The Faculty Lounge

The New Law School Accreditation Debate

The ongoing battle over the standards for accreditation of law schools by the American Bar Association Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar burst into general public view just over a week ago with a Chronicle of Higher Education story.  The story reported on the budding debate concerning proposals that would require law schools to identify a set of comprehensive learning objectives and then assess whether their students actually achieved an appropriate level of proficiency in those identified objectives.

Some background about the context of the debate might be useful.  Legal education, like all of American higher education, is a regulated industry through the practice of accreditation.  The Section on Legal Education is approved by the U.S. Department of Education as the accrediting body for American law schools.  The Department requires federally approved accrediting bodies to examine their standards for accreditation regularly and comprehensively.  The Section’s preliminary proposals for stated learning goals and assessment methods come as part of that comprehensive review process.  The proposals respond to longstanding criticisms that the current standards are too oriented toward inputs rather than outputs.  Thus, current rules look more at faculty size and library resources and less at the institution’s  success in teaching lawyering skills.

The drive for measurable outcomes is not unique to legal education.  It is part of a major trend generally in higher education accreditation practice to make the rules more output rather than input oriented.  For example, the regional accreditors for colleges and universities now have made assessment of learning outcomes a major component of their standards.  Specialized accreditors, such as those for medicine, pharmacy and nursing also require institutions to establish focused learning goals and assessment rubrics.

So why are law schools resisting efforts to refocus accreditation on learning outcomes?  The objections to the Section’s proposed standards come in a variety of forms.  Opponents argue that requiring formal assessment unduly increases the costs of law school programs, interferes with institutional autonomy, and stifles innovation.  None of these objections are trivial and their ultimate force depends greatly on the precise details of the standards the Section ultimately adopts.  The more profound issues with the proposals have not yet been made explicit.  They relate to internal law school politics and battles for the soul of legal education.  No law school would want to commit publicly to having its students learn only a narrow range of skills.  Both students and employers would insist on a broadly based learning agenda.  By identifying such an agenda, a law school would necessarily be obligated to devote the resources to support such learning.  Thus, I believe a significant source of the angst about the proposals is the well founded belief that, because the total resources available to a law school are not likely to grow, the new standards would lead to a major reallocation of institutional resources from faculty scholarship to skills teaching.  My assumption is supported by the interest group politics exhibited to date.  The major supporters of the proposal are the organized groups representing clinicians and legal writing faculty.  So stay tuned.  What looks like a modest debate about accreditation may lead to a deep discussion about our future.

Commuting ... and Kindling

So I'm doing a lot of flying this semester and have finally entered the age of netbooks and Kindles.  And here's what I've discovered.  While I absolutely adore both my netbook and my Kindle, I've run into a few glitches here and there.  I'm sure I'll work out solutions at some point.

1. When you have to fly airlines in which you don't hold membership to the airline lounge, you take your chances that the rest of the airport has: (a) wireless Internet access at all; or, (b) wireless Internet access for a reasonable fee.

2. When you stop off in Canada, you can't access any of your U.S. licensed Internet media (at least things like movies on Netflix) because of regional restrictions on the license.

3. Sometimes even in airline lounges, the Internet capacity isn't good enough to stream audio or vidio files effectively.

4. Gotta love Charlotte Airport with exceptionally strong free Wi-Fi throughout!

5. While Kindles are terrific and I can read all the trashy novels I want whenever and wherever I travel, they are an electronic device and must be switched off during takeoff and landing.  Not a limitation with a real book - for all those people who say reading from a Kindle is as close as you can get to reading from a book.

Anyone else want to share electronic travel glitches?

An Athens Cemetery

Been meaning to post some pictures of the Athens, Georgia cemetery where Thomas Cobb is buried (Oconee Hill).  Here's a picture of the monument to Thomas Cobb in the Cobb family plot.  And below I've posted a close-up of the column, which has details on the lives of several generations of the Cobb family who are buried in this plot.  I took these when I was down in Athens last August for a conference at the Thomas Cobb house.

And I also have a picture of an antebellum mausoleum--dedicated to an officer who died in the Mexican-American war. You may recall we've spoken recently of the Mexican-American War Memorial on the South Carolina capitol grounds.  

Damages (Season 3)

Damages returns Monday night.   (I've blogged previously about the show here.)  What can we expect in the third season?  From the website:

.... Patty Hewes has recently been appointed by the U.S. government to recover billions of dollars in stolen assets from the largest investment fraud in U.S. history, a fraud perpetrated by the esteemed financier Louis Tobin.

Inspired by recent events in the world's economic collapse, Season 3 showcases Damages signature legal-thriller storytelling as Patty Hewes takes on the Tobin family - a secretive clan determined to protect its interests at all costs. The Tobin family members have maintained their complete and total innocence. They claim not to have known anything about Louis Tobin's fraud. But Patty Hewes believes otherwise and will stop at nothing to prove it. Patty and her trusted lieutenant Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan) do battle against the Tobin family's trusted attorney Leonard Winstone (Martin Short), son Joe Tobin (Campbell Scott), and Louis Tobin's wife Marilyn (Lily Tomlin).

Glenn Close (two-time Emmy winner for this role) and Martin Short (in the role of "a sinister, untrustworthy character who oozes brainy insincerity like oil," says Entertainment Weekly) as legal adversaries?  Wow!  This I gotta see!

The (Early) Triumph of Law and Entrepreneurship

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

How do you know that a field has "made it" in the legal academy?  The answer is when a school creates an LLM program in the area.  Luckily, this past week the Wall Street Journal Law Blog reported that not one but two schools are in the process of starting up Law and Entrepreneurship LLM programs - Duke and Colorado.

This semester in my own Law and Entrepreneurship class we just finished a unit on what is distinct about entrepreneurship as well as law and entrepreneurship.  I suspect that with the Kauffman Foundation providing the funding for cutting edge research in the area, within the next few years the field will look a bit more coherent to those outside of it.  

So, what is Law and Entrepreneurship? 

Generally speaking, “entrepreneurship” involves new products or services, new ways of organizing, or new geographic markets (collectively, “entrepreneurial opportunities”). A key feature of entrepreneurial opportunities is their novelty. Entrepreneurial opportunities may be novel in a strong sense, which typically implies a technological breakthrough, or they may be novel in a weak sense, such as opening a new restaurant in a vacant building. We define entrepreneurship as “engaging in a novel activity that carries substantial risk or uncertainty, in a sustained manner with the intent of creating an ongoing enterprise.” Operationally, this usually translates to “founding a new firm.” Understanding law is relevant to understanding entrepreneurship.

Focusing on “law” as it relates to entrepreneurship can mean various things, but the basic idea of “law and entrepreneurship” is to find either (1) a unique set of legal rules or legal practices in the entrepreneurial context, or (2) the unique expression or interaction of more generally applicable legal rules in the entrepreneurial context. “Legal rules” include constitutions, statutes, regulations, and common law doctrines. “Legal practices” include contracts or other forms of private ordering. Further, we include “legal bodies.” By “legal bodies” we mean the personnel, technologies, facilities, operational routines, etc. that implement legal rules and practices including the legal profession. For example, professions are organizers and rationalizers of the organizational environment. Legal bodies include the linkages to work on law firm management, legal ethics, and the nature of corporate legal work.

In my own research in this area for an article in which I am writing with Gordon Smith(BYU Law), we note that lots of the existing literature in entrepreneurship is fundamentally about legal issues.  Nevertheless,  academics in other fields that have been active in entrepreneurship research (sociology/org theory, accounting, finance and economics) for the most part have yet to make these connections explicit in their work.

As I explained to a colleague on Friday who wondered why the "law" part is so important if it has not been explicit in much of the non-legal research to date, my answer to him is that the "law" is like the Book of Esther.  Unlike other books of the Bible, God (in all possible variations of the name) does not appear even once in the Book of Esther.  However, as we learned in Hebrew School, this does not mean that God is not ever-present in the story. 

Biblical allusions aside, law and entrepreneurship is a hot field and one that I think will continue to grow in part because the study of entrepreneurship  has taken off in many universities.  With BIGLAW jobs perhaps no longer guaranteed for students, law and entrepreneurship allows students to access an area of law where jobs might be possible for those who are willing to take on some risk.  Additionally, increasingly the structure of BIGLAW might make a number of current BIGLAW associates and partners more willing to take the plunge into a fascinating area of law that is a driver of US innovation and growth. 

Genial Dismissals, The Chicago Way

Via Freakonomics, This New Yorker piece (gated) by John Cassidy, which explores the state of the “Chicago School.”  From Stephen Dubner:

Richard Posner, unsurprisingly, is the hero of the article. But Fama, as Cassidy notes, was “genial” in his dismissal of Posner’s analysis; and Fama’s “equanimity was unshaken” even when discussing Krugman’s fierce criticisms. “My attitude is this,” he said. “If you are getting attacked by Krugman, you must be doing something right.”

From the article abstract:

Earlier this year, Judge Richard A. Posner published “A Failure of Capitalism,” in which he argues that lax monetary policy and deregulation helped bring on the current economic slump. Posner has been a leading figure in the conservative Chicago School of economics for decades. In September, he came out as a Keynesian. [See this New Republic article for the “coming out.” -- KDK]  As acts of betrayal go, this was roughly akin to Johnny Damon’s forsaking the Red Sox Nation and joining the Yankees. Ever since Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and others founded the Chicago School, in the nineteen-forties and fifties, one of its goals has been to displace Keynesianism, and it had largely succeeded. . . . In “A Failure of Capitalism,” Posner singles out several economists, including Robert Lucas and John Cochrane, both of the Chicago School, for failing to appreciate the magnitude of the subprime crisis, and he questioned the entire methodology that Lucas and his colleagues pioneered. . . .

In the course of a few days, the writer talked to economists from various branches of the subject. The over-all reaction he encountered put him in mind of what happened to cosmology after the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, and was much larger than scientists believed. The profession fell into turmoil, with some physicists sticking to existing theories, while others came up with the big-bang theory. Eugene Fama, of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, was firmly in the denial camp. He defended the efficient-markets hypothesis, which underpinned the deregulation of the banking system championed by Alan Greenspan and others. He insisted that the real culprit in the mortgage mess was the federal government. Mentions John Cochrane. Gary Becker, who won the Nobel in 1992, says that Posner and others raised fair critiques of Chicago economics. Mentions Robert Lucas and James Heckman. If the economic equivalent of a big-bang theory is to emerge, it will almost certainly come from scholars much less invested in the old doctrines than Fama and Lucas. Mentions Richard Thaler. Raghuram Rajan, an Indian-born Chicago professor, is one of the few economists who warned about the dangers of the financial crisis. . . .

The impact of the financial crisis shouldn’t be underestimated, especially for Chicago-style economics. “Keynes is back,” Posner said, “and behavioral finance is on the march.”

As a follow-up, Cassidy has posted interview transcripts with the Chicago economists that are the subject of the piece.  Says Justin Wolfers:

All the interviews are with truly great economists. The very best come across as trying to build insight that is both rigorous and empirically relevant. But some come across as obtuse; others as arrogant; and some oblivious, or uninterested in evidence. Time and again I was surprised at how readily the interviews slipped from careful insight into personal ideology and dogmas. In each case, the interviews are revealing. (The charitable interpretation is that perhaps what they reveal is how seriously each took Cassidy’s interviews.)

Here are links to the transcripts:

                              Richard Posner

                              Eugene Fama

                              John Cochrane

                              Gary Becker

                              Jim Heckman

                              Kevin Murphy

 Raghu Rajan

Richard Thaler

In Memoriam: Eugene Gressman, 1917-2010

My friend and UNC emeritus colleague Gene Gressman passed away this afternoon at the age of ninety-two.  

Gene was, by any measure, one of the twentieth century's towering figures of Supreme Court practice and  constitutional law.  Born in 1917, he got both his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Michigan.  For five years, from 1943 to 1948, Gene served as law clerk to Associate Justice Frank Murphy of the United States Supreme Court.

He spent 30 years as a litigator in Washington, DC, and  then joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of Law, where he taught until his retirement in 1987.  Even after retirement, Gene continued to teach, both here at UNC and also for several years at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, New Jersey, where he was warmly received by faculty and students alike.

Gene also continued work through retirement on what is surely the central scholarly achievement of his career:  the treatise "Supreme Court Practice," which he and Bob Stern launched in 1950 and now, in its ninth edition, considered "The Bible" for those who practice before the Court.

He was a skilled oral advocate who argued 13 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court.  The most notable of these was undoubtedly his argument for the House of Representatives in I.N.S. v. Chadha.  You can listen to his argument in that case here.

Throughout his life Gene remained very proud of the work he did for Justice Murphy.  He took special pride in his work on Justice Murphy's justly famous dissent in Korematsu v. United States (1944):

"I dissent ... from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must accordingly be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution."

Gene was always too much of a professional, and too protective of Justice Murphy's memory and reputation, to come out and admit it, but I have no doubt that Gene was, for all practical purposes, the author of that dissent.  (Gene was still reflecting on Korematsu, and writing beautifully, as recently as 2004, when he published Korematsu:  A Melange of Military Imperatives in a symposium in Law and Contemporary Problems commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Japanese American cases of World War II.)

I'll miss Gene Gressman, and so will the whole legal profession.

IOC Recommendations on Intersex Athletes Released

As I previously blogged about here and here, I just returned from the 2nd World Conference on the Hormonal and Genetic Basis of Sexual Differentiation Disorders and Hot Topics in Endocrinology in Miami, held in conjunction with the International Olympic Committee’s special conference of medical experts to draw up guidelines on the competitive eligibility of intersex athletes. 

Yesterday, the IOC released recommendations stemming from that conference.  I can’t find a copy of the recommendations to link to at this time, but Gina Kolata’s NY Times article reports on some of the content.   According to Kolata:

Athletes who identify themselves as female but have medical disorders that give them masculine characteristics should have their disorders diagnosed and treated, the group concluded after two days of meetings in Miami Beach. The experts also said that rules should be put in place for determining an athlete’s eligibility to compete on a case-by-case basis — but they did not indicate what those rules should be.

Obviously, one needs more information than this to say much of anything useful about the specifics of the recommendations.  But even given this limited bit of information I would expect this recommendation to be controversial for at least two reasons. 

First, some have already taken issue with the IOC position that intersex athletes have medical disorders that must be diagnosed and treated (see here also).   I have not seen a statement yet from patient advocate groups, such as Accord Alliance or others, but will be interested to see their position.  As stated by Ross Tucker at Science of Sport:

If this is the agreed upon approach, then fairness is very definitely an issue.  One cannot be forced into medical treatment as a condition for participation, surely? . . .

As I see it, the only way this would be feasible is if athletic competition with such a sex ambiguity poses a risk - then authorities could say that they do not wish to be party to the increased risk and deny the athlete the right to participate.  The risk of having such a condition alone would not entitle the IOC to ban an athlete, surely?

Second, many female athletes and others involved in female athletics have expressed concerns about competitive fairness (see the above-mentioned NY Times article for quotes from some).  Again, the specifics of the recommendation are quite vague at the moment, but would appear to treat the potential competitive advantage arising from some intersex conditions as either irrelevant or reversible through treatment.  But this may not be the case: some intersex conditions can alter skeletomuscular structure in lasting ways that may impact athletic performance.  (See here for a short article reviewing these issues)

And none of this even begins to touch on the murky issues relating to other biological athletic advantages.  As noted by George Dvorsky at Sentient Developments:

Immediate examples include swimmer Michael Phelps with his many advantageous traits (including the possibility of Marfan Syndrome) and those athletes with higher levels of hemoglobin which gives them superior oxygen-carrying capability.

Clearly, sport is not – and never has been -- about creating a completely level playing field.   Yet it does involve drawing a variety of sometimes-arbitrary seeming lines for the sake of maintaining performance within specified ranges considered conducive to competition (and, thus, audience appeal).  See, for example, the recent debate between Richard Posner and Michael Sandel (which I previously blogged about here) on sports doping to get a flavor of some of these issues.

Ross Tucker summarizes what’s at stake well, I think:

The question is, does the right to compete with a possible advantage as a result of masculinization trump the right to fair competition for those without it?   Whose rights are more important, because balancing fairness requires that somebody assign a value to each side's arguments.

The IOC special conference apparently recognized the same trade-off.  According to the New York Times:

Simpson, of Florida International University, said he recognized that some female athletes would find the guidelines unfair. But, he said, “we have to balance fairness to female athletes to fairness to other competitors.”

Judge Sharon Keller (Update)

Last February, Dan blogged about Texas Court of Criminal Appeals presiding judge Sharon Keller and her decision concerning a last-minute appeal from a prisoner on death row.

Yesterday a special master presiding over Judge Keller's ethics trial issued a 16-page report on the matter.  Stories here, here, here, here and elsewhere on the internet.  (I cannot find a link to the report at this time.)

Dan or others may have more on this story.

The Return of Michael, Fiona, and Sam

Burn Notice is back for another season!  Hallelujah!

If you're not yet a fan, check out the new episodes, starting tomorrow (Thursday) night on the USA Network.   (The first three seasons are available on Netflix.)

Tenure Track Hiring: Risks versus Rewards

I may have blogged along these lines before, but I had a conversation about entry level hiring yesterday that reminded me of my fascination with this issue.  I know that some law schools only hire people on the tenure track who they are very sure will succeed in getting tenure - so they focus on low risk/no risk (if there's any such thing) candidates.  This means that the hiring decision is also effectively the tenure decision at many schools.  Then there are other schools were tenure is not an assured thing and where faculty might potentially hire higher risk candidates because there's no presumption at the point of hire that the person will most likely get tenure.  So which system is better for the candidate and for the school?  Obviously, the second approach potentially leads to much more anxiety on the tenure track, but at the same time it perhaps gives greater opportunities to candidates whose CVs are not so obviously glowing at the time of the meat market.  The first approach also has its own downsides because if a school really develops a presumption that the hiring decision is in effect the tenure decision, what happens if a candidate doesn't actually live up to their promise along the tenure track?  Might that school's standards get diluted over time?  (Although perhaps that's not likely given the current strength of the tenure-track pool of candidates.)  I'm from a school where we like to think that we don't hire anyone who doesn't have a very strong shot at tenure at least, but I wonder if that also makes it more difficult for us to hire in the first place ie we're competing with many more schools for the very strongest candidates and perhaps less likely to take a risk on someone whose CV is less polished at the time of the meat market.  One solution to this is obviously creating VAP type positions for the "riskier" candidates, but there, we might be competing with other schools who will offer a tenure track position, but who are less sure that tenure is almost a fait accompli at the time of hiring.  I'd be interested in the perspectives of hiring committees at other schools and of entry level candidates on these approaches - and on whether there are other approaches to entry level hiring I might have missed in this context.

Dean Finalists At Tulane Law

Through the grapevine, we hear that the finalists for the Tulane Law deanship are:

Diane Amann, Professor of Law, UC Davis and Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall;

David Meyer,  Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois College of Law; and

Symeon Symeonides,  Dean of the College of Law at Willamette University.

Keep track of all of this year's dean searches here.

Workshop on Empirical Legal Scholarship

From the announcement:

The Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship workshop is for law school faculty interested in learning about empirical research. Leading empirical scholars Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin will teach the workshop, which provides the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies, and to use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data. Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop.

Hat tip:  our friends at the ELS Blog.

New Journal on Accounting, Economics, and Law

Via Lawrence Cunningham comes this announcement of the Journal of Accounting, Economics and Law:

The Journal of Accounting, Economics, and Law aims to encourage a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between individuals, organizations, and institutions in economy and society. Among others, attention will be paid to financial, economic and legal techniques and languages that play an influential and neglected role in this relationship. Concerns of finance, control, accountability, responsibility, valuation, regulation, and governance will be raised in their connection with accounting, economics, law, sociology, anthropology, history, finance, political science, and the management and policy sciences. The journal encourages works that seek to recombine disciplinary domains in response to practically relevant issues, while encouraging theoretical advances and insights, and comparative historical perspectives.

Constitutional Places: A New Coffee Table Book

I love this!  Josh Blackman and Yaakov Roth are putting together a book of photographs of places where great constitutional law cases arose.  They write:

In keeping with the mission of the Harlan Institute, which seeks to utilize the power of Web 2.0 to make the Constitution more accessible, we are asking (blegging in the cyber lingo) bloggers across the Nation to help us out, and submit photographs. You will be credited in the ultimate production.  If you live in any of these areas, we will find the exact location, and help you track it down.

They've got some great cases picked out that are in need of photographs.  Of course they're looking for a Ten Commandments monument (Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005)).  Other cases to think about adding ... Fletcher v. Peck, Johnson v. McIntosh, and Worcester v. Georgia -- and The Antelope.  There's a monument to the latter on Amelia Island, Florida, as I recall.   How about Euclid v. Ambler Realty, too?  And a school in Charlotte -- for Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg? 

Over at Volokh, Ilya Somin's talking about this project.

Not to sound too "popular constitutional" about things -- but maybe they'd want to include photographs of places important in constitutional thought even though they're not immediately connected to a case -- like Charleston, SC, ground zero for the nullification controversy, or Fort Sumter for that matter.  Or the Virginia state capitol, sight of debates over slavery in the 1830s and later the seat of the Confederate Congress.  Or Gettysburg.  Or maybe a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Now, this also makes me think .... what about great cases from the North Carolina Supreme Court?  Like, hmm, University of North Carolina v. Foy.  Sally Greene's already got State v. Mann fully covered.

Along the lines of "popular constitutionalism," the illustration is of a tree at the Brandywine Battlefield Park, which I took over winter break.  The tree was there at the time of the battle and so was the house in the background, which is where LaFayette had his headquarters.  I'll be talking soon some more about those heroes who barely staved off defeat of the revolutionary cause at Brandywine.  On that day (September 11, 1777), to invoke a nineteenth-centuryism, "escape itself was almost victory" for us.  John Marshall was there, as a young officer, and so were a bunch of other people who were almost captured.

Before we could proudly say of Franklin that he wrested lightning from the heavens and scepters from tyrannts, our cause had to actually wrest a scepter from a tyrannt.  Brandywine was part of putting those revolutionary ideas into practice, though as things worked out, there wasn't a whole lot of wresting scepters on that day, or in the dark freezing and starving times that followed at Valley Forge.

Nebraska Dean Search

Five candidates are scheduled to interview for the deanship at the University of Nebraska College of Law over the next few weeks.  Story here.

You Had Me at "Dear Sir"

Everyone has received an email saying that they have won a massive lottery prize in Latvia, or that a fallen leader in Africa needs to deposit $24M USD into your private bank account.   It's a simple scam: they ask to pay processing fees; there is a problem with the $24M; and then you have to send more processing fees.  Thinking that you are "almost there," unsuspecting emailers get swindled.

Similar scams have now reached academia, in the form of false conference announcements. Everyone likes international conferences, right?  And invited speaking engagements are always fun to add to the CV.  But beware of governmental-sounding human rights organizations requesting your presence in Senegal!

After the jump, a sample letter.

South Carolina Statehouse: African American Monument

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I thought I'd post some pictures of the monument to African Americans on the South Carolina statehouse grounds.  The South Carolina capitol grounds are packed with monuments -- to the Mexican-American War, the Confederacy, the Spanish-American War, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman, Strom Thurmond, World War II, and probably some other people and/or wars, which I didn't take pictures of.  I've not seen another statehouse with so many monuments around it.  Though I must say that in terms of monuments, nothing beats Gettysburg in my experience.

Anyway, the monument to African Americans is different from the other monuments around the statehouse -- it's more recent than all but one of the monuments.  (It was dedicated in March 2001.)  And visitors walk inside it.  There are two panoramics of African American history in South Carolina.  A picture of one is on the upper right. One of the things that interests me are the phrases on the monument, "Jim Crow Law," "Black Codes," "Lynching," "Sharecropping," then later on, a few panels down, there's Briggs v. Elliott (a 1952 Supreme Court case that became part of Brown v. Board of Education) and, of course, Brown v. Board of Education.  Quite a lot gets packed into that monument.

Then in the center of the monument is a map of Africa and the United States, which shows some of the places where South Carolina's African Americans' ancestors came from.  It's hard to get a good picture of the map.

Here're some more pictures of the monument.  They put the monument into perspective on the capitol grounds, as well as give close ups of a lot of the panels.

Call for Papers

Disability and Ethics through the Life Cycle: 

Cases, Controversies, & Finding Common Ground

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

May 21-22, 2010

Union College, Schenectady, NY

 

Despite a common interest in facilitating good medical care, bioethicists and members of the disability rights community sometimes differ in their approach to issues arising in the bio-medical settings, especially on such polarizing issues as abortion and physician-assisted suicide.  Focusing on these polarizing issues, however, distracts attention from other ethical issues that affect people with disabilities in biomedical contexts.  This conference will offer a forum for bioethicists, disability-rights scholars, disability-rights advocates, and other stakeholders with a different focus for discussing these issues by viewing disability from a life -cycle perspective.  People confront disability through the life cycle: infancy, childhood, reproductive years, middle age, and old age. At each age they confront situations with ethical dimensions that present them, their families, and their caregivers and biomedical researchers with ethical challenges.  This conference is designed to promote interdisciplinary conversations about these less frequently discussed ethical issues.

We are soliciting contributed papers or panels to be presented in highly interactive sessions. Those interested should submit a 250-word abstract describing original work that does not substantially overlap with papers already published. Topics of interest include but are not limited to specific cases where disability generates ethical issues during infancy, childhood, the reproductive years, middle age, and old age, or research on disabled people.  Because of the conference’s life-cycle focus, no papers on prenatal issues or assisted suicide will be considered. 

The authors of accepted submissions will be invited to present their work at the conference. Presentations on these papers should not exceed 20 minutes in length. Accepted papers will be considered for publication in a printed volume to be edited by conference organizers.

General & Format Guidelines for Abstract Submission

1.    Abstracts must not exceed 250 words

2.    Abstracts should contain the names, degrees and institutions of all authors

3.    Abstracts should contain the contact information of at least one author (the submitting author), including an email address

4.    Abstracts should be submitted to blooma@union.edu with a subject line of "Disability and Bioethics"

5.    Deadline for abstract submission is 15 March 2010

6.    Email notification of accepted abstracts will be sent by 2 April 2010

7.    The presenting author(s) of a contributed paper must register for the conference and pay the registration fee $ 150 in order to have the paper included in the conference.

 

Sponsors:  Albany Law School, Rapaport Ethics Across the Curriculum Program of Union College, & the Union Graduate College-Mount Sinai School of Medicine Bioethics Program

 

For additional information, contact blooma@union.edu or noltea@uniongraduatecollege.edu

Some youtube videos

I thought I'd posted about this already -- but I guess not.  Here are three youtube videos I enjoy.  The first -- which I was thinking about recently as I was nostalgic for my time in Tuscaloosa after the Crimson Tide's national championship -- is "Big Time in the Jungle."  It's about an army recruit from .... yes, Eutaw, Alabama!  Close readers of the faculty lounge will recall that I blogged extensively about Eutaw, the county seat of Greene County last summer.  Though I take it the song is by the Old Crow Medicine Show, this version is by the Foggy Bottom Bandits.

The next video is of Dan Tyminski's song, "Some Early Morning." This one I first heard in Chapel Hill.  

Then final one is a monologue by Smokey Robinson, "A black American." I heard this while driving through DC last winter break. Pretty creative.