The Faculty Lounge

Vis Moot Opening Ceremony 2018

I've never had the privilege of attending a Vis Moot competition, although many of my colleagues have coached teams. So for everyone who has never been, and even those who have, you might enjoy this video with a musical tribute to the Vis Moot 25th anniversary by Pitt law Prof Harry Flechtner: available here.

And for those who've ever taught international sales law, just watch the first three minutes for the CISG song!

The Untimely Death of Freddie Gray and Baltimore’s “Troubles”: A Few Comments from the Trenches – Part I

 

Taunya Lovell Banks

The law professor blogs have been largely silent about the sad and troubling events stemming from the arrest and death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore so I want to thank Dan for giving me this space to comment on Baltimore’s “troubles.”    Having lived through the D.C. riots in 1968 while I was in law school I am hesitant to call what happened last Monday a riot, a civil disturbance is a more accurate term.  But I prefer to refer to the turmoil surrounding the arrest on April 12^th and untimely death of Freddie Gray on April 19^th as Baltimore’s “troubles” because, as some commentators point out, what happened Monday April 27^th is symptomatic of a larger problem that plagues Baltimore, an old southern industrial city struggling to redefine itself in a post-industrial country.  It is a city with large areas of racially segregated housing, concentrated poverty and misery.  Many of these neighborhoods have not recovered from Baltimore’s 1968 riot.  But Baltimore also is a city with many universities, University of Maryland Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, Morgan State, University of Baltimore, Notre Dame, Coppin State, Loyola and Goucher (in the near suburbs).  It is an arts town, home to great writers, playwrights and filmmakers.  Too often these two sides of the city never meet.

I live less than two miles from the corner of Pennsylvania and North Avenue where the CVS burned last Monday and where crowds rallied throughout last week.  Anyone who tuned into CNN last week saw this corner as the national and international media covered our troubles.  I not so jokingly tell my friends that I live five blocks from The Wire, David Simon’s well-regarded show about some of Baltimore’s communities impacted by intractable unemployment, poverty, drugs and violence, including police violence. Despite the proximity of my relatively affluent neighborhood, composed of stately late 19^th and early 20^th century townhouses and bordered by the Maryland Institute College of Art, I live in a different world from Freddie Gray and his neighbors.  It is easy to live in Baltimore, if you are relatively affluent, and not come in contact with the parts of Baltimore that are hurting.  As one Baltimore resident wrote in Slate, people like me are complicit in maintaining the environment that resulted in Freddie Gray’s death.  But in the end none of us benefit from the way some communities are policed.

This Made Me Smile Today

One Philadelphia trolley operator took his holiday decorations to a new level.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Digital Photography Review asks: who owns a viral monkey selfie? Some interesting observations in the comments, including the suggestion that the moneky in question was the camera owner's agent.

Gary Rosin

Employment-Related Object Trivia!

I have always enjoyed Al's various trivia questions, so here is one of my own. 

I have been at the Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship workshop over the last few days trying to learn something about statistical analysis for an article I am writing on the impact of Pres. Obama's judicial nominees on the Fourth Circuit's judicial ideology (as viewed through its labor and employment cases over the last decade). 

In the course of the conference, I ran across this rather unusual object related to employment: 

What is it?  Where is this one located?

Law Revue, the Hunta, Etc.

As graduation approaches, the 3Ls at my school (and many others) have a night of debauchery to roast the faculty and generally have a last fling prior to exams, graduation and the bar.  At Charlotte, the faculty participates as well.  Last year, I penned this little ditty and sang it at the roast.  I will sing it again tomorrow night (keeping in mind that such events are intended to be light and fun and more than slightly tounge-in-cheek) . . .

BarBri, Take Them In
To the tune of “I and Love and You” by The Avett Brothers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrsgIEBwIZM

Load the car and take your notes.
Grab your laptop and a Coke.
Tell the ones who need to know,
That you are headed out.

Study a week then take one off?
Ain't no way to get prepared
Better cut your social life right out
... oh, never to return  

Chorus:

Oh BarBri, BarBri, take them in.
Are you aware of the shape they’re in?
Their hands they shake, their heads they spin.
Oh, BarBri, BarBri, take them in.

A Different Kind of Trivia Here at the Lounge

Source: here. 

Law Professors, Law Students and Depression . . . Coming Out (Part 3)

At long last, we have arrived at the third and final post of my “Coming Out Trilogy.” 

As promised, I want to focus this post on the role my struggles with depression and anxiety have played and continue to play in my interactions with my students, both in and out of the classroom.    

My prior posts have covered the bleak statistics regarding depression and suicide rates among lawyers (nearly four times more likely to be depressed and six times more likely to commit suicide than the general public).  Further, I also mentioned that many of our students are suffering from depression (32% by second semester first year and 40% by graduation).  Although I have not found any specific data to support it, my guess is that an equal or (more likely) higher percentage of our students are also suffering from significant levels of anxiety. 

In short, a third or more of our students are struggling with mental illnesses that are exacerbated (or triggered or caused or whatever word you most prefer) by the significant stresses of law school (and the various issues surrounding it, including -- to be frank – the cost, debt loads, and job prospects).*  According to the research, if a person suffers a single incident of clinical depression, he has a 50% chance of experiencing another even if he takes antidepressant medication.  After 3 incidents, there is a 90% chance of recurrance.**  [I, for example, had my first (undiagnosed) bout of clinical depression in college and my first bout of anxiety (diagnosed) my first year of law school.]  So, there is a very good chance that the depressed law students of today will be the depressed lawyers of tomorrow. 

Our students need help to better understand the challenges of the profession they are entering:  the potential for dissatisfaction, disillusionment, mental illness (including depression, anxiety and substance abuse), burnout, and more.  When I left practice and started teaching, I promised myself that I would be open and honest with my students about my struggles and about the realities of law practice. 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love the Law and there were many, many aspects of practicing law that I loved (and at which I excelled).  There were also aspects that I did not love (and tried my best to tolerate, sometimes less than successfully).  I know, without reservation or qualification, that being a lawyer can be a highly rewarding career: emotionally, intellectually, and financially.  If I was not honest with my students about the challenges of being a lawyer, however, I would be doing them a disservice. 

Further, in my view, knowledge is power.  With knowledge of the challenges and some of their causes, I figure my students will be better equipped to meet and overcome them. 

In raising these issues with my students my basic goals are as follows: (1) to help destroy – via openness, honesty, and shamelessness – the very real stigma associated with mental illness in general and depression and anxiety in particular; (2) to make sure my students know that if they are struggling with depression or anxiety, they are not alone (even if they feel that way) and that there is no reason in the world for these illnesses to hold them back in any way; (3) to offer myself as a resource for any among them that are struggling; (4) to educate them about the challenges of practicing law; (5) to get them thinking about why they are in law school and what they want their lives in the law to be like (or if they even want a life in the law); and (6) to get them thinking, critically and proactively, about the different career paths, options, settings, locales and such available to those with law degrees, all of which can have a significant impact on their personal well-being.

So, what do I do?  I talk openly and honestly about my struggles and experiences and I do so in class (in first year Civil Procedure).  (Thanks to this series of posts, I now know I am not the only law professor in America who does this.  Nancy Rapoport at UNLV does the same in her Contracts classes and there are, hopefully, others out there that do something similar.) 

Of course, I do not do this on the first day of class.  I am not that crazy. 

 

Whose Business Is It If You Want To Induce a Bee To Sting Your Penis?

You might think that the answer to this question is obvious. Obviously, it's your business, and yours alone, right? I mean, sure, maybe it would be considerate to discuss the potential ramifications of this activity with your partner. And you might want to consider the welfare of the bee. But other than that, whose business could it possibly be?

Well, as academic empiricists know, what others can do freely, they often require permission to do. Journalists, for instance, can ask potentially traumatizing questions to children without having to ask whether the risk to these children of interviewing them is justified by the expected knowledge to be gained; academics, by contrast, have to get permission from their institution's IRB first (and often that permission never comes).

So, too, with potentially traumatizing yourself — at least if you're an academic who’s trying to induce a bee to sting your penis in order to produce generalizable knowledge, rather than for some, um, other purpose.

Earlier today, science writer Ed Yong reported a fascinating self-experiment conducted by Michael Smith, a Cornell graduate student in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior who studies the behavior and evolution of honeybees. As Ed explains, when, while doing his other research, a honeybee flew up Smith's shorts and stung his testicles, Smith was surprised to find that it didn't hurt as much as he expected. He began to wonder which body parts would really smart if they were stung by a bee and was again surprised to learn that this was a gap in the literature. So he decided to conduct an experiment on himself. (In addition to writing about the science of bee stings to the human penis, Ed is also your go-to guy for bat fellatio and cunnilingus, the spiky penises of beetles and spiders, and coral orgies.)

As Ed notes, Smith explains in his recently published paper reporting the results of his experiment, Honey bee sting pain index by body location, that

Cornell University’s Human Research Protection Program does not have a policy regarding researcher self-experimentation, so this research was not subject to review from their offices. The methods do not conflict with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, revised in 1983. The author was the only person stung, was aware of all associated risks therein, gave his consent, and is aware that these results will be made public.

As Ed says, Smith's paper is "deadpan gold." But on this point, it's also wrong.

Law Professors, Law Students and Depression . . . A Story of Coming Out (Part 2)

In Part I of this little series, I laid out some of the statistics regarding the scope of the problem of depression and anxiety among lawyers and law students.  Before I tell my story, I want to spend a little time talking about why these diseases are so prevalent among lawyers.    

One of the more eloquent “whys” for the high incidence of depression among lawyers was contained in an opinion piece by Patrick Krill (a lawyer, clinician and board-certified counselor) that accompanied the CNN article on lawyer suicides.  As Patrick put it, “lawyers are both the guardians of your most precious liberties and the butts of your harshest jokes[; i]nhabiting the unique role of both hero and villain in our cultural imagination….”  Patrick explained that the high incidence of depression (and substance abuse, which is another huge problem) was due to a number of factors but that “the rampant, multidimensional stress of the profession is certainly a factor.”  Further, “there are also some personality traits common among lawyers — self-reliance, ambition, perfectionism and competitiveness -- that aren't always consistent with healthy coping skills and the type of emotional elasticity necessary to endure the unrelenting pressures and unexpected disappointments that a career in the law can bring.” 

Patrick’s discussion of this issue really stuck a cord with me.  Practicing law is hard.  The law part is not that hard (that was the fun part for me), but the business side of law is a bear.  Finding clients, billing time, and collecting money, are just a few aspects of the business of law of which I was not a big fan.  Keeping tasks and deadlines in dozens (or hundreds) of cases straight and getting everything done well and on time is a constant challenge.  The fear of letting one of those balls drop can be terrifying, especially for the type A perfectionist who is always terrified of making a mistake or doing a less than perfect job.  Forget work-life balance.  Forget vacations.  Every day out of the office is another day you are behind. 

Plus, as a lawyer (and especially as a litigator), no matter how good a job you do, sometimes you lose.  That inevitable loss is made worse by the emotion that the lawyer often takes on from his or her client.  Almost no client is excited to call her lawyer.  Clients only call, of course, when they have problems.  Those problems can range from the mild (for example, a traffic ticket) to the profound (like a capital murder charge).  But whatever the problem, the client is counting on the lawyer to fix it.  Every lawyer I know takes that expectation and responsibility very seriously.  As much as you try not to get emotionally invested in your client’s case or problem, you often do.  When that happens, losing hurts.  Letting your client down hurts.  This pain leads to reliving the case and thinking about all of the things you could have done better.  This then leads to increased vigilance in the next case.  While this is not necessarily a bad thing, for some lawyers this leads to a constant fear of making mistakes, then a constant spike of stress hormones that, eventually, wear the lawyer down.  The impact of this constant bombardment of stress hormones can be to trigger a change in brain chemistry that, over time, leads to major depression.    

Depression is a subtle and insidious disease.  By the time you are sick enough to recognize that you have a problem, your ability to engage in accurate self-evaluation is significantly impaired.  It is a strange thing to know, deep down, that something is wrong with you but to not be able to recognize the massive changes in yourself.  Helping yourself at that point is often impossible.  Unfortunately, those suffering from depression become expert actors who are extremely adept at hiding their problems and building a façade of normalcy.  Eventually, it takes all of your energy to maintain this façade.  The façade becomes the only thing there is.   

Depression is not a character flaw.  It is not a weakness.  It is not a moral failing.  You cannot “just get over it.”  No amount of will-power, determination or intestinal fortitude will cure it.  Depression is a disease caused (in very basic and general terms) by an imbalance and/or insufficiency of two neurotransmitters in the brain: serotonin and norepinephrine.  In this way, it is biologically similar to diabetes, which is caused by the insufficiency of insulin in the body.  As a disease, depression can be treated – and treated very effectively.  But it takes time and it takes help – personal help and professional help.

And now we get to the personal part.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

ABA To End Mandated Use Of LSAT, GPA; Moves To Holistic Admissions Standard

Last night, the ABA Section on Law School Accreditation and Review announced one of the most significant changes to law school accreditation standards in over twenty years.  By a split vote, the Section voted to eliminate the mandated use of LSAT and GPA's in law school admissions.  The majority decided that the pernicious effects of these indicators - and particularly, the way in which they easily facilitate law school rankings such as U.S. News - 0utweigh any value they might otherwise provide admission committees.  The Committee was particularly troubled by the routine use of GPA's which have been shown to reflect more of an average of undergraduate performance while marginalizing high and low grades, as well as a student's median performance.   The Committee also backed off its prior enthusiastic support of the LSAT, noting that it is only a small snapshot of how a student performs on tests.  In lieu of the LSAT and GPA, the ABA urged law schools to look at the whole candidate, including both successes and failures.

While the news was significant, the ABA did not outright prohibit use of such indicators.  Instead, it suggested that schools might utilize other tests in addition to the LSAT, such as the GMAT, the GRE, and the fMRI.  Similarly, the ABA identified other indicia of undergraduate success beyond the GPA, such as departmental honors, selective club membership, or generosity under difficult circumstances.   The ABA seemed particularly interested in facilitating more direct communication between undergraduate institutions and law schools, suggesting the creation of a recommendation marketplace where law admissions committees and recommenders could engage in more dynamic and iterative process of reference creation and evaluation.

Reaction among professors has been muted, although Paul Campos, the Harold Camping Professor of Law at the University of Colorado,  argued that this change was unlikely to reverse the trend of law schools admitting students based primarily on their ability to apply to law school.  

Scamblogger critics called it yet another ABA sham.  "I'll bet that everyone on that Committee is in the pocket of [Santa Clara law professor Stephen] Diamond", wrote one anonymous commenter at Lawyers, Guns and Bitcoins.   And with an almost ritualistic incantation, the commenter added, "Brian Leiter is nothing more than a legal philosopher and quite possibly an oenophile."  

The ABA Committee also voted provisional approval to the new University of Washington School of Law, Tacoma campus.

 

Ranking the Mettle of Olympic Teams

Dan has kindly invited me to step back into the lounge for a bit.

What's on my mind is the Winter Olympics, and rankings.

As a part of Olympic coverage, we see the medal count rankings.  NBC always uses total medal counts. Last night’s NBC ranking had the U.S. at No. 1 with 23 medals. But total medal count treats all medals as equal; if Ecuador had had 24 Bronze medals, it would have led the rankings.

But the mettle of a team is measured by metal, not just counts; Gold medals are better than Silver medals, which are better than Bronze medals. The rankings on the official Sochi website last night ranked Norway No. 1, even though it had only 20 medals.

Happy Valentine's Day, Twitter Style

Just in time for the "holiday," Twitter brings us #AcademicValentines. Not surprisingly, many of these tidings of love and joy center on tenure:

But for you academic commitophobes out there, you can always hedge your bets:

Ouch. Of course, many entries address scholarship strategy...

...and methodology (again, offered in the more and less committed varieties)...

...and the beloved peer review process:

There are even nods to scholarly citation styles:

Sure, but is she committed enough to convert to Bluebook? That's dedication. And speaking of Bluebook, and the legal academy's penchant for insisting that every factual claim, no matter how obviously true or otherwise universally accepted, be cited:

I'll end with another one of my favorites:

Anyway, check out the live updates under the hashtag, or this great storify of some of the best ones from the past few days.

Also worth checking out: #ScienceValentines and #PhilosophyValentines. Sadly, I cannot recommend the #LawValentines hashtag, as it's pretty pathetic, with only two entries to date. Get on it, people.

UPDATE: Al is on the case:

Not Your Everyday Nonpaternity Story

UPDATED BELOW

From the truth is (a lot) stranger than fiction files comes this disturbing story, which interweaves—in ways that would be deemed implausible, if they appeared in a fiction manuscript—several of the topics I've written about here before: legal academia, human subjects research (sort of), reproductive technologies, direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing, and preference heterogeneity.

Recently, a family—wife, husband, 21-year-old daughter—with an interest in genetic genealogy decided to avail themselves of 23andMe's DTC services. They received the results and were surprised to learn that the daughter is the biological child of the wife, but not the husband (and confirmed these results through clinical testing). So far, not so fantastic a story. Rates of non-paternity in the general population are traditionally said to be about 10%, although recent studies have suggested much lower rates. And the fact that the family discovered non-paternity through DTC genetic testing? Welcome to 2013.

The couple, it turns out, had had difficulty conceiving, and in 1991 had sought the help of Reproductive Medical Technologies, a fertility clinic associated with the University of Utah. Several times, clinicians there inseminated the wife with her husband's sperm. Alas, no pregnancies resulted. They decided to give artificial insemination one final try and—success. Some twenty-one-years later, they reflected on their newfound knowledge of the husband's nonpaternity and figured that there must have been a mix up in the clinic. They imagined the life now perhaps being lived by another 21-year-old, created from the husband's sperm and another artificially inseminated client. Unfortunate though they are, accidental mix-ups in fertility clinics are known to happen.

In this case, the family took its nonpaternity results beautifully in stride; the daughter knows that the man who raised her is her "real" dad, and he knows that she is his "real" daughter. Indeed, the family decided to go further and seek out their daughter's biological father—and perhaps the husband's biological daughter. To do so, they used the other two major DTC genetic genealogy companies, Family Tree DNA and AncestryDNA, to find close paternal relatives of the daughter. Searching for biological relatives through DTC genetic genealogy is increasingly common. Here's a great story about one adoptee's search, for instance, and only yesterday, I agreed to share my 23andMe profile with an adoptee looking for biological relatives. We're not quite yet at truth-stranger-than-fiction status yet.

The AncestryDNA testing yielded a predicted second cousin for the daughter, and the family made contact. The second cousin was at a loss to explain their genetic connection, except to note that her first cousin, an only child now deceased, had lived in Salt Lake City at the time and told the family that he'd been a sperm donor. When she shared his name—Thomas Ray Lippert—and an older picture of him, the husband and wife recognized him as Tom, who had worked at the front desk of the fertility clinic as well as in the back, as a technician. The wife

remembered [Tom] proudly displaying dozens of photos of babies behind his desk, boasting that he had helped all of their parents conceive. Looking at all of those beautiful babies and Tom’s confidence gave [the wife] hope that she and [the husband] could have the baby that they so desperately wanted as well. She never could have imagined how far Tom apparently would go to “help” couples conceive. [The husband] too remembered him and recalled thinking that Tom was a bit odd when he handed him the sample receptacle and the magazine.

Admittedly, discovering that someone in the fertility clinic substituted his sperm for the husband-client's is slightly more fantastical, but hardly unheard of in the real world. Tom's mother, still living, consented to genetic testing, which confirmed that Tom was indeed the daughter's biological father.

What happens next, however, reads like the kind of fantastical plot elements that would get a fiction manuscript tossed.

Perfect Stocking Stuffers

               Really?

Behavioral Economics for Tots

Between The Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, which I previously touted, and now Behavioural Economics for Kids, my kid is in for a real treat this holiday season—and probably several (additional) therapy sessions twenty years hence.

The latter book features some of law profs' favorite predictable irrationalities, including the endowment effect, framing, and hyperbolic discounting. Pictured here is anchoring bias (or, in the book's preferred nomenclature, reference dependence). As someone who thinks the law doesn't always leave sufficient space for altruism, and that in general legal academia has tended to overemphasize bounded rationality (and, to a lesser extent, bounded will-power) while overlooking the interesting implications for law and policy of bounded self-interest, I was particularly pleased to see that the book includes a discussion of preferences for fairness and competitor orientation. H/T Cass Sunstein on the Twitters.

Death of an Adjunct, the Hotness-IQ Tradeoff in Academia, & Several Other Random Items

As I’ve done before, I thought I’d offer up some recent highlights from my Twitter feed that may be of interest to TFL readers but escaped notice. Alors, in no particular order:

— First up is an interesting draft by USC economists Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo, The neurobiology of opinions: can judges and juries be impartial? The authors draw on neuroscience to model belief formation and decision-making by judges and juries, concluding that “early cases in a judge's career may affect his decisions later on, and that early evidence produced in a trial may matter more than late evidence,” and that “the distribution of preferences in a jury affects the way information is interpreted by individual jurors.”

— Anyone who has been paying attention knows that adjuncts get a raw deal. But this adjunct really got a raw deal. (To be fair, her former institution may have been distracted by more pressing matters.)

— In (much) lighter news (which you will need after you read about the adjunct), I give you The Hotness-IQ Tradeoff in Academia. The philosophers, apparently, are to be congratulated. Alas, legal academia is not represented, although perhaps that’s for the best; I fear that the law types may have ended up below the line with their med school counterparts (a placement that suggests that such faculty are even dumber than their physical appearance would have predicted).

— I’ve always thought that the 1L curriculum could do with some informal logic. And with An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, it really couldn’t be easier. Come to think of it, I’ve found myself on the business end of the Guilt By Association fallacy (illustrated right) more than once while workshopping a paper. So maybe we could all use a refresher course.

— UNC and Harvard have apparently both seen the light and (consistent with a pending proposal by federal regulators) largely taken away from IRBs responsibility for assessing information privacy risks and given that responsibility to actual IT experts. What’s that adage about a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?

— Maybe this is only an issue for those of us who work in or near the sciences, but you know those emails you get inviting you, on behalf of your Extraordinary Contribution to a field (often, one in which you have contributed precisely nothing) to be the Most Honored Speaker at some random conference? You guys know that those conferences are fake, right? Well, this guy didn’t get the memo, and boy is he (rightly) pissed. 

— Think bickering among legal academics sometimes gets heated? Hey, in the sciences, it’s not a party until one academic calls another a “bitch” (and “crook” and “con artist”) while critiquing her work. (The author has since edited his blog post to replace “bitch” with “ma’am.” Apparently “Dr.” and “Prof.” were already taken.)

Adler On Skirt Suits

Here.

No, NOT Jonathan.  (Or this Jonathan.)  

Amy Adler.  

Seriously Impaired

I noted last week that the intersection of Michigan law and the Bankruptcy Code provided some interesting questions about the scope of the Supremacy Clause, the Tenth Amendment, and federalism generally. On a more lighthearted note, the Wall Street Journal reported today that the bonds issued for construction of the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument (which featured briefly in Jack Nicholson's About Schmidt) would get $50,000 on a $20 million tab. That's .0025%. But it's worse than that: The initial issue was for $60 million, which was voluntarily written down by the bondholders to $20 million in 2002. Talk about haircuts!

But on a positive note, "'Not many bonds were sold locally,' Joel Johnson, the foundation board’s chairman, told Bankruptcy Beat."

Detroit bondholders beware: Matters could be worse. Much worse.

1D Philadelphia Store Location And Hours: One Direction Pops-Up In Philly

Yes, I have a daughter who's One Direction crazy.  So I had to go through the fairly substantial effort required to figure out what doesn't seem to be anywhere else on the web: the hours of the Philly 1D store.  The store is open until July 28, 2013.  It's at 1518 Walnut St.  And its hours are Monday to Saturday, 11-7.  Sunday, 11-6.  Consider this a public service - for Lounge readers everywhere!