The Faculty Lounge

AALS Section on Election Law Award Winners

From Joshua Sellers, the Chair of the AALS Section on Election Law:

The AALS Section on Election Law is pleased to announce the winners of its annual awards.

The John Hart Ely Prize in the Law of Democracy

This award is presented annually by the executive committee of the AALS Section on Election Law to a senior scholar in the field for his or her “extraordinary lifetime contributions to the study of election law and the law of democracy in the United States.” This year’s recipient is Daniel Lowenstein (UCLA).

Distinguished Scholarship Award in Election Law

This award is presented annually in recognition of “a single work that exemplifies excellence in the field and that is published in a given year.” Winners are chosen by a scholarship selection committee which, in some years, additionally awards an honorable mention. Because no award was given last year, this year the Section decided to recognize winners for the past two years.

The winner for 2025 is Travis Crum (Wash U – St. Louis) for his article, The Unabridged Fifteenth Amendment, 133 Yale Law Journal 1039 (2024).

The winner for 2024 is Jacob Eisler (Florida State) for his book “The Law of Freedom: The Supreme Court and Democracy” (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

The selection committee also decided to award an honorable mention to Nicholas Stephanopoulos (Harvard) for his book “Aligning Election Law” (Oxford University Press, 2024).

The winners will be recognized at the 2025 AALS Annual Meeting.

AALS CFP: Legal Implications of Social and Political Activism in Sports

This just in:

AALS Section on Law and Sports Co-sponsored by the AALS Section on Contracts

When QB Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem at NFL games during the 2016 football season, he quickly became a symbol of a renewed era of athlete activism, triggering collegiate and professional athlete activists across the country to join demonstrations and sparking national conversations about racism and police brutality. But athlete activism is much broader, extending to philanthropic work such as NFL wide receiver Brandon Marshall’s efforts to spread mental health awareness and Lebron James’ funding of college scholarships for inner-city youth. Professional athletes’ willingness to take public stands on political and social issues is reflected and reinforced by sports entities’ social responsibility initiatives. For example, the NCAA relocated men’s basketball championship games out of North Carolina in response to a state law that curbed anti-discrimination protections for transgender people. Most sports leagues and governing bodies regularly participate in socially responsible causes.

In short, the sports industry has adapted the tenets of corporate social responsibility to fit its uniquely visible profile and serve its communities. Consequently, a constant stream of information can be found in news reports that showcase league, team and player efforts to make sports healthier and safer at all levels, improve literacy, create and fill jobs, address gender and racial inequalities, fight disease and poverty, prevent substantive abuse, address domestic violence, and clean up the environment. However, in staking out positions on political, social, and health questions, sports industry participants face legal ramifications and risk.

This program examines both public and private law issues that arise whenever individuals and organizations among the complex network of relationships that define the sports industry try to make socially responsible choices or engage in social or political activism. For example, public expression from professional athletes may be circumscribed by their collective bargaining agreements and league/team personal conduct codes. Morality clauses in endorsement contracts may be triggered by an athlete’s statements or actions. The ability of leagues to implement their social responsibility programs is heavily affected by the buy-in of their constituent teams. Athletes and other sports entities may require reverse morality clauses to ensure their rights to disassociate from corporate relationships when company conduct leads to public opprobrium. First Amendment considerations must be reconciled with contractual obligations.

The program will include a speaker selected from this Call for Papers. The selected author will participate in the Section’s annual program on Thursday, January 4, 2017 from 10:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m. in San Diego, California. Only full-time faculty from AALS member institutions are eligible to submit papers. Authors must rely on their own institutions for funding to attend the conference.

The Journal of Legal Aspects of Sports will consider proposals submitted in response to this Call for Papers for inclusion in a Special Issue on Athlete Activism and Sports Industry Social Responsibility scheduled for publication in August 2018 and guest edited by Professors Arthur Miller (NYU Law) and Jodi Balsam (Brooklyn Law).

The deadline to submit a draft paper or abstract is Monday, August 21, 2017. Please e-mail your submission to Professor Ettie Ward, Chair of the Section on Law and Sports, at [email protected]. Members of the Section’s Executive Committee will review submissions and communicate decisions by late September 2017.

Charlottesville, the Jim Crow South, and the Nazis

Brent Staples op-ed that links the Jim Crow South to the Nazis from last May is making the rounds again today, for obvious reasons.  One of the things Staples does is mention Jim Whitman's important new book, Hitler's American Model.  I posted a little bit about this last June, which I want to repost now:

James Whitman's fabulous new book Hitler's American Model explores the Nazis' use of American precedents on race laws.  There's a lot to say about it; I'd like to focus here on the fact that Whitman's book is much, much more about how Nazis thought about the US than about what the law in the US was, or whether there was some causation or "transplantation" from the southern US states to the Nazis.  The Nazis were plenty capable of coming up with vicious race laws all by themselves -- but this is largely the story of how Nazi lawyers interpreted and spoke about the US' history of conquering Native Americans and then segregating African Americans.  (There was, of course, criticism by the Nazis of the breakdown of the strict line separating the races in the US.)  If this had been written in the 1950s, at the height of the myth and symbol school of American studies, it would have been called something like "The image of southern US law in the Nazi legal mind."  Let me say to legal historians, you really need  to read this book, soon.  As I told a colleague this afternoon, this is the best book I've read in legal history in years, in large part I think because it seems so fresh.  I've read books that are deeper but none in recent years that seem so original and iconoclastic.

I've been obsessed with the Nazis of late (probably like a lot of readers).  Though I guess my interest in this goes back to the day as as a graduate student when I watched a bunch of Nazi era films at the Harvard film archives.  How, I continue to wonder, did the person who wrote and starred in Das Blaue Licht become a leading filmmaker for the Nazis?  I mean, my god, isn't that all about unjust persecution?  Did Leni Riefenstahl ever consider in her later years what her younger self (who wrote about the persecution of the witch) would have thought of the Nazis?  Maybe not.  I guess that's how self-delusion  works.

To return to my story, Whitman talks about a lot of things that are of interest to American legal historians, especially how the Nazis had a form of legal realism.  This will cause me to rewrite at least somewhat my essay on Karl Llewellyn's lost work against lynching.  But one of the more astonishing insights of many in Whitman's book is that Heinrich Krieger, who published a major study of the American race laws in 1936 also published an article, on Native Americans in the George Washington University Law Review in 1935.  Holy cow.  (And here I am thinking that the defense of the Confederacy and the constitutional vision of the pre-Civil War south in the Yale Law Journal in 1921 was bad).  To be fair, Krieger's article is really about how the Constitution does not quite cover the category of dependent citizenship that had been assigned to Native Americans.  If you didn't know Krieger was a Nazi lawyer, you wouldn't get that sense from this article, with maybe a few asides (such as a remark about the degeneration of Native Americans at 284).  Though there are some other places where he seems to doubt the wisdom of recognizing that Native Americans have the same rights as other citizens. (at 307-08.)  (And if you're interested in reading Krieger's book I've scanned it in here.)

I'm going to spend some time thinking all of this through, though I'm really slow at reading German these days, so this is going to be a long-term project for me.  What interests me most about this book is the legal theory and how American law looks through the eyes of the Nazis.  And how the Nazi perspective aligns -- or not -- with how we now think about the US' long history with race.  One comment stuck with me from Whitman -- that the Nazis complained that the Americans tried to hide some of their grosser race laws.

The image is of the Lee Statue in Charlottesville.

AALS CFP: Legal Competency at the Crossroads: Mental Disability & Family Law

This just in:

Co-Sponsored by the AALS Sections on Disability Law, Family and Juvenile Law, and Law, Medicine, and Health Care

Legal competency, the law’s recognition of an individual’s personhood and agency, represents a conceptual cornerstone for law and mental disability scholars. The success of the disability rights movements in fostering greater public support for economic and social rights for people with mental disabilities has generated, at least rhetorically, broader support for the law’s recognition of the decisional capacity of people with mental disabilities in these areas. The scope of scholarly inquiry has expanded in recent years from curbing state encroachment in private decision-making to crafting positive theories of rights for people with mental disabilities in sexuality, reproduction, marriage, and parenting.

This panel seeks to bring together legal scholars across several fields to explore emerging theory and doctrine in family law for people with mental disabilities. With its emphasis on intersectionality and cross-pollination, panelists will discuss such issues as assisted reproductive technology, parental termination, and sexual access. An explicit goal of this panel is to develop a research agenda for this emerging interdisciplinary area of legal scholarship. The Family Court Review, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, has agreed to publish the program proceedings. For more information on publication guidelines and recent issues, see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291744-1617;jsessionid=0F04F41C5579A8C616CC83AA114B131F.d03t04.

We encourage academics at all levels and from a broad range of backgrounds including but not limited to law and mental disability, disability rights, health law, and particularly family law to submit proposals for consideration. Please e-mail your abstract to Jasmine E. Harris at [email protected] by Wednesday, August 23rd.

AALS CFP: Keeping Up With The Changing Face Of The American Family

This just in:

Keeping Up with the Changing Face of the American Family

The AALS Sections on Family and Juvenile Law, Children and the Law, and Aging and the Law are pleased to announce a call for papers from which two to four presenters will be selected for the section’s program at the AALS 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, California. We will have a joint, half-day program with two consecutive panels. The date and time of the joint program is Friday, January 5, 2018 from 9 am - 12 noon. The two panels will be divided based on general topics, such as caregiving, family formation and regulation, family dissolution, or structural legal policy impacting children, parents, the elderly or families as a whole.

Here is an overview of the panel subject matter:

The composition and structure of the American family has changed significantly in the last 65 years. From the decline of marriage and fertility to the increase in blended families, interracial relationships, and single parenthood, the face of the family is visibly different. The legalization of same sex marriage, the rise in the number of working women and fathers who share in household and childcare responsibilities, and the growing number of aging family members who need daily care has also impacted how families function. In some ways federal and state family laws precipitated these changes and opened the door for the new trends, but in other ways the law has been mired down in tradition, making it more difficult for the modern family to operate. This panel explores the ways in which family law and other related laws lie behind the curve in areas such as reproduction, custody, companionship, and caretaking. Panelists will also examine the various consequences of this gap between law and the realities of families today, as well as consider ideas and current efforts being made to close the divide.

We ask that submissions fall generally or specifically under the above topics. The papers will be published in a 2018 symposium volume of Family Law Quarterly, the scholarly journal of the American Bar Association Section on Family Law. If you are interested in submitting your paper for consideration, please send it to [email protected] by August 21, 2017. Please use “AALS Call for Papers Submission” as the subject line of your email. We are particularly interested in submissions from junior faculty. Papers should be no longer than 11,000 words and no more than 100 footnotes. Papers that have been accepted for publication are not eligible for consideration because panelists will be publishing their papers in the Family Law Quarterly.

A committee appointed by the section chairs will review the submitted papers and notify the authors of the selected papers by September 25, 2017. All panelists, including the panelists selected from this call for papers, are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses. If you have any questions about the call for papers or the Family Law Quarterly symposium, please contact Jessica Weaver.

AALS CFP: Professional Responsibility 2018 Works In Progress

This just in:

AALS Section on Professional Responsibility Call for Papers – 2018 AALS Annual Meeting  

The AALS Section on Professional Responsibility invites papers for its program “Professional Responsibility 2018 Works in Progress Workshop” at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego. Two papers will be selected from those submitted.  

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:  

This workshop will be an opportunity to test ideas, work out issues in drafts and interrogate a paper prior to submission. It will pair each work in progress scholar with a more senior scholar in the field who will lead a discussion of the piece and provide feedback. Successful papers should engage with scholarly literature and make a meaningful original contribution to the field or professional responsibility or legal ethics.  

ELIGIBILITY:  

Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Preference will be given to junior scholars focusing their work in the area of professional responsibility and legal ethics. Pursuant to AALS rules, faculty at fee-paid law schools, foreign faculty, adjunct and visiting faculty (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school), graduate students, fellows, and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Please note that all faculty members presenting at the program are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.  

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:  

Two papers will be selected by the Section’s Executive Committee for presentation at the AALS annual meeting.  

There is no formal requirement as to the form or length of proposals. However, the presenter is expected to have a draft for commentators one month prior to the beginning of the AALS conference.  

The paper MUST be a work in progress and cannot be published at the time of presentation. It may, however have been accepted for publication and be forthcoming.  

DEADLINE:  

Please email submissions to Ben Edwards, Associate Professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law, at [email protected] on or before September 30, 2017. The title of the email submission should read: “Submission – 2018 AALS Section on Professional Responsibility.” 

 

AALS CFP: New Voices In Legislation

This just in:

AALS Call for Papers: “New Voices in Legislation”

AALS 2018 Annual Meeting

The AALS Section on Legislation & Law of the Political Process is pleased to announce that it will host a “New Voices in Legislation” program during the 2018 AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. This works-in-progress program will bring together junior and senior scholars in the field of legislation for the purpose of providing the junior scholars with feedback and guidance on their draft articles. Scholars whose papers are selected will present their work in small panel sessions. A senior scholar will moderate each panel and lead discussion about the draft article.

Eligibility: The New Voices Program will be open to full-time faculty members from AALS member schools who are untenured or have been tenured for two years or less. All scholars, whether or not presenting a paper or moderating a discussion, are welcome to attend the program and participate in discussions.

Submission Requirements: Submissions should be drafts of articles relating to legislation and the law of the political process, including articles related to legislative structure, the legislative process, the budget process, statutory interpretation, and deliberation. Submissions should be near completion and should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. The purpose of the program is to provide junior scholars with feedback that can be incorporated into their works-in-progress; as a result, articles are ineligible for the program if they are expected to be in print at the time of the program in January 2018. However, articles that already have been submitted to journals for publication, and accepted for publication, are not ineligible for this reason.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation in the program, please email a copy of the paper and abstract to Evan Zoldan, [email protected] by Sunday, October 1, 2017. Selected participants will be notified in early November 2017. Final drafts of those who are selected must be submitted by December 15, 2017.

Senior Scholars: If you are interested is serving as a commentator for one of the junior papers, please contact Evan Zoldan, [email protected].

CFP: AALS Section on Law & Religion Award for Excellence in Scholarship

The AALS Section on Law & Religion is once again soliciting papers for consideration for its annual Award for Excellence in Scholarship, to be given at the AALS Annual Meeting next January. All fellows at AALS Member Schools, as well as faculty members with ten years or less experience as faculty members, are eligible. The award is given annually to a paper either published or to be published by July 15 of this year, that has made an outstanding scholarly contribution to the field of law and religion.

Any faculty member at an AALS member school can nominate up to one paper for the award. Nominations should be sent directly to Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi ([email protected]) as Chair of the Prize Committee. Nominations must be received by August 15.

Haider Ala Hamoudi, Chair, Prize Committee
Professor Of Law
Associate Dean For Academic Affairs
University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law
(412) 624-1055
[email protected]

Robin Fretwell Wilson, Chair, Law & Religion Section
Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law
University of Illinois College of Law
504 East Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign, Illinois 61820
217.244.1227 (office)
[email protected]

International students in US law schools: AALS discussions and the need for information

Thank you, Dan!

At the AALS annual meeting last week, the topic of international students in US law schools was the focus of a number of sessions.  These included a discussion about (i) fostering inclusion of international students enrolled in post-JD programs as well as encouraging their interaction with JD students, (ii) the ABA Section of Legal Education’s approach to gathering information and acquiescing in post-JD and non-JD programs that include international students and (iii) how law schools help international students in non-JD programs prepare for a US bar exam.  The number of sessions that included some discussion of international students’ experiences in US law schools, coupled with the variety of participants in these sessions, is some evidence of the importance of this population to US law schools. 

At the same time, many who work with the international student population remain frustrated with the absence of basic information about this group and their experiences in US law schools.  For example, there is no public source of information reporting the number of international students in US law schools outside of those enrolled in a JD program, much less on the home countries of such students (law schools report the number of non-resident alien JD students in their Standard 509 reports).  Demographic information about international applicants to post- and non-JD programs (including number of applicants, home country, age, gender etc) is not available, nor do law schools report on their funding of international students in these degree programs.   My work on the careers of international LLMs remains the only empirical research on career trajectories and the ways in which international students experienced the value of a US LLM.  

The AALS sessions did not solve this dearth of information, and comments by Bill Adams of the Section of Legal Education indicated that the Section is reluctant to add disclosure obligations relating to information that is not directly necessary for regulatory purposes.  And information about applicants, law school experiences, funding and careers is not required for the Section to determine its position on acquiescence, which is the standard for non- and post-JD programs.  But perhaps there is another reason for law schools to cooperate on disclosing this sort of information, related to what Theresa Kaiser-Jarvis of the University of Michigan describes as a business reason: to help US law schools make informed decisions in structuring the operating programs for international students, and to contribute to knowledge about the value of US legal education for these students. 

My next post will take up the issue of the value of US legal education for international students.

The Law School Industry: Dean, Associate/Assistant Dean Positions 2015-2016

The data included in the excel spread sheet and attached brief pdf summary (downloaded attachement is provided via link on tab 'files') provides information from the 2015-2016 academic year on the composition of dean positions in the US Law School industry.

The appointments are organized alphabetically by state, and within each state, by school, with a list of the Head Dean and any Assistant and Associate Deans. In addition, profile links, email addresses and background degree information is provided. Certain information is color-coded to help identify specific factors (e.g., female deans, post-graduate degrees). We specifically focused on questions of gender, pedigree and level of degrees in relation to state geographies, and we have included some overview of our findings below.

There are, of course, a substantial number of additional factors that could be incorporated into the study, and might influence how the data is interpreted: e.g., questions of age, disability, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic conditions, and so forth. The data was compiled from the 2015-2016 academic year, so there may be some more recent updates that are not incorporated into this study. We apologize for any errors, hope the document is of interest, and grateful for any corrections.

 

 

AALS CFP: China In Africa: Legal, Political And Development Issues In The Africa-China Relationship

This just in:

The AALS Africa Section, in cooperation with our co-sponsor the AALS East Asia Law & Society Section, is pleased to announce the following call for papers for our 2017 Annual Meeting program:

China in Africa: Legal, Political and Development Issues in the Africa-China Relationship

Over the last 15 years, the Africa-China relationship has expanded dramatically driven by exponential growth in trade and economic investments that have resulted in increasing social, political and legal interactions between Africa and Asia. The rapid expansion and intensification of this relationship raises a complex set of inter-related issues that unfold in a context shaped by the persistent influence of the colonial legacy in Africa, which has contributed to persistent poverty and instability in a number of African countries. We are seeking papers that address all legal, political and development aspects of the Africa-China relationship. Papers may focus on a single African state or regional and international dimensions of the relationship.

We anticipate choosing at least one paper for presentation at the session from this Call for Papers. The subject is deliberately broad, and we welcome papers that address any aspect of the topic that has a legal connection.

Manuscripts or proposals should be comprehensive enough to allow the selection committee to meaningfully evaluate the aims and likely content of the final papers. Papers that have been published, or will have been published by the time of the Annual Meeting, are not eligible.

AALS CFP: Animals As Living Accomodations

The AALS Sections on Animal Law, Disability Law and Law and Mental Disability have issued a call for papers for their 2016 panel, Animals as Living Accomodations.   

This panel will explore the use of animals as living accommodations for individuals with disabilities. The panel will be interdisciplinary, likely spanning topics in animal, disability, health, business, criminal and education law and policy. Possible topics include but are not limited to: business obligations to accommodate service and emotional support animals; species restrictions in service animals; animals as accommodations in schools; emotional support animals in civil and criminal proceedings, housing, and air travel; the use of animals to treat mental distress; and service animal training and placement. Interested speakers should submit an abstract of up to 300 words electronically by August 31, 2016 to: Ani B. Satz, Chair, AALS Section on Animal Law, [email protected]. Selected speakers will have the option of publishing original papers in a dedicated symposium in the Animal Law Review.

AALS CFP: New Voices In Legislation

This just in:

The AALS Section on Legislation and Law of the Political Process is pleased to announce that it will host a "New Voices in Legislation" program during the 2017 AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. This works-in-progress program will bring together junior and senior scholars in the field of legislation for the purpose of providing the junior scholars with feedback and guidance on their draft articles. Scholars whose papers are selected will present their work in small panel sessions. A senior scholar will moderate each panel and lead discussion about the draft article.

Eligibility: The New Voices Program will be open to full-time faculty members from AALS member schools who are untenured or have been tenured for two years or less. All scholars, whether or not presenting a paper or moderating a discussion, arewelcome to attend the program and participate in discussions.
Submission Requirements: Submissions should be drafts of articles relating to legislation and the law of the political process, including articles related to legislative structure, the legislative process, statutory interpretation, and deliberation. Submissions should be near completion and should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. The purpose of the program is to provide junior scholars with feedback that can be incorporated into their works-in-progress; as a result, articles are ineligible for the program if they are expected to be in print at the time of the program in January 2017. However, articles that already have been submitted to law reviews for publication, and accepted for publication, are not ineligible for this reason.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation in the program, please email a copy of the paper and abstract to Evan Zoldan, [email protected] by Friday, October 7, 2016. Selected participants will be notified in early November 2016. Final drafts of those who are selected must be submitted by December 15, 2016.

Senior Scholars: If you are interested is serving as a commentator for one of the junior papers, please contact Evan Zoldan, [email protected].

 

AALS CFP: Responding To Fisher v. Texas

This just in:

The AALS Employment Discrimination Section is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the section’s program, which will take place Thursday, January 5th from 1:30 pm to 3:15 pm, at the 2017 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. This year’s program is titled, Responding to Fisher v. Texas. This program will reassess, in the wake of Fisher v. University of Texas (to be decided in Summer of 2016), whether and/or how employers can be attentive to race in hiring and promotion. The answers to these questions are important since very large numbers of employers engage in diversity programs that might or might not be characterized as affirmative action, but are certainly not blind to race. Moreover, Fisher may tell us something about the Court’s view of the relationship, if any, between diversity and merit. This panel will react to Fisher and consider the potential implications of the Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence for the world of employment.

We are seeking one or two additional speakers who will present on a relevant topic, and we particularly encourage new voices to submit a paper abstract. To be considered as an additional speaker, please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words and a resume to Section Chair, Professor Brad Areheart, at [email protected] by August 31, 2016. Additional speaker(s) will be selected by members of the Executive Committee of the Section and will be notified by September 15, 2016.

Please note that the selected author(s) will be responsible for paying his/her registration fee as well as hotel and travel expenses. Any inquiries about this Call for Papers should be submitted by email to Professor Areheart.

 

CFP: The Unruly Nature of the Laws of Trusts and Estates

Call for Papers

Trusts & Estates Section

2017 AALS Annual Meeting

January 4-7, 2017 – San Francisco, CA

Sex, Death, and Taxes: The Unruly Nature of the Laws of Trusts and Estates

Trusts & Estates is a far-reaching and broad-based discipline of law that impacts private citizens’ decisions about sex, death, and taxes.  This legal discipline is based on speculation about donors and their intentions that, by their very nature, create unintended consequences because the laws exist largely unseen until they come into play.  Moreover, ascertaining these preferences prove difficult because individuals are entrenched with idiosyncratic preconceptions about death, family, property rights, personal legacies, paternalism, altruism, investment strategies, taxes, and many other effective interests.  In addition, the field sits at the crossroads of other legal disciplines such as family law, property law, elder law, and tax law.  For students, T&E makes an appearance in law schools and the bar exam, but is not like a constitutional law class that is unabashedly theoretical in its presentation and in meeting students’ non-expectations of a skills-centric classroom experience.  In practice, some of the most thriving areas require expertise in T&E.  In ordinary people’s everyday lives, the legal discipline is like an operating system that quietly runs in the background, but in reality organizes and informs the end user’s experience, often without the end user’s full awareness.  In the academy, it is caught between the practical and theoretical—a microcosm of the questions at the heart of debates about the value and normative objectives of a legal education.  Yet, during a time when T&E is becoming more relevant than ever, the discipline may be under–theorized and marginalized in the academy.  Therefore, this panel will interrogate T&E’s unruly nature, entertaining inquiries about the intersectionality of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class; the pervasiveness of succession law in aligned fields; its history of adaptation to changing social norms; and the development and evolution of law reform in this area.  The panel will explore new visions for the field and frameworks that disrupt and reimagine the field, while looking forward to practical and theoretical responses to such things as the pending elder care issues, concentration of wealth, taxation, large wealth transfers, social fixity, and the ongoing privatization of family caregiving and support. 

Submissions, due dates and method:

Submissions should be of abstracts between 250 and 1000 words, inclusive of any footnotes. Scholarship may be at any stage of the publication process from work-in-progress to completed article, but if already published, scholarship may not be published any earlier than 2015. Each potential speaker may submit only one abstract for consideration.

There are two submission due dates.  The Section seeks detailed abstracts in late summer, with final papers due in late fall.

• The due date for detailed abstracts is August 15, 2016.
• The due date for final papers is November 15, 2016.

 

AALS CFP: LLCs, New Charitable Forms And The Rise Of Philanthrocapitalism

This call for papers for the 2017 AALS Annual Meeting in San Franciso has just come  in:

 

Joint Program of the AALS Section onAgency, Partnerships LLCs, and  Unincorporated Associations &  Section on Nonprofit and Philanthropy Law

LLCS, NEW CHARITABLE FORMS, AND THE RISE OF PHILANTHROCAPITALISM

In December 2015, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, pledged their personal fortune—then valued at $45 billion—to the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a philanthropic effort aimed at “advancing human potential and promoting equality.” But instead of organizing CZI using a traditional charitable structure, the couple organized CZI as a for-profit Delaware LLC. CZI is perhaps the most notable example, but not the only example, of Silicon Valley billionaires exploiting the LLC form to advance philanthropic efforts. But are LLCs and other for-profit business structures compatible with philanthropy? What are the tax, governance, and other policy implications of this new tool of philanthrocapitalism? What happens when LLCs, rather than traditional charitable forms, are used for “philanthropic” purposes?

From the heart of Silicon Valley, the AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations and Section on Nonprofit and Philanthropy Law will host a joint program tackling these timely issues. In addition to featuring invited speakers, we seek speakers (and papers) selected from this call.

Any full-time faculty of an AALS member or fee-paid school who has written an unpublished paper, is working on a paper, or who is interested in writing a paper in this area is invited to submit a 1- or 2-page proposal by June 1, 2016. The Executive Committees of the Sections will review all submissions and select two papers by July 1, 2016. If selected, a very polished draft must be submitted by November 30, 2016. All submissions and inquiries should be directed to the Chairs of the Sections at the email addresses below:

Mohsen Manesh
Associate Professor
University of Oregon School of Law
[email protected]

Garry W. Jenkins
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Professor of Law
Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University
[email protected]

 

The Law School Industry - Veteran Emphasis in US Based Law Schools

This analysis provides an excel based study of how the law school industry approaches military veterans, especially who are students at the school but also more broadly. The title is, Veteran Emphasis in US Oriented Law Schools: Part 1, as we will be continuing with this study to contact every entry to develop a better understanding of current challenges, developing practices, and new innovations (note: you will have to download the document for it to view correctly as in excel format).

The information is organized alphabetically by state, and within each state by law school, and includes website links and contact details. A number of factors were taking into account, including law reviews, clinics and externships, associations and organizations, classes, and other miscellaneous innovations. The 'classes' data is somewhat fuzzy as we did not develop a clear metric about what counted as a veteran oriented class and instead went for classes that would be specifically of a military nature. The 'miscellaneous' factor includes a number of interesting innovations, which might be better located under a different classification but we've situated together - e.g., Yellow Ribbon Programs, Outreach Centers, Recruitment Innovations.

A surface read of the information reveals some potentially interesting takeaways. First, while there are considerable number of 'military' or 'national security' law school courses (approximately 120), there are less than 10 classes specifically addressing veteran law (and only one LLM). Second, there are approximately 30 Veteran clinics at US law schools, and while about 115 organizations, only a little more than 1/2 that are specifically focused on veterans (e.g., many instead are more generalist, such as Military Justice Society). Third, there is a significant need for law journals specifically dedicated to veteran conditions (this is not to say there are not special issues or articles that come up in other contexts or other non-scholarship networks). Fourth, while many states will have law schools that offer some focus on veterans, often the emphasis is a more generalist class or a student society. In fact, a number of states have no emphasis on veterans in regards to any of the dynamics (e.g., Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon). Other states only offer some class, but do not offer any additional emphasis or support (e.g., Indiana). Other states have very strong innovations at play (e.g., California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio). There is so much more to be studied here, but we hope this provides some useful information for those interested to better address veteran considerations. At the very least, there seems to be considerable energy at the student level to create community, which may be a valuable resource for future innovations. The relative lack of clinics and more over explicit information on law school websites suggests that this may be an area for more institutionalized veteran-oriented support, and which might also be a valuable opportunity for building a niche market for student recruitment and career placement.

This part of the study was completed with Mr. James Russell Dumas, and with helpful input from Prof. Evan Seamone, Prof Richard Meyer, and a number of MC School of Law veterans. Moving forward with the studies will be in collaboration with Prof. Evan Seamone.

MarkelFest! 2016 At The AALS Meeting

In case you haven't heard, Prawfs will again be hosting a MarkelFest! happy hour at the 2016 New York AALS meeting.  Join other law faculty at Bridges in the Hilton on Thursday evening, January 7, from 8:30 onward at the public side of the bar.

Important New Report From Law School Transparency on Law School Admissions

An important new report entitled: 2015 State of Legal Education: An in-depth look into law school admissions choices” has just been released by Law School Transparency (LST).  (Full disclosure – I had a minor role in editing some sections of the report.)  The report has already received attention in the press (see this editorial in today’s New York Times) and is likely to receive more in the coming days.  It is also likely to be a topic of conversation among current and prospective law students, many of whom rely heavily on LST for reliable information about law schools.  I recommend that all law professors and law school administrators read it in its entirety.  In the meantime, I offer below a summary of what I consider to be some of the most important findings and recommendations in the report.  

As the title implies, the report focuses on the questionable admissions policies practiced by many law schools during the enrollment crisis from 2011 to the present (although there are several other important subjects covered as well).  Using a risk profile that I developed based on LSAT scores (first reported here on TFL)  the report identifies 74 schools which admitted classes consisting of at least 25% at risk students in the fall of 2014 (statistics are not yet available for the 2015 entering classes).  Fully half of these schools, 37, admitted classes consisting of at least 50% at risk students (149 LSAT and below).  Most disturbingly, 18 schools admitted classes where over half of the students were categorized as being at very high or extreme risk of failing out of law school or failing the bar exam. (See the list of schools here.)

The report acknowledges that LSAT scores are imperfect predictors, and that the risk presented by admitting a student with a low LSAT score might be offset by requiring that the student have a correspondingly strong undergraduate GPA.  Through sophisticated statistical modeling, the report proves that this is not what is happening.  (See the section headed “Serious risk law schools did not take enough students with better undergraduate GPAs” in the Analysis section of the report.) 

To confirm the reliability of my risk-model, LST managed to acquire data regarding bar passage from two law schools. A school which chose to remain anonymous provided 7 years’ worth of data, and the University of Denver provided 14 years’ worth of data.  The data confirms that my risk categories are valid.  At the anonymous school, only 16% of students in the extreme risk category (144 LSAT or lower) passed the bar on their first attempt.  At the University of Denver, students in the extreme risk category passed on their first attempt at the slightly higher rate of 27%.   In the very high risk category (LSAT of 145 or 146), 19% passed the first time at the anonymous school, and 39% passed the first time at Denver.  In the high risk category (147-149 LSAT), 23% passed the first time at the anonymous school and 57% passed at Denver.  

The Law School Industry - Institutional Considerations for Military Veterans

From movies to policy debates, veterans are a perennial image in the American psyche. At the law school, the most notable presence of the military are recruiting officers (e.g., JAG), and to a lesser extent, student organizations (e.g., student veterans organizations, military justice societies) and the occasional veteran clinic. There is, however, no comprehensive in-depth study of how law schools accommodate veterans or how various institutional platforms operate (in the next few months, I will post an excel-based study mapping all these initiatives at law schools with some brief comments). While researching this topic and speaking with student veteran groups, military personnel and therapists, certain themes have emerged that might provide law school administrations with some guide for developing 'best practices' towards students serving or having served in the military. 

The core challenge seems to be that there tends to be a lack of awareness by law school admission offices about the psychological and social challenges that veterans face, in civilian life or at school in particular. Below is a brief list of some common blind spots and potential reforms.

AALS CFP: New Voices In Legislation

This just in:

The AALS Section on Legislation & Law of the Political Process is pleased to announce that it will host a “New Voices in Legislation” program during the 2016 AALS Annual Meeting in New York, NY. This works-in-progress program will bring together junior and senior scholars in the field of legislation for the purpose of providing the junior scholars with feedback and guidance on their draft articles. Scholars whose papers are selected will present their work in small panel sessions. A senior scholar will moderate each panel and lead discussion about the draft article.

Eligibility: The New Voices Program will be open to full-time faculty members from AALS member schools who are untenured or have been tenured for two years or less. All scholars, whether or not presenting a paper or moderating a discussion, are welcome to attend the program and participate in discussions.

Submission Requirements: Submissions should be drafts of articles relating to legislation and law of the political process, including articles related to legislative structure, the legislative process, statutory interpretation, and deliberation. Submissions should be near completion and expected to be submitted during the year following the program. Submissions should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. The purpose of the program is to provide junior scholars with feedback that can be incorporated into their works-in-progress; as a result, articles are ineligible for the program if they are expected to be in print at the time of the program in January 2016. However, articles that already have been submitted to law reviews for publication, and accepted for publication, are not ineligible for this reason.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation in the program, please email a copy of the paper and abstract to Evan Zoldan, [email protected] by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time,Friday, October 2, 2015. Selected participants will be notified in late October.