The Faculty Lounge

Mack the Knife

"Mack the Knife" was written by Kurt Weill (music) and Bertolt Brecht (lyrics) for their musical The Threepenny Opera, which premiered in Germany in 1928. The most common English lyrics were written for a New York production in 1954, leading to hit singles by Louis Armstrong (1955) and Bobby Darin (1959). Weill's widow, the vocalist Lotta Lenya, who starred in both the original in 1928 and on Broadway, was present at Armstrong's recording session, leading to his spontaneous improvisation, "Look out for Miss Lotta Lenya." Bobby Darin incorporated the line in his pop version, and so have others since then. Don't miss Liberace's piano variations at the bottom of this post.

Rutgers Law Seeks Dean

This just in:

Rutgers Law School, the largest public law school in the northeast, invites applications and nominations for the position of Dean of the Law School. Rutgers Law School is looking for a dynamic leader whose skills and energy will focus on building and aligning the faculty, the staff, the student body, and external legal partners to prepare excellent and engaged lawyers for the future.

Now is an exciting time in the history of legal education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Rutgers Law School offers students, alumni, attorneys, and the public a rich array of services and opportunities from its two well-established New Jersey locations at Camden and Newark, and it adjoins two of the nation’s largest, most dynamic legal markets (New York City and Philadelphia). Rutgers is well-recognized for its tradition of academic excellence, opportunity, inclusion, and affordability. Rutgers Law School is committed to scholarly distinction and engagement with the major legal issues and concerns facing our host communities, the region, country, and world. The faculty has acted on its commitment to equity and to scholarly excellence by creating a unitary tenure-track structure for full-time faculty. Rutgers Law School has a long-standing and steadfast commitment to social justice and public service, carried out through a myriad of programs, and projects that provide legal services to individuals in need: locally, nationally, and globally. The law school is committed to excellence in practice: both the legal writing and clinical programs are annually ranked within the top #15 in the nation. The law school is also highly ranked for its part-time program. As one of the largest law schools in the nation, Rutgers Law School delivers a comprehensive enhanced curriculum, an extensive alumni association, and a heightened national profile befitting the law school of a major public research university.

 

If at First You Don’t Succeed

This is the third guest post by Steve Epstein, about his book Extreme Punishment:  The Chilling True Story of Acclaimed Law Professor Dan Markel’s Murder.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7, Till Death Do Us Part:

Dan’s Meat Market 2.0 turned into an eerily familiar, harried adventure through the elevators and corridors of the Marriott Wardman Park.  Yet with a very different outcome.  This time around, when he entered the different law schools’ hotel suites, the professors seated around him were bowled over by his energy, hunger, and intellectual bandwidth.  He was engaging—almost charming—showing off his ability to connect as a human as much as his brilliance.  With only modest adjustments in his approach, the aspiring professor had come across as passionate and ambitious—equally as impressive in person as on paper. 

Which led to numerous invitations for on-campus, callback interviews.  Topping that list was UC Berkeley—the nation’s tenth ranked law school according to U.S. News & World Report—a dream job Dan believed was a perfect match for his skill set and ambition.  Further down on his list of callbacks was Florida State—number 67 in that year’s rankings—a school and faculty Dan considered mediocre at best.  Not exactly where he hoped his teaching career would begin.

To Dan’s deep disappointment, UC Berkeley didn’t extend him an offer.  As it turned out, his most attractive offer came from Florida State, whose faculty saw tremendous potential in the two-time Harvard grad.  If Dan wanted to avoid another year’s wait and a Meat Market 3.0, a move to Tallahassee was his most logical step forward.  He swallowed his pride, yet again, and accepted Florida State’s invitation for a site visit, so he and Wendi could explore Tally’s cultural scene, synagogues, schools, and check out housing options.

Hawai‘i Law Seeks Legal Writing Professor

This just in:

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law seeks to hire a tenured legal writing professor (Professor or Associate Professor of Law) to begin academic year 2023-2024. The Law School is located in Mānoa on the flagship campus of the University of Hawai‘i system. It reflects and embraces Hawai‘i’s diversity, location, and values, and recognizes its special responsibility to Hawai‘i and the Pacific region.

The Law School faculty recently voted to change the current 1L legal writing program from a hybrid adjunct program to a coordinated course staffed entirely by tenured or tenure-track faculty whose primary teaching and scholarship interests are in legal writing. The faculty voted to make this transition over the next three or four years, subject to receiving University approval for the necessary faculty hires. The current search is for a candidate to direct the existing 1L legal writing program until the additional faculty can be hired to support the new staffing model, at which time the candidate will teach in the new coordinated program. We encourage candidates who are members of groups underrepresented in the legal academy to apply.

 

Georgia State College of Law Seeks Faculty for Externship Program

This just in:

Georgia State University's College of Law seeks highly qualified applicants for a full­time clinical faculty position in the Externship Program at the rank of Clinical Assistant Professor.

Appointment could begin as early as Spring 2023. The position is a non-tenure track twelve-month clinical faculty appointment, with faculty status, a renewable contract, and job security commensurate with tenured faculty. Clinical faculty have voting rights and serve on faculty committees at the College of Law. Clinical faculty also teach non-clinic courses consistent with their expertise and interests.

The Externship Program is an integral part of GSU Law’s experiential learning curriculum. The Externship Program provides GSU Law full-time and part-time students opportunities to work with non-profits, government agencies, corporate in-house departments, law firms and judges while earning academic credit.

Responsibilities of the position include, but are not limited to:

• Teach externship seminar, focusing on the intersection of effective lawyering skills with professional identity formation, in all semesters including summer. • Supervise new and returning externs, facilitating a meaningful legal learning experience that adheres to program requirements. • Engage with extern students in one-on-one meetings and classroom environment to foster their learning and development, specifically as it relates to the formation of their professional identity. • Cultivate and oversee externship placements. • Provide support to site supervisors to ensure students receive a quality legal educational experience. • Conduct externship site visits as needed. • Advise and guide students on selecting externship placements. • Develop new externship placements in locations outside of Metro-Atlanta, including Washington D.C. and rural counties in Georgia. • Develop new externship placements with a special focus on increasing opportunities for part-time students. • Participate in meetings of and supervisor training CLE programs given by the Georgia Association of Legal Externships.

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law Call for Submissions

Fordham JCFL Volume XXVIII: Call for Submissions

The Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law is now accepting submissions for the Spring 2023 Issue of Volume XXVIII.  As one of the premier student-edited business law journals in the country, the Journal ranks among the top-five specialty journals in banking and financial law, and among the top-ten specialty journals in corporate and securities law.

The Journal welcomes articles and essays addressing important issues in banking, bankruptcy, corporate governance, capital markets, finance, mergers and acquisitions, securities, and tax law and practice.

Please send all submissions to either our Scholastica page or our email at [email protected]. For consideration in our Spring 2023 Issue, kindly send in your submissions by Friday, December 14^th, 2022.

For more information regarding submissions, please visit our website. If you have any questions, please contact Brendan Finnerty, Senior Articles Editor, at [email protected].

Liberty University School of Law Seeks Full-Time Assistant or Associate Professor

This just in:

Liberty University School of Law invites applicants for a full-time assistant or associate professor in the residential Juris Doctor program. The most competitive applicants will demonstrate a commitment to excellence in teaching and possess a strong Biblical worldview. Additionally, faculty need to passionately support our mission to equip future leaders in law with a superior legal education in fidelity to the Christian faith expressed through the Holy Scriptures.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Teach first-year, upper division required, and elective classes
• Engage in scholarship
• Mentor students
• Provide timely feedback in the form of assessments, grading, and other requested formats
• Follow guidelines, policies, and procedures as outlined in the faculty handbook

Minimum Qualifications:

• J.D. Degree from an ABA accredited law school
• Recognized academic and professional background
• Superior scholarly promise
• Practice and/or judicial clerkship experience
• Commitment to student mentoring and professional development
• Enthusiasm for working with law students

 

Penn Law Names Consultative Dean Search Committee

The University of Pennsylvania  has announced a Consultative Committee to advise on the selection of the next dean of Penn Law.  The faculty members are:

• Erika H. James, Committee Chair; Dean, Wharton School and Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise (WHA)
• Anita L. Allen, Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and professor of philosophy (LAW)
• Mitchell Berman, Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and professor of philosophy (LAW)
• Cary Coglianese, Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and professor of political science (LAW)
• Jonathan D. Moreno, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor; professor of medical ethics & health policy and history & sociology of science (PSOM and SAS)
• Sarah Pierce, Denise A. Rotko Associate Dean for Legal Practice Skills (LAW)
• Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, professor of law and psychology (LAW)
• Christopher S. Yoo, John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science (LAW)

Nominations may be sent to  [email protected].  Kenneth L. Kring, from Korn Ferry, is consulting on the search. 

More on the Berkeley Students' Speakers Ban

Prof. Mohammad Fadel recently published a defense of nine Berkeley student organizations’ ban on “Zionist speakers,” which was a response to my own essay last week. The Chronicle of Higher Education offered me the last word, which was published yesterday.

Here is the gist:

Chronicle of Higher Education

Yes, Berkeley Is Silencing Jews

By  Steven Lubet

OCTOBER 24, 2022

It not unusual for student organizations to pass resolutions critical of, or even hostile to, Israel, but nine law-student groups at the University of California at Berkeley broke radical new ground when they adopted a bylaw banning all speakers who hold pro-Israel views, regardless of the topics they would address.

Mohammad Fadel of the University of Toronto presented an eloquent defense of the Berkeley students, also in these pages, but only by omitting the actual language of the resolution, as well as the students’ rationale for it, in favor of his own cleaned-up and more politically palatable version.

Fadel characterizes the prohibition as applying to “speakers who are rabidly anti-Palestinian.” In fact, the Berkeley bylaw is so excessive that it would prohibit mainstream speakers of all backgrounds from addressing any of the nine signatory organizations on topics entirely unrelated to the Middle East. Justice Elena Kagan could not speak to the Women of Berkeley Law on issues before the Supreme Court; Vice President Kamala Harris could not tell the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association of her childhood in Berkeley; Sen. Tammy Baldwin could not speak to the Queer Caucus about her experience as the first openly lesbian senator; and even President Barack Obama would be barred from addressing the Law Students of African Descent.

The great irony is that Fadel closes his essay with a quote from the late Edward Said, calling upon Jewish Americans to declare themselves “for the joint, politically equal survival of two peoples.” Anyone heeding Said’s admonition today — advocating the political independence of both Israelis and Palestinians — would be prohibited from speaking on that subject, or any other, to nine law-student organizations in Berkeley.

You can read the entire essay at Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled with free registration).

Taboo Trades Podcast: Prisons, Commodification, & Privatization with Jonathan Peterson

In this episode, I'm joined by UVA Law 3Ls Ryan Fitzgerald and Mary Talkington to interview Jonathan Peterson, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola New Orleans, about commodification and privatization in prisons. The paper we’re discussing is forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook on Commodification, edited by Elodie Bertrand and Vida Panitch. 

Jonathan’s research specializations are in philosophy of law and political philosophy. His current research focuses on political authority, social justice, criminal law, and punishment. 

Jonathan Peterson's webpage at Loyola New Orleans: http://cas.loyno.edu/philosophy/bios/jonathan-peterson

 

 

Слава Героям Україні! Glory to the heroes of Ukraine!

I posted this clip about four years ago with some American cowboy yodelers, and it seemed worth doing again by itself. The caption is in Russian but the banner behind her is in Ukrainian. Ukraine's got talent:

Слава Героям Україні! Glory to the heroes of Ukraine!

 

 

Trusts and Estates Collaborative Research Network (CRN56)

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Annual Meeting on Law and Society

San Juan, Puerto Rico

June 1-4, 2023

IN PERSON ONLY

Abstracts deadline: 8 November 2022

The Trusts and Estates Collaborative Research Network invites you to submit your paper and panel proposals for the upcoming annual meeting on Law and Society, to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This conference will be in-person only. There will be no hybrid or virtual panels. 

We invite papers and proposals that touch in any way on succession (inheritance), equity, or wealth transfers more generally. Subjects of inquiry may involve any aspect of government or social policy with respect to trusts, estates, inheritance, wealth transfer, equity or courts with jurisdiction over these issues.

The conference theme of ‘Separate and Unequal’ offers an opportunity to explore the role of law in normalizing inequality and discrimination. However, papers are not limited to these topics.

We welcome any papers on the topic of trusts and estates. For more information about the conference theme, visit:

https://www.lawandsociety.org/sanjuan2023/

How to submit:

To be included in a CRN56 Trusts and Estates session please submit your proposal directly through the Law and Society Association’s website by November 8, making sure to select CRN56 from the dropdown menu. 

We welcome any of the following submissions: 

• Individual papers (we will organize submissions into panels).
• Paper sessions: panels formed around a single theme, with 4 or 5 paper presenters, and a chair/discussant.
• Roundtables: formed around a single topic with 4 to 8 participants, and a chair. 
• Author Meets Reader (AMR): for scholarly books published in 2022. 

Individual abstracts can be submitted in English or Spanish

Session abstracts must be in English, but can be presented in Spanish as long as all papers in the session are in Spanish. 

For more information on the different submission types, and how to submit, visit: https://www.lawandsociety.org/types-of-submissions/

Important information about the conference:

More information including details regarding visa requirements, and accessibility information can be found at the conference website: 

https://www.lawandsociety.org/sanjuan2023/