The Faculty Lounge

Sam & Dave

Sam Moore and Dave Prater were originally from Miami, where they had performed individually with gospel groups such as the Sensational Hummingbirds and the Melionaires. They signed together with Roulette Records in 1961, then made the switch to Atlantic/Stax, and moved to Memphis, in 1964. They had a long series of hits, many produced or written by Isaac Hayes, Steve Cropper, or Booker T. Jones.

Moore and Prater, rather famously, did not get along well (an understatement), which did not affect their even more famously energetic live performances, for which they were known as "Double Dynamite" and the "Sultans of Sweat." Their first break-up was in 1970. They intermittently reunited until 1981, when they parted for good.

Beginning in 1982, Prater performed with Sam Daniels as "The New Sam & Dave Review. As far as I know, there wasn't any litigation over the name, which is surprising. Prater passed away in 1988.

Moore has attempted a solo career with some success, often guest performing with other acts, though has been said to resent being constantly asked to perform Sam & Dave numbers. What did he expect?

Statement of 68 UVA Law Professors

Is here. Discussion of the earlier Harvard Faculty letter can be found here  and here.

Download Statement of 68 UVA Law Professors

Law Students Keeping Receipts

Via BlueSky Social, I came across this spreadsheet maintained by a group of law students at Georgetown.

We are a grassroots group of law students who were extremely disappointed to see members of the legal profession—law firms, Department of Justice lawyers, members of the Trump Administration—completely disregard the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, legal ethics, and equal treatment and protection under the law. As law students make decisions about their careers, we thought it imperative to collect information about where law firms currently stand on the use of the federal government to attack lawyers, law firms, the legal profession, and freedom of speech and expression. We created this spreadsheet based on publicly available information to help law students make decisions that align with their values and to show those in the legal profession where their colleagues stand on such a critical and existential issue. If you have any questions or want to request an update to the sheet, please email [email protected]. This list was last updated on April 3, 2025 at 2:22 PM ET. We will be making updates regularly, but please be patient with us. We are law students doing this in our free time.

The students are collecting "information about where law firms currently stand on the use of the federal government to attack lawyers, law firms, the legal profession, and freedom of speech and expression."

The spreadsheet categorizes firms by those that "Caved to Administration," "Complying in Advance," "Stood Up Against Administration's Tactics," and "No Response."

For anyone teaching Professional Responsibility this semester, this might be an interesting resource for further conversations about the role of the lawyers as an "officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice."

Peter Jaworski on Canada and paid plasma

The always-thoughtful Peter Jaworkski discusses a recent piece in the Toronto Star on paid plasma in Canada

 

The Krever Commission also “warned” against relying on imports.

As I say in the article, you can’t have it both ways: You can either pay donors or rely on imports from countries that pay donors.

No country is an exception to this https://t.co/GmfAOg8YR5

— The Plasma Professor (@petermjaworski) March 30, 2025

CFP: Weaving it All Together: Hair, Health, Law, and Policy

Weaving it All Together: Hair, Health, Law, and Policy

Inaugural symposium examining the intersections between hair, health, law, and policy

Expressions of interest due: May 5, 2025

Program dates: Friday, September 25 - Saturday, September 26, 2025

Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Philadelphia, PA

The Drexel Kline Law Review in conjunction with the Drexel Kline Center for Law, Policy, & Social Action and the Drexel Kline Health Law Program is pleased to announce the first symposium examining the intersections between hair, health, law, and policy. This ground-breaking symposium will take place on Friday, September 25, and Saturday, September 26, 2025, at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In innumerable ways, hair matters. Significantly, hair is connected to our identity formation and expression, exercise of freedom, educational access, professional prospects, economic security, as well as our health and well-being. As a consequence, hair influences society, law, policy, advocacy, and movements—contemporarily, historically, domestically and internationally.

New Book Announcement - Jill Weber Lens, Stillbirth & the Law

UC Press has published a new book by Jill Weber Lens (Iowa): Stillbirth & the Law. Here is the publisher's description:

Each year in the United States, about 1 in 170 births is a stillbirth, a rate that has remained stagnant for most of this century even as other high-income countries have dramatically reduced their already lower rates. Jill Wieber Lens, the nation’s foremost expert on stillbirth and the law, blends personal experience and legal analysis to bring us an original, essential guide to this all-too-often unrecognized public health crisis. By exposing how the law inhibits prevention, affects the experience of stillbirth for birthing parents, and shapes broader notions of unborn life, Lens argues for a series of pragmatic, data-driven changes to the legal landscape that could enjoy broad popular support and strengthen reproductive justice and reproductive rights.

The UC Press page for the book is here.

University of Detroit Mercy Law Seeks Immigration Law Clinic Director

This just in:

University of Detroit Mercy School of Law is seeking applicants for a 12-month tenured or tenure- track position to teach and direct the Immigration Law Clinic starting with the 2025-26 academic year, with the potential to begin as early as Summer 2025. Detroit Mercy Law has a unified tenure track regardless of one’s area of teaching focus and supports scholarship from all tenure-track faculty.

The Immigration Law Clinic represents immigrants seeking a variety of relief and benefits, including family sponsorship, Violence Against Women Act petitions, and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Students in the clinic will also represent clients in trials before the U.S. Immigration Court and hearings before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Ideal candidates will have a strong interest and experience working on immigration issues; an understanding of the U.S. Immigration system and the ability to think imaginatively and critically about approaches to problems; and the ability to work collaboratively with community groups, the U.S. Immigration Court, and the Department of Homeland Security.

 

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Taking a page from Ilya Somin, who usually posts his speaking engagements at the beginning of the semester, I’ve been meaning to do the same, but am only just now getting around to it. I already discussed my 2025 Baron de Lancey Lecture at Cambridge, which took place on March 20. Below are remaining speaking engagements for the spring semester, at which I hope to see some Loungers!

 

March 20, “Repugnant Transactions and Taboo Trades”	2025 Baron de Lancy Lecture, Cambridge University. Free and open to the public (recorded). See more here.
April 7, Faculty Workshop	St. John’s University, School of Law. See more here.
April 11, Private Law Workshop	University of Notre Dame School of Law. See more here.
April 14, Faculty Workshop	George Washington University School of Law
April 24-25, Newman Colloquium	Yale Law School
May 9-10, The Normative Foundations of the Market	Worcester College, Oxford, UK. See more here.

UMass Law Seeks Visiting Professors

This just in:

UMass Law welcomes applications for two Visiting Professor positions to begin July 1 or August 1, 2025.

Successful candidates will teach Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure in fall 2025 and spring 2026. Applicants must be able to teach in the day and evening divisions as needed. The contract term will run through May 31, 2026.

UMass Law is the Commonwealth’s only public law school. We are dedicated to providing an excellent and affordable legal education and to improving the quality and reach of justice in the Commonwealth and beyond. The law school’s mission emphasizes public service and access to legal education. UMass Law is committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty and student body, and encourages applications from members of underrepresented groups who will add diversity to the Law School Community.

Minimum qualifications: Applicants must have a law degree, strong academic credentials, and demonstrated commitment to teaching excellence. Preferred qualifications: We prefer applicants with relevant law school teaching experience.

To apply, please submit an application package at https://careers.umassd.edu/en-us/job/526840/visiting-professors-criminal-law-and-procedure-law-school-2-positions including (1) a cover letter, (2) curriculum vitae, (3) contact information for three professional references, and (4) a copy of prior student evaluations (if available).

The review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. For more information about this position, qualifications, and how to apply, please contact Shaun Spencer, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, at [email protected].

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth employees and applicants for employment are protected by federal laws, Presidential Executive Orders, and state and local laws designed to protect employees and job applicants from discrimination on the bases of race, religion, color, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age, disability, family medical history or genetic information, military service, veteran status or other non-merit based factors.

The University of Massachusetts reserves the right to conduct background checks on all potential employees.

Diversity, Non-Discrimination, and a Symposium: A Response to Professor Crawford

Professor Thomas Gallanis asked me to post this response to Professor Bridget Crawford's post, Where are the Women? George Mason Law School & ACTEC Foundation Edition.

On March 28, Professor Bridget Crawford posted an entry on this blog, criticizing me, by name, for not having what Professor Crawford considered a sufficient percentage of women speakers at two scholarly events I organized at my law school. Professor Crawford did not speak with me about her concerns nor did I have any notice of the post. I came across it only by happenstance. Professor Crawford also closed comments to the post, so I was unable to respond there. I took the initiative to contact Dean Daniel Filler to seek an opportunity to respond, and he graciously offered to post my response.  

Given that Professor Crawford did not contact me, she had no opportunity to ask me whether I made efforts to encourage a broad range of potential speakers, including women speakers, to submit abstracts for these events. I did. In addition to posting calls for papers on AALS Section listservs, I tried to think of a broad range of potential speakers and sent them emails encouraging them to submit an abstract. 

I teach at a public university where we are committed to nondiscrimination. This means that we make efforts to broaden the applicant pool, whether for conference submissions or for faculty positions, for example, but once we have a list of the applicants, we do not evaluate any individual applicant better or worse because of a protected characteristic such as the individual’s sex.