The Faculty Lounge

Blueberry Hill

"Blueberry Hill" is best known today for Antoine "Fats" Domino's 1956 R&B hit, but it had been a hit for others over fifteen years earlier. Written in 1940 by Vincent Rose, Larry Stock, and Al Lewis, its first release was a fox trot rendition by Sammy Kaye's big band. The first hit version was by the Glen Miller Orchestra, also in 1940, on the RCA subsidiary Bluebird Records. (Note: Bluebird may be best remembered today for its early blues releases by Blind Willie McTell, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Washboard Sam, and others. I didn't know until researching "Blueberry Hill" that big bands also recorded for Bluebird.) Louis Armstrong also had a hit with "Blueberry Hill" in 1949, with the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra, which was sort of a transitional version that influenced Domino. (Another note: Gordon Jenkins seemed to make a habit of recording with diverse artists, including the Weavers' English translation of "Tzena Tzena" in 1950.) There have been numerous covers, virtually all of the Fats Domino version, including an unexpected one by an infamous amateur at the bottom of the post.

This short clip is the earliest one I could find. I will include a longer one later in the post.

Life On The Tenure Track

life on the tenure track

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— John Holbein (@johnholbein1.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 2:47 PM

Call for Papers: Miami Law & Finance Workshop, Fall 2025

From a recent email message:

We invite submissions of paper abstracts for the Fall series of the Miami Law & Finance Workshop. The workshop will take place online on Fridays from 1pm to 2pm EST. We welcome papers on all finance-related topics, including corporate law and finance.

Abstracts should be sent to the workshop co-organizers [email protected],[email protected] and [email protected] no later than Friday July 18th, 2025, with the following information:
- Name of author(s)
- Affiliation
- Summary of paper’s main thesis, contribution to the prior literature, and methods employed 

(Abstract length: 500-1000 words max).

We will notify selected authors by July 25th. Note that selected authors must be ready to send a complete draft of their paper to us at least one week before the scheduled date of the workshop, which we will circulate to the discussant and registered workshop participants.

 

Amelia Rinehart Stepping Down as West Virginia Law Dean; Brewer Named Interim

Amelia Smith Rinehart has announced that she is stepping down as dean of the West Virginia University College Law at the end of June.  Rinehart became dean in 2021 and will rejoin the faculty.  Susan Brewer, former CEO of Steptoe and Johnson, who holds a JD from George Mason Law, has agreed to take the reins as interim dean while the College opens a national search for its next dean.

HLR Internal Memos Leak

For anyone not on social media who may have missed the leaked 3,000 pages of Harvard Law Review's internal memos from last year, they are here. (Relatedly, here is the complaint against Michigan Law Review).

I say "not on social media", because if you're there you couldn't possibly have missed it as it's all anyone was talking about, up until this happened (over at Prawfs, Howard Wasserman has a long post on the Florida incident)

 

This article is every bit as crazy as the title suggests

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— Kim Krawiec (@kimkrawiec.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 8:02 AM

No Words

I need all of #lawsky to see this video from a Colorado appeals court livestream yesterday. I am in actual tears. Sound *incredibly* on, the subtitles will not help.

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— Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. (@clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social) June 18, 2025 at 10:47 PM 

Original video/full argument via www.coloradojudicial.gov/court-appeal... (search for 23CA2125)

Roland Fryer on Slavery

Roland Fryer had a very nice piece on slavery in the Wall Street Journal to mark Juneteenth. A small excerpt:

Slavery endured not only because society condoned it but also because, for slaveholders, it paid. Fogel and Engerman overturned the then-fashionable view that bondage was an economically backward form of racist exploitation, manned by an idle workforce that dragged the South down. Their data revealed a colder truth: For those who owned people, slavery was the most profitable and therefore most rational labor system on offer. Recognizing the profit calculus behind slavery doesn’t dilute its moral horror—it sharpens it. It exposes how market incentives can entrench inhumanity and how the lure of profit can eclipse compassion.

Read the whole thing here. HT: Al Roth

Imminent Death Donation

I’m joined today by two special guests to discuss an unusual and ethically complex type of organ donation – imminent death donation, or IDD. As you’ll hear Thao Galvan explain in the episode, organ donation currently has three standard types: living donation, donation after brain death (a type of deceased donation in which the patient is declared brain dead, and thus legally dead), and donation after circulatory death, or DCD. In DCD, a patient who is not brain dead is removed from life support, but the heart keeps beating. If it takes the patient more than roughly 90 minutes to die, the organs may not be usable. IDD, or imminent death donation, attempts to prevent that, by retrieving non-vital organs (usually a kidney) for donation prior to the removal of life support.

Thao Galvan is a transplant surgeon and professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. Kathy Osterrieder is a retired financial analyst, who came to this issue after attempting, unsuccessfully, to donate the organs of her late husband, Robert Osterrieder, after making the difficult decision to remove him from life support. It is another first for the Taboo Trades podcast – the first time in over five years of recording that I’ve been unable to hold back the tears, as Kathy talks about what the experience was like for her family.

 

 

Links

Host: Kimberly D. Krawiec, Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Guests:

Nhu Thao Nguyen Galvan, M.D., M.P.H., FACS, Associate Professor of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine

Kathleen Osterrieder, Donor Family Member in Spirit, Retired Financial Analyst

 

Reading:

The Difficult Ethics of Organ Donations From Living Donors, Wall St. J. (2016)

Let’s change the rules for organ donations — and save lives, Wash. Post (2019)

OPTN, Ethical considerations of imminent death donation white paper (2016)

Survey of public attitudes towards imminent death donation in the United States, Am. J. Transplant. (2020)

Teaching Skill and Age

Recently, I blogged about a touching story from Mark Tushnet in We Age But Our Students Remain Young. Over at PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman provides a counterpoint:

This Atlantic piece has stuck with me since first published in 2019 (I blogged about it). The Atlantic website recirculated it in today's daily email. I will highlight the piece that captures teaching and the academic connection.

As Bach demonstrated, teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time. A study in The Journal of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors in disciplines requiring a large store of fixed knowledge, specifically the humanities, tended to get evaluated most positively by students. This probably explains the professional longevity of college professors, three-quarters of whom plan to retire after age 65—more than half of them after 70, and some 15 percent of them after 80. (The average American retires at 61.) One day, during my first year as a professor, I asked a colleague in his late 60s whether he’d ever considered retiring. He laughed, and told me he was more likely to leave his office horizontally than vertically.

Our dean might have chuckled ruefully at this—college administrators complain that research productivity among tenured faculty drops off significantly in the last decades of their career. Older professors take up budget slots that could otherwise be used to hire young scholars hungry to do cutting-edge research. But perhaps therein lies an opportunity: If older faculty members can shift the balance of their work from research to teaching without loss of professional prestige, younger faculty members can take on more research.

Ironically, the move to vigorous post-tenure review since 2019 (most prominently at Florida schools) flies in the face of this six-year-old article's insight--a 60-year-old who has taught for 25 years cannot be as productive a scholar as a 40-year-old in her first decade of teaching, and schools should adjust job assignments, expectations, and evaluation accordingly. Post-tenure review potentially flattens that evolution.

Read the whole thing here.