The Faculty Lounge

Weekend Links

Arthur Levitt, “We need an orderly way to let institutions fail.”  From the FT (via Paul Kedrosky):

So in the unique series of events that started with the fall of Bear Stearns, there was no way to deliver an orderly lesson on the danger of moral hazard. As a result, investors, lenders and management could believe, in almost every case, their institutions were "too big to fail".

To avoid another crisis we must address this flaw in our regulatory system. We need a process that is known in advance, includes the efficient and orderly write-down of assets and restructuring of debt, and draws on public funds only as a last resort. We need a resolution authority created explicitly to impose discipline on those with the most power to influence the level of risk-taking: the holders of both equity and debt of institutions that may be "too big to fail."

This one’s for you Tim: new video footage of Babe Ruth from 1928.  From the NY Times, includes video, (again, via Kedrosky): “The latest Babe Ruth film, unseen publicly until now, is part of a 90-second clip shot from the first-base stands at Yankee Stadium.”

Solum on Vermeule.

High-profile inmates are hiring prison consultants to help them navigate their entry to a confined life.  Clients include Plaxico Burress, Bernard L. Madoff, Michael Vick, Mike Tyson, Martha Stewart, and Leona Helmsley.  Story from the NY Times, via Al Roth.

Jeff Harrison at MoneyLaw on Blind Salarying:

Blind salarying would mean salaries would be based on an objective assessment of productivity. I don't think that could be achieved by blotting off the names on yearly reports because Deans -- unlike faculty grading papers -- will know who did what. So, the blind grading should be done by a third party -- say a special committee of the AALS that analyzes faculty performance from each school each year and files a report -- almost like a big arbitration but there are are [sic] no "sides."

Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog: Economists Warm to Financial Transactions Tax.

Via Freakonomics, the “briefest abstract award” goes to this new NBER working paper titled “When Is the Government Spending Multiplier Large?”

The abstract: “When the nominal interest rate is constant.”

When good intentions aren’t enough, also from Freakonomics:

“We found that 27.7 percent [of people] who saw calorie labeling in New York said the information influenced their choices.”

Great news, right? Um, no:

“However, we did not detect a change in calories purchased after the introduction of calorie labeling.”

From Dan Ernst at Legal History Blog, Et seq., the blog of the Harvard Law School Library, has posted an expense book covering the expenses a lawyer might incur in setting out to practice in Boston after the Civil War.

From Crooked Timber, proposed amendment to prevent the NSF from funding political science research. “Apparently, Fox News and CNN pundits can do our job better than we can.”

The largest award over the last 10 years under the political science program has been $5.4 million for the University of Michigan for the “American National Election Studies” grant. The grant is to “inform explanations of election outcomes.” The University of Michigan may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

From Larry Ribstein at Ideoblog, How to stop Congress from insider trading.

From Paul Horwitz at PrawfsBlawg, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi: "Bigger Than Jesus"

Via Dan Ernst at Legal History Blog, from the University of North Carolina Press, Catherine Fisk’s new book, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930.

From David Bernstein at VC, the coming Jewish deli federal bailout. 

Law School News

1) The inaugural class of the Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University posted very impressive numbers on the July 2009 bar exam in Pennsylvania.  Kudos to Dean Roger Dennis (a faithful reader of this blog),  our very own Dan Filler, and other members of Drexel's outstanding faculty (including UCC guru Amy Boss!).  Story here.    

2)  Ohio State law prof Deborah Jones Merritt had an exciting week, arguing a copyright case before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Coverage here.

3) A few days ago The Princeton Review released its 2010 edition of "The Best 172 Law Schools," creating eleven ranking lists (such as "best classroom experience," "best professors," and "most competitive students") based on its survey of more than 18,000 students.  The press release is here.  Additional reading here.

Guess I'll have more time to blog, now that my beloved Redbirds have been "swept" out of the playoffs.   Stay strong, Cardinal Nation!  We still have the MVP and Cy Young awards to look forward to!

 

The Discourse of DNA

My co-author, John Conley (UNC) will be giving an interdisciplinary (their terminology, but perhaps we should say “multidisciplinary”?) seminar sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Genomics and Society on October 20.  The talk is entitled “The Discourse of DNA: What Subjects Say about Participating in Genetic Biobanks.” Download Seminar Flyer-2009.10.20-1. (opens pdf) From the flyer:

This talk will present results from a qualitative discourse analysis of interviews with people who were invited to contribute DNA samples to the Environmental Polymorphisms Registry. In lengthy, semi-structured interviews, they were asked generally about their decisions to participate or decline. The method of discourse analysis allows the concerns of the subjects to emerge, as opposed to simply eliciting their responses to the a priori concerns of the researchers. A number of the issues that have arisen have been unexpected, including the characterization of "consenting" as a discursive process rather than an event, the treatment of the sample contribution transaction as a kind of trade secret license, and the subjects' folk theories of DNA.

Lounge readers in the triangle area may want to put this one on their calendars.  There’s no paper distributed yet, but I just finished looking through John’s slides for the presentation.  I’m sure that we’re all predisposed to believe that our co-authors are doing brilliant and important work (even without us) but this really does look especially interesting, raising questions about how we define both “informed” and “consent,” as well as the role of monetary compensation in such decisions.

A Different Take on the "Piece" Prize

Here is how political cartoonist, Jeff Darcy, responded to the news of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to President Obama:

Source:  Cleveland Plain Dealer Online

Oklahoma's Abortion Information Law

Oklahoma State Senate Republicans Dan Sullivan and Todd Lamb have pushed an abortion bill that collects information about abortions performed in the state, with an ultimate result of posting them online.  The data collected includes:

1. Date of abortion

2. County in which abortion performed

3. Age of mother

4. Marital status of mother

(married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)

5. Race of mother

6. Years of education of mother

7. State or foreign country of residence of mother

8. Total number of previous pregnancies of the mother

Live Births

Miscarriages

Induced Abortions

The bill purports to keep name, address, and other identifying information private, but as some opponents have argued, it would still be easy to locate women from small communities.

"Fair and balanced" news??

Ten Things Bankruptcy Court Won't Tell You

In its "Ten Things" column this month, SmartMoney Magazine explores "Ten Things Bankruptcy Court Won't Tell You."  Included on the list compiled by author Elizabeth O'Brien are:  "this could actually improve your credit score down the road" (#4); "debt-settlement firms may do more harm than good" (#5); "better save up before you file" (#7); and "just because your bills stop coming doesn't mean you shouldn't pay them" (#8).  For the full list with accompanying commentary, click here.

And if the topic of bankruptcy holds no interest for you (shame!), then perhaps this article from the same issue will:  Ten Ways to Make Your Boss Love You.  Assume, for the moment, that you're asked to write a related article, entitled "Ten Ways to Put A Smile On Your Dean's Face."  What's on the list?

A Prize for Strengthening America

Ann Althouse:  A man on the street in Egypt "nails it" when he says that "they are handing him the Nobel Peace Prize because he isn't George Bush."

That doesn't do justice to what I imagine to be the Nobel Peace Prize Committee's intent in awarding the prize to President Obama.  The point, as I take it, is not that Obama isn't Bush.  Many people are not George Bush.  (Well, technically, every other person is not George Bush, but you get my point).  It's hard to imagine the committee's awarding the prize this year to any of the other Democratic candidates who, had they been successful, would have replaced George Bush -- Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards (snicker), Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, or Mike Gravel.

I see the committee's message a little differently from that Egyptian man on the street.  I think they handed Obama the prize not just because he isn't George Bush (though that surely helped), but because he represents a reaffirmation of an idea about the United States and the role that idea can play in world politics and world peace.  That idea is the possibility of cross-racial, cross-"tribal," cross-ethnic, cross-religious reconciliation.  Race, tribe, ethnicity, religion -- nothing (except perhaps oil) undermines peace within and between countries quite as effectively or as often as these.  Barack Obama's presidency reminds the world that there is a different way.

Obama symbolizes a major success of the American political experiment.  He is one of the most significant one-man illustrations of the capacity to transcend tribe that the world has seen.  It's easy for us here in the United States to get caught up in our domestic politics, our Bill-O'Reilly-versus-Keith-Olbermann dueling, and forget what the election of Barack Obama meant, and still means, to a great many people the world over.

The best analogy for this award might be the 1993 award to Mandela and de Klerk, or maybe the 1998 award to Hume and Trimble.  But they're imperfect analogies because the committee could only make its message intelligible by simultaneously honoring two people, two races, two religious, two tribes.  Here the committee was able to communicate its message of hope for a more peaceful world with an award to just one. 

Yes, Barack Obama's frame is too small, and his presidency too new, to support the award comfortably.  But if you think of it as an award not to one man but to all of us, the United States, the people who elected him and then peacefully transferred power to him, the frame seems a lot bigger and stronger.

"A prize for weakening America?"  

No.  Just the opposite.  It's a prize to all of us, for finding it within ourselves to remind the rest of the world that the idea of America is still alive.

Care to Bet?

By how many points will President Obama's domestic approval rating drop as a consequence of his being award the Nobel Peace Prize?

President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

NY Times:

In a stunning surprise, the Nobel Committee announced Friday that it had awarded its annual peace prize to President Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” less than nine months after he took office. . . .

As to whether the prize was given too early in Mr. Obama’s presidency, [Nobel Committee Chair Thorbjorn Jagland], said: “We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.” . . .

“One of the first things he did was to go to Cairo to try to reach out to the Muslim world, then to restart the Mideast negotiations and then he reached out to the rest of the world through international institutions.

Obama apparently had not been considered a front-runner (did anyone know he had been nominated?), but according to Jagland, the vote was unanimous, and uncontroversial.

-Kathleen Bergin

First Female Hispanic Named To High Court

No, this is not an archived post about Sonia Sotomayor.

It's a post about Houston appellate judge Eva Guzman, who today was named by Governor Rick Perry to the Texas Supreme Court.  Judge Guzman (a South Texas alum) becomes the first female Hispanic judge in the Court's history.

Story, with video content, available here.

 

NEPOC 2009, at Buffalo Law School Oct 23-24

Conference Chair, Elaine Chiu (St. John's)

Link: http://www.law.buffalo.edu/nepoc09/

America's New Class Warfare" broadly encompasses many possible topics and perspectives. For instance, the Right has long rallied against the inappropriate scrutiny of the wealthy. Indeed, the wealthy and in particular, the people commanding the heights of corporate America, are under more scrutiny today than usual, thanks to the financial meltdown of 2008. But does this scrutiny constitute class warfare? Was the invisibility of the wealthy ever warranted, given the economic and social power they command, including the power to shape law? The poor too have been under extreme levels of scrutiny over the last several decades. Does their scrutiny also constitute class warfare?

What might be the relationships among the wealthy, the disappearing middle class, the working class, and the poor, particularly in the current moment when classes not only exist, but are also antagonistic, contrary to the tenets of our dominant ideology? Further, given that our economic system has always been racialized and gendered, such that young black men have been the hardest hit by the recession, and women continue to earn less money than men, how might the current burdens and potential policy solutions soften or reinforce these patterns? That is, how might an intersectional analysis of race, gender, class, sexuality, etc. as well as cross disciplinary approaches and heterodox economic theories aid in our understandings of the current moment?

And finally, what role is law playing in shaping the structures, power, interests, resource uses, individual and group identities and distributions of wealth and recovery? These are some of the questions we hope our panelists will explore.

Michelle Obama's Ancestor

I've been most quiet of late because I'm recovering from a cold that threw me for a loop -- or maybe a couple of them.  But emerging from the silence to comment on ....

The New York Times has a story about Michelle Obama's great, great, great grandmother, Malvinia Shields (an enslaved person) here.  Most exciting for me--and I suspect for most law professors and legal historians?  Jason Gillmer's quoted in it!

But running a close second for me is that there's talk in the article of an antebellum will.  And running a close third to that, there's talk of a neglected cemetery!

Mid-week Links

Dahlia Lithwick outdoes herself in this recap of the oral argument in US v. Stevens (pdf file) (see Calvin’s post on this here).  The ending scene?

Katyal ends his rebuttal by agreeing with Millett that since there is currently no robust consumer market for human sacrifice videos, Congress could probably not constitutionally ban Channel 115—the human-sacrifice channel. So at least everyone on both sides is agreed that the human-sacrifice channel is constitutional. And that's a relief.

How do news organizations land interviews with militants and terrorist groups?  Slate

Dave Hoffman in the first of a series of posts on the content of veil piercing complaints.

Jack Chin on chalking on campus.

GW Law School reduces size of evening student class in an attempt to combat an eight-place drop in the U.S. News and World Report Rankings, a school dean told alumni. (The GW Hatchet, via WSJ Blog, Paul Caron)

Via Michael Heise, Wired on Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.  And discussion at Social Science Statistics Blog.

Andrew Ross Sorkin in Vanity Fair on Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience. Excerpted from Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, to be published this month by Viking:

With the implosion of Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, the realization dawned: Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs could be next. In an excerpt from his new book, the author reveals the incredible scramble that took place—desperate phone calls, seat-of-the-pants merger proposals, flaring tempers—as Washington got tough and Wall Street titans Lloyd Blankfein and John Mack fought for survival.

Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, INSIDE THE CRISIS: Larry Summers and the White House economic team.

Race For The Cure

A big shout-out to the faculty, staff, students, and friends of South Texas College of Law who joined together over the weekend to raise over $6,000 in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure.   The team ("Motion to Quash") included over 160 participants.

I hope readers will share other stories about teams from law firms, law schools, houses of worship, civic organizations, etc., that have participated in recent Race for the Cure events.

And as someone with a family member who met breast cancer head-on earlier this year, permit me to express my personal and sincere thanks to participants and contributors everywhere.

The Disappearing Academic Fox? (Part II)

In my last post, I began discussing Edward Carr’s excellent article in the Autumn edition of Intelligent Life, The Last Days Of The Polymath.  The (quite lengthy) part of Carr’s article on Richard Posner will naturally be of interest to many Lounge readers.

One part of the interview couldn’t help but remind me of Posner’s recent scrapes with the macroeconomists (see here and here):

“Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical.

“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field. I can make mistakes. On the other hand for me to be criticising someone whose whole career is committed to a particular outlook and method and so on, that is very painful.”

According to Chris Leek, the chairman of British Mensa, the polymath is becoming increasingly rare in today’s competitive academic climate:

“It’s very hard to show yourself as a polymath in the current academic climate. If you’ve got someone interested in going across departments, spending part of the time in physics and part of the time elsewhere, their colleagues are going to kick them out. They’re not contributing fully to any single department. OK, every so often you’re going to get a huge benefit, but from day to day, where the universities are making appointments, they want the focus in one field.”

Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, is it any wonder that the polymath is endangered?  And does it matter?  Carr thinks so:

innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields.

As someone with fox-like tendencies, though obviously nowhere approaching either the depth or breadth of any of these folks (and probably more fairly labeled as “short attention span” than even a fox, much less a polymath), I do think about such issues.   (Although, I’m not sure why.  Certainly no one has asked for my grand plan for the legal academy).

But how might law schools sustain a robust intellectual environment in an age of increasing specialization, and divergent training and methodologies?  Such changes appear here to stay, and I assume that the future of law schools requires navigating this new terrain.  How can we hire the best and most promising minds in their fields (many of whom will be specialists), while still ensuring that at least four people in the room can understand (and are interested in) each other at a faculty workshop? 

I suppose one answer is that we simply not try, breaking off instead into smaller “mini-departments.”  But in the current economic climate that seems unlikely to me at all but the wealthiest and largest schools.

Moreover, I don’t know that such a trend would be in our best interests (although I’m willing to be persuaded on the point).  It seems to me that law schools have always been one of the departments more open to divergent expertise, training, and methodologies.  We’re willing to hire economists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and more, some of whom have no formal legal training, not to mention the usual assortment of J.D.s from a variety of substantive (and increasingly technical and specialized) legal fields.  This presents both opportunities and challenges, I think. 

Our breadth gives us an opportunity, if capitalized on, to come up with better legal and policy solutions than research informed by any single field.  Moreover, there is something to be said for the fact that we are, in the end, training lawyers, judges, regulators, and lawmakers.  Okay, so admittedly most practicing lawyers are even more specialized than academics these days, but judges and lawmakers remain largely generalists.  Maybe each of these groups would be better served by taking only classes from “narrow” (not intended pejoratively) but deep specialists, so long as they take enough of them.  But it seems to me that a case can be made for at least a partial, “generalist,” how-to-think-like-a-lawyer approach to law schools from a student and professional service standpoint.

Law schools’ relative “openness” in the face of increasing specialization presents a challenge as well, I suspect.  Namely, the danger of academic subgroups who don’t talk or learn from each other; reinvent the wheel constantly; and attempt to replicate themselves in hiring and promotion decisions to the point that, in the end, you really wind up with a school deep in a limited number of subject matters or methodologies, but ignorant of important fields and ideas. 

 But assuming that the trend is toward ever-greater specialization in law schools as elsewhere, what is the institutional environment that will lead specialists to collaborate with specialists in other fields, seeking new breakthroughs?  And will there still be a role for the polymath?  Or even just your run-of-the-mill smart generalist? What will it be?

Carr says, for example, that the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton is specifically laid out so that different disciplines rub shoulders. I suspect that at most institutions that’s not sufficient encouragement or incentive for the type of collaboration and intellectual curiosity that would be ideal (heck, I suspect that at some institutions it wouldn’t necessarily even lead to a friendly greeting upon crossing paths in the hallway, but that’s neither here nor there).

These questions remind me somewhat of Posner’s (again! jeez, we really are becoming the blog about Richard Posner) article in the Georgetown Law Journal about the future of legal scholarship (a response to Pierre Schlag), and also of Josh Wright’s series of posts last year on the future of L&E (here, here, here, and here), as it becomes ever more specialized.  Both are worth reading. 

I don’t know the answers to these questions, so feel free to post your greater insights in the comments.  I’m off to read enough to sound competent in just one field today, at least as judged by the standards of my students . . .

Rape Culture at Memorial High

 

Here's what the kids from Memorial HS were selling last week to promote the big game against the Stratford Spartans. 

I won't post the images on this site, because frankly, they leave me frozen, awed, disgusted, enraged, sad, furious, outraged, sick.

What also makes me sad: the people who aren't outraged.  When I received an e-mail from the concerned parent last week, I told him/her I'd ask around to see if anyone in the district knew about this.  Most folks wanted to vomit even without seeing the image, but what shocked me most were those who couldn't care less; those who shrugged it off or said it was a school-boy prank (b/c that makes it ok?), those who communicated by silence or otherwise that I, again, was causin' trouble.

Well, to them I say this:  I get it, I really do.  Misogyny is scary, standing up to it more so.  And if I grew up in Texas football culture, I’d probably keep quite too. 

But I didn’t.  So I won’t. 

Let the trouble begin.

-Kathleen Bergin

post-script:  Spring Branch ISD, where Memorial is located, posted this statement on their website today:

Spring Branch ISD has learned about a t-shirt with an inappropriate graphic image that surfaced in connection with the recent Memorial-Stratford High School football game. This t-shirt was not approved, condoned or sanctioned by SBISD or Memorial High. Several t-shirts were confiscated at the game, and several students have been questioned so far about them. This type of behavior is not acceptable. SBISD and Memorial High officials continue to investigate the situation. Any individuals found to be responsible will be dealt with appropriately.

Hmm, ok.  But the statement makes it sound like SBISD just now learned about the t-shirt, when in fact, grotesquely similar t-shirts apparently have been sold there for years.

  

"Disappointed"

That's how Sandra Day O'Connor apparently feels about the Court under Justice Roberts.  Here's how Nina Totenberg recalled O'Connor's weekend remarks at William & Mary: 

She referred to some of her opinions as, quote, "being dismantled," by the current court under Chief Justice Roberts. Since her retirement, the court has backed away from some decisions in which she, sort of, brokered a consensus - on campaign finance, on abortion, on affirmative action. And asked how she felt about the court, that and this court, she responded, well what would you feel? I'd be a little disappointed, she said. If you think you've been helpful and then it's dismantled, you think, oh, dear. But life goes on, she said. It's not always positive.

-Kathleen Bergin

Sotomayor 36, Scalia 30

It appears that Justice Sotomayor will not be a shrinking violet.  She brought her Bronx moxie with her to the Court yesterday.  According to the LA Times,

Sotomayor peppered the lawyers with questions in a pair of cases, joining with Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the oral arguments. Together, they left the other justices sitting in silence for much of the time. In the first hour alone, Sotomayor asked 36 questions, and Scalia followed with 30. Ginsburg is particularly interested in legal procedures, and she and Sotomayor dominated the questioning for much of the second hour.

Imagine how much Sotomayor would have had to say if she, like Ginsburg, were particularly interested in legal procedures!

The Disappearing Academic Fox? (Part I)

Edward Carr has an excellent article in the Autumn edition of Intelligent Life, The Last Days Of The Polymath.  In it, Carr discusses the lives and careers of several polymaths (basically, people who know a lot) including two law school professors: Judge Richard Posner and Alexander McCall Smith.  Smith is probably best known, especially in the U.S., for the 60 books he has authored, including The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series (although I prefer The Sunday Philosophy Club series, featuring the Isabel Dalhousie character).  But Smith is also an Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.  McCall Smith’s fields of expertise are medical law and criminal law, and he has written books, articles, and chapters in those fields and has served on British and international committees concerned with those issues.

One of the polymaths interviewed by Carr, Carl Djerassi (the chemist, novelist, and playwright, who is credited as one of the developers of oral contraceptives), actually rejects the term, noting that it connotes dabbling – an intellectual promiscuity – when he prefers to think of himself as an intellectual polygamist who has various marriages, each one important.

But the theme of Carr’s piece is how poorly today’s polymaths compare with the polymaths of the past. Carr writes that, “as human learning has flowered, the man or woman who does great things in many fields has become a rare species.” According to Carr:

Over the past 200 years the nature of intellectual endeavour has changed profoundly. The polymaths of old were one-brain universities. These days you count as a polymath if you excel at one thing and go on to write a decent book about another.

Being a polymath is more difficult today, because breaking new ground is more difficult.  There is more research out there to wade through and master before one can stake out a promising research path of one’s own.  (Carr points to the older age, by about six years, at which the 1998 Nobel Laureates did their seminal research, as compared to those of 1873 -- it was the same with great inventors – as evidence).  Moreover, staying on top of a field is harder now than it once was, especially in the sciences. Simply keeping up with the reading in any given specialty is a full time job. 

And thus we come to the source of the polymath’s death: specialization.  Both the vast amounts of knowledge, and the vast increase in the number of specialists in every field puts the polymath at a disadvantage.

If you have a multitude who give their lives to a specialism, their combined knowledge will drown out even a gifted generalist. And while the polymath tries to take possession of a second expertise in some distant discipline, his or her first expertise is being colonised by someone else.

I’ll leave off there for today.  But tomorrow, I’ll be back with more on the polymath question, plus some thoughts and theories about what all of this increasing specialization means for law schools (especially in the new and more frugal economic environment that seems destined to hang around for awhile).  

For the next post in this series, see The Disappearing Academic Fox? (Part II)

First Monday in October

So you're expecting a post about the beginning of the 2009-10 term of the United States Supreme Court?  This isn't it.

This is a post about Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Lord Hope of Craighead, Lord Saville of Newdigate, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe, Baroness Hale of Richmond, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, Lord Mance, Lord Collins of Mapesbury, Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore, and Lord Clarke of Stone-cum-Ebony.

Who?

These are the initial justices (along with, I believe, one more to be named) of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.  According to its web site, the Supreme Court will:

• be the final court of appeal for all United Kingdom civil cases, and criminal cases from England, Wales and Northern Ireland
• hear appeals on arguable points of law of general public importance
• concentrate on cases of the greatest public and constitutional importance
• maintain and develop the role of the highest court in the United Kingdom as a leader in the common law world

So why is today -- the first Monday in October -- such a big day?

Actually, a date of more importance was last Thursday, October 1, on which the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom came into being (replacing "the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords," according to this press release).  Today, October 5, carries its own importance, though, marking  the day on which the new Supreme Court heard its first case, which, according to this news story, is "an appeal by five terrorism suspects who say the British government has overstepped its power by freezing their assets without a conviction."  Perhaps of some surprise (disappointment?) to more than a few readers, the justices "wore no wigs, no robes and sat in a new courtroom equipped with cameras and microphones for their first hearing."

Bummer.  I so love the wigs.

Additional reading (and some pictures) here, here, here, here, and here.

Photo source here.