the universal sign of full employment and economic prosperity.  I hoped for an image that would convey the hope for a return to full employment.  But then when Cole's haunting image appeared on the NGA's home page, I thought--you know what, that's might appropriate, too.

Global Free Speech Update

Lawmakers in the Philippines are debating a 'right of reply' bill, though one of the bill's original sponsors recently withdrew his support.  Deputy Majority Leader Juan Edgardo Angara said that media groups already extend a right of reply as a practical matter, and opined that editorial functions should remain a "privately exercised" prerogative.

Activists in Botswana are calling for a "free and independent press," and urging lawmakers to loosen restrictions on reporting activities.  One major point of criticism is the country's Media Practitioner's Act which includes a 'right of reply' provision and a registration requirement for journalists.   

In Yemen, the High Judicial Council announced plans to establish a special court to try cases related to media and publishing offenses.  Yemeni journalist Abdel Karim al-Khaiwani, called the court a "huge step backward" and "flagrant violation of the Constitution and international law."

The European Union declared internet access a "fundamental right" on par with freedom of expression and passed a measure requiring member states to obtain a court order before terminating a user's access.  But the Senate in France passed a rule of its own promising to cut internet access for up to a year the third time someone is accused of illegally sharing copyrighted material.  Accused is the key word here, as guilt is apparently not required to trigger a suspension.  And there's no procedure for appeal.     

-Kathleen A. Bergin

Plugging New Faculty Scholarship...

As I posted a while ago, many of us are about to welcome new junior colleagues into our ranks over the summer months.

This might be a nice time to introduce them and some of their recent work, so I would like to start the ball rolling by saying that I'm delighted to have Professor Irina Manta joining the faculty at CWRU as an Assistant Professor.  Her recent article on "Privatizing Trademarks" is about to appear in the Arizona Law Review and I'm sure she would welcome comments on this piece as well as suggestions for future directions for her scholarship.  (She gave me permission to make this post and I hope, by doing so, to encourage other more senior faculty to introduce the work of their incoming junior colleagues, or indeed existing tenure track folks.)