The Faculty Lounge

UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy Exclusive Call for Submissions: Now Through July 7

From the student editors at UC Davis:

The UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy (“JJLP”) is now accepting exclusive submissions for its Winter Issue of Volume 23. JJLP is a biannual publication of the UC Davis School of Law that addresses the unique concerns of youth in the American legal system. All articles submitted to JJLP between now and July 7 , 2018, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time, will be evaluated and considered for publication by July 28 , 2018. To be considered, an article must relate to some aspect of juvenile law or policy, such as juvenile health and mental health, education, or the juvenile justice system. If you have previously submitted an article to JJLP, you must resubmit the article for consideration in this review.

By submitting an article via this exclusive submission track, the author agrees to accept an offer of publication, should one be extended. Articles that receive offers of publication will be published in the Winter Issue of Volume 23. The publication process involves an interactive editing process between the author and the staff of JJLP.

To submit, please email your article manuscript in Microsoft Word format, along with your CV, to jjlp.ucdavis@gmail.com. Please title the subject line “Winter 2019 Exclusive Submission Track.”

For Men in the Legal Academy Who Want to Help Fight Sexism

Men in the legal academy, if you want to help fight sexism...

...do cite good scholarship by women. Empirically survey your own footnotes before sending in that manuscript....don't accept invites to speak on panels without racial and gender balance. Ask the question before accepting....do call out other men who speak over women in faculty meetings.

...do ask each law review that offers to publish your article about the racial and gender balance of the authors the journal has published in the last five years.

...do advocate for key committee leadership by women of all colors, men of all colors and other minority groups. Faculty hiring might look a wee bit different.

...do look at racial and gender salary disparities on your own faculty, if the information is publicly available. Ask questions. In. Front. Of. Everyone.

...don't close your office door fully when meeting with any students, especially women.  In confidential situations, draw the door partially closed and speak quietly.

...don't date students.  If you respect women, men, and yourself, you can wait until after graduation.

...don't call on a female student to give the "woman's perspective;" don't call on a student of color to give the "black/brown/Asian/other" perspective.  No one speaks for an entire group. No one student should carry the burden of educating the rest of the class. You're the teacher.

...don't wait for a student to raise issues of gender, race, class, sexuality.  Lead by example and signal that these issues can be important.

...when teaching Crim Law, do remember that there are rape survivors in your classroom. They are not snowflakes; they are strong; but be considerate.

...don't comment on any student's appearance. If the student needs some friendly advice about what is or is not appropriate clothing for class or interviews, there's a Dean of Students for a reason.

...do instruct moot court judges that they are not to comment on students' appearances. If there are concerns that could hurt the student's career, rely again on the Dean of Students, not the moot court judges, to convey the info.

...don't call a mixed-gender group of staff or students "guys" (e.g., don't say, "Have the guys in the IT department check your computer," when there are women who work in the IT department, too.)

...do object to the use of the word "guys" to refer to a mixed-gender group of students, colleagues, staff (e.g., "Those guys did a great job"). Your vocal objection to the use of "guys" in a case like this would be a rare instance in which "mansplaining" is welcome, especially to other men. Don't make it women's work to be the ones who remind everyone else of the importance of gender-neutral language. Your school may even have a policy on it.

 

(cross-post from FeministLawProfs.com, here)

Introducing the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum & Call for Proposals

From the mailbox:

In the spirit of academic engagement and mentoring in the area of Equality Law, we (Tristin Green, University of San Francisco; Angela Onwuachi-Willig, UC Berkeley; and Leticia Saucedo, UC Davis) introduce the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum to be held this Fall.  This Scholars’ Forum seeks to provide junior scholars with commentary and critique and to provide scholars at all career stages the opportunity to engage with new scholarly currents and ideas.  We hope to bring together scholars with varied perspectives (e.g., critical race theory, class critical theory, feminist legal theory, law and economics, law and society) across fields (e.g., criminal system, education, employment, family, health, immigration, property, tax) and with work relevant to many diverse identities (e.g., age, class, disability, national origin, race, sex, sexuality) to build bridges and to generate new ideas in the area of Equality Law.  

We will select three to four relatively junior scholars (untenured, newly tenured, or prospective professors) to present papers from proposals submitted in response to this Call for Proposals. In so doing, we will select papers that cover a broad range of topics within the area of Equality Law.  Leading senior scholars will provide commentary on each of the featured papers in an intimate and collegial setting.  The Equality Law Scholars’ Forum will pay transportation and accommodation expenses for participants and will host a dinner on Friday evening.  

This year’s Forum will be held on November 17, 2017 at Berkeley Law School.

Junior scholars are invited to submit abstracts of proposed papers, 3-5 pages in length, by July 14, 2017.

Full drafts must be available for circulation to participants by October 27, 2017.

Proposals should be submitted to: Tristin Green, USF School of Law, tgreen4@usfca.edu.  Electronic submissions via email are preferred.

Exclusive Submission Opportunity at Penn State Law Review

From the students at the Penn State Law Review:

The Penn State Law Review is conducting a direct article review to fill positions in Volume 121: Issue 1 and 2. Any article submitted to this review between now and May 9th will be considered and evaluated by May 13th. If you have submitted an article to the Penn State Law Review previously, you must resubmit your article for consideration in this direct review. 

By submitting your article, you agree to accept an offer for publication, should one be extended. Any articles accepted will be published in Volume 121: Issue 1 or Issue 2 of this review. Issue 1 is currently scheduled for publication in September 2016. 

If you have an article that you would like to submit, please e-mail an attached copy of the article, along with your cv and cover letter, to bta5030@psu.edu . Please include “2016 Direct Article Review” in the subject line.​

Please feel free to contact Brett Atanasio, Editor-In-Chief, with questions.

 

Empirical Research Security Concerns

Continuing with the posts I've been doing over the past two weeks about my new book, Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, today I want to write a bit about the security concerns that my co-author and I confronted in doing this research.  Some of this is generalizable to other qualitative empirical research, but some of it is very particular to the topic we were researching.

The generalizable concerns are not terribly new, so I'll be quick with them.  The big concern we had here, which is true with most qualitative research (though not all), was in protecting the identities of our interview subjects.  We labeled all computer files associated with a particular subject with a random number, rather than names, and had only one password-protected file that linked the random numbers with individual names.  That file was on a non-networked hard-drive and backed up to a non-networked backup drive.  There were no other copies of the file, and it could not be accessed remotely.  The consent forms that individuals signed, which had their real names on them, were not in any way associated with their random number and were kept in a locked file cabinet in alphabetical order.

As I wrote in an earlier post, in writing the book, we used fake names for each subject in our book (except for the small number who insisted on real names) and used the Census Bureau region map to identify where a person worked.  We offered each person the opportunity to approve the fake name and the descriptive region, with some wanting a different name or more generalized region description (or none at all) to protect their identity.

These are all fairly standard concerns, though.  What was more interesting with our research were the concerns that came from the topic - anti-abortion harassment and terrorism.  Because of this topic, with its history of intimidation, targeting, and violence, there were extra security precautions as part of the research:

• Limitations on initial contact:  We were prohibited by our IRB from making the initial contact with any of our possible research subjects.  In other words, they had to come to us; we couldn't go to them.  Thus, even if one of our subjects told us about someone they knew who would be a valuable person to interview (a pretty standard way to get more interview subjects), we had to ask the initial person to contact their friend and ask that person to then email or call us.  This was cumbersome, but it made sense.  After all, we were studying individualized harassment, so an unwelcome phone call from a stranger could add to the sense of being harassed.  Or worse - the person we called may not know whether to trust us and may feel that this is a possible trick to get personal information from them.  We didn't want to put anyone in that position, so we strictly followed this IRB requirement even though it made subject enrollment more difficult.
• Professional conference security:  Partly due to what I just described, pretty early on we got some great advice to attend a professional meeting of abortion providers so we could have a booth advertising our research for potential interview subjects.  For the exact reasons we wrote our book, this conference was like no other professional conference that I've heard about.  The date and location are secret.  In order to find out that information, we had to get letters of reference from two people already trusted by the organizer.  In the weeks leading up to it, we received notices about confidentiality and secrecy about the conference and its location.  When we got there, bomb-sniffing dogs and large men and women wearing gray suits and earpieces were all over the conference venue.  Name tags had to be worn at all times and then taken off upon leaving the conference area.  One morning, we had to wait 15 minutes to enter the conference area because the dogs had to do an extra bomb check.  These security measures were in place so that abortion providers are kept safe.  It presents a barrier to entry for researchers, but a barrier that is necessary given the history of violence and targeting. 
• Our own personal security:  We have often gotten the question "do you fear the anti-abortion extremists will come after you?"  Relatedly, "do you need extra security for your research data in your office?"  While we can never be 100% sure, history tells us that we don't need to be concerned about this.  Anti-abortion extremists have gone after all sorts of providers -- doctors, nurses, administrators, counselors, volunteers, security guards, and more -- but they have not, so far, targeted attorneys and researchers.  This, of course, could change, but we made a decision early on not to let this concern get to us unless for some reason we had reason to believe otherwise.

There were other security-related concerns doing this work, but these were the most significant.  It's pretty safe to say that empirical research presents security concerns that traditional legal research does not.

The Fun - and Messiness - of Qualitative Empirical Research

I've always greatly enjoyed the scholarship side of being a law professor.  In fact, and I'm just one of many who's said this before, if you don't enjoy it, it's really not the right job for you.

But little did I know until I started in on the research behind my newly released book about anti-abortion terrorism that there is another form of scholarship that is much more enjoyable than your standard law professor theoretical or doctrinal scholarship - the qualitative empirical research that my last couple of posts have covered.

The key factor in most qualitative empirical research is that you are talking with people about their experiences to learn about how and why they do or experience things.  These interviews form a data set that you then analyze to raise questions or reach conclusions about the phenomenon you are studying.  It's nearly impossible to draw generalizable conclusions from qualitative research, but you can provide useful explanations and derive novel theories from it.

This is a very different method of scholarship than typical law professor scholarship.  At least as I've experienced it, theoretical and doctrinal legal scholarship is a fairly solitary enterprise.  You read cases, books, articles, legal documents, etc.; develop ideas and theories based on them; and then write up your analysis.  All of this can be done from the confines of your office (or home or coffee shop or whevever).  As I said at the start of this post, I have no doubt enjoyed this type of scholarship in the past.

But after doing this qualitative research project over the past few years, I'm not sure I'm eager to go back to traditional legal scholarship.  Why?  Because the qualitative research is simply more fun.

There are many reasons for this.  I think the main reason is that you are interacting with people who are describing their lives and how law interacts with it.  In doing so, you get yourself out of your office, see and learn about the variety of people's lives, and learn about the real world effects of law.  To me, this was energizing in a way that I never anticipated.

Beyond this, there's a thrill of creating a new data set that had never existed before.  In capturing stories and people's experiences that may have never been told before, you are producing raw data for the world that's new.  From that, you develop your own analysis, but others may be able to use this data for other analyses.  That's a contribution to the world that's different than ordinary research.

Then there's also the connections that you get from doing this kind of research.  You build a network of people who trust you and might help you with other projects, whether scholarly or otherwise.

All of this, and other aspects of it as well, has been hugely rewarding and fun for me.  It doesn't come without its messiness though.  And the messiness comes from what makes it so rewarding and fun in the first place - dealing with people.

When you deal with people, you have to track them down, keep track of them, work around their schedules, and handle their idiosyncrasies.  Caselaw and law review articles don't change contact information mid-stream, fail to return your calls, or demand that you do things one way or they won't participate.  Compiling your sources for typical legal scholarship doesn't turn you into a detective trying to locate subjects who are sometimes moving targets.  In other words, all the things that are messy about dealing with people in real life are also messy in dealing with people for research purposes.

Which makes qualitative research not the right thing for every law professor.  Far from it.  However, for me, after having so much fun with this methodology, even with the messiness, I really do find it hard to imagine going back.

Doing Qualitative Empirical Research

Continuing with my discussion of my recent book and some of the scholarship issues that I worked through, today I'm going to write about some of the tips and pitfalls I discovered actually doing qualitative empirical research.  Hopefully some of these can be helpful to others who are embarking on a similar endeavor:

Interview recording:  We started the interviews by having a stand-alone mic that we plugged into a laptop computer to record the interviews.  We quickly realized this was too cumbersome and bought a small digital recorder, along these lines.  This was much better -- easier to use and less intrusive.  You can use your phone's voice recorder, but you always run the risk of running out your battery.  Having a dedicated digital recorder is a better plan.

Post-interview form:  One thing I regret not doing is having a basic post-interview form for us to record our basic thoughts following each interview.  Things like - important points, key stories, apparent themes, issues raised, etc.  When you do so many interviews, it's easy to forget these things that you might have fresh in your mind right after.  Having a form to complete following each interview would have helped.

Transcription:  We didn't even try to transcribe the almost 100 hours of interviews ourselves.  Instead, we hired someone via Elance who had been recommended to us by a colleague.  She was great and charged $40 per interview hour, much less than some other services we looked into.

Coding software:  Getting to coding and analysis time, the big question was what software to use.  NVivo is the big player here, but it just didn't work well for our purposes.  Having two authors working on the coding at the same time presented problems with NVivo - one of us had a PC and the other a Mac, and NVivo was not so easy on a Mac.  Also, syncing our updates was not easy on NVivo, involving extra server software that was very expensive.

Dedoose solved these issues and more.  Dedoose is internet-based software that runs the same regardless of the computer (since it's on the internet).  It updates real-time, so if two people are working separately their updates can be seen almost immediately by the other.  Both of the major NVivo issues were solved with Dedoose.

Plus, Dedoose was easier to use in many ways.  Its interface was intuitive and very easy to use.  Its customer service was very responsive.  It was relatively cheap, did everything we would have asked NVivo to do with our data, and had helpful video tutorials.  We started with Dedoose almost out of necessity; we continued using it because it was easy and powerful.

Developing codes:  We made the mistake when we developed the codes for our interviews of creating too many codes and sub-codes.  This seemed to make sense at the time, as we wanted to capture fine distinctions, but it became too unwieldy as we tried to actually apply the codes.  Thankfully, Dedoose allowed us to merge the codes without too much trouble, but it would have been better if we had been more judicious with our codes and sub-codes at the start.

Fake names:  This is a little thing, but it was hugely helpful.  If you're like me, when you write exams, you make up fake names for your fact patters.  At some point though, you run out of good names and feel stupid using combinations of family members' and friends' names.  For our book, we use almost all fake names (to protect identities).  It would have been a bear to come up with so many fake names.  But thankfully, there's a website to solve the problem.  Actually, there are many websites.  The best one I found was the appropriately named Fake Name Generator.  It generates all sorts of fake names for you, customizable by sex, country of origin, and ethnicity.  It was an invaluable resource for writing.

There are other decisions to make in actually doing qualitative empirical research, but these are the ones that were either the most important or the most valuable in passing on.  When in doubt, there's no better advice than this - ask someone else who's done it before!

Learning Qualitative Empirical Research

Last week I started writing about my new book, Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism.  I introduced the book and then explained how it came about from a perfect storm of scholarship, teaching, and service.

Today, I want to write about learning qualitative empirical research methods.  The book is an interview-based book, so my co-author and I had to learn how to do interview-based empirical research.  Neither of us is formally trained in this, so it was quite the undertaking.  Thankfully, though, there were a lot of great resources available to us.  Here's a list of useful tips/resources, in no particular order:

Your IRB: Your Institutional Review Board is not just there to give you nightmares about paperwork and hoops that you have to jump through.  A great piece of advice we got early on was to talk with the people at the IRB before we started filing anything.  They were really helpful in thinking through various aspects of our methodology and framework for our research.

Faculty colleagues:  I am very fortunate to have many colleagues on my faculty who have advanced degrees in fields that use qualitative research more than law, several of whom really know qualitative methodology.  They were incredibly helpful throughout this.  Like the IRB, we talked with them very early in the process to help think about basic methodological approaches and then continued to talk with them for details.  If your law school doesn't have people like this, chances are, if you are part of a university, colleagues in other departments would be more than willing to help.

Professors elsewhere:  One of the most important decisions I made early on with this project was to not be shy in reaching out to people, even if I had no prior connections with them.  I reached out to people who had written books in this field as well as other law professors who did qualitative research that was somewhat related.  Almost everyone responded and gave generously of their time in helping and thinking through what it was that we were doing.

AALS: The AALS occasionally offers workshops on qualitative empirical research.  I went to one as part of an annual meeting and found it immensely helpful, even though I had already started doing interviews.

Books:  Sage publishes a litany of books on qualitative empirical research.  The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research is excellent for all-around help.  For overall understanding of qualitative research and the beginnings of study design, my favorite was Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches by John Creswell.  Theoretical Frameworks in Qualitative Research by Anfara and Mertz was also useful.

Videos:  There are some professors who teach in this area who have recorded videos of classes going through methodology issues.  The videos from Graham Gibbs were the ones that I found most useful, especially when getting into the nitty-gritty of doing the interviews and then coding/analysis.

Other qualitative studies: Reading other qualitative empirical studies is very valuable as well.  Seeing what other scholars have done, both legal and non-legal scholars, can help with your own study design.

There are other resources out there, of course, but these were the most useful ones that I found.  I think one other thing to keep in mind is that many of us lawyers have a good head start on qualitative research because we have developed interviewing skills already.  Qualitative research interviews are not identical to client interviews, but there are many similarities.

Tomorrow I'll continue in this vein with some more specifics related to conducting qualitative research (once you've learned what it is that you're doing).

Generating Scholarship From Service and Teaching

Four and a half years ago, if you had asked me whether I was ever going to write a book, I'd have laughed.  I was comfortable in the world of law review publishing, had found two different niches writing about gender construction and masculinity as well as Supreme Court voting paradoxes, and hadn't really thought much beyond continuing with that trajectory.  Plus, writing a book sounded really hard!

Here I am now though, just having published the book that I introduced yesterday about how abortion providers are personally targeted by anti-abortion extremists.  How it came about, given that I wasn't looking to write a book and wasn't writing in the area of abortion, is a perfect storm of service, teaching, and scholarship.

Before I started teaching, I was a staff attorney at the Women's Law Project in Philadelphia.  One of the many reproductive rights cases I worked on was representing an abortion clinic in Allentown, Pennsylvania that was having issues with protesters.  I enjoyed having that clinic and their executive director as a client, so when they were directly sued by protesters after I joined the Drexel faculty, I offered to work on the case pro bono with my former colleagues.

The case was also a great opportunity to engage students in constitutional litigation raising issues that I taught in class and to show students how the material we cover in my courses is relevant to real law (something, despite much trying on my part, some of them refuse to believe).  The crux of this new case was the issue of state action - could a private abortion clinic and its executive director violate anti-abortion protesters' First Amendment rights?  The theory of the case from the protesters' view was that the clinic had conspired with the police to limit the protesters' access to the patients.  This is one of the exceptions to the state action doctrine, an important issue in my constitutional law courses, and it was the central issue in this case.

I had originally thought the case would quickly be dismissed because there was no proof of a conspiracy.  But, unfortunately for my client, it took over 3 years for the federal judge to agree, which he ultimately did on our motion for summary judgment.  (And then the case was mooted on appeal after the clinic moved locations.)

This extended period of time was fortunate for my students though, and ultimately very fortunate for me and my co-author.  It was fortunate for my students because I was able to have several of them work on the case through its various pre-trial stages.  Not all of the work they did was about constitutional law, but it was all directly relevant to a constitutional case, which was interesting for them to work on in law school.

The last student I asked to work on the case was my co-author, Krysten Connon, who was a 2L at the time she started on the case.  After researching various aspects of pre-trial procedure, Krysten had the opportunity to meet our client, the director of the clinic.  The clinic director told Krysten how she not only deals with protesters at the clinic but also has to deal with protesters targeting her individually.  The protesters picketed the clinic director at home on a regular basis, sent hate mail to her parents, and posted about her on an internet site devoted to anti-abortion violence.  This last form of targeting, along with the past murders of abortion providers, spurred the clinic director to purchase a bullet proof vest and wear it to work on a regular basis.

It was this last piece of information, about the bulletproof vest, that stunned Krysten.  Unfortunately, I had known about this but had been desensitized to the issue.  For Krysten, who was hearing it for the first time, it was shocking . . . as it should be: a person running a perfectly lawful medical health clinic feared for her life because of her profession so much that she wore a bullet proof vest to work.

A day after hearing this, Krysten wrote me an email saying that it would be interesting to research how abortion providers are targeted, not at work as part of clinic-based protest, but as individuals wherever they may be found.  Four and a half years after that email, we published this book.

When I think about the origin of the book, I think of it as the perfect (and lucky!) combination of service, teaching, and scholarship, the three things professors are responsible for.  The case work I was doing was part of the service I perform for the community; I involved students in the case because it was a way to supplement the teaching I did around constitutional law issues; and from that a new area of scholarship arose for me and my co-author, an area that I hope to continue beyond this book.

These three parts of our job certainly do not always coincide and can often all be separate from one another.  But, when they do overlap, it can be a very productive thing.

New Book: Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism

Amidst our current national discussion about how quickly the media and politicians label one group (Muslims) terrorists but bend over backwards to avoid using the term for other groups (most particularly, white men), a particular group of homegrown terrorists have been largely overlooked - anti-abortion terrorists.

This group of extremists have killed eight abortion providers since 1993, have bombed and set fire to clinics, have stalked doctors, nurses, administrators, and their families, have picketed at providers' homes and their kids' schools, have sent death threats, and engaged in a litany of other activity to terrorize abortion providers.  These actions are not a historical remnant of the days when Operation Rescue was at its height; rather, these actions continue and are a regular part of the lives of many abortion providers around the country.

The stories of how these actions impact abortion providers and what, if anything, law can do about it form the basis for my newly released co-authored book - Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism (Oxford University Press 2015).  In the book, Krysten Connon and I tell the stories of abortion providers in the United States as they struggle to live through being targets of anti-abortion terrorists.

Thank you to Dan for asking me to blog about the book in a series of posts.  I'll use this post to introduce the basics of the book and will use several others to highlight different aspects of the writing/publishing process for the book that should be (I hope!) of interest to other academics.

The basic idea behind the book is that many people know about the general debate around abortion and that this leads to anti-abortion folks gathering at abortion clinics to protest the clinic and try to get women entering to reconsider their decision (this is intentionally a very neutral description of what happens outside clinics).  But, what many people do not know about is the ways in which abortion providers are individually targeted, separate from clinic-based protest, because of their association with abortion.

This kind of individualized targeting is the subject of the book.  The book tells tells the stories of the people who suffer from being targeted, analyzes the ways in which they are targeted, describes how this kind of targeting impacts their lives, and looks at how law and law enforcement can do better in preventing and responding to this kind of harassment.  The book concludes by explaining why abortion providers continue in this line of work despite being individually harassed, targeted, threatened, and terrorized.

Given what many abortion providers put up with as the targets of anti-abortion terrorists, it is amazing that we have abortion providers in this country at all.  But we do, and as our book uncovers, we do because of the inspiring dedication and compassion of those in the field of abortion care.

If you want more than this short introduction, you can read some reviews of the book from The New Republic, Ms. Magazine, RH Reality Check, Truth-Out, and The New York Journal of Books; interviews with me and my co-author at Salon, Rolling Stone, or Cosmopolitan; or excerpts at Salon, Women's eNews, or Alternet.

In the coming days, I won't be writing much more about the substance of the book (at least, not directly) but instead will be posting about the process of writing, researching, publishing, and promoting the book.  In particular, I'll be posting about how this book came about as a mix of service, teaching, and scholarship; the process of tackling qualitative empirical research methodology for a newbie; how this research opened up a whole new world to me of academics mixing with practitioners in a productive way; what I've learned about promoting my work; and maybe a few other things as well.  I hope you'll find it interesting.

Akron Law Review Fast Track Summer Submissions

From the editors of the Akron Law Review...

Akron Law Review Summer Submission

And Fast-Track Review

 The Akron Law Review is excited to announce that it is implementing a Summer Submission Program.  The Editorial Board of the Akron Law Review will review articles submitted during the months of June, July, and August.  We welcome articles from legal scholars and practitioners writing on all areas of law. We also encourage submissions in the areas of Taxation and Intellectual Property, as two of our issues next year will be dedicated to these topics.

Through the Summer Submission Program, the Akron Law Review offers traditional and a “fast-track” review.  Traditional review is standard review during the summer months.  Authors choosing fast-track review agree to accept an offer for publication.  In return, the Akron Law Review will guarantee that within two weeks of your submission, members of our staff will review your article and promptly respond with an acceptance or rejection.

If you are interested in submitting an article for our Summer Submission Program, you may do so through Expresso or by email to lawreview@uakron.edu.  Please note whether you are choosing traditional or fast-track review. 

Please contact Akron Law Review’s Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Glass, with any questions or concerns.  He can be reached by email at djg71@zips.uakron.edu or by telephone at 330-819-2865.  

 

Jack Katz On Alice Goffman

Steve has been doing a great job of catalyzing a conversation about Alice Goffman's book, On the Run.  Eugene Volokh has a post up on the topic, and he includes comments from UCLA sociologist Jack Katz (who is a lawyer himself).  Katz's thoughts are worth reading here.

This turns out to be an incredibly rich topic, touching on issues of ethics (writ large), professional ethics within different fields, the nature and demands of social activism, professional norms on note destruction (including the demands of IRB's), the challenge of critiques across disciplines, hyperbole, distinct norms of credentialing, intergenerational reputations, and much more.  

All of this seems to insure that Goffman's book will see a large number of course adoptions in years to come!

The Ethics of Punking the Diet-Research Media Complex (and Millions of Readers)

A remarkable new “sting” of the "diet research-media complex" was just revealed. It tells us little we didn’t already know and has potentially caused a fair amount of damage, spread across millions of people. It does, however, offer an opportunity to explore the importance of prospective group review of non-consensual human subjects research—and the limits of IRBs applying the Common Rule in serving that function in contexts like this.

Journalist John Bohannon, two German reporters, a doctor and a statistician recruited 16 German subjects through Facebook into a three-week randomized controlled trial of diet and weight loss. One-third were told to follow a low-carb diet, one-third were told to cut carbs but add 1.5 ounces of dark chocolate (about 230 calories) per day, and one-third served as control subjects and were told to make no changes to their current diet. They were all given questionnaires and blood tests in advance to ensure they didn't have diabetes, eating disorders, or other conditions that would make the study dangerous for them, and these tests were repeated after the study. They were each paid 150 Euros (~$163) for their trouble.

But it turns out that Bohannon, the good doctor (who had written a book about dietary pseudoscience), and their colleagues were not at all interested in studying diet. Instead, they wanted to show how easy it is for bad science to be published and reported by the media. The design of the diet trial was deliberately poor. It involved only a handful of subjects, had a poor balance of age and of men and women, and so on. But, through the magic of p-hacking, they managed several statistically significant results: eating chocolate accelerates weight loss and leads to healthier cholesterol levels and increased well-being.

They wrote up the results, submitted the manuscript to twenty predatory journals known to publish basically anything for a price, picked one of the “multiple” ones that accepted it, and wrote a check. (The journal that published the paper now says it did so “by mistake” and has removed it from its website, but you can read it here.) Then they cooked up a press release, sent it out to numerous journalists and media outlets, and waited. Several (of various quality, focus, and circulation) took the bait and passed on to their readers the good news that adding chocolate to a "strict" low-carb diet would "accelerate weight loss." As Bohannon brags:

It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily”, page 128).

Then, yesterday, Bohannon exposed his own “con” in io9, an online science and technology magazine, under a headline that blared: I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss.

Was the sting ethical?

Exclusive Submission Period: Northern Illinois University Law Review

This just in:

The Northern Illinois University Law Review is conducting an exclusive review for Volume 36-1. Articles for review should be submitted by Friday, May 8th and will be evaluated Friday, May 15th. By submitting an article, you agree to accept an offer of publication, should one be extended. Articles accepted for publication will be published in the winter of 2015-2016. If you have an article for submission, please e-mail a copy of the article, along with a cover letter and your cv, to lawreview@niu.edu.

Penn State Law Review Announces Spring Exclusive Submission Process

This just in:

The Penn State Law Review is conducting an exclusive spring-cycle article review. Any article submitted to this exclusive review between now and April 19th will be evaluated by April 27th. If you have submitted an article to the Penn State Law Review previously, you must resubmit your article for consideration in the exclusive article review.

By submitting your article, you agree to accept an offer for publication, should one be extended. Any articles accepted will be published in Volume 120: Issue 1 or Issue 2 of this review—both of which are slated for publication in summer of 2015.

If you have an article that you would like to submit, please e-mail an attached copy of the article, along with your cv and cover letter, to esg5028@law.psu.edu . Please include “Exclusive Spring 2015 Article Review” in the subject line.

Reference Management Software – If you’re not using it, you probably should be.

After spending 4 years doing other sorts of graduate coursework before starting my JD, I was pretty surprised when I learned that many (most?) legal academics don’t use reference management software. However, after an introduction to the Bluebook, I realized why this is probably the case. One of the best features these sorts of programs provide is the ability to automatically generate and dynamically update the citations in a paper-in-progress. Unfortunately, the Bluebook is so (needlessly?) complex that until recently there wasn’t a good implementation of BB style citations by any of the major citation management packages. 

Enter MLZ, a branch of the open source Zotero program aimed at implementing a number of multi-language features (hence the name “MultiLingual Zotero”). But the “killer feature” as far as legal writing goes is the MLZ Bluebook style. While MLZ’s bluebooking isn’t perfect, I’ve seen many hundreds of submitted law review articles and I’d wager that a paper written solely relying on MLZ’s automatic citation generation would be in better bluebooking shape than most of the articles that student reviewers receive. And, for better or worse, the state of one’s citations is probably an important factor in determining how your article is perceived by reviewers. 

Associate Dean for Research & Scholarship Symposium Offers Perspectives on Engaged Scholarship and the Changing Definition of Scholarly Work

The Touro Law Review has published a symposium, “Perspectives from an Associate Dean: Scholarship and School Visibility,” coordinated by Associate Dean Fabio Arcila. A theme running through the five essays is not only the balancing of resources in legal education to continue to promote scholarship for a multitude of reasons, but the broadening of the definition of what constitutes appropriate and desirable scholarship, engaged scholarship with a purpose, and broadening the community of scholars as well as the audience to receive the work.  This broadening can enhance a school’s visibility and impact – and not simply inside the academy.

Arcila of Touro Law Center offers an introductory piece, The Future of Scholarship in Law Schools, beginning with a discussion of the scholarly obligation to engage in research and scholarship noting that despite the waves of anti-intellectualism, scholarship “…influences public and academic discourse, legislation, and judicial decisions, all of which guide our conduct.” He asserts that even with the increased emphasis on experiential legal education, scholarship deserves prominence not only because it is “central to the role of institutions of higher education as creators of knowledge and fonts of ideas about law’s role in society, government, and business,” but also because such efforts also help to inform our teaching role by deepening knowledge and thinking on the subject matters we teach.  He acknowledges the challenges of promoting and encouraging scholarship given the tendency to downsize or eliminate budgets to support this effort coupled with time demands on faculty members to focus on other competing priorities, and calls for finding new ways to support research at the same time as supporting pedagogical reforms. His ideas include a realignment of teaching schedules for productive scholars – not necessarily always less time in the classroom (although he asserts faculty less interested in scholarship may assume a heavier teaching and/or student load) but offering a more compact teaching schedule to accommodate blocks of time for research and writing; using titles as a form of recognition for prolific faculty; and encouraging alternate outlets for shorter pieces (e.g., blogs, commentaries and essays).

 A. Benjamin Spencer, the Earl K. Shaw Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, who served as Associate Dean for Research and Director of the Frances Lewis Law Center at Washington & Lee University School of Law, focuses his contribution, Supporting and Promoting Scholarly Life in Turbulent Times,noted that at Washington & Lee, an independent endowment was specifically created to fund scholarly life and his role included strategically investing those funds in faculty to promote scholarly pursuits.  The fact that such an endowment exists, he observes, is what has insulated scholarship support from the economic realities facing legal education.  Spencer describes other strategies he employed in his associate dean role such as the sponsoring of scholarship roundtables where books and other significant work were vetted by inviting thought leaders in the field to the school for a day to offer critiques in the development of the work; junior faculty exchanges and faculty workshops – both involving sharing faculty by sending junior faculty to other schools and inviting scholars from other schools to present at colloquia; “incubator lunches” where faculty can bounce off ideas at the early stage of development; and hosting symposia including participants from outside the school. Spencer concludes with describing ways in which he helped faculty to get their work published and then how he helped to promote the work for others to read. 

B. Jesse Hill, Laura B. Chisolm Research Scholar and Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research at Case Western Reserve University School of Law contributed an essay entitled, The Associate Dean for Research in the Age of the Internet. Hill focuses on how the internet has created new opportunities for research but also outlets for scholarly work and vehicles to more easily share the scholarship produced, noting of course, that a law school’s visibility is tied to the visibility of its faculty. Her essay offers a number of ideas on how to use the internet to promote faculty research and scholarship.  For example, replacing the expensive glossy scholarship pieces received in the mail with electronic newsletters, such as Case Western’s Scholarly Impact. She offers important insights into the differences between Digital Commons and SSRN, two platforms most often used by law schools to make faculty scholarship more widely available due to the free nature of the search engines and the ability for many more people to discover the work. Although admittedly not a regular blogger herself, Hill acknowledges the intellectual exchanges that can be spurred by blogging, as well as the name recognition that can develop for bloggers. Hill concludes by reminding associate deans that they should lead by example and maintain their own scholarly profile (something I think all deans should do). 

The next piece in the symposium is from Christine N. Cimini, Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development at Vermont Law School. She begins her piece, Scholarship with a Purpose: The View from a Mission-Driven School, by reflecting on how she got this decanal appointment given her fairly recent entry into the academy and her background as a clinical faculty member, however, this can offer refreshing perspectives (and as she later observes, “can bridge the divide between theory and real-world application.”).  Cimini ties her observations to the unique mission of Vermont Law School, opining that effective associate deans will tie their actions to the mission of their schools. She quotes the Vermont Law mission, “we are committed to developing a generation of leaders who use the power of the law to make a difference in our communities and the world because the status quo is no longer acceptable.” She describes the culture of faculty and students engaged in scholarly exchanges that advance the mission including through the auspices of centers and institutes at the school.  She describes how a faculty can connect scholarly exploration with real world impact offering a range of examples of how faculty prepare testimony for legislative hearings, write amicus briefs for significant court cases, publish op-ed pieces in major newspapers, are columnists, bloggers, and write, among other things, transition papers for high-level governmental offices – all important work and mostly left out in the tradition connotation of scholarship. Cimini correctly notes that traditional law review placements may not always reach the intended target audiences and that at times, industry, technical and profession journals prove much more valuable to getting out the message in a particular body of work. She also reminds us that student scholarship can be an important part of a school’s scholarly culture.  She concludes by stating emphatically, “Engaging in meaningful scholarship is critical because it makes us better teachers, better citizens in the world, supports our students and provides them role models on how to use the law to impact the world in positive ways.” 

The symposium concludes with an article, Encouraging Engaged Scholarship: Perspectives From an Associate Dean for Research, by Sonia K. Katyal, Associate Dean for Research and Joseph McLaughlin Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. It is a fitting end to the symposium as she recounts passages from a 1996 article by Robert A. Williams in the Michigan Law Review, Vampires Anonymous and Critical Race Praxis, making the point that publishing work, that should count as scholarship, in various formats and for a, reaches more people and different types of people with the writer’s messages.  Katyal uses this as a jumping off point to assert that, “one of the most glaring failures in legal academia today: our romance with ‘serious scholarship’ – the ‘top’ law reviews, the ‘top’ scholars in the field, the ‘top’ law schools – has obscured the potential breadth and value of legal scholarship, overshadowing the impact of what legal scholarship can become.”  She recounts how Williams described how he wrote in bar journals, newsletters, encyclopedia-type publications, casebooks, applied for grants and engaged in clinical projects, all of which would not have been considered serious scholarly pursuits by his colleagues, but Katyal notes that by following Williams’ example, we can vastly improve and extend the audience for legal scholarship. Katyal next explores opportunities and complex challenges for today’s associate deans (challenges identifies include social relationships on faculties, race, gender and class; as well as support for librarians, clinicians, students, clinicians and other categories deserving of greater support to encourage and build a broad scholarly community).  She writes that after her first year in the role of associate dean, she realized the importance of valuing the “broader constellation” of writings as legitimate scholarship – e.g., peer reviewed papers, work in clinical publications, books, reports, white papers, blogs and essays – all different from the “traditional” view of scholarship. In the next section, Katyal proceeds to discuss the important benefits of engaged scholarship. Turning to methods of scholarly engagement, she suggests “building a scholarly community by chipping away at the ivory tower,” by, among other things, actively bringing in parts of the law school community often left out. She offers practical ideas on how to do so, how to share substantive news of community scholarship, mentoring and distributive considerations in supporting research visibility. She concludes her article and the symposium with these words, “…the task of an Associate Dean for Research is to find methods to broaden the law school community, increase its visibility and vibrance, while maintaining a healthy commitment to innovation, inclusion, and self-critique.” 

Thank you Deans Arcila, Spencer, Hill, Cimini and Katyal for opening a new dialogue and saying what needs to be heard.

What Good is Legal Scholarship?

I was going to comment on Profs. Harrison's & Mashburn's draft Citations, Justifications, and the Troubled State of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study, but Al Brophy beat me to it. They note that law professors will instinctively push back against their results. Count me among them - at least some of the normative conclusions.

Harrison and Mashburn Ask the Meaning of Citations And Suggest Reform

Jeff Harrison and Amy Mashburn of the University of Florida have a paper up on ssrn, "Citations, Justifications, and the Troubled State of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study."  It asks the uses that authors and courts make of legal scholarship.  The ask whether scholarship is worth the cost, which they estimate at $240 million per year.  Cribbing now from their abstract:

Recent pedagogical, economic and technological changes require law schools to reevaluate their resource allocations. Although typically viewed in terms of curricular changes, it is important also to focus on the very significant investment in legal scholarship and its impact. Typically this has been determined by some version of citation counting with little regard for what it means to be cited. This Article discusses why this is a deeply flawed measure of impact. Much of that discussion is based on an empirical study the authors conducted. The investigation found that citation by other authors is highly influenced by the rank of the review in which a work is published and the school from which the author graduated. Courts, on the other hand, are less sensitive to these markers of institutional authority. Perhaps more importantly, when the purpose of the citation is examined, a very small handful of those citing a work do so for anything related to the ideas, reasoning, methodology, or conclusions found in the cited work. This is slightly less true for judicial citation compared to citations by other authors. Given the level of current investment in legal scholarship and findings that reliance on it is far lower than citation counts would suggest, the authors offer a number of recommendation designed to increase accountability of legal scholars and the utility of what they produce.

I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of talk about this paper.

Facebook Announces New Research Policies

A WSJ reporter just tipped me off to this news release by Facebook regarding the changes it has made in its research practices in response to public outrage about its emotional contagion experiment, published in PNAS. I had a brief window of time in which to respond with my comments, so these are rushed and a first reaction, but for what they're worth, here's what I told her (plus links and less a couple of typos):

There’s a lot to like in this announcement. I’m delighted that, despite the backlash it received, Facebook will continue to publish at least some of their research in peer-reviewed journals and to post reprints of that research on their website, where everyone can benefit from it. It’s also encouraging that the company acknowledges the importance of user trust and that it has expressed a commitment to better communicate its research goals and results.

As for Facebook’s promise to subject future research to more extensive review by a wider and more senior group of people within the company, with an enhanced review process for research that concerns, say, minors or sensitive topics, it’s impossible to assess whether this is ethically good or bad without knowing a lot more about both the people who comprise the panel and their review process (including but not limited to Facebook's policy on when, if ever, the default requirements of informed consent may be modified or waived). It’s tempting to conclude that more review is always better. But research ethics committees (IRBs) can and do make mistakes in both directions – by approving research that should not have gone forward and by unreasonably thwarting important research. Do Facebook’s law, privacy, and policy people have any training in research ethics? Is there any sort of appeal process for Facebook’s data scientists if the panel arbitrarily rejects their proposal? These are the tip of the iceberg of challenges that the academic IRBs continue to face, and I fear that we are unthinkingly exporting an unhealthy system into the corporate world. Discussion is just beginning among academic scientists, corporate data scientists, and ethicists about the ethics of mass-scale digital experimentation (see, ahem, here and here). It’s theoretically possible, but unlikely, that in its new, but unclear, guidelines and review process Facebook has struck the optimal balance among the competing values and interests that this work involves.

Most alarming is Facebook’s suggestion that it retreat from experimental methods in favor of what are often second-best methods resorted to only when randomized, controlled studies are impossible. Academics, including those Facebook’s statement references in its announcement, often have to resort to non-experimental methods in studying social media because they lack access to corporate data and algorithms. “Manipulation” has a negative connotation outside of science but it is the heart of the scientific method and the best way of inferring causation. Studies have found that people perceive research to be more risky when it is described by words like “experiment” or “manipulation” rather than “study,” but it’s not always the case that randomized, controlled studies pose more risk than do observational studies. The incremental risk that a study — of whatever type — imposes on users is clearly ethically relevant, and that's what we should focus on, not this crude proxy for risk. I would rather see Facebook and other companies engage in ethical experiments than retreat from the scientific method.

It’s also unclear to me why guidelines require more extensive review if the work involves a collaboration with someone in the academic community.