The Faculty Lounge

Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar

"Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar" was written in 1940 by Don Raye, Hughie Prince, and Ray McKinley. It was released that year by the Will Bradley Orchestra, with McKinley on drums a vocals (see audio clip at bottom of this post). The title phrase is a request for the drummer to set a boogie woogie rhythm, and the "best piano player by far" has been thought to be a reference to John "Peck" Kelly, who was the leader of "Peck's Bad Boys." It has since become a classic number for piano players to show off their chops. The Andrews Sisters also turned it into a signature trio act.

Sarah Lipton-Lubet on Court Expansion

 

 

What Justice Thomas Doesn't Understand about Respect for the Supreme Court

Here is the gist of my new column for The Hill:

Clarence Thomas is right about declining respect for the Supreme Court — but wrong about its cause

Speaking at a conference sponsored by three conservative think tanks, Thomas blamed the leak on either a clerk or fellow justice. In the old days, he said, nobody would have leaked a single line of an opinion, let alone an entire draft. There was “belief in the court” that made confidentiality sacrosanct. Now, alas, the court has experienced a sort of “infidelity.” You “begin to look over your shoulder,” he explained, which risks “destroying the institutions that are required for a free society.”

Almost nobody is in favor of disclosing confidences or disturbing the peace in residential neighborhoods, but those phenomena are at best symptoms of declining respect for the Supreme Court. The root causes are more profound, some of which can be traced to the justices’ open disregard for the ethical norms applicable to every other American judge.

Congressional attempts to remedy the crisis of confidence have lately broken down on political lines. Democrats have proposed reform legislation to address pressing institutional issues, with little or no support from Republicans.

Just last week, the House Judiciary Committee passed the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act (SCERTA), which would enact the most comprehensive ethics reforms in many decades. The 22-16 vote was along strict party lines, with every Democrat voting in favor of the legislation and every Republican voting against it.

Perhaps congressional Republicans believe they must defend the court’s 6-3 conservative majority at every turn, but that is a mistake. Waning public confidence hurts the majority most of all, as it is their decisions that must meet the test of widespread acceptance.

[Thomas] is oblivious to the true nature of the court’s legitimacy problem, which has almost nothing to do with its internal dynamics (about which nobody else much cares, other than wannabe insiders) and far more to do with its haughty attitude toward public transparency.

You can read the entire piece here.

Law Schools Miss the Mark on Bar Passage - Will the ABA Act?

I promised to provide a bar passage update when this year’s bar passage reports came out, and they are available.  You can access the individual school reports here. You can access the all-school compilations here at the ABA Statistics Page.

As a reminder, the ABA bar passage standard, Standard 316, requires that law schools attain an “Ultimate Bar Passage” (UBP) rate of 75% within two years of graduation.  The most recent reported results are for the class of 2019, the graduates of which had until the July 2021 bar exam to pass the bar.   So far, the ABA has found only three schools to be out of compliance with Standard 316, so let’s start by reviewing the results at those schools.

Hutchins Named Dean of Maryland Law

The University of Maryland has announced that Dean Renée McDonald Hutchins of UDC Law will be the new dean of its law school.  She joined UDC as dean in 2019 after fourteen years on the Maryland Law faculty.   Hutchins, who holds a JD from Yale, will head back to Baltimore on August 1. 

Call for Papers – The Legal Treatise: Past, Present, and Future

An FYI on an important symposium:

The Lillian Goldman Law Library and Law Library Journal invite proposals​ for a symposium on the Legal Treatise to be held at Yale Law School on Friday, March 24, 2023. 

The purpose of this symposium is to examine the many aspects of the history, present circumstances, and future of the legal treatise as a source and genre. Possible topics include but are not limited to: the origins of the treatise, the role of the treatise in English and American law practice and legal culture during particular periods in history, the commodification of the treatise, international and comparative perspectives on the treatise, microhistories of specific treatise titles, biographical accounts of treatise writers, rivalries between treatise writers, treatise authorship successions, reflections on contemporary treatise writing and publishing, the rise of the scholarly monograph, the (in)accessibility of the treatise, the transition of the treatise from a print resource to an electronic resource, the decline of the multi-volume treatise in law practice and legal scholarship, and theories about and proposals for the future of the treatise. 

Jennifer Mnookin Named Chancellor of of UW-Madison

Jennifer Mnookin  has been named Chancellor of  the University of Wisconsin-Madison.   Mnookin has served as dean of the UCLA School of Law since 2015.  A Bruin no longer, Mnookin will become a Badger on August 4.