The Faculty Lounge

Third Party Peer Reviewing?

There have been many discussions on this blog - and others - about the ills of the law review publishing system, which may be unintentionally exacerbated by services like Expresso which make it cheap and easy for more authors to submit more papers to more journals.  And we have had threads before where we've compared our system with the blind peer reviewing system common in other disciplines - and common in other countries in academic legal publishing.

So in the middle of the night last night I was struck with a thought about whether there is any way of combining the two systems and getting the best of both worlds - although anything I come up with in the middle of the night is likely to lead to the worst of both worlds.

My thought was whether a formal peer-reviewing service could be incorporated into the system we already have and whether that could make article selection and editing smoother sailing and less time consuming for editors and authors.  What about a third party peer reviewing service that could use professional peer reviewers to write short reports emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of an article prior to submission to journals?  (I suggest third party here so that blind peer review could be organized, rather than authors just asking their colleagues to write nice things about their work prior to submission that they could then use in the submission process.) 

Such a system would potentially allow authors to submit papers to journals accompanied by peer reviews.  This may make article selection easier for journal editors who could at least use blind peer reviews as a proxy for quality as opposed to letterhead of the author or any other factor that might come into play?  Of course, one would hope that articles selection editors would still carefully read pieces they were interested in publishing but, let's face it, no one board can read multiple thousands of submissions each cycle so they have to have some kinds of proxies to help with at  least a first cut.

I haven't thought this out any further and the logistics may be impossible, but couldn't some enterprising group set up a pay-per-use peer reviewing service?  This would simply be interposing an optional third party service much in the way we have done for article submission by using Expresso as a paid third party rather than submitting directly to many individual journals?  Or is this just injecting too many middle men into the process?  Could Expresso introduce such an optional service itself if it could be managed cost-effectively?

Vincent Rougeau Named Dean At BC Law

Boston College School of Law is announcing today that Professor Vincent Rougeau, of Notre Dame Law, will become its new Dean.   He takes over on July 1.  Rougeau writes about the relationship between religion and public policy.  My guess is that his service will be a big shift from the deanship of John Garvey.  He is the first African-American dean at BC Law.

My Favorite Libraries

I speak often of my favorite librarian -- but now I want to post some pictures of my favorite libraries -- Harvard's Widener Library; Columbia's Butler Library and the Columbia Law Library; and the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt Library.

Fallout From Law School Speech: SlutWalk Toronto

Back in January, a Toronto police office - speaking to students at Toronto's Osgoode Hall Law School - suggested that one way for women to avoid sexual assault was to "not dress like sluts."  Naturally, and appropriately, this comment generated much anger - and an apology from the officer.  But in the great tradition of reappropriating language, activists in Toronto have now organized SlutWalk Toronto for April 3.

 

Pace Law School Seeks to Hire Assistant Dean of Environmental Program

Pace University School of Law  (White Plains, NY) is seeking to fill one position, titled, Assistant Dean of Environmental Programs and Professor of Law for Designated Project or Service (Assistant Dean) for its nationally ranked Center for Environmental Legal Studies (CELS).  This non-tenure track position offers the opportunity to direct one of the nation’s top Environmental Law Programs.  The Assistant Dean reports to the Vice Dean for Academic Affairs, and will be responsible for the overall management and administration of the Center.

Working in conjunction with the environmental faculty, the Assistant Dean helps establish the overall direction for the Environmental Law Program and is responsible for developing new programs and projects and managing and coordinating the day-to-day undertakings of the Center.  Those responsibilities include organizing lectures, colloquia and our National Environmental Moot Court Competition, as well as coordinating programs with the Environmental Litigation Clinic, Pace Land Use Law Center, Pace Center for Climate and Energy Law, Brazil-American Institute for Law and Environment (BAILE), and Pace’s Public Interest Law Center.  The Assistant Dean also teaches in the program.  

The ideal candidate enjoys creating and maintaining partnerships and relationships with other law schools and educational institutions, bar and professional associations, governmental agencies, civic and community associations and the private sector.   We seek candidates with excellent administrative and management skills, in-depth knowledge of environmental law and the environmental legal community, and familiarity with academic institutions.  All applicants should have a J.D. degree.   Extensive legal and/or teaching experience in the area is a strong plus.

Pace is committed to achieving equal opportunity in all aspects of University life.  Applications are encouraged from people of color, gays and transgendered individuals, individuals who are differently-abled, veterans of the armed forces or national service, and anyone whose background and experience will contribute to the diversity of our school.

Salaries and benefits, including domestic partner benefits, are commensurate with experience and performance.  

Pace University School of Law is located in suburban White Plains, New York, in Westchester County, approximately 15 miles north of New York City.  Pace’s reputation and strong financial aid and scholarship program attract extremely talented students from diverse backgrounds, from thirty-four states, and more than 15 countries.  The Law School’s primary commitment is to providing its students with the skills, knowledge, and values necessary to be effective and ethical lawyers as well as community leaders.  We offer the resources of a private, nationally-ranked university, tuition waivers for family members and an attractive benefits and compensation package.

 To apply, please send a resume and references to:

Professor Leslie Yalof Garfield

Chair, Search Committee

Pace University School of Law

78 North Broadway

White Plains, N.Y. 10603

e-mail:  lgarfield@law.pace.edu 

LSAT Deflation: Is This An Ideal Time To Apply To Law School?

Over at Slate, Annie Lowrey argues that the surge of law school applicants and graduates was a bubble and that the bubble was burst by cultural, rather than economic forces.

 In the past year or two, scads of blogs have committed themselves to exposing law school as a "scam," and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have devoted thousands of words to telling readers why law school is a bad,bad idea if you do not actually want to be a lawyer.

As we've noted, law school applications are down over 11% this year to 2001 levels.  Who knows - maybe they'll drop even more next year.  And maybe the market for lawyers will continue to suffer - after all, automation and the off-shoring of legal work could reduce the long term demand for lawyers in the U.S.

Maybe.  Or maybe not.  But we know this much.  Because law school applications are down this year, it's likely a student's LSAT will go a lot farther in this admissions cycle.  Compare the LSAT required to get into schools back in 2001 compared to 2009.  I've compiled a chart with selected law school 25th and 75th percentile LSAT's for 2001 and 2009.  And I've included the US News overall rank (not for the truth of the ranking, but to show that the school is not likely to have suddenly become more attactive to top students).   There are other possible explanations for the phenomenon, of course: increased reliance on transfer students or overall LSAT score inflation.  But this chart suggests, at least, that particularly among the more elite schools, this might be an excellent opportunity for students already certain about attending law school to - shall we say - get more house for their LSAT dollar.

 

School & USNews Rank ‘02/’11	2001 LSAT (25th-75th percentile)	2009 LSAT (25th-75 percentile)
Yale 1/1	168-174	170-176
Harvard 3/2	167-172	171-176
Stanford 2/3	165-170	167-172
Columbia 4/4	166-172	170-175
Chicago 6/5	165-172	169-173
NYU 5/6	167-172	169-173
Georgetown 14/14	163-168	167-171
Vanderbilt 17/17	160-164	164-169
Emory 22/22	158-162	165-167
BYU 37/42	158-164	160-165
Wake Forest 36/38	156-161	160-164
American 49/48	155-160	158-164
Maryland 2nd Tier/48	152-159	159-166
Brooklyn 2nd Tier/67	155-160	159-164
Rutgers Newark 2nd Tier/80	153-159	155-161
Marquette 3rd Tier/3rd Tier	153-157	154-159

 

Cross posted at Leiter, without the chart.

In Memoriam: Judge Blane Michael

Fourth Circuit Judge M. Blane Michael, who sat in West Virginia, died last Friday.  He was 68.  He had been appointed to the bench by President Clinton in 1993.

Matt Bodie shares thoughts about Judge Michael for whom he clerked for in 1996-97.  

A Judge Michael clerkship launched a number of careers in law teaching.  Other former Michael clerks in the academy include Jonathan Witmer-Rich, John Taylor, Vic Fleischer, Sean Andrussier, Caroline Mala Corbin and Alex Kreit.

Next Week in Jerusalem

On March 23^rd a bomb exploded on a busy street in Jerusalem, killing one person and injuring over 30 others, including a 19 year old woman from my hometown of Cleveland.  I have thought a lot about this bombing in no small part because on Friday, I will leave for Israel, to speak about health information technology at a conference there.  I have also thought about the unrest in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, all of which border Israel.  The Middle East is a far less quiet place than it was when I accepted the invitation in November.  Yet, I am still going.  I look forward to seeing friends and relatives, but I also have a notion that having made the commitment to participate, it would be wrong to pull out barring a personal emergency or a “clear and present danger.” 

Has anyone else attended international conferences despite unrest in the region?  Does our participation make any meaningful difference in supporting and encouraging academic endeavors in other parts of the world?  Do we, as academics, have an ethical or professional responsibility to support research and share knowledge outside the U.S.?  I would welcome your thoughts and experiences.

Because I will be busy preparing for my trip, this may well be my last post.  I have very much enjoyed my two months as a guest blogger and appreciate everyone’s valuable comments.

Al Roth: The Pied Piper of Repugnance?

Stephen Dubner has labeled Al Roth (George Gund Professor Of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University) the “dean of repugnance.”  I prefer to think of Al as the “pied piper of repugnance,” with his many followers the children of Hamelin (who he doesn’t drown in a river, but rather leads to a magic cave where we talk about repugnance, kidney exchange, and other fun topics). All I know is that hosting Roth for a faculty workshop and visit to my Taboo Trades seminar last week was tons of fun and reaffirmed an impression previously formed from other sources and prior interactions: Al is incredibly generous with his time and expertise. 

Roth was here to discuss his new draft, Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate, co-authored with Judd B. Kessler.  I was the lucky workshop commentator, together with my colleague Kieran Healy (Sociology, Kenan Institute for Ethics).  Kieran’s research interests are in market- and gift-based exchange in human blood, organs, genetic material, and cultural goods, and the moral order of market society, and it is always a treat to work with him.

The Kessler and Roth project is a laboratory study of an experimental game modeled on the decision to register as an organ donor, and investigates how changes in the management of the organ waiting list might impact the donation rate.  Kessler and Roth find that an organ allocation policy giving priority on waiting lists to those who previously registered as donors (an example modeled on the regimes of Singapore and Israel) has a significant positive impact on registration.  Although the increase in registration rates generated by the priority rule was also eventually achieved by experimental conditions creating a discount, that directly decreased the costs of donation, and by a rebate, Kessler and Roth conclude that the priority rule appears to have advantages over both rebate and discount, including simplicity.   

For the lawyers among us, one of the more interesting aspects of the paper relates to the role of law and, particularly, the choice of default rule.  The paper compares the priority rule to other policies designed to increase the number of registered donors, such as the “opt out” (a.k.a “presumed consent”) rule popular in some parts of Europe, and “mandated choice,” under which everyone (such as those applying for a driver’s license) are required to choose whether or not to donate.  All three regimes are in contrast to the current U.S. “opt in” rule, under which everyone is presumed to be a non-donor unless they choose otherwise.

In contrast to so much work on the choice of donor registration rule, Kessler and Roth recognize that simply increasing the number of registered organ donors may not significantly increase the number of donated organs. As I’ve noted in prior posts, presumed consent laws are not the fix-all that advocates often assume.  Although presumed-consent laws increase the number of registered donors, their effect on procurement rates is less clear.  Specifically, presumed consent laws typically do not remove the next of kin from the procurement process, leaving a potential gap between registration rates and procurement rates.

So, the relevant question is not merely, “which rule increases registered donor rates?”, but also should be, “will any particular rule do a better job than the others of closing any resulting gap between registration rates and procurement rates?”  (Note that the gap works both ways: Kessler and Roth report that the New England Organ Bank is able to recover organs from about half of all non-registered potential donors in New England by approaching next of kin.)

Kessler and Roth conclude that a change to the default rule “is likely to have legal consequences that could be detrimental to organ retrieval,” because it “may weaken the link between the registration decision and the legal clarity of the potential donors’ last wishes.”  But this seems to me to overestimate the importance of law to current procurement practices and underestimate the understandable reluctance of procurement personnel to override the wishes of the deceased’s next-of-kin, even when legally entitled to do so.  Overly cautious legal advice is a well-documented phenomenon in other contexts, especially when negative publicity is associated with legal actions, even those in which the defendant prevails.

Nonetheless, I think that Kessler and Roth may be right that a priority rule has advantages over both opt-out and mandated choice rules.  Not because it increases legal clarity, but because it may increase the chances that potential donors have clearly signaled their wishes to next-of-kin, and thus mediates the space between donor wishes, procurement personnel, and next-of-kin.

Though it’s been suggested that the primary benefit of presumed consent lies in making the wishes of the potential donor more clearly known to her family, this strikes me as backwards.  Although presumed consent could conceivably signal societal norms about organ donation expectations, and thus nudge next-of-kin donation decisions in that way, it seems a rather poor vehicle for signaling individual intent.  A potential donor opting in to donation clearly indicates to her family that, at least at one point in her life, she affirmatively decided in favor of organ donation.  But a failure to opt out doesn’t do so as clearly: did she even see this part of the form?  Did she just not want to think about dying right now and so neglect to decide?

And mandated choice could be even worse on this front.  A prospective donor unwilling to contemplate death and the potential future uses of her body may do nothing under an opt-in regime, leaving open the possibility of posthumous donation through next-of-kin approval.  But, under a mandated choice regime, such an individual could well check no, thus signaling to family (perhaps incorrectly) a desire not to donate.  So, Kessler and Roth conclude that “more than half of the people who are not currently registered under opt in would need to choose “yes” in mandated choice to increase the recovery rate.”

It seems possible that a priority rule, in contrast, could prompt potential donors to alert their family to their donation decision, because it carries with it significant benefits to the entire family (at least under the Israeli model).  All of these conjectures about the role of the default rule on family decision-making are highly speculative, of course, but then so is most of what we think we know about donor registration and allocation regimes.  Which is why projects such as this one by Kessler and Roth are extremely important. 

Tomlins' Freedom Bound

Thanks to Mary Dudziak's post at Legal History Blog, I learned the very exciting news on Friday that Chris Tomlins' Freedom Bound won the Bancroft prize in American history -- along with Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and Slavery and Sara Dubow's Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America.  This is most exciting news for legal historians.

This is particularly important for legal historians, because it is pretty rare that works of legal history win the Bancroft prize.  Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights won in 2005; David Kyvig's Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the US Constitution, 1776-1995 won in 1997; Edmund Morgan's Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America won in 1989, along with Foner's Reconstruction.  The last time a work of "pure" legal history (as opposed to constitutional history) won the prize was, I think, Morton Horwitz' The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, back in 1978?  (The prize winners from 1948 to 2010 are here.)

A number of other books in which law is important have won lately -- including Stephen Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet (about Jim Crow) in 2004, David Blight's Race and Reunion (about reconciliation in the wake of the Civil War) in 2001, Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphen Abduction in 2000, Roger Lane's The Roots of Black Violence in 1987 and Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontiers -- a book I have assigned to my first years in property a couple of times -- won in 1986.  Suzanne Lebsock's The Free Women of Petersburg, which relies heavily on probate records, won in 1985, and John Demos' Entertaining Satan, which relies heavily on criminal prosecutions for witchcraft in New England, won in 1983.

Looking at the list of winners now, it strikes me just how much slavery, Jim Crow, and Native Americans have dominated recent prizes.  All good from my perspective, of course -- and even thanks to Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order, the occassional work on proslavery thinkers wins attention!

One of the many things that interests me about the list of winners is that in 1975 two very different books -- Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross and Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll -- won.   Both were about the lives of enslaved people, but they came from drastically different political and methodological perspectives.

Turning now to Chris'  book, which I pulled down off my shelf Thursday evening to read in honor of the announcement -- a couple of things are really interesting here.  Tomlins places the legal regulation of labor at the center of his sprawling narrative -- which begins in the early seventeenth century and then moves up systematically through the Revolution and early years of the nineteenth century, then jumps forward in the final chapter to Dred Scott and Civil War.  I'm obviously incredibly biased in this, but I like the way that what is central to the narrative of American history is labor and particularly our shifting relationship with slavery.  I will not be heard to argue against the centrality of slavery -- believe me I won't.  But I do wonder how we fit other narratives, including Enlightenment, industrialization, and Romanticism into this story.  (Romanticism was central to Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order, which won the Bancroft in 2005.)  Second, I wonder how this will shift what legal historians (and others) study?  What's the framework that people will now argue against?  Or write within?  

Freedom Bound inspires a lot of thoughts -- one of them is how to compare it to other works that engage with migration in early America.  For instance, there's a very different story here from the one that Bernard Bailyn tells in Voyagers to the West.  Where Bailyn sees the project as one of peopling America and optimism, Tomlins is much more circumspect.  And Freedom Bound also invites comparison with Richard Morris' 1946 Government and Labor in Early America -- another book that placed unfree labor at the center of a narrative about colonial America.  Chris writes of the ways that demographic reality and ideas of colonization are built on a platform of law.  He sees a relatively unbroken narrative of bound (slave) labor up to the time of the Civil War, when there is a possibility of freedom, not quite realized, of course, but at least put into motion.  In this way he's linked with Mark Graber -- explicitly because Tomlins cites Graber -- and the idea that Dred Scott was a mainstream decision that drew up ideas in common circulation at the time.  Ok -- time for point of contention here.  I'm in agreement with Chris on the "slavery was central to the American mission up to the time of Civil War" point, but what I see in the Revolution and pre-war period is a growing disjunction between American missions.  There were some groups for whom Dred Scott was a natural result of long-standing ideas and doctrine; for others, that opinion was outside of their decades-old ideas about freedom.  Where Chris sees a national narrative, I see more of a sectional one.  This is one of my points in University, Court, and Slave  -- that southern intellectuals, particularly legal thinkers, helped expand ideas about the need for slavery and the utter impracticality of freedom, and they secured those ideas in place, even as the world around them was moving in the opposite direction.  As with Chris, my scholarship focuses on the bound part of the story -- how the powerful and mighty thought about the importance of slavery and how they justified their world.  But I see more people departing from that world earlier than does Chris.  To put this provocatively and simplistically, a key point of contention that this book raises is -- did the Revolution or Civil War make the United States anti-slavery?

Another hope for this book is that it furthers the revival of interest in ideas of colonization -- in the ways that the powerful set up ideas on top of  economic realities to create a whole system for economic development and for political control.

Freedom Bound is a very literary, as well as quantitative and empirical, book -- it begins with talk of narratives of Jamestown and the concluding chapter  discusses two plays performed around the time of James I's daughter, Elizabeth's, marriage in 1613  -- The Memorable Maske and The Tempest --  which help to frame the ideas of conquest and colonization that Tomlins deals with.  Obviously we're going to be living with this book for a very long time and, like a lot of the other great works of history, it's a book that we'll need to read many times to begin to understand (Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order again comes to mind).

Now, on a separate issue, the former book reviews editor in me wonders ... what will the Michigan Law Review annual book review issue do with Freedom Bound?

Saturday Roundup

Taking a moment here, before the press of exams consumes all of my energy, to talk about some things that are on my mind.  First, the fabulous Robert Darnton has an op-ed in Thurday's Times on the possibility of a digital library better than google's.  Impossible you say?  I know it's hard to believe, given how absolutely outstanding book.google is.  The only way it could be better -- at least for my research -- is if they put some more of the pre-Civil War pamphlet literature on-line.

Darnton has this suggestion, which I'm guessing won't be followed:

Perhaps Google itself could be enlisted to the cause of the digital public library. It has scanned about 15 million books; two million of that total are in the public domain and could be turned over to the library as the foundation of its collection. The company would lose nothing by this generosity, and might win admiration for its good deed.

Why am I guessing it won't be followed?  Because I think the public domain material generates a lot of traffic for google and they won't want to give that up.

Second topic, been meaning to write about this for a while.  Here's the best article I've read in legal history in a long time.

Third topic, I see from James Donovan and Carol Watson's recent article, "Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship"  (via TaxProf) that we have some empirical evidence that open source articles are more likely to be cited than those that are behind a gate.  No surprise here -- but very important.   Pretty interesting experient they ran -- looking at citations to articles in the journals published by the University of Georgia's law school since 1990 and comparing the citations to the pieces available in full text on the net without a gate to those that gated.

Law School Visiting Faculty 2011-2012

This year, I will be compiling the law school visiting faculty list for visits taking place in the 2011-2012 academic year (either or both semesters).  So please feel free to post updates in the comment thread and/or to email them to me direct (JDL14@case.edu).  Here's what I have so far.  The bold text indicates the school at which the person is visiting.  The person's home institution and date of visit are listed in parantheses.  (Links to previous visiting faculty lists for 2010, 2009, and 2008 are linked here.)

Alabama:   David Dana (Northwestern, spring 2012); Margaret Drew (clinic, Cincinnati, fall 2011-spring 2012); Bill Geimer (Washington & Lee, retired, fall 2011); Mona Hymel (Arizona, spring 2012); Susan Kuo (University of South Carolina, fall 2011); Paul Robinson (U. Penn., fall 2011); Austin Sarat (spring 2012)

Brooklyn:   Irina Manta (Case Western Reserve, fall 2011-spring 2012); Fabio Arcila, Jr. (Touro, spring 2012)

Case Western Reserve:    Ilhyung Lee (Missouri, fall 2011); Steven Steinglass (Cleveland-Marshall, spring 2012)

Chicago:  Eric Biber (Berkeley, fall 2011)

Connecticut:  John Chung (Roger Williams, spring 2012)

CUNY:  Alan White (Valpraiso, spring 2012)

Drexel:   Kathryn Stanchi (Temple, fall 2011-spring 2012); Kimberly Mutcherson (Rutgers-Camden, fall 2011); Fernanda Nicola from (American, spring 2012)

Duke:  Mary Dudziak (USC, fall 2011)

Florida International:  Jeff Yates (Binghamton, Political Science, fall 2011)

Florida State:  Linda Jellum (Mercer, fall 2011-spring 2012); Peter Appel (Georgia, spring 2012).

Hofstra:  Judd F. Sneirson (Oregon, fall 2011-spring 2012)

Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science:  Eugene Kontorovich (Northwestern, fall 2011-spring 2012)

Iowa:   Corey Yung (John Marshall, spring 2012); William Birdthistle (Chicago-Kent, Fall 2011)

Kansas:    Corey Yung (John Marshall, fall 2011)

Loyola Los Angeles:  Tom Morawetz (Connecticut, fall 2011)

McGeorge:  Ben Bratman (Pittsburgh)

Notre Dame:    Andrea Matwyshyn (Wharton, fall 2011); David Schwartz (Chicago-Kent, fall, 2011); Barry Cushman (Virginia, fall 2011)

Nova Southeastern:  Charles Pouncy (Florida International, fall 2011-spring 2012)

Penn:  Randy Barnett (Georgetown, fall 2011)

Pepperdine: Akhil Amar (Yale, Fall 2011); Paul Caron (Cincinnati, Spring 2012); Laurie Levenson (Loyola-L.A., Fall 2011)

Pittsburgh:    Annemarie Bridy (Idaho, fall, 2011); Aaron Lacy (SMU); Carla Spivack (Oklahoma City, spring 2012)

Seattle:  Tim Duane (Vermont, spring 2012)

Stetson:  Chad Emerson (Faulkner University, spring 2012)

Suffolk:    Sadiq Reza (NYLS, spring 2012)

Tulane:  Alan White (Valpraiso, fall 2011)

UCLA:  Nancy Polikoff (American University, fall 2011-spring 2012): AmandaFrost (American University, fall 2011)

UNLV:    Francine Lipman (Chapman, fall 2011); Lisa Blomgren Bingham,(IU-Bloomington's, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, fall 2011-spring2012)

Virginia:  Ruth Mason (Connecticut, spring 2012)

Widener:  Steven Steinglass (Cleveland-Marshall, fall 2011)

Willamette: Eric Chiappinelli (Creighton, fall 2011-spring 2012)

William and Mary:    Melanie Wilson (Kansas, fall 2011)

Wisconsin:  Paul Secunda (Marquette, fall 2011)

 

Judge's House Trivia

Well, because lawyer house trivia was so successful, I thought I'd try another one.  This time it's "judge house trivia."  The house at right was owned by a justice on the Georgia Supreme Court.  It's in Athens.

Entry Level Law School Faculty Hiring 2010 - 2011

Now that Larry Solum has decided to give up his annual Entryl Level Hiring Report - though you can still find the archived versions from 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004 - Prawfs has set up an open thread for folks to report new hires here.  That's a great service to all of us who crave this information.  I imagine folks here at the Lounge will also try to help fill Larry's huge shoes by doing a little slicing and dicing of the data that the Prawfs collects.   Time for everyone to report!

Ethan Leib from Hastings to Fordham

My colleague Ethan Leib will be moving from Hastings to Fordham this coming fall.  His interesting and challenging scholarship will continue but his presence will be missed at Hastings.  Fordham is lucky to have Ethan.  

"You can do it, Japan!" Penn Students Raise Funds for Japan Earthquake Relief

 
Members of the LL.M. Class of 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania Law School have joined with students from Wharton's Japan Club to fundraise for earthquake relief efforts in Japan.  The students are selling a t-shirt, with all proceeds going to the Red Cross.  Their email (reprinted with permission) appears below.

We are the Japanese LL.M. 2011 students of University of Pennsylvania Law School.

As you might know, the Japanese people are struggling to recover from the unimaginable wreckage and loss of life from the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, which happened on March 11^th. Fortunately, all of our family members in Japan are safe, but about 380,000 people are still living in evacuation centers and are in desperate need of basic supplies. In addition to the thousands who lost their lives, more than 10,000 others are still missing.

In cooperation with the Wharton Japan Club, we Japanese law students have decided to do some fundraising in the Law School for the victims of the devastation. We are grateful if you would help us by buying a T-shirt and making a donation online here . Also, you can directly donate through this website here.  All donations and proceeds from the sale of T-shirts will go to the Red Cross, where the money will be used to help those affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

For updates on ways to help, please join this Facebook group. Any assistance you can provide would be most appreciated.

Sincerely,

Japanese LL.M. 2011 students of Penn Law

The t-shirt says in Japanese, "You can do it, Japan!"  The shirts are available for purchase only by residents of the U.S., Canada and Mexico.  World-wide donations are being accepted via the FirstGiving website here.  Kudos to the Penn students for putting this together. 

Houdini Trivia

Anyone who has googled anything today has probably seen the tribute to Harry Houdini on what would have been  his 137th birthday.  I also noticed an interesting article here about the death of Houdini's last living assistant, Dorothy Young, who passed away today.  After working with Houdini, she became a noted dancer and then a significant benefactor to Drew University.  Interesting life story...

The Anti-Canon

Following up on my promise to highlight interesting and unique articles for the next few weeks, here is another one, written by Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School:

The Anti-Canon, forthcoming Harvard Law Review.

Here's the abstract:

Argument from the “anticanon,” the set of cases whose central propositions all legitimate decisions must refute, has become a persistent but curious feature of American constitutional law. These cases, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York, and Korematsu v. United States, are consistently cited in Supreme Court opinions, in constitutional law casebooks, and at confirmation hearings as prime examples of weak constitutional analysis. Upon reflection, however, anticanonical cases do not involve unusually bad reasoning, nor are they uniquely morally repugnant. Rather, these cases are held out as examples for reasons external to conventional constitutional argument. This Article substantiates that claim and explores those reasons. I argue that anticanonical cases achieve their status through historical happenstance, and that their status is reaffirmed as subsequent interpretive communities avail themselves of the rhetorical resource the anticanon represents. That use is enabled by at least three features of anticanonical cases: their incomplete theorization, their amenability to traditional forms of legal argumentation, and their resonance with constitutive ethical propositions that have achieved consensus. I argue that it is vital for law professors in particular to be conscious of the various ways in which the anticanon is used – for example, to dispel dissensus about or sanitize the Constitution – that we may better decide if and when that use is justified.

 Fascinating.

 

Elizabeth Taylor: 1932-2011

Screen icon Elizabeth Taylor has died.

What is your favorite Liz Taylor movie?  I would include National Velvet, A Place in the Sun, and Ivanhoe on my list (more for enjoyment of the stories, than for any other particular reason).

How about you?  You'll find a list of her films here.

Faculty Civility

If I'm remembering correctly, there was a thread on the Associate Dean list-serve recently about whether any schools have "civility codes" for conduct during faculty meetings.  I remember folks raising doubts that such a code would have any positive impact on faculty that couldn't be civil during meetings.  And I think the question was raised whether faculty would just spend meeting time arguing about the proper interpretation of the civility code.

But I have a better idea.  What about bringing in Supernanny to deal with uncivil faculties?  I mean, if she can whip British and American dysfunctional families into shape, can you imagine what she could do with a law faculty?  I would like to pitch this to one of the networks.  We could call it "Supernanny:  Law School Edition".  What do you think?