The Faculty Lounge

'What's Law Got To Do With It?'

This past spring I was fortunate enough to attend a mini-conference at the University of Indiana Maurer School of Law that ostensibly drew upon Tina Turner's classic "What's Love Got to Do With It" for its title. It was a very interesting conference that saw academics and judges coming together to analyze, um, judicial decision making. Here's some copy from the conference website:

This conference will explore the interplay between law and other influences on judicial decision-making, and the implications of that interplay for judicial selection and public confidence in the courts. The goal is to highlight the recent spate of empirical scholarship that has moved away from dichotomous arguments pitting law against attitude, and toward a more nuanced and eclectic way of looking at what judges do. Examining this debate and the related research will help us to assess questions like: How should judges be selected and regulated? Is the public likely to care about judicial selection and decision-making? What is still missing from our knowledge about the work that judges do?

The conference was put together by master of ceremonies and Indiana law professor Charles Geyh. The distinguished judges attending included federal district court judge Sarah Evans Barker, Indiana Supreme Court Justice Frank Sullivan, and Indian Court of Appeals Judge Nancy Vaidik. Professor Geyh noted that:

"For a long time, the debate over this issue was presented as an either-or proposition," he said. "Do judges follow the law, or do they follow their ideological predilections? Recent interdisciplinary research corroborates the common-sense view that judicial decision-making is more complicated than that and is subject to an array of influences. By bringing together scholars and the judges who make the decisions, we were able to have a free-flowing exchange of ideas. I think both the judges and the academics came away with a greater understanding of one another."

The conference's website includes the pdf copies of the papers/remarks as well as mp3 audio of the presentations. You can even hear Justice Sullivan passionately quote Tina Turner.

Mid-week Links

Chicago on “The Chicago School” and its critics (U of Chicago Magazine. HT: Mark Thoma)

Because housing prices always go up . . . Ginnie Mae’s buy versus rent calculator accepts only positive values for Yearly Home Value Increase Rate.  Go on, try it.  (Via Rolfe Winkler)

Al Capone's "hideout retreat" in Wisconsin (pictured right) up for auction.  Minimum bid: $2.5 million. (HT: Calculated Risk)

Via Josh Wright at Truth On The Market, “This American Life” on price-fixing, including an interview with Kurt Eichenwald, author of the Informant, the book (now movie) about the Archers Daniel Midland price-fixing conspiracy. The movie review from Manohla Dargis at the NY Times is quite positive.  Ah, a weekend plan, I hope.

For fans of baseball, or fans of tax, or those who are just fans of Sarah, Sarah Lawsky at Tax Prof (here and here) on The Tax Savings Behind the Sale of the Chicago Cubs for $845m.

Brad DeLong can’t resist the urge to post about Richard Posner.

Via Reason, now it’s gone too far: Snuggies have a runway show (pictured left) at Fashion Week.

Anatomy of A Murder tribute, via Randy Barnett.

Funny, pornographic, repressed, ridiculous; featuring teens, gay cops, reluctant parents, and satisfied milkmen-- it can only be The World’s Best Condom Ads.

Randy Picker on the DOJ Filing in Google Book Search.

 

Elyn Saks, Southern California Law Professor, Wins MacArthur Genius Grant

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is announcing its new fellows today and one of the winners of these so-called "genius grants" is Elyn Saks.  Saks is Associate Dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences  at Southern Cal's Gould School of Law.  Saks battles with schizophrenia and acute psychosis and authored the 2007 volume, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.  Reviews of the book and video of Saks talking about the book are here.

This from the ABA Journal's report on the news:

Saks recalled in an interview with the Washington Post that, after her first psychotic episode at the age of 18, she was told she would never be able to live and work on her own. She told of an episode at Yale Law School when classmates found her singing on a rooftop outside the law library. "I thought there were beings in the sky controlling my brain," she said. Saks told the Associated Press she plans to use the money to continue educating people about the lives of people with mental illness. ''I want to make a difference in how people see schizophrenia,'' Saks said. She is working on a second book about high functioning people with schizophrenia.

Congratulations to Dean Saks.  

Consensus about Consensus?

I've been reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) which is marketed as a "leadership fable" based largely on corporate life although it may have some interesting applications to academia.  Three things I found notable about Lencioni's theory of good leadership strategy that seem to run counter to things I hear in academia:

1/ While I've heard in several dean searches about the importance of "consensus-building", a lot of academics seem to think that this means everyone getting what they want, or everyone agreeing on the same thing.  Lencioni suggests that "consensus-building" should not be a management goal, if that's what it means.  He notes that "Great teams understand the danger of seeking consensus, and find ways to achieve buy-in even when complete agreement is impossible.  They understand that reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered." (p 207)  How many of us in academia understand this as the meaning of consensus?

Conservative "Faculty Lounge" Blogger And President Obama Find Common Ground

The President foresees a World Series match-up between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees.

Some of our readers may remember that the two teams last did battle in the Fall Classic in 1964.  For a wonderful book that chronicles that baseball season, with a focus on the decline of the Yankees dynasty, the ascendancy of the Cardinals, and their march toward a thrilling seven-game series, I highly recommend October 1964 by David Halberstam.

May history repeat itself!  Go Cardinals!!!

All That Jazz -- In Tokyo?

There’s an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about the popularity of jazz in Japan, particularly in Tokyo. I don’t know why this surprises me, as I’ve heard (pun intended) that Tokyo is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Also, there are some great jazz musicians who hail from Japan, including Keiko Matsui, and the wonderful group, Hiroshima. Speaking of jazz, I once worked with a colleague who had a small, hidden radio in his office, and jazz was always softly playing in the background, even when he left for the day. For some odd reason, the sound never seemed intrusive; instead, it was just…nice. Does music belong in the office? Can we, do we, whistle while we work in academia? If so, to what?

Weird Books

                                   

From the Weird Books Room of AbeBooks.com:

The Pop-Up Book of Phobias

How Green Were the Nazis?

Poop-eaters: Dung Beetles in the Food Chain

The Great Pantyhose Crafts Book

Dead Clients Don't Pay: The Bodyguard's Manual

How to Survive a Robot Uprising

How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction

And many others.  (HT: Tyler Cowen)

An Antebellum Bookcase

One of my most favorite works of history, the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's Report, begins with a very elegant line: "Let us begin with a clock."  I absolutely love first lines, like  Marshall Sahlins' line in his much-discussed book, How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Instance, "Heinrich Zimmerman heard it directly from the Hawaiians: Cook was Lono."  And so perhaps I can borrow from the Brown Report and begin, "Consider a bookcase ... and its contents."

Why am I blogging about an antebellum bookcase, you ask?  For two reasons.  First, I'm interested in the architecture of bookcases; second, I'm interested in the contents that might have been found in the bookcase of an antebellum southern law professor.

And I have one bookcase I'm particularly interested in  In the Cobb house in Athens--the home where Thomas Cobb wrote An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery--there is a bookcase, which is, well, unlike any bookcase I've seen before.   The uprights have the seemingly ubiquitous arches of the 1850s (recall the arches on Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama, which I wrote about in the summer?)  I have a detail of thetop of the bookcase's left upright at the left.  (As I recall, the bookcase was owned by Howell Cobb, Thomas' brother; though the speculation at the house is that there was one just like it in Thomas' house.)

But what of the books that were on those shelves?  Close followers of the faculty lounge know that I'm most interested in what books people read and how books are used to propagate ideas.  Well, perhaps we can get some sense from Cobb's An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery.  He tells us at one point in the book that he purchased some volumes when they weren't otherwise available in a library (and he also tells us that he visited libraries far and wide and drew on the kindness of academics far and wide as well).  And I'd imagine that a bunch of his books rested on shelves like these.

Law Prof Named To Head New SEC Division

Last week the SEC announced the creation of its fifth division, the Division of Risk, Strategy, and  Financial Innovation.  From the SEC's press release:

The new division combines the Office of Economic Analysis, the Office of Risk Assessment, and other functions to provide the Commission with sophisticated analysis that integrates economic, financial, and legal disciplines.   The division's responsibilities cover three broad areas:   risk and economic analysis; strategic research; and financial innovation.

*  *  *

The new division will perform all of the functions previously performed by OEA and ORA, along with the following:   (1) strategic and long-term analysis; (2) identifying new developments and trends in financial markets and systemic risk; (3) making recommendations as to how these new developments and trends affect the Commission's regulatory activities; (4) conducting research and analysis in furtherance and support of the functions of the Commission and its divisions and offices; and (5) providing training on new developments and trends and other matters.

Named as the initial director of the Division is law professor Henry T. C.  Hu (pictured), who holds the Allan Shivers Chair in the Law of Banking and Finance at the University of Texas.   Said Hu:

"I am honored that Chairman Schapiro has asked me to be the director of this new division at this seminal time.   The derivatives revolution, the rise of hedge funds and institutional investors, technological change, and other factors have transformed both capital markets and corporate governance.   I look forward to working with the Commission and to using an interdisciplinary approach that is informed by law and modern finance and economics, as well as developments in real world products and practices on Wall Street and Main Street."

Professor Hu's profile is here.  The UT press release is here.

UCI Egg Theft Case Developments

From The California Bar Journal:

Egg donations

Award: $4,230,000

Doctors at UCI Center for Reproductive Health were found to have engaged in the misappropriation and nonconsensual transfer of donor eggs, several of which resulted in live births (Beasley v. Regents of the University of California, Orange County Superior Court, Plaintiff attorney: Daniel M. Hodes).

(HT: Egg Donor & Surrogacy Law Blog)

OC Register story here:

So far, 157 cases have been settled for roughly $27.7 million. Three more cases are pending.

The most recent settlements range from $45,000 to $675,000. 

 And some background here, especially beginning at fn. 125.

Weekend Links

Before buying that Prada knockoff . . . Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), who I do not think normally wears that Hugh Heffner jacket/robe around campus

(HT: Freakonomics)

The audio of Obama calling Kanye West a “jackass.”

Cutting Carbon Through Condoms – the “Fewer Emitters” study (Salon.com via Reproductive Rights Prof Blog)

Via Freakonomics, cardboard sign creativity, including “blogless, please help,” “ninjas killed family, need money for kung-fu lessons,” and “will take verbal abuse for change.”

Spit Markets.

Al Roth on law firm recruitment, rescinded offers, and accepting multiple offers (prior Lounge coverage on this topic here)

Top Five Ways Students Use Technology to Cheat.

FT on StockTwits (always an odd sounding name to me), which resurrects “in cyberspace the teeming trading pits of yesteryear.”

Brian Leiter on ranking Canadian law schools.

John Ip at CoOp on the UK/Commonwealth journal submission process – ah to be free (or forced) to write short articles with minimal footnotes. 

The S.E.C. proposes banning flash trading, and puts forward new rules for credit ratings agencies. (NY Times, FT) (Hope to have more on these, plus an update on bank failures and developments, later this week).

More on ISI's Selection Criteria for Journals

 Following up on my post yesterday about the 35 student-edited general interest law reviews in ISI's Social Sciences Citation Index -- and a few anomalies in there, I thought I'd post a little on what ISI says about its selection criteria. Their website has an article by James Testa, Senior Director, Editorial Development, Thomson Rueters, which explains the process of selection and the criteria they use.

Here's part of Testa's essay on the criteria for selection:

Journal evaluation and selection is ongoing at Thomson Reuters with journals added to and deleted from the database as frequently as every two weeks. Each year, Thomson Reuter's editorial staff reviews over 2,000 journal titles, and selects around 10-12% of the journals evaluated for inclusion in the Thomson Reuters database. Moreover, existing journal coverage in Thomson Reuters products is constantly under review. Journals now covered are monitored to ensure that they are maintaining high standards and a clear relevance to the products in which they are covered. The journal selection process described here is applied to all journals in Web of Science^®, whether covered in Science Citation Index Expanded^TM, Social Sciences Citation Index^®, or Arts & Humanities Citation Index^®. Some special consideration is given in the evaluation of social science and arts & humanities journals, particularly with regard to citation analysis. These considerations are noted below.

Many factors are taken into account when evaluating journals for coverage, ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative. The journal's basic publishing standards, its editorial content, the international diversity of its authorship, and the citation data associated with it are all considered. No one factor is considered in isolation, but by combining and interrelating the data, the editor is able to determine the journal's overall strengths and weaknesses.

 ISI invites nominations for journals to include here.  There's some really interesting stuff to talk about here, especially for someone like me, who's interested in citations.  I'll come back to talk about the SSCI in the near future.

The illustrations are images of ISI's building at 3501 Market Street in Philadelphia, which I took when I was visiting Dan Filler.  His office is across the street and a block down.

Physicians and the public health option

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an interesting study on physician views concerning the public health option. Here's a selection from the introduction portion of the article:

 In the past few months, a key point of contention in the health care reform debate has been whether a public health insurance option should be included in the final legislation. Although polls have shown that 52 to 69% of Americans support such an option,¹ the views of physicians are unclear. Physicians are critical stakeholders in health care reform and have been influential in shaping health policy throughout the history of organizedmedicine in the United States.²

The voices of physicians in the current debate have emanated almost exclusively from national physicians’ groups and societies. Like any special-interest group, these organizations claim to represent their members (and often nonmembers as well). The result is a well-established understanding of the interests of physicians’ societies but little, if any, understanding of views among physicians in general. Faced with this absence ofempirical data, we conducted a national survey of physicians to inform federal policymakers about physicians’ views of proposed expansions of health care coverage.

and a graphic of the results:

[hat tip to Discourse.net Blog]

A Reenactment So Bad It's Good

Via Hanna Rosin:

 

 

Life After The Supreme Court

We wrote a little bit about Justice Souter when he left DC at the end of last term and his plans for doing some cool things, like writing a history of his hometown. 

It seems he's enjoying life back in New England.  The Harvard Crimson reports that Justice Souter spoke on a panel on Thursday at Harvard Law School's Constitution Day celebration.  With him on the panel were Charles Fried, Noah R. Feldman, Michael Klarman, Alexander Keyssar, Sandy Levinson, and Mark Tushnet.  You can view the archived webcast here.

Paperless to Papered Up

It seems the pendulum is swinging back from computers helping us go "paperless" to computers helping us make physical copies of the written word. As Amy Landers notes over at PrawfsBlawg, lots and lots of really good books are available in downloadable, free, scanned versions from Google Books:

After running a Google book search, I found a familiar list of links to dealers along the left side of the page, where the book might be purchased.  This time, and for the first time in my experience, I found an additional link which allowed me to download the entire book in PDF format.  All 578 pages, just as they would appear in a paper form.  Right there, right now.

Now Amy can print the book if she wants to (I would, screen reading doesn't agree with my old-fashioned eyes), put it in a three-ring-binder, and have it for all time. You can also download Google books, and if you have the full Adobe Acrobat software (or perhaps even ghostscript or another PDF utility), extract pages, re-order them, save the compiled version, and distribute them to students for reading (the most recent books I used in this way were Proudhon's "What is Property" and Marx's "Capital" -- any guesses what topics I'm covering in Property Theory next week?).

But there is another option for turning the written scanned word back into "real" print. It follows from Google's agreement to team up with "On Demand Books" to provide for printing of out of copyright books (and perhaps out of print "orphan" books if the Settlement goes through in some form or another). With On Demand's "Espresso" book printing machine, you can print out a copy of a book from Google's collection of more than two million scanned out of copyright books. The machine prints and binds a book of 300 pages in about four minutes. Suggested retail price is $8 (with $1 going to On Demand and $1 going to Google, which has said it will donate its share to charity).

This means that books that have been taking up no space on new shelves for a long time can now once again take up space on shelves.  (via Slashdot)

There are other options for moving from online to print, as well. Blog2PDF allows you to print a book from your blog (or a blog where you have posting permissions). Since my login was created for my guest stint here on the Lounge, we've published 442 pages worth of posts (without comments!!). The books have covers (you can customize) as well as a table of contents. In addition to being able to order a copy of the book for $163.35, you can buy a version for download (for $7.95). I wonder if Dan could make a book from all of the posts since the Lounge opened, get the $7.95 download version (I'm only guessing that the download price stays the same regardless of length), then release it to the public domain, provide a copy to the Google book project, and then print it on an Espresso machine for $8.00 more. (via The Reference Frame)

In any event, I'm off to download the book Amy wrote about (Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science). And I'll probably print it and put it in a three-ring-binder on Monday.

Social Sciences Citation Index and Law Reviews

As I'm working up some thoughts on the use of the social sciences citation index as a companion to westlaw citation searches, I've been looking a little at the journals that the ssci already uses.  Couple of things of some interest here -- they index 35 student-edited, general subject law reviews (and about twice that number of specialized journals).  So that alone has me thinking -- what journals do they employ?  Does that tell us something about ranking of journals?

The journals are (in order of rank according to the gold-standard, i.e., Washington and Lee Law Library's rankings): Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Texas Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Southern California Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, University of Illinois Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, Wisconsin Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, University of Cincinnati Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Washington Law Review, Buffalo Law Review, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, Catholic University Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, and Denver University Law Review.

Many of the usual suspects are there -- and few that aren't quite the usual suspects.  Want to see those reviews' W&L ranking?  Here's a table that lists the reviews by rank.  Pretty interesting, isn't it?  All of the top 19 reviews are in ssci; it skips over William and Mary (20), North Carolina Law Review (24), Emory Law Journal (27), and UC Davis (28) -- and is selective after 29.  So it misses such leading reviews as Boston College (30), Ohio State (31), and Cardozo (32).  It picks up some important journals (like Wisconsin, Indiana, and George Washington).   It also has the Buffalo Law Review (56), Pitt Law Review (61), Catholic Law Review (71), Rutgers Law Review (80), and Denver Law Review (110).

I usually don't care much for people who complain about how rankings are unfairly biased against their schools.  "Yeah, do what everyone else does and make up a ranking system on which you do well!"  (That's my usual response.)  However, in this case -- since my school's involved -- I can't resist noting that the North Carolina Law Review is missing here.

In case you're interested in some of my more considered thoughts on citation rankings of law reviews and their relationship to law school rankings, they're available here.

 About the illustration:  This Philadelphia boy couldn't resist the temptation to use a picture of the ISI's building on Market Street in west Philly.  The building's exterior is supposed to represent an IBM punch card.  I think it's really cool; but it's also a reminder of how quickly technology changes and how quickly what once appears modern looks well, out of date.  Even in the early 1980s when I was an undergraduate and I'd walk by the building I thought it rather quaint looking.

Update as of April 10, 2010:  I've added an illustration of ISI's building, which I took on Tuesday when I was in Philly.

Faculty Lounges: Rooms with a View?

As my colleagues will attest, I am passionate about interior design, and the title of this wonderful Blog inspired today’s post about…faculty lounges. I think most law schools have them, but I doubt they’re often used for their intended purpose. How many people really meet their colleagues in the room designated for faculty musings? Could the design of these rooms be to blame, or have we become a more informal lot who instead prefer impromptu visits in personal offices and hallways? What would it take to inspire more faculty to congregate in these spaces?

Difficulties with Death Penalty

I don't know if people outside of Ohio have heard about the situation this week in the case of Romell Broom who was to be executed earlier this week for a murder committed some 25 years ago.  The governor was forced to order a temporary halt to the execution when the execution team was physically unable to insert shunts into the inmate's veins through which the lethal injections would be applied.  The execution team apparently tried to insert the shunts for 2 hours and then the governor was called.  A reprieve has been granted until sometime next week, although it was not clear from the news reports exactly how this matter will proceed.  A report from the Cleveland Plain Dealer is here.  Has this ever happened before in other death penalty states?  Is there a protocol for it?  It's obviously troubling on a number of levels, not the least of which is how one might feel about the death penalty in the first place.

Robins Chair Open at University of Richmond

The University of Richmond has begun a search for the E. Claiborne  Robins Chair in their law school.  The field is open.  From the announcement:

The University of Richmond School of Law is seeking to fill the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in Law. The Robins Chair recognizes a faculty member who has demonstrated outstanding achievement in his or her field, and is not limited by subject matter. Candidates should have a record of scholarly excellence and of strong classroom teaching, as well as a commitment to service in and outside the law school community.
Applications and inquiries may be directed to:

Professor Daniel T. Murphy
Chair, Faculty Appointments Committee
University of Richmond School of Law, Richmond, VA 23173 

The image is of the Virginia capitol building in Richmond.  And as a sometime resident of Richmond, I have to say it's a beautiful city.  I had the chance to visit it again recently and was surprised by how much it's changed in the nearly twenty years since I lived there -- it's incredibly liveable, close to DC, affordable, is close to the coast ... and to other important historic sites and it has barbeque, too! It's also -- along with Chapel Hill and Columbia, SC -- one of the three best places in the world to research the old South (though I suspect that's of only moderate interest to people who'll be applying for the Robins chair!).