The Faculty Lounge

To Love Somebody

"To Love Somebody" was the Bee Gees second single, written by Barry and Robin Gibb and released in 1967. Barry once told Piers Morgan that it was his favorite of the songs they'd written because it has "a clear, emotional message." I first heard it by Janis Joplin in 1969. Not being a Bee Gees fan, I had no idea that they'd written and recorded it first. (Don't miss the anagramic guest star at the bottom of this post.)

Georgia State Law Seeks Community Development/Entrepreneurship Clinic Faculty

This just in:

Georgia State University’s College of Law seeks highly qualified applicants for a full­time clinical faculty position to serve as Co-Director of a new Community Development and Entrepreneurship Law Clinic (“CDELC”) to be launched in the Fall of 2023. The CDELC will provide legal assistance to cooperative institutions, entrepreneurs, and grassroots coalitions organizing to build economies and communities rooted in solidarity in Atlanta, including efforts affiliated with Georgia State University. Clients will receive transactional law services, such as entity counseling and formation, contract drafting/negotiating (e.g., service contracts, financing agreements, commercial leases), limited labor law advice, limited intellectual property, and limited tax law advice, among others. In addition, employing a movement lawyering framework, the CDELC may provide research, policy analysis, advocacy, and popular community education to grassroots organizations and campaigns in Atlanta, building collective economic power.

Appointment could begin as early as Summer 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.

 

Ethics & Legal Studies Doctoral Program at Wharton

The Ethics & Legal Studies Doctoral Program at Wharton invites applications for a course of study that would begin in Fall 2023. The program focuses on the study of ethics and law in business. It is designed to prepare graduates for academic careers at leading business schools, law schools, and other programs. 

  

Our curriculum crosses many disciplinary boundaries and offers flexibility in course offerings and research topics. Students take a core set of courses in ethics and law in business, along with courses in an additional disciplinary concentration. Students may take courses in other Penn departments and pursue joint degrees.  

  

We encourage applicants who already possess a JD, LLM, or other non-doctoral advanced degree. 

 

Learn about the broad range of our faculty’s scholarly interests here: https://lgst.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/faculty-list/ 

 

Learn about the program requirements here: 

https://doctoral.wharton.upenn.edu/ethics-legal-studies/ 

 

  

Application Information 

One may apply online for the Ethics & Legal Studies Doctoral Program by going to: https://doctoral.wharton.upenn.edu/. The application deadline is December 15th. Strong GRE or GMAT scores are required; GRE scores are preferred. The last possible test date for the GRE and GMAT is December 15th. Official results must be available by mid-January. 

  

Contact & Resources:  

Professor Amy Sepinwall, Faculty Coordinator
[email protected] 

Tamara English, Department Administrator 

[email protected] 

 

Kathleen Boozang Stepping Down as Dean of Seton Hall Law

Kathleen Boozang, who has served as dean of Seton Hall School of Law since 2015, will step down on January 1, 2023 and will return to the faculty.  Professor John Kip Cornwell will serve as interim dean while the university conducts a search for its next dean. 

 

 

Long-Form Essay on Judge Ho's Unethical Boycott

I have a long-form essay  in The Daily Beast about the unethical judicial boycott of Yale Law School (written before Yale announced that it would no longer cooperate with the U.S. New rankings).

Here is the gist:

Yale Law School Needs to Stand Up to This Bullying Judge

 Nov. 19, 2022 

This is a story about a confrontation between a prominent federal judge and the nation’s top-ranked law school. Neither comes away looking very good.

The judge has unethically attempted to bully the school into tightening its control over student protests in conformity with his own policy views, and the law school meekly moved to placate the judge, without objecting to (or even mentioning) his blatant abuse of judicial power.

Far from resisting the boycott, or even criticizing the violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct, Gerken rewarded Ho and Branch with an invitation to speak at the law school, implicitly committing to keep student protests at a level acceptable to the judges.

There is little reason to think that Gerken or other faculty members will address the looming ethics issue, but it might well arise if the judges agree to take questions from students. If so, it is likely that Ho will resort to an argument that he raised in the published version of his Federalist Society lecture.

“Suppose a law school discriminates on the basis of race,” he posited. “Could a judge publicly refuse to hire from that school, in hopes of spurring a change? Surely a judge could do so.” The analogy seems compelling, but it is ultimately misplaced. The Code of Judicial Conduct does not make exceptions for honorable intentions, and it is easy to understand why.

Ho’s comparator to promoting non-discrimination is “freedom of speech,” but other judges might have different priorities. Under Ho’s theory, a judge could ethically boycott clerks from Liberty University to coerce a change in its policy of punishing students who engage in “sexual relations outside of a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman.” Likewise, a judge could refuse to hire clerks from Brigham Young University until the Mormon school agrees to serve alcohol. As conservative judges are fond of complaining about liberal initiatives, there is no limiting principle.

Someone among the deans and faculty at Yale must surely understand that federal court clerkships were designed to help judges decide cases, not for use as collateral in the culture wars. The administration’s inexplicable silence, however, confers legitimacy on Ho and Branch’s unethical boycott.

You can read the entire essay at The Daily Beast.