The Faculty Lounge

"Financial Exigency" at Albany Law School?

According to a November 19, 2013 letter issued by AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum, Albany Law School's "administration and governing board have announced that, because of serious financial difficulties, notifications of faculty layoffs will be issued shortly."

The newly-formed AAUP chapter at Albany certainly disagrees that "financial exigency" exists.  In a letter dated January 11, 2014, that group states (here):

The Chapter maintains that there is no showing of a bona fide institutional financial exigency or of individual faculty incompetence. Accordingly, no justification for faculty terminations exists. Since no faculty terminations are justified, the Chapter takes no position on what the order of layoffs would be if terminations were warranted under a state of financial exigency. In the absence of evidence of anything remotely resembling a bona fide financial exigency, firing any faculty member would depart from nationally accepted standards of law school governance.

The Albany Law School Chapter of the AAUP has made various documents available here.  This situation will be one to watch.

 

Turning the Tide

I'm looking forward to reading Turning the Tide: The University of Alabama in the 1960s.  Cribbing now from the University of Alabama Press website:

Turning the Tide is an institutional and cultural history of a dramatic decade of change at the University of Alabama set against the backdrop of desegregation, the continuing civil rights struggle, and the growing antiwar movement.

This book documents the period when a handful of University of Alabama student activists formed an alliance with President Frank A. Rose, his staff, and a small group of progressive-minded professors in order to transform the university during a time of social and political turmoil. Together they engaged in a struggle against Governor George Wallace and a state legislature that reflected the worst aspects of racism in a state where the passage of civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 did little to reduce segregation and much to inflame the fears and passions of many white Alabamians.

Earl H. Tilford details the origins of the student movement from within the Student Government Association, whose leaders included Ralph Knowles and future governor Don Siegelman, among others; the participation of key members of “The Machine,” the political faction made up of the powerful fraternities and sororities on campus; and the efforts of more radical non-Greek students like Jack Drake, Ed Still, and Sondra Nesmith. Tilford also details the political maneuverings that drove the cause of social change through multiple administrations at the university.Turning the Tide highlights the contributions of university presidents Frank A. Rose and David Mathews, as well as administrators like the dean of men John L. Blackburn, who supported the student leaders but also encouraged them to work within the system rather than against it.

This looks like a great companion to Cully Clark's fabulous Standing in the Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama.  I'm delighted -- and not surprised -- to hear the faculty, students, and administration put at the center of this positive story.  That is different from the University faculty in the pre-Civil War era.  I have a few thoughts on the long arc of the University's history here.

Did wikipedia get this one right?

I was talking with a distinguished scholar of women's history yesterday and she mentioned that she's going to show one of her classes Iron Jawed Angels.  I commented that this is one place that our courses overlap.  I mention the movie in my trusts and estates class when we read In re Strittmater, where a New Jersey court invalidated the will of a testator who left her property to the National Woman's Party.  In looking for a copy of the case to email this professor, I checked wikipedia.  (Of course they don't have the case, but now I do.)  That led me to read their description of the case; the way it's written it seems as though the case was correctly decided.  I have found wikipedia entries quite good in recent years, but this time I think it's off-base.  Thoughts?

The illustration is Alice Paul Hall on Swarthmore's campus.

Ricky Revesz Named New Director Of American Law Institute

Former NYU Law Dean Richard Revesz has been named the new director of the ALI.  He replaces Lance Liebman who has led the organization for the past 15 years.  Revesz is only the sixth person to head the organization over 90 plus years.

LSAC Data and Predicting Number of Applicants for Fall 2014, part 5

Following up on my recent posts on LSAC data on LSAT administrations and applications for fall 2014, I wanted to call attention to these statements from the LSAC:  "As of 1/24/14, there are 187,726 fall 2014 applications submitted by 26,379 applicants. Applicants are down 12.6% and applications are down 13.7% from 2013.  Last year at this time, we had 51% of the preliminary final applicant count."  If this year's applicants follow last year's pattern, we'll have approximately 51,724 total applicants for the class entering in fall 2014.  Dan has some historical data on the first year enrollment from 1964 to 2012 here.  I link to some more comprehensive data (going back to the 1940s) here.

Burying the Korematsu Decision? Why Not Hirabayashi Instead?

Adam Liptak today covers an effort to persuade the Solicitor General to try to persuade the Supreme Court to use the pending cert petition in Hedges v. Obama as an opportunity to overrule the reviled-but-never-formally-overruled Korematsu decision.

Naturally I'd love to see the Court overrule Korematsu.

This particular effort seems like quite a stretch, though -- for the obvious reasons (the ones alluded to in Liptak's piece) and for a less obvious one.

The "hook" in the Hedges case that could bag a Korematsu overruling is a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 which left in place "existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."  

It's claimed that this at least implicitly reaffirms the continued validity of Korematsu -- and that the challenge to the statute therefore gives the Supreme Court the chance to overrule that precedent.

A hidden trouble with this claim is that the 1944 Supreme Court went to great (and troubling) lengths to make clear that it was addressing only mass removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, not their detention.  It shaved off the detention issue for separate consideration in Ex parte Endo (and ruled continued detention illegal, on the same day as the Korematsu decision, on administrative law, not constitutional law, grounds).  Removal admittedly implies detention, and that's one of the reasons the Korematsu decision is so bogus, but the Korematsu Court insisted that it was not addressing the constitutionality of detaining American citizens.

Thus, to say that the majority opinion in Korematsu is an "existing law or authorit[y] relating to the detention of United States citizens" is to say that the Korematsu Court decided an issue it said it was not addressing.  

(I acknowledge that the "relating to ... detention" language in the statute leaves space to argue that Korematsu "relate[d] to" detention by upholding removal, but my point is that this is a degree of attenuation that decreases the likelihood that the current Court would see Hedges as implicating Korematsu.)

Of course, there is a bad old decision lying about that endorses the racial detention of citizens, but it's not Korematsu.  It's Hirabayashi, decided unanimously by the Court a year before Korematsu.  The Court upheld against constitutional challenge a dusk-to-dawn curfew (that is, house arrest) of Japanese Americans.

Though the Hedges effort is a stretch, Hirabayashi would seem the better candidate for designation as an "authority relating to the detention of United States citizens" than Korematsu.

What's more, the Court's Hirabayashi decision was infected by arguably more significant misconduct than the later Korematsu decision.  

And, unlike Korematsu, which no living Supreme Court justice is willing to touch with a ten-foot pole, a sitting Justice has actually cited the Hirabayashi opinion with approval in the pages of the U.S. Reports.  

Korematsu, it seems to me, is already a dead letter.  Hirabayashi is the decision that seems (barely) to survive, and is, in my view, the more dangerous.  I wish the effort in Hedges -- and similar future efforts -- were directed at Hirabayashi in addition to (or in place of) Korematsu.

Orth on 19th Century Legal History

My colleague John Orth has a short (and characteristically beautifully written) new essay on the imagery of "release of energy" in nineteenth century Anglo-America law.  The imagery originates with Willard Hurst's 1956 book Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States, though as John points out around the turn of the twentieth century Albert V. Dicey used similar langauge to describe English law in the nineteenth century.

I'm very interested in this imagery and the changes of statutory and common law that attend it.  I guess I would say that eighteenth century American law seemed pretty suited to the "release of energy" (a catchall phrase that suggests law allows humans to maximize economic development.)  But certainly the age of market revolution saw an expansion in the sophistication of commercial law.  I think of this in similar terms as the ways that law was a technology, much like the steam engine, the telegraph, and print.  And that as a technology law was used to promote economic growth.

I've used one of my favorite antebellum courthouses to illustrate this post.

Would Marlise Munoz's Fetus Have Survived? Should It Have?

This is post is part of The Bioethics Program’s ongoing Online Symposium on the Munoz and McMath cases, which I've organized, and is cross-posted from the symposium. To see all symposium contributions, in reverse chronological order, click here.

Had the hospital not relented and removed the ventilator from Marlise Munoz's body, could the Munoz fetus have been brought to term, or at least to viability? And if so, would the resulting child have experienced any temporary or permanent adverse health outcomes? Despite some overly confident commentary on both "sides" of this case suggesting a clear answer one way or the other—i.e., that there was no point in retaining the ventilator because the fetus could never be viable or was doomed to be born with catastrophic abnormalities; or, on the other hand, that but for the removal of the ventilator, the "unborn baby" was clearly on track to being born healthy—the truth is that we simply don't know.

Before getting into the limited available data about fetal outcomes in these relatively rare cases, a bit of brush clearing. The New York Times juxtaposed reports about possible abnormalities in the Munoz fetus with the hospital's stipulation about the fetus's non-viability in ways that are likely to confuse, rather than clarify:

Lawyers for Ms. Muñoz’s husband, Erick Muñoz, said they were provided with medical records that showed the fetus was “distinctly abnormal” and suffered from hydrocephalus — an accumulation of fluid in the cavities of the brain — as well as a possible heart problem.

The hospital acknowledged in court documents that the fetus was not viable.

Whether intentionally or not, the nation's newspaper of record implies — wrongly, I think — that the hospital conceded that the fetus would never be viable because of these reported abnormalities. In court, the hospital and Erick Munoz stipulated to a series of facts, including that Marlise was then 22 weeks pregnant and that "[a]t the time of this hearing, the fetus gestating inside Mrs. Munoz is not viable" (emphasis added). The hospital conceded nothing at all about any fetal abnormalities. In short, the Times, and many other commentors, have conflated "non-viability" as a function of gestational age with "non-viability" as a way of characterizing disabilities that are incompatible with life. As I read this stipulation, the hospital was not at all conceding that the fetus would never have been viable, had the ventilator remained in place. Rather, given the constitutional relevance of fetal viability, the hospital was merely conceding the banal scientific fact that the Munoz fetus was, at 22 weeks, not currently viable. There is nothing surprising in the least about the hospital's "concession" about "viability" in the first sense, above: 22-week fetuses are generally not considered viable.

Jeff Harrison On The Florida Dean Search & The Value Of Search Consultants

Professor Jeffrey Harrison is in the news again on the subject of the University of Florida law school dean search.  Saturday he published an op/ed, UF Administration is Tone Deaf in Search for Law Dean,  in the Gainesville Sun.  The central thrust of his piece is the administration's marginalization of law faculty in the search process.  Perhaps of more interest to Lounge readers, however, he argues that the school's search firm "bungled" a crucial part of the search:

It is increasingly clear that the firm did not fully advise the candidates about Florida's open records policy: All materials and names associated with the search are public. Exacerbating this was the firm's decision to announce all 24 candidates at once. This led to a massive data dump. In the past, although public as the law requires, the process allowed publicity-shy dean candidates to have their names trickled out over several months and allowed them ample time to drop out if the competition looked stiff.

He also comments on the utility of using a search firm in law dean searches generally:

The law teaching world...is a small one, and hiring a search firm to find a law dean candidate is like hiring one to find a football stadium in Gainesville. This means for what was likely tens of thousands of dollars the search firm appears to have made phone calls and forwarded curricula vitae (CV). At most it did what a first-year professor could have done. 

Harrison is troubled by the lack of faculty involvement in paring the list from 24 to 10, and then from 10 to a small on-campus interview cohort.  He may be right that the committee is unusually thin on law faculty.  But how common it is for dean search committees to solicit faculty input on candidates prior to the selection of finalists?  I had thought that most dean search committees,  operating in the absence of open record laws, kept the identity of candidates under wraps until they'd made their final cut.  

Randy Bezanson (1946-2014)

I am shocked and saddened to learn that beloved University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson passed away yesterday after a lengthy illness.  Cribbing now from the letter by University of Iowa Law School Dean Gail Agrawal to the law school community:

A native of Cedar Rapids, Professor Bezanson earned his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in 1968 and his J.D. summa cum laude here at the University of Iowa College of Law in 1971.  He was a star student, graduating first in his class and serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Iowa Law Review.  After law school, he was as a law clerk first to the Honorable Roger Robb on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and then the following year to the Honorable Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court.  In 1973, Randy returned home and joined our faculty.  He quickly established himself as one the nation’s leading experts on the First Amendment, libel law, and mass communications law. ...

Randy will be remembered by his colleagues for his rigorous mind, his great wit, his unyielding commitment to legal education, his deep devotion to using writing as a vehicle for sharpening students’ minds, his unfailing willingness to read and comment on colleagues’ drafts, and his instinctive questioning of unspoken assumptions.  Many of those qualities were on daily display around the faculty lunch table, to which Randy invariably came with a topic worthy of careful thought and discussion.  His students will remember him as a gifted and committed teacher, learned scholar, and wonderful mentor.  His greatest professional pride came from his students’ achievements.  Life in the Boyd Law Building will not be the same without him.

I am really shocked by this news and I hope to reflect some on what Randy's first amendment scholarship, particularly on the history of free speech, means to me sometime soon.  Randy was important to us in the scholarly community for his generosity, warmth, and good humor -- even more than his scholarship.  But I thought that I would illustrate this post with the dust jacket of his last book, Art and Freedom of Speech, as a tribute to some of the topics of central importance to his scholarly life.  (Thanks to my friend Todd Pettys for passing along this news.)

Bias in the Shadows of Criminal Law: The Problem of Implicit White Favoritism

My UNC colleague Rob Smith,  my former UH colleague Justin Levinson and Zoe Robinson of DePaul have a new paper up on ssrn, "Bias in the Shadows of Criminal Law: The Problem of Implicit White Favoritism."  Cribbing now from their abstract:

Commentators idealize a racially fair criminal justice system as one without racial animus. But unjustified racial disparities would persist even if racial animus disappeared overnight. In this Article, we introduce the concept of implicit white favoritism into criminal law and procedure scholarship, and explain why preferential treatment of white Americans helps drive the stark disparities that define America’s criminal justice system. Scholarly efforts thus far have shone considerable light on how unconscious negative stereotyping of black Americans as hostile, violent, and prone to criminality occurs at critical points in the criminal justice process. We rotate the flashlight to reveal implicit favoritism, a rich and diverse set of automatic associations of positive stereotypes and attitudes with white Americans. White favoritism can operate in a range of powerful ways that can be distinguished from traditional race-focused examples: in the way, for example, white drivers are pulled over less often than unseen drivers or crimes against white victims are seen as more aggravating than those against non-white victims.  Our account of implicit white favoritism both enriches existing accounts of how implicit racial bias corrupts the criminal justice system and provides explanations for disparities that implicit negative stereotyping explanations miss altogether.

I suspect this will generate some controversy.  One other thought: so far the implicit bias literature has focused a lot of attention on criminal law.  I wonder if some of what Smith et al. identify here applies in similar ways to other areas of the law (I'm thinking tort is the most likely area).

Online Symposium on Munoz and McMath Cases

UPDATE: Following Friday's court order (discussed below), the hospital today (Sunday, Jan. 26, 2014) removed the ventilator from Marlise Munoz, who has met the criteria for brain death since Nov. 28, 2013.

Two high-profile, rapidly evolving cases involving death by neurological criteria — better known as “brain death” — raise vexing and sometimes novel legal, ethical, and medical questions at the edges of life and death. I'm organizing an online symposium on these cases over at The Bioethics Program Blog, and will be cross-posting my contributions here, beginning with this introduction to the symposium, which brings readers up to date with legal developments through today. Please contact me if you're interested in participating.

The Marlise Munoz Case

On November 26, 2013, Erick Munoz found his wife, Marlise, unconscious on their kitchen floor. She was then 14 weeks pregnant with their second child. Erick resuscitated her and she was transported, alive, to John Peter Smith Hospital, where she was placed on a ventilator to assist her breathing and given other life-sustaining treatment. Not long thereafter, however, Erick says that the hospital told him that Marlise was brain dead.

Although Marlise did not have a written advance directive, according to Erick, both he and Marlise had

worked as paramedics during their marriage, and thus were knowledgeable of and had personally witnessed injuries that resulted in death, including brain death. Erick and Marlise frequently discussed their requests, beliefs and desires with each other, and expressed clearly to each other, family members and friends, their respective desires not to be resuscitated should either of them become brain dead.

Erick requested, with the “full support” of Marlise’s parents, that the ventilator be removed from her body and that he be given possession of it for burial.

The hospital refused. It argued that § 166.049 of the Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA) — which provides that “a person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient” — prohibits it from removing the ventilator. It was not entirely clear whether the hospital believed that Marlise was in fact dead or not. The media was reporting as late as December 24 that the hospital had said that Marlise was in “serious condition,” and the hospital had not released Marlise’s medical records, which Erick said would show a diagnosis of brain death, to him.

More about the Munoz case, the McMath case, and the symposium participants after the jump.

Garrow on Griggs v. Duke Power

University of Pittsburgh law professor David Garrow has an essay review on Robert Belton's posthumously published The Crusade for Equality in the Workplace: The Griggs v. Duke Power Story.  It appears in the most recent issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review.  

This is going to be a big year for scholarship on the history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its interpretation.  Very hard for me to believe that the act is fifty years old this year, but I'm certain we're going to have a lot of retrospectives on the act.  Those interested in the latest assessment of Griggs, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 more generally, will want to read Garrow's essay.

Judge Gould on overcoming obstacles

Here's an inspiring video about the Ninth Circuit judge I clerked for, the Honorable Ronald M. Gould.   He was a great judge to work for, and this is both a wonderful testament to his strength and perseverance in the face of MS and a reminder of how much each of us can accomplish.  

Kidneys, Part II: The Limits of Deceased Donation Proposals

In my last post, I discussed a new paper, A Primer on Kidney Transplantation: Anatomy of the Shortage, that Phil Cook and I just posted to SSRN.  The paper provides a quantitative description of the kidney shortage and future trends, and yields some insights on possible policy solutions (and non-solutions) to the kidney shortage. 

We wanted to provide a more fine-grained picture of the kidney shortage than what is typically presented, by documenting the flows on and off the kidney waiting list for a single year, 2011. For the sake of brevity I won’t repeat that analysis here, but we conclude that unmet need is at least 21,000 kidneys per year, and very likely more than that.  Those interested in the specifics should consult Table 1, Figure 2, and the discussion in Parts IV and V of the article.

In considering where to look for more kidneys, we begin with the basic demographics: the typical criteria that are applied to identifying suitable deceased donors have the effect of disqualifying all but a small fraction of the 2.5 million U.S. deaths per year.  Table 3 from our paper, reproduced above right, provides some detail on this “winnowing” process for 2010, gathered by sorting the 2.5 million records from the National Vital Statistics multiple cause mortality dataset according to particular fields in the electronic records, beginning with age.  We begin with the fact that almost 2/3 of all deaths are over 70 and hence almost always deemed medically unacceptable due to age alone.  Of the remainder, most are uncontrolled deaths out of the hospital, or deaths in the hospital from causes like cancer, diabetes, and renal disease that ordinarily are disqualifying. 

The result is that, in 2010, only about 9,000 deaths were “eligible” by either the standard criteria or expanded criteria, and in 70% of those cases the kidneys were in fact donated.  (In addition, there were 928 others who became donors after cardiac death, which is uncommon because it is a difficult, though expanding, procedure, which we discuss in more detail in the paper).  

One lesson from these statistics is that even a deceased organ consent and allocation system with a 100% success rate would have yielded only an additional 2751 donors, or roughly 5500 kidneys.  This is not nearly enough to satisfy current need, particularly if any progress is to be made on the backlog.   

Those who believe that the kidney shortage can be eliminated through presumed consent, priority systems, funeral vouchers, or other proposals aimed at improving rates of deceased donation are thus mistaken.  Additional kidneys from deceased donors would be welcome, of course, but will not be nearly enough to satisfy current need.  Barring a major breakthrough in recovering organs from patients that are currently deemed unsuitable, increasing donations from living donors is the only plausible means to close the gap. 

In my next post, I’ll conclude with some more specific policy implications of our paper.

Related posts:

 

Cash for Kidneys: Reality is Complicated

 

Kidneys, Part II: The Limits of Deceased Donation Proposals

 

Innovation and Incentives: Beyond “Cash For Kidneys”

 

More Organs & Inducements

 

LSAC Data and Predicting Number of Applicants for Fall 2014, part 4

Following up on my recent posts on LSAC data on LSAT administrations and applications for fall 2014, I wanted to call attention to these statements from the LSAC:  "As of 1/17/14, there are 171,899 fall 2014 applications submitted by 24,500 applicants. Applicants are down 12.4% and applications are down 14.1% from 2013.  Last year at this time, we had 47% of the preliminary final applicant count."  If this year's applicants follow last year's pattern, we'll have approximately 52,128 total applicants for the class entering in fall 2014.  Dan has some historical data on the first year enrollment from 1964 to 2012 here.  I link to some more comprehensive data (going back to the 1940s) here.

Philadelphia Law School Tuition Price War Escalates; Prices Drop

I've previously noted that there are significant regional differences in the cost of law school.  Put simply, it's cheaper to go to law school in Philadelphia than in many other - and perhaps virtually all other - cities.  And now, it's gotten even less expensive.

A month or two ago, Penn State announced that it would offer Pennsylvania residents a $20,000 annual tuition discount irrespective of credentials.  And now, Villanova has levied a massive volley at all market competitors, offering three years of free tuition for applicants with a 157/3.6 GPA. 

I know that my school, Drexel Law, works to match scholarship offers from Villanova, Penn State, Rutgers-Camden and Temple.  Villanova's maneuver will put tremendous pressure on Temple, Penn State, and Rutgers-Camden to up their awards.  Widener is going to get caught up in this as well.   The price of law school in Philly is dropping fast.

A month ago I said that a person with a 161 could attend a very good law school for free in Philly.  Now I'd have to make that a 157, with significant discounts available to folks with a 154 or 155.

Call for Papers: National Business Law Scholars' Conference

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Thursday, June 19th and Friday, June 20th at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

 

This is the fifth annual meeting of the NBLSC, a conference which annually draws together dozens of legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all scholarly submissions relating to business law. Presentations should focus on research appropriate for publication in academic journals, especially law reviews, and should make a contribution to the existing scholarly literature. We will attempt to provide the opportunity for everyone to actively participate. Junior scholars and those considering entering the legal academy are especially encouraged to participate.

 

To submit a presentation, email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at [email protected] with an abstract or paper by April 4, 2014. Please title the email “NBLSC Submission – {Name}”. If you would like to attend, but not present, email Professor Chaffee with an email entitled “NBLSC Attendance.” Please specify in your email whether you are willing to serve as a commentator or moderator. A conference schedule will be circulated in late May.  More information is available here:  http://lls.edu/resources/events/listofevents/eventtitle,81539,en.html

 

Conference Organizers

Barbara Black (The University of Cincinnati College of Law)
Eric C. Chaffee (The University of Toledo College of Law)
Steven M. Davidoff (The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law)
Kristin N. Johnson (Seton Hall University School of Law)
Elizabeth Pollman (Loyola Law School, Los Angeles)
Margaret V. Sachs (University of Georgia Law)

Letters to My Younger Self

I spent a lot of Thanksgiving day reading a powerful and moving collection, Letters to My Younger Self, which was co-edited by Jayne Thompson and Emily DeFreitas.  The book, which is forthcoming soon from Serving House Press, consists of letters written as part of an English class that Jayne taught at Graterford Prison; they are written from the perspective of the students giving advice to themselves at a younger age, or sometimes to their children or parents.  I highly, highly recommend the volume.  The letters are powerfully and beautifully written and set loose a wide range of emotions.  You really get a sense of how the students have thought about what set them on the path they're on and how they'd try to redirect others.  Many sometimes talk about the extraordinary violence of their pasts and they in no way are making excuses or minimizing their violence -- but you do get a powerful sense of the humanity of the authors, which I don't think often comes through in the academic writing about the prison system in our country.

Several of the letters particularly stuck in my mind -- one is about a child who received a dog (a pit bull, as it happens) for his eleventh birthday.  He took the dog with him when he fought other children because it wouldn't run away -- as his friends did; and when he got in serious trouble a few years later and was sent away, his grandmother got rid of the dog.  The last line of the letter is "when I realized the dog was gone for good, I realized my heart was gone, too."

Another letter is about life inside Graterford, where the writer observes a flock of canadian geese flying overhead.  "Beauty knows no boundaries" is one of the writer's insights from this.

But maybe the most powerful is a lengthy letter by a man who stabbed and seriously wounded a rival gang member, then was attacked by the rival gang.  The man's brother was almost killed in the attack.  I can't begin to do justice to the compelling writing.  You should check it out yourself -- and I highly recommend this.

A WaPo Conspiracy

Congrats to the Volokh Conspirators, whose blog, beginning today, will now be hosted at the Washington Post. Conspirator Kenneth Anderson strikes me as an especially natural fit. #rimshot #hereallweek