The Faculty Lounge

Dutton & Mohapatra on "COVID-19 and Law Teaching: Guidance on Developing An Asynchronous Online Course for Law Students"

Yvonne Dutton (IU McKinney) and Seema Mohapatra (IU McKinney) have posted to SSRN their article, COVID-19 and Law Teaching: Guidance on Developing An Asynchronous Online Course for Law Students. Here is the abstract:

Most law schools suspended their live classroom teaching in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and quickly transitioned to online programming. Although professors can be commended for rapidly adapting to an emergency situation, some commentators have nevertheless suggested that the emergency online product delivered to students was substandard. Based on our own experiences in designing and delivering online courses, we caution against embracing a broad-reaching, negative conclusion about the efficacy of online education. Indeed, much of this emergency online programming would be more properly defined as “emergency remote teaching,” as opposed to “online education.” Delivering online education to students involves more than giving the same classroom lecture on Zoom. Online education requires professors to design their courses to be delivered at a distance, with the goal being to create a course driven by pedagogy using technological tools to inform and enhance the learning experience. COVID-19 is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and because some schools might be unable to bring all of their students back into the classroom in the fall, we urge faculty to prepare to deliver their courses online. Law schools and faculty should not wait for another emergency and should prepare to deliver at least some of their courses online in the fall. To aid with this transition, this Article offers some guidance on how to develop and implement an effective asynchronous distance-learning course for law students.

The full article is available here.

A Boring Person's Idea of What a Funny Person Sounds Like

 

 

AALS CFP: Outsourced Borders and Invisible Walls

This just in:

The Section on Immigration Law of the Association of American Law Schools invites papers for presentation at its principal session during the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, which will take place January 5-9, 2021. This session has not yet been scheduled. We will send updated information when we have it. Please note that individuals presenting at the program are responsible for their own Annual Meeting registration fee and travel expenses

The Session theme is: “Outsourced Borders and Invisible Walls.”

This panel explores the many ways that the U.S. government relies on outsourced borders and invisible walls in its immigration policy. In recent years, the U.S. has outsourced many of its immigration enforcement functions. The federal government has delegated power and responsibility for immigration enforcement to state and local governments, to private actors, and to foreign governments. In its operation of and within detention facilities that are privately owned and maintained, its formal and informal collaboration with Mexican border agents and police, in its reliance on private contractors for building a border wall, and more, the U.S. government extensively leverages other entities and governments in its immigration enforcement efforts.

At the same time, the government has constructed a number of invisible barriers to immigration. In recent years, the White House has leveraged its control of administrative agencies to promote new barriers to immigration. Agencies and actors formally charged with protecting immigrants and workers have been repurposed to bolster immigration enforcement efforts. The resulting barriers block access to opportunities to immigrate legally under existing law and complicate individuals’ efforts to regularize their immigration status.

This panel will assess these outsourced borders and invisible walls, unpack the history behind them, and discuss the impact that these developments have had on democratic accountability and on the rights of migrants and long-term U.S. residents, including citizens.

Submission Guidelines: The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2020. We welcome submissions at any stage of development, although preference may be given to more fully developed papers over abstracts and paper proposals. Priority also will be given to individuals who have not recently presented a paper at the AALS Annual Meeting. Decisions will be made by September 30, 2020.

Please email submissions in Microsoft Word format to chacon@law.ucla.edu with the subject “AALS Submission.” In your email, please indicate whether you have previously presented your work at an AALS Annual Meeting, and if so, when and in what capacity.

Inquiries: Please direct any questions or inquiries to Jennifer M. Chacón (chacon@law.ucla.edu) and Kit Johnson ( profkitjohnson@gmail.com)

Law Teaching During the Pandemic: What Profs Want Their Deans (and Other Administrators) to Know

Today I close out my 5-part series of blog posts reporting my very unscientific survey of law faculty experiences during the pandemic. I asked colleagues an open-ended question: Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your law school dean/administration to know?

Representative responses after the fold.

Finding Women on Supreme Court Shortlists

This post is part of a series about my new book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, co-authored with Hannah Brenner Johnson. The first post offered an overview of the book. Today’s sheds some light on how we found the women profiled in the book.

More than a decade ago, when President Obama announced the nominations of Sonya Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010, Hannah and I noticed media’s fixation on their single status and appearance. Headlines like “Then Comes the Marriage Question” and “Elena Kagan v. Sonia Sotomayor: Who Wore it Better”? were common. We didn’t recall reading much about the appearance or marital status of John Roberts or Samuel Alito when President Bush nominated them just a few years earlier. This led us to conduct an empirical media study. We read and coded for dozens of variables every newspaper article written about a Supreme Court nominee in the New York Times and Washington Post from the early 1970s through 2010. The study revealed, unsurprisingly, that women are portrayed and judged in explicitly gendered and often unfavorable ways, specifically in the context of motherhood, marital status, sexuality, and appearance.

From the thousands of articles we read for our media study one, in particular, stood out. The New York Times ran a short piece about President Nixon’s shortlist in 1971, when he faced two vacancies. Two women’s names appeared among six possible candidates—Sylvia Bacon and Mildred Lillie who, according to the article, fortunately had no children and “maintained a bathing beauty figure” even in her 50s. Of course this commentary fit the thesis of our media study, but that wasn’t what captured our attention. We wondered…who were these women? Why had we never heard of them before? How many other women were shortlisted by presidents before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice?

To answer these questions, I spent a lot of time in archives. Some of this material is available online, but mostly it meant traveling across the country to comb through stacks of files housed in presidential libraries. (I could write another book about that experience alone!) We did have work from other scholars, like Christine Nemacheck’s Strategic Selection, to build on. Sometimes the shortlists were relatively easy to identify mixed among paperwork on judicial appointments. For example, I found Gerald Ford’s list in his papers housed on the University of Michigan campus and you can see it for yourself now on his Wikipedia page—at the bottom of a typed list you’ll find two women’s names handwritten, “Judge Kennedy” as in Cornelia Kennedy and “Carla Hills.” Sometimes we had to rely on a combination of oral histories, news stories, and personal accounts. (Only one president has publicly posted his shortlist, even when not faced with a vacancy—Trump’s shortlist is available on the White House website.)

We found nine women who appeared on presidential shortlists going back to the 1930s. 

Ben Spencer Named Dean of William & Mary Law

The William & Mary Law School has announced that its new dean will be A. Benjamin Spencer.  Spencer, the Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, holds a JD from Harvard.  He will take over on July 1.

CFP - Columbia Journal of Gender & Law Symposium, April 9, 2021: "Are You There Law? It's Me, Menstruation."

Columbia Journal of Gender & Law

Symposium Announcement and Call for Papers

Are You There, Law? It’s Me, Menstruation

April 9, 2021

The Columbia Journal of Gender & Law is pleased to announce a call for papers for its Spring 2021 symposium: Are You There, Law? It’s Me, Menstruation.

This symposium explores the intersection of law and menstruation. Over half the population menstruates for a large portion of their lives, but the law has mostly been silent on the issue. Virtually all people with female biology menstruate, although not all who menstruate are girls or women. A truly inclusive law reform movement will take all who menstruate into account, without regard to race, economic class, age, or gender identity. A legal system that takes into account the biology of over half the population is the foundation for a more just society. 

Judy Blume’s young adult classic, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, first captured readers’ attention fifty years ago, but only recently have periods entered the public discourse. The “tampon tax”—the state sales tax on menstrual products—is currently the subject of multi-state litigation and legislative advocacy. Public awareness of the unfairness of the tax has inspired many people to start speaking and mobilizing about other obstacles, including the lack of employment-related accommodations for menstrual needs, the lack of access to safe and affordable products (particularly in schools and prisons), and the anxiety and harassment that menstruating students can face at school.  Increasingly, litigation is being brought about some of these issues, and some states and localities are also taking action on their own, notably by requiring free menstrual products in settings like prisons, schools, and shelters. “Period poverty”—being unable to afford menstrual products—remains an obstacle to school, work and full participation in public life. 

The Symposium will be held at Columbia Law School on April 9, 2021. The conference will include a full day of panel discussions and will be open to the public. The program concludes with a reception celebrating the journal’s thirtieth anniversary.

Papers

To be considered for a paper presentation at the symposium, please submit an abstract of your proposed paper by 5:00 p.m. on August 15, 2020 to columbia.jgl.submissions@gmail.com. Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words and should relate to the conference theme.  Possible topics might include:

• Affordability, availability, or safety of menstrual products.
• Challenging the state sales tax on menstrual products.
• Menstruation-related discrimination and harassment in employment, education, and/or other contexts.
• Menstrual education in schools.
• Menstruation-related challenges unique to prisoners, incarcerated people, and visitors and employees in carceral facilities.
• Menstruation-related needs of homeless and low-income individuals and families.
• Cultural stigmas and taboos related to menstruation.
• Lawyering and social movements that are inclusive of all who menstruate, including trans boys and men, people with gender fluid identities, and people with non-binary gender identities.
• Research related to health issues connected with menstruation and menstrual products.
• Environmental issues related to menstruation, including access to water, disposal of menstrual products, and toxic chemicals used in menstrual products.
• Alternatives to commercial menstrual products, including micro-lending for financing of menstruation-related small businesses.
• Human rights concerns, including the right to dignity, the right to education, and/or the right to employment, and their connection to menstruation.
• The relationship of popular culture, including Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, to the understanding of menstruation.
• The use of female empowerment and feminist messaging in selling menstrual products and menstrual education.
• Menstrual-related activism, including litigation and legislative reform.
• Coalition-building between and among groups around issues related to menstruation.

AALS CFP: New Voices in Immigration Law

This just in:

The Section on Immigration Law of the Association of American Law Schools invites papers and works in progress for its “New Voices in Immigration Law” session at the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, which will take place January 5-9, 2021. This session has not yet been scheduled. 

This session will be structured as a series of simultaneous works-in-progress discussions, rather than as a panel. Preselected commentators will lead small-group round-table discussions of papers.

Submissions may address any aspect of immigration and citizenship law. We also welcome papers that explore these topics from alternative disciplines or perspectives.

Please note that individuals presenting at the program are responsible for their own Annual Meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

Submission Guidelines: The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2020. Feel free to submit an abstract, a précis, or a work-in-progress. Priority will be given to individuals who have never presented an immigration law paper at the AALS Annual Meeting, works not yet published or submitted for publication, and junior scholars.

Please email submissions in Microsoft Word format to profkitjohnson@gmail.com (Subject: AALS 2021: New Voices in Immigration Law). In your email, please indicate how you meet our selection priorities. If you have participated on previous AALS panels, please indicate when and in what capacity.

Inquiries: Please direct any questions or inquiries to Kit Johnson (profkitjohnson@gmail.com).

CFP - AALS Section on Islamic Law: Islamic Law and the Modern International Legal Order

Call for Papers: Islamic Law and the Modern International Legal Order

AALS Section on Islamic Law

For the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting

The Section on Islamic Law is pleased to announce a Call for Papers from which one or more presenters will be selected for the section’s program to be held during the AALS 2021 Annual Meeting in San Francisco on the subject of Islamic Law and the Modern International Legal Order. The program description is as follows:

The United States and Europe are awash in ethnic nationalist and quite often protoauthoritarian movements that show some level of contempt for transnational and international law.  From Brexit to America First to Hungary’s identity based Orbanomics, many in the West have turned their back on the idea of international cooperation in favor of localism. The underlying conviction seems to be that local values and local institutions serve the populations of these respective nations better, and therefore they should not subject themselves to foreign arrangements created by others.   These phenomena raise deeper questions respecting the future of the modern international order.  Is there truly an unmanageable tension between a preference, perhaps even a universalist one, for a particular political arrangement and a willingness to subject the state to a higher order set of rules that recognizes that arrangement as only one among many?  This sort of question is hardly new to Islam, which is both traditionally universalist in its conviction that an Islamic political order fulfills the Will of God, and an awareness of the necessity of finding a way to manage relationships with others.   Our panelists will discuss these questions others relating to the relationship of international law and Islamic law, and the manner in which these might prove relevant to an international legal order that finds itself in near existential crisis. 

Papers should be between 7500 and 15,000 words in length, not previously published, and relate to the above topic.  The selected presenter will have the opportunity, but not the obligation, to publish the article in the Arab Law Quarterly if they so desire.  Applicants may be academics or nonacademics at any level and in any relevant discipline.

Papers should be submitted electronically to Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi (hamoudi@pitt.edu) no later than August 14, 2020.  The author of the selected paper will be notified by September 1, 2020.  The Call for Paper presenter will be responsible for paying their registration fee and hotel and travel expenses.   Presenters who do not hold a faculty position at an AALS law school will not be require to pay registration fees.    

Any inquiries for the Call for Papers should be submitted to Professor Hamoudi (hamoudi@pitt.edu).

Hard Times Come again No More [UPDATED with James Taylor and Yo Yo Ma]

Guest post by Jeff Rice.

Written by Stephen Foster in 1854:

80.5% of Law Professors Prefer In-Person Instruction

According to a National Student Survey (April Replication) by Simpson Scarborough (here), 70% of surveyed college students say that online education is "worse" than in-person instruction. The survey does not drill down on what respondents meant by "worse;" no doubt that those law profs teaching during this pandemic have plenty of anecdotal data about what "worse" has meant for our students.

In my unscientific survey of law professors' experiences teaching during the pandemic, I asked this question:

In terms of your personal preferences, how do you like teaching on-line sessions compared to teaching in the traditional, in-class environment?

Details after the fold.

May 15, 1970

From BlackPast:

Posted on September 9, 2017by contributed by: Samuel Momodu

Philip Gibbs and James Earl Green, killed at Jackson State College, May 15, 1970

Fair use image

The Jackson State Killings took place at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) on May 15, 1970, in Jackson, Mississippi.  Around midnight on May 14, city and state police confronted a group of students and opened fire on them, killing two students and injuring twelve. The Jackson State Killings occurred eleven days after the more widely publicized Kent State University Shootings in Kent, Ohio eleven days earlier.

Read the rest of the article here.

This plaque on Northwestern's Deering Meadow commemorates the six students who died at Jackson State and Kent State in May 1970:

 

 

 

 

 

(photo credit Jeff Rice)

UNH Law Seeks Director of Legal Residency Program

This just in:

The University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law (UNH Law), a national leader in practical legal education with a commitment to inclusion, diversity, and quality engagement for all, seeks to hire an Assistant or Associate Clinical Professor to serve as Director of the Legal Residency Program to begin August 2020.

The legal residency program is a foundation of the practical legal training at UNH Law. The program allows students to apply classroom knowledge in a real-world legal setting by working under the supervision of attorneys or other professionals. Through this experience, students build skills, characteristics, and competencies essential to success.

The Director is a full-time member of the law faculty who participates in faculty governance. The position demands administrative and communication skills necessary to run and promote a program that involves numerous constituents, including alumni, students, judges, lawyers, and other professional practitioners.

Essential Job Functions:
• Developing and maintaining high quality legal residency field placements meeting the needs of a diverse student population.
• Creating curriculum for and teaching a companion legal residency course in compliance with ABA Standard 304.
• Communicating with and advising students about legal residency placements.
• Assisting students in securing legal residency placements in all types of legal practice.
• Mentoring students during their legal residencies as they develop professional identities and lawyering skills.
• Cultivating and managing relationships with existing and potential legal residency placements and supervisors including regular communications with the bar and bench.

Law Teaching During the Pandemic: What Profs Want Their Colleagues to Know

In my (unscientific) survey of law teaching during the pandemic (see here and here), I asked colleagues an open-ended question: Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your faculty colleagues in general to know?

Representative responses after the fold.

Matthew Lyon Named Dean of Lincoln Memorial Law

Lincoln Memorial University has announced that Matt Lyon will be taking over as dean of its law school.  Lyon, who currently serves as associate dean of academic affairs, is a graduate of Northwestern Law.  He will become dean this summer.

Law Teaching During the Pandemic: Home Life and Access to Technology

As part of my (utterly unscientific) survey (described here), I asked law faculty to indicate whether several statements accurately described their situations. Of the 37 respondents, here are the percentages agreeing with each of the following statements:

I personally know someone who became sick from COVID-19.	60%
I faced increasing childcare or eldercare responsibilities.	45.7%
I faced food insecurity.	2.9%
I have a family member who is an essential worker.	20%
I have an immediate family member who has become unemployed or is worried about job security.	37.1%
I have more people living at home with me now than I usually do.	25.7%

The survey was administered from May 4 through May 11.  At different points in the pandemic, the results might vary. I had not asked my students the identical question when I surveyed them several weeks prior, so I cannot say how the faculty responses compare to student responses (see here). Anecdotally, though, it seems that faculty and students alike are facing many of the same concerns: increased family responsibilities and economic worries close to home.

Where faculty and student experience diverge seems to be on availability of home-based technology. I asked faculty respondents whether they had access to these items:

Reliable internet	97.3% yes
A reliable computing device (laptop, desktop, handheld device)	91.9% yes
A printer	78.4% yes
A quiet place at home for online teaching and course preparation	83.8% yes

Again anecdotally, because I did not pose the question to the students in the same way (I wasn't intending to do a comparative series of blog posts), many of my students this semester seemed to struggle with access to internet service, printers, and a quiet work space. What did surprise me in these survey results is the percentage of faculty (21.6%) without access to a printer. Based on the relative seniority of the faculty surveyed (see here) and my own stereotypes about students being more digitally intense than professors, I would have thought that more professors would have printers at home. It may be that professors are not as tied to paper as I thought, that they are tied to paper but do most of their printing at the office, or some other factor is at work.

Guest blogging about Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court

Hello Faculty Lounge readers. I’m pleased to be joining in the conversation as a guest blogger over the next few weeks, thanks to a kind invitation from Steve Lubet. Today happens to be the official release of my new book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, co-authored with Hannah Brenner Johnson and published by New York University Press. So, many of my upcoming posts will explore current events in the context of research that we conducted for the book. For now, let me offer a short teaser about the book itself.

Shortlisted shares the inspiring and previously untold history of the women considered, but not selected, for the US Supreme Court before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice in 1981 (see Linda Greenhouse’s article announcing O'Connor's first day on the bench here). We all know her story, and rightly so. She was an extraordinary justice, and not just because she was the first woman on the court after centuries of male appointments. Yet few know about the remarkable women considered in the decades before her triumph. Our research documents the overlooked stories of nine extraordinary women—a cohort large enough to seat the entire Supreme Court—who appeared on presidential lists dating back to the 1930s. Florence Allen, the first female judge on the highest court in Ohio, was named repeatedly in those early years. Eight more followed, including Amalya Kearse, a federal appellate judge who was the first African American woman viewed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. We combed through long-forgotten materials from presidential libraries and personal archives to learn about the professional and personal worlds of these accomplished women. Meet all of the women here.

In addition to filling a notable historical gap, the book exposes the harms of shortlisting―it reveals how adding qualified female candidates to a list but passing over them ultimately creates the appearance of diversity while preserving the status quo. This phenomenon often occurs with any pursuit of professional advancement, whether the judge in the courtroom, the CEO in the corner office, or the coach on the playing field. Women, and especially female minorities, while as qualified as others on the shortlist (if not more so), find themselves far less likely to be chosen. Shortlisted concludes with strategies for upending the injustices that still endure, drawn from the lives of those early trail-blazing women who, even if not selected from the ultimate shortlist, accomplished incredible professional feats. One way, of course, to ensure that a shortlist isn’t used only for appearances is to follow Joe Biden’s lead with his promise of an all-female VP shortlist, as I recently reflected in an op-ed published by The Hill. More on that, and related topics, in future posts.

What Law Faculty Want Students to Know

Shortly after the switch to online legal education, I surveyed the 99 students in my Corporations & Partnerships class about how they were doing generally and how they were experiencing online education. I included an open-ended question, "Is there anything you would like your professors generally to know?" Those results are here.

I recently surveyed an unrepresentative, unscientifically-selected group of U.S. law professors about their experiences of teaching in the pandemic. I solicited participants by emailing 61 local and national colleagues who I thought might be willing to respond. The colleagues taught at proverbial "T14" schools and schools of other ranks (measured by whatever conventional, if problematic, metric). I collected responses anonymously.

I received 37 responses from colleagues who taught in states on the West coast, East coast, and not-coasts. 36 respondents had recently finished teaching online during the Spring 2020 semester. One was scheduled to teach online this coming summer, but had not taught during the Spring 2020 semester.  Respondents' levels of experienced varied, perhaps skewed toward more senior faculty. Respondents included those with experience teaching 0-3 years (5.4%) and 35+ years (5.4%), with instructors having 25-35 years of teaching experience (29.7%) and 15-25 years of teaching experience (27%) well represented. Those with 3-7 years of teaching experience (10.8%) and 7-15 years of teaching experience (21.6%) rounded out the group.

Without making any claims about generalizability (the results decidedly are not generalizable), the responses are subjective snapshots of this particular time in American legal education.

Mirroring the question I had asked my students, I asked the (anonymous) faculty colleagues this open-ended question: "Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your students in general to know?"  Representative responses appear after the fold.

TAMU Musical Interlude

Guest post by Susan Fortney, of Texas A & M:

During these challenging times, musical escapes and inspirational comments are most welcome.  At Texas A&M University School of Law our grads had both in our on-line celebration. It included a musical number by faculty whose piece takes off on the joys of teaching online.   Check out it out:

 The second clip features short remarks from Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute from the Office TV show). His message on gratitude is especially meaningful at a time when our students (and countless others) are experiencing stress and anxiety. Here’s that clip:

How Much Does It Cost to Put “Free” Tampons and Pads in School Bathrooms? About $2.48 Per Year

I have previously speculated (here) about what it would cost for public schools in Yonkers, New York to put menstrual products in the bathrooms of public schools serving students in grades 6 through 12. According to press reports (here), the Yonkers Board of Education had estimated that supplies would cost $29 per student per year. 

I now have some data from the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Public Schools (CPS) that indicates that the actual costs can be much, much lower.  The CPS graciously shared with me their three-year purchasing figures. Based on a three year average (calculated during traditional, non-pandemic times), the cost of keeping dispensers stocked with menstrual products is more like $2.48 per student per year. 

Details after the fold.