The Faculty Lounge

Georgetown Law Journal Call for Symposium Proposals

The Georgetown Law Journal is now accepting proposals for its biennial symposium, which will be hosted on Georgetown Law’s campus in the Fall semester of 2019. As Georgetown’s only generalist law journal, The Georgetown Law Journal is open to symposium proposals on any legal issue. The symposium is intended to stimulate the development of legal scholarship; provide opportunities for interaction between students, academics, and practitioners; and foster novel legal discussions on Georgetown Law’s campus. Previous topics include: The Law of Nations and the United States Constitution; Police/State: Race, Power, and Control; and Law in an Age of Disruptive Technology.

To streamline the proposal process, the Journal requests that all applicants use the attached form here. Responses should be limited to 200 words per question. All proposal forms and inquiries should be submitted to Caitlin Haynes, the Journal’s Executive Symposium Editor, at gljsymposiumeditor@gmail.com. Proposals submitted by the priority deadline of April 5, 2019 will be given first consideration. After this date, exemplary proposals will be considered on an ad hoc basis. Applicants should expect that the Journal may request further information or the opportunity to discuss the proposal in further detail. The Journal will notify applicants whether they remain under consideration by April 19, 2019.

 

Hiring Announcement: Stanford Law School (Teaching Fellow - Corporate Governance and Practice LLM)

From an email message that I received in recent days:

Stanford Law School offers multiple specialized LLM programs to international students who have practiced law outside the U.S. The Corporate Governance and Practice LLM program admits approximately 20 students annually. Working under the supervision of Professor Michael Klausner, the Faculty Director of the program, the Teaching Fellow will assume significant academic, advising and administrative responsibilities for these students. Applicants are sought for a two-year commitment, starting in August 2019, with the possibility of a third year by mutual agreement.

The Teaching Fellow will be responsible for teaching two courses: one on corporate law from an economics perspective; and another on corporate law practice. The latter course will include outside speakers from practice. The fellow will also organize other academic and social events, and will be responsible for managing the Corporate Governance and Practice LLM program on a day-to-day basis, advising LLM students on academic and career issues, responding to inquiries from prospective LLM applicants, screening and admitting applicants, and interacting with faculty in support of the LLM program goals and needs. The fellow will have the support of and work with the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, the Associate Dean for Student Affairs, the Executive Director of the International Law Programs, and the Associate Dean for Admissions. Although this is a full time position, the fellow should be able to spend approximately half their time conducting their own research, and will have ready access to faculty for that purpose.

Qualifications:

• Candidates for this position are expected to have strong academic records and references.
• Professional experience in corporate practice is required, with three or more years of such experience preferred.  
• JD from a US school is preferred but candidates with an LLM or JSD will also be considered.
• In the past, people who have held this position have used it as a step toward a tenure track position at a law school. We have a preference for candidates with an academic career in mind but this is not a requirement.

How to Apply:

1. Submit your application online via the Stanford Careers website.
2. Send the following materials via email to Spencer Williams at spencerw@stanford.edu: a cover letter (addressed to Professor Klausner), an official law school transcript, a resume/CV, copies of any publications, and the names and contact information for at least three professional references (at least two law professors).

Application deadline: Until position is filled

Stanford Law School seeks to hire the best talent and to promote a safe and secure environment for all members of the university community and its property. To that end, new staff hires must successfully pass a background check prior to starting work at Stanford University.

* - Consistent with its obligations under the law, the University will provide reasonable accommodation to any employee with a disability who requires accommodation to perform the essential functions of his or her job.

Additional Information:

This is a two-year fixed-term position with the possibility of a third year by mutual consent and approval.

Stanford University is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Consistent with its obligations under the law, the University will provide reasonable accommodation to any employee with a disability who requires accommodation to perform the essential functions of the job.

Stanford Law School seeks to hire the best talent and to promote a safe and secure environment for all members of the university community and its property. To that end, new staff hires must successfully pass a background check prior to starting work at Stanford University.

Hiring Announcement: Stanford Law School (Teaching Fellow - LLM Program in Environmental Law & Policy)

From an email message that I received in recent days:

The Teaching Fellow for the Stanford Law School LLM Program in Environmental Law & Policy will work with LLM student candidates in the program. The fellow will assume significant academic, advising and administrative responsibilities. He or she will be responsible for organizing and teaching two or three quarters of a colloquium addressing current issues and scholarship in the environment, energy, other natural resources, and related fields. The fellow will also organize and facilitate informal workshops, outside speakers, and academic and social events; be responsible for day-to-day administrative management of the LLM program; advise and counsel LLM candidates on academic and personal issues; respond to inquiries from prospective LLM applicants; and interact with our faculty in support of the LLM program goals and needs. The fellow will work under the supervision of Professor Barton Thompson and the Associate Dean for Global Programs. The fellow will also fully participate in the admissions process, working under the guidance of the Associate Dean for Admissions, to admit the new class. Although this is a full time position, the fellow will have a reasonable amount of time to conduct his or her own research, have access to environmental and other faculty at the law school for feedback on their research, and be able to participate in the robust academic life of Stanford Law School.

Candidates for this position are expected to have strong academic records and references. Professional experience in the area is also valuable, but not required. This position is intended primarily for people who expect to pursue an academic career in a field that is reasonably related to environmental or resource law, although others may apply.  Candidates must hold a JD, JSD, PhD, or LLM from a U.S. law school. Applicants are expected to commit to this position for a two-year term.  A third year is possible by mutual consent and approval.  This is not a long-term teaching opportunity.

Those interested should apply by letter, summarizing their complete educational qualifications and experience, as well as any other information that might help us in making selections. Each applicant should also send us an official law school transcript, a resume, copies of any publications, and three letters of recommendation (at least two from law professors) commenting on the applicant’s suitability for the position in terms of teaching ability, analytic capability, interpersonal skills, and writing ability.

There is a multi-step application process as outlined below:

Review of applications will begin on March 15, 2019.

Application Deadline: April 5, 2019

1. Submit your application online via the Stanford Careers website.
2. Submit your application materials as noted above to:   jobapps@law.stanford.edu.
3. Your references must send their letters of recommendation directly to jobapps@law.stanford.edu, with your name in the email subject line.

Additional Information:

This is a two-year fixed-term position with the possibility of a third year by mutual consent and approval.

Stanford University is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Consistent with its obligations under the law, the University will provide reasonable accommodation to any employee with a disability who requires accommodation to perform the essential functions of the job.

Stanford Law School seeks to hire the best talent and to promote a safe and secure environment for all members of the university community and its property. To that end, new staff hires must successfully pass a background check prior to starting work at Stanford University.

Prof. Michael Burawoy Does Not Like My Work

As I posted last week, the current issue of Contexts includes my essay on "Accuracy in Ethnography: Narratives, Documents, and Circumstances." The print issue of Contexts has now been published, and the contents are available on line, here, with no paywall until April 7 (and never paywalled here). Below are some of my main points (sorry about the weird indentations, which I cannot seem to fix):

"The practice of institutional skepticism, or adversary testing, is familiar to scientists, journalists, historians, and lawyers, but it appears relatively uncommon among ethnographers, who seem overly willing to accept one another’s truth claims. Nonetheless, some ethnographic narratives raise questions that can be tested against documentary or circumstantial evidence."

***

"The ultimate issue here is whether, and to what extent, facts and fact-checking should matter as much for ethnographers as

for historians, journalists, and lawyers. The best ethnographers, perhaps needless to say, take painstaking measures to achieve

accuracy, but there are others who seem to minimize the importance of factual specifics in favor of the big picture."

 

***

 

"When encountering questionable or implausible stories, ethnographers must avoid the temptation—based on a greater truth or a bigger picture—to imagine ways in which they might still be true. As the psychologist Daniel Effron has shown, it is not uncommon for people presented with even explicit falsehoods to indulge 'counterfactual thoughts' that make the information 'feel more or less truthful,' especially when the misinformation is 'aligned with participants’ political preferences.' Moreover,

neither prior knowledge nor subject-matter expertise provides complete protection from 'illusory truth.'”

 

The University of California's Prof. Michael Burawoy really, really does not like my essay, or anything else I've written on ethnography, as he explains in a response published in the same issue of Contexts, titled "Empiricism and Its Fallacies." Here is the gist:

Lubet writes as a lawyer. He argues that, while the legal process inoculates itself against falsehood through the adversarial process, ethnography’s truths are more vulnerable, hiding its evidence behind a veil of secrecy and anonymity and allegedly equating myth and hearsay with reality. Accordingly, Lubet would require ethnographers to rely on multiple sources of evidence, employing documents, fact-checkers, reliable witnesses, and experts. In addition, he calls on ethnographers to follow the example of other scientists and cross-examine each other’s “facts”. This is, indeed, the strategy he follows in contesting some of Goffman and others’ empirical claims. As Lubet puts ethnography on trial, he acts as a stereotypical trial lawyer, ferreting out random errors in monographs to discredit them. Thus, for example, he disputes Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer’s claim, in $2 a Day, that students from Mississippi don’t know an elevator when they see one. He goes to great length, consulting all manner of experts, to show this is implausible, irrespective of whether this affects the argument of the book. Because Lubet’s pickings along these lines are quite thin, he goes on to indict ethnographers for covering their tracks through anonymity, thereby making it difficult to fact-check their evidence. At no point, however, is there any serious discussion of the theory or argument of the research Lubet addresses; in this line of reasoning, facts come first, and theory follows. If any of the facts are false, ipso facto, the entire theory is false.

You can read Burawoy's full response here (no paywall until April 7) or here (any time).

Nearly every sentence in the above paragraph mischaracterizes my views, and Burawoy's full essay is even more tendentious. I have written a reply that will appear on the Contexts website some time in the next few weeks, and I will post it on the blog when it is available. In the meantime, please enjoy Burawoy's essay, which is overheated, to say the least.

"The practice of institutional skepticism, or adversary testing, is familiar to scientists, journalists, historians, and lawyers, but it appears relatively uncommon among ethnographers, who seem overly willing to accept one another’s truth claims. Nonetheless, some ethnographic narratives raise questions that can be tested against documentary or circumstantial evidence."

***

"The ultimate issue here is whether, and to what extent, facts and fact-checking should matter as much for ethnographers as

for historians, journalists, and lawyers. The best ethnographers, perhaps needless to say, take painstaking measures to achieve

accuracy, but there are others who seem to minimize the importance of factual specifics in favor of the big picture."

 

***

 

"When encountering questionable or implausible stories, ethnographers must avoid the temptation—based on a greater truth or a bigger picture—to imagine ways in which they might still be true. As the psychologist Daniel Effron has shown, it is not uncommon for people presented with even explicit falsehoods to indulge 'counterfactual thoughts' that make the information 'feel more or less truthful,' especially when the misinformation is 'aligned with participants’ political preferences.' Moreover,

neither prior knowledge nor subject-matter expertise provides complete protection from 'illusory truth.'”

 

"The practice of institutional skepticism, or adversary testing, is familiar to scientists, journalists, historians, and lawyers, but it appears relatively uncommon among ethnographers, who seem overly willing to accept one another’s truth claims. Nonetheless, some ethnographic narratives raise questions that can be tested against documentary or circumstantial evidence."

***

"The ultimate issue here is whether, and to what extent, facts and fact-checking should matter as much for ethnographers as

for historians, journalists, and lawyers. The best ethnographers, perhaps needless to say, take painstaking measures to achieve

accuracy, but there are others who seem to minimize the importance of factual specifics in favor of the big picture."

 

***

 

"When encountering questionable or implausible stories, ethnographers must avoid the temptation—based on a greater truth or a bigger picture—to imagine ways in which they might still be true. As the psychologist Daniel Effron has shown, it is not uncommon for people presented with even explicit falsehoods to indulge 'counterfactual thoughts' that make the information 'feel more or less truthful,' especially when the misinformation is 'aligned with participants’ political preferences.' Moreover,

neither prior knowledge nor subject-matter expertise provides complete protection from 'illusory truth.'”

 

One Tune, Three Songs (at least)

Great Speckle Bird:

FDR and his little dog, Fala

Yesterday I wrote about Franklin Roosevelt and new research on Prohibition’s role in the 1932 election.

If you want to see with your own eyes an example of what an incredibly talented politician FDR was, I highly recommend spending three minutes watching this clip of his famous 1944 Teamsters Dinner speech. 

Before you watch it, however, here’s the background to the “Fala controversy.” In September 1944—two months before the presidential election—GOP Congressman Harold Knutson of Minnesota claimed that FDR had sent a U.S. Navy destroyer to pick up the president’s dog, Fala, in Alaska. According to Knutson, Roosevelt mistakenly left the dog behind during a wartime trip to the Aleutian Islands, resulting in a rescue mission that cost taxpayers $20 million.

There was no truth to Knutson’s claims, and the Fala controversy seems ridiculous now. But it unfolded at a deadly serious time. In September 1944 the U.S. military was engaged in heavy combat against the Germans in Europe and against the Japanese in the Pacific. World War II would ultimately cost over 416,000 U.S. troops their lives (a death toll exceeded only by the Civil War) and kill tens of millions of people around the world.  

At such a grave time, the allegation that the president had redirected a warship for personal reasons was politically explosive, especially in an election year. Knutson and congressional Republicans thus saw the Fala story as a way to persuade voters that Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented fourth term as president, had grown out of touch with the people.

Remarkably, the Fala controversy generated national news coverage for much of September 1944. It became such a big story that Admiral William Leahy (the top U.S. military commander during WWII) had to issue a public statement assuring Americans that the Navy had not sent a destroyer to pick up Fala. As the admiral explained, “the story about Fala, the president’s dog, is made out of whole cloth. The dog was never lost.” Fake news was thus a problem in 1944 too.

But Roosevelt knew he had to directly address the issue himself. He chose the Teamsters dinner in part because it was broadcast nationally on the radio. Here’s the text of his Fala remarks, which demonstrates as much as any other speech how politically skilled Roosevelt was: 

CFP: ClassCrits XII Conference

Call for Panel and Paper Proposals

ClassCrits XII:

Facing Our Challenges: Rescuing Democracy, Ensuring Wellbeing & Exorcizing the Politics of Fear (Or: How To Be Free)

Co-Sponsored by

Western New England University School of Law

and ClassCrits, Inc.

www.classcrits.org

November 15 & 16, 2019

ClassCrits and Western New England University School of Law invite interested scholars, practitioners and advanced degree students to consider submitting a panel or a paper proposal for the upcoming ClassCrits XII Conference that will be held between Friday, November 15 and Saturday, November 16, 2019, at Western New England University School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts, entitled Facing Our Challenges: Rescuing Democracy, Ensuring Wellbeing & Exorcizing the Politics of Fear (Or: How To Be Free).

This year, ClassCrits seeks the mantle of the FREE. To be free requires that we actively face the challenges that all humanity now jointly confronts. These include the accelerating environmental degradation of the Earth's natural systems, the dramatic rise in economic inequality, the failure of our institutions, the breakdown of our communities, and the alienation from our selves (body, mind and spirit) and one another. However, these challenges cannot be met unless we rescue or even reinvent our democracy, ensure the wellbeing of all as the appropriate measure of justice, and exorcize the politics of fear.  In this vein, ClassCrits seeks ideas, work, activities and practices that: (1) analyze and propose concrete solutions to the existential threats to humanity and planet Earth; (2) demand expansive democracy and justice; (3) embrace and seek to ensure the economic wellbeing of all across our differences; and (4) inspire courage and solidarity.

For more information about ClassCrits XII and the submission of proposals, please contact www.classcrits.org.

Mercer Law Seeks Visiting Faculty

This just in:

Mercer University’s School of Law is seeking visiting professors for one or both semesters of the 2019-20 school year to teach (1) Business Associations and other business courses, possibly including Contracts and Business Drafting; and (2) Real Estate Transactions and possibly Trusts and Estates and other courses.

Please contact Associate Dean Scott Titshaw at titshaw_sc@law.mercer.edu.  Or you may visit http://mujobs.mercer.edu/cw/en-us/job/492755/visiting-faculty-law-legal-writing-andor-real-estate or http://mujobs.mercer.edu/cw/en-us/job/492761/visiting-faculty-business-law for more information or to complete an official university application.

Did Prohibition Give Rise to the New Deal?

Conventional wisdom holds that the Great Depression sank Herbert Hoover’s presidency. After all, how could it not have? When American voters went to the polls in November 1932, the unemployment rate exceeded 25% and the global economy languished amid the most severe downturn in modern history.

In light of the Great Depression, it seems obvious that when voters elected Franklin Roosevelt—a charismatic candidate who had promised a “New Deal” for the American people—they must have done so for economic reasons. Indeed, a central political tenet (then and now) is that voters always vote their pocketbooks. As the Democratic strategist James Carville famously put it in 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Surely the same was true in 1932? 

Steven Salaita's New Circumstances

I have an oped in the Chicago Tribune on Steven Salaita's unfair exile from academia and his new circumstances as a school bus driver. It covers pretty much the same ground as my earlier (and much longer) blog post. Here is the gist.

As one of Salaita’s most severe critics, I have pointed out that his vilification of Israel tended to cross the line into bigotry. But the Israel-Palestine struggle has driven numerous others, of all persuasions, to deplorable rhetoric, and Salaita’s tweeted outbursts were no worse than those of many still-employed professors. He deserved censure, not expulsion.

Even so, Salaita has applied a scholar’s insights to the safe transport of schoolkids, which suggests that he has found some peace:

“Every now and again while my family sleeps and I’m on the back porch enjoying a final cigarette I think about my days as a star speaker, memories that allow me to better appreciate the quiet of my surroundings, although in pronounced moments of loneliness I miss the company of the audience, the pleasure of applause and laughter and the cathartic thrill of raging against injustice, but the feeling is evanescent, for the sobering immediacy of cold air on my fingertips and pressure in my thorax reminds me of both material and psychological limitations that render me unfit for prominence, being that I’ve become the kind of person content with the humdrum thrill of stopping traffic.”

The entire piece is here.

Oklahoma City Law Seeks Visitor

This just in:

Oklahoma City University School of Law seeks a full-time visiting faculty member for the 2019-20 Academic Year. This is a one-year, non-tenure-track position. Subject matter areas of particular interest include civil procedure, evidence, property, intellectual property, contracts, and commercial law. Candidates with prior law school teaching experience are preferred.

Interested candidates should send a cv and cover letter to Prof. Barry L. Johnson, bjohnson@okcu.edu. We may conduct an interview via Skype or similar platform, and may request submission of teaching evaluations or other materials.

Oklahoma City University School of Law provides equality of opportunity in legal education for all persons, including faculty and employees, without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, handicap or disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or veteran status.

CFP: 7th Annual Corporate & Securities Litigation Workshop

This just in:

Boston University School of Law, in conjunction with the University of Illinois College of Law, UCLA School of Law, and the University of Richmond School of Law, invites submissions for the Seventh Annual Workshop for Corporate & Securities Litigation. This workshop will be held on Friday, September 27 and Saturday, September 28, 2019 at the Boston University School of Law.

This annual workshop brings together scholars focused on corporate and securities litigation to present their scholarly works. Papers addressing any aspect of corporate and securities litigation or enforcement are eligible, including securities class actions, fiduciary duty litigation, and comparative approaches. We welcome scholars working in a variety of methodologies, as well as both completed papers and works-in-progress.  Authors whose papers are selected will be invited to present their work at a workshop hosted by Boston University. Hotel costs will be covered. Participants will pay for their own travel and other expenses.

If you are interested in participating, please send the paper you would like to present, or an abstract of the paper, to corpandseclitigation@gmail.com by Friday, May 24, 2019. Please include your name, current position, and contact information in the e-mail accompanying the submission. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by late June.

Any questions concerning the workshop should be directed to the organizers: David Webber (dhwebber@bu.edu), Verity Winship (vwinship@illinois.edu), Jim Park (James.park@law.ucla.edu), and Jessica Erickson (jerickso@richmond.edu).

Dayton Seeking Assistant Professors of Academic Success

The University of Dayton School of Law invites applications for two Assistant Professors of Academic Success. These are twelve month, non-tenure track positions with an initial appointment of one year and the possibility of renewal for long-term (three or five-year) appointments after three years of satisfactory service. The positions are to begin July 1, 2019. The focus of the Academic Success Program at the School of Law is to help students develop the skills necessary for law school success and first-time bar passage.

For more information, you can find the University's posting at: https://jobs.udayton.edu/postings/28239

Juan Corona (1934-2019)

Juan Corona, also known as the "Machete Murderer" died in a California prison on March 4 at the age of 85. Corona had been convicted of 25 murders in 1973, and again on retrial in 1982, and sentenced to 25 terms of life without parole. At the time, Corona was the most notorious mass murderer in U.S. history. The New York Times obituary is here.

Corona's crimes were discovered almost by mistake when a neighbor noticed what appeared to be a freshly dug grave on his property near Yuba City in 1971. Virtually all of the victims had been hacked to death -- one was also shot -- and they all appeared to be migrant laborers who had been lured to the property with promises of work from Corona, who was a farm labor contractor. Four victims were never identified, and there may have been more bodies that were not discovered.

Corona's defense counsel at the first trial was private attorney Richard Hawk, whose conduct led to a revision in standards of legal ethics, now codified in the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility.

Dayton Seeking Assistant Professor of Lawyering Skills

The University of Dayton School of Law invites applications for one Assistant
Professor of Lawyering Skills. This is a non-tenure track position with an initial
appointment of one year and the possibility of renewal for long-term (three or five-year)
appointments after three years of satisfactory service.

For more information, you can find the University's posting at: https://jobs.udayton.edu/postings/28237

New Study on the State of the Entry-Level Law-Jobs Market and its Implications (Part II: What the Market is, and What the ABA is Not, Telling Us about “JD Advantage” Placements)

This is the second in a series of what I intend to be four posts on my new study of the entry-level Law-Jobs market.  Part I laid out the current state of the job market, and you can find it here.  The full paper is available here. 

Today I’ll discuss so-called “JD Advantage” placements, what the job market is telling us about them, and what the available data is not telling us.

For those not entirely familiar, the ABA’s disclosure requirements call on reporting law schools to break down their recent graduates’ employment outcomes (among other ways) into four mutually exclusive categories:  Bar Passage Required, JD Advantage, Professional Position, and Nonprofessional Position.  The current definition of a JD Advantage position (see here at p.26) includes that its “duties . . . do not require passage of the bar exam or an active law license or involve practicing law”; but “[t]he possession of a JD by the graduate was sought by the employer, required by the employer, or provided a demonstrable advantage in either obtaining or performing the duties of the position from the perspective of the employer . . . .”  (For a history of the evolution of this job category, see my earlier job-market study at 555-59.)

I’ll talk about the problems with this definition, and what we do and don’t know about its application, after the jump.

"Accuracy in Ethnography: Narratives, Documents, and Circumstances"

My essay on accuracy in ethnography (titled as above) will soon appear in Contexts, published by the American Sociological Association. 

Here is the gist:

The practice of institutional skepticism, or adversary testing, is familiar to scientists, journalists, historians, and lawyers, but it appears relatively uncommon among ethnographers, who seem overly willing to accept one another’s truth claims. Nonetheless, some ethnographic narratives raise questions that can be tested against documentary or circumstantial evidence.

Attorneys and other fact-seeking professionals look to such documentary and circumstantial evidence for three reasons: First, documents don’t tend to change. Unlike the accounts of witnesses or research participants, documents are not subject to the vagaries of recollection or wishful thinking. Second, documents are usually (though not always) created before there is an issue in controversy, meaning that they are likely to be relatively objective. Although documents are not always accurate or unbiased, they do have certain advantages over human memory and should be consulted if available. Despite its bad reputation among lay people, circumstantial evidence can actually provide a neutral context for evaluating certain claims. To take a simple example, the presence of ice on a pond provides valuable circumstantial evidence of a below-freezing temperature, and can be more reliable than the impressions of a witness, which might be influenced by confounding factors such as wind or clothing.

***

The ultimate issue here is whether, and to what extent, facts and fact-checking should matter as much for ethnographers as

for historians, journalists, and lawyers. The best ethnographers, perhaps needless to say, take painstaking measures to achieve

accuracy, but there are others who seem to minimize the importance of factual specifics in favor of the big picture.

 

***

 

When encountering questionable or implausible stories, ethnographers must avoid the temptation—based on a greater truth or a bigger picture—to imagine ways in which they might still be true. As the psychologist Daniel Effron has shown, it is not

uncommon for people presented with even explicit falsehoods to indulge “counterfactual thoughts” that make the information

“feel more or less truthful,” especially when the misinformation is “aligned with participants’ political preferences.” Moreover,

neither prior knowledge nor subject-matter expertise provides complete protection from “illusory truth.”

I have posted the entire essay here.

There will also be a response and a reply, which I will post when they become available.

Songs by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann

 

CFP: Junior Faculty Forum at Richmond Law

This just in:

The University of Richmond School of Law invites submissions for its third annual Junior Faculty Forum. This workshop will be held on Tuesday, May 21 and Wednesday, May 22, 2018 in Richmond, Virginia.

This workshop brings together junior law scholars to present their scholarship in an informal collegial atmosphere. The workshop is timed to allow participants to incorporate feedback on early ideas or projects before the summer. Papers and works-in-progress are welcome at any stage of completion. To maximize discussion and feedback, the author will provide a brief introduction to the paper, but the majority of the individual sessions will be devoted to collective discussion of the papers. We will also have opportunities for networking and more casual discussions.
Richmond Law will provide lunches and dinners during the workshop, but attendees will cover their own travel and lodging costs.

All untenured faculty at law schools who have been teaching for ten years or less are eligible to participate. Those who do not currently hold a permanent or visiting faculty appointment, but expect to do so beginning in fall 2019 are also welcome.

If you would like to participate, please register here. Registration will remain open until Friday, March 22.  More information about the workshop is available here. Any questions concerning the workshop should be directed to Professor Jessica Erickson (jerickso@richmond.edu).

Alabama Seeks Constitutional Law Faculty for New Endowed Chair

This just in:

The University of Alabama School of Law announces a search for the inaugural Hugh F. Culverhouse, Jr. Chairholder in Constitutional Law. This position is a University-level Chair. We seek a person who is a nationally or internationally recognized scholar and teacher of constitutional law, who will continue to make substantial and meaningful scholarly contributions, who will participate actively in the life of the Law School, and who will enhance the School of Law’s already strong presence in public law. The Chairholder will have the opportunity to establish and direct a Program in Constitutional Studies.

The School of Law has achieved a high level of excellence in the quality of its faculty, students, administration, and staff, and we seek to build on our standing as one of the leading public law schools in the United States. The Search Committee welcomes both applications and nominations. While most candidates will have a J.D. degree from an accredited law school, it is not required for exceptional candidates who possess an advanced degree, such as a Ph.D., and who have scholarship related to the law involving interdisciplinary, jurisprudential, empirical, or social scientific work may be considered without holding a law degree.

The University of Alabama embraces and welcomes diversity in its faculty, student body, and staff; accordingly, the School of Law actively welcomes applications from and nominations of persons who would add to the diversity of our academic community. The School of Law embraces EEO principles in our faculty recruiting efforts. Salary, benefits, and research support will be nationally competitive. The School of Law will treat all nominations and applications as strictly confidential, subject only to requirements of state and federal law.

Interested candidates should apply online here.   Nominations, applications, and questions may also be transmitted by e-mail to Professor Ron Krotoszynski at culverhousechair@law.ua.edu. Applications will be reviewed as received.