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On Admitting Mistakes

This story is bizarre, but the predictable combination of arrogance and an official attitude that correcting errors leads to unacceptable disrespect. Apparently a basketball coach collapsed due to a heart condition during a game. A referee thought he was reacting to a foul called against his team and assessed a technical foul. Even as the coach was removed from the court by medical personnel, however, the referees refused to rescind the call. Thanks to the Sports Law Blog for the tip.

I've made some blunders in officiating, and I much prefer it if my partner(s) can help me correct an error than forcing me to defend a mistake to a coach. Nevertheless, I can sympathize with the referees here -- not because I think their actions were reasonable. Quite the contrary -- the actions were unreasonable and they deserve punishment. But some officiating clinics teach that the general practice is to admit mistakes but not go back on a call that is made. (I have no knowledge about basketball clinics or Conference USA policy on this matter, though.) One instructor at a hockey clinic, for example, told me and the rest of the students of an occasion where he prematurely signaled a delayed tripping penalty . . . and the fouled player never went down, meaning that the penalty did not in fact occur. He called the penalty anyway, and apologized as he was doing it. In his mind there was nothing else he could do. The possibility that he would reverse the call was out of the question.

I do not understand the rationale for that sort of approach. In discussing stare decisis in class, we constantly ask whether it is better for courts to leave decided cases undisturbed or for them to correct past errors. But isn't the worst approach of all -- in judging and in officiating -- to admit error and say "too bad"? Most sports, I think, are coming around to the notion that it is better to get the call right than to pretend that the officials always got it right the first time. So we see more conferences in baseball and football, it seems, than there used to be. Perhaps without instant replay sports officials would feel less pressure to confer and get calls right.

Posted by Mike_Dimino at 12:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Injustice in Michigan

Via Howard B., I read this report on a recent case before Michigan state trial court Judge Michael Martone. According the article, back in May '05, high school teens were caught drinking at their prom. The school sanctioned them, but they were also sent to Judge Martone on charges of being a minor in possession of alcohol (a misdemeanor). Judge Martone apparently said from the bench (as the students were leaving, perhaps?): "There's to be no alcohol [in the future.]"

Needless to say, the students went to college, drank, and classically, posted photos of themselves drunk on the web. The pictures were captioned, and some of the captions slurred Martone.

Judge Martone self-googled and found the page. I can't seem to, which suggests something about our respective googling skills. ""They made a mockery of the legal system," he said. "I had to do something." He reported the students to their probation officers and the police, and had the students arrested for contempt of court. The charge: "disobeying [Martone's] direct order not to consume alcohol." The article tells us what happened next.

Martone began questioning [the student who created the internet page about it], why she created it, and what some of its symbols and profane words meant.

In an exchange of about 45 minutes, Martone reminded her to be honest, as [she] first evaded some questions [she was pro se], then admitted that her Web site did use profanity aimed at Martone, and that she had a drinking problem.

He sentenced her to 30 days in the Oakland County Jail. She was marched off in handcuffs, to spend Christmas and New Year's Day behind bars.
Martone then sentenced [another student] to 15 days. The two become cellmates.

If this version of the facts is accurate, this story strikes me as deeply troubling on a number of levels.

First, we don't know if the students were advised of their right to counsel before Judge Marone started to question them. They should have been, as criminal contempt "is a crime in the ordinary sense and . . . the proceedings must comport with the standard of due process applicable in all criminal proceedings." City of Ann Arbor v. Danish News Co., 139 Mich.App. 218, 361 N.W.2d 772 (Mich. App. 1984). But even if they were, I don't understand how you can turn an admonishment not to drink into a judicial order specific enough to give rise to a criminal contempt charge. (This assumes that it is constitutional to prohibit 19 year olds from drinking alcohol.) Criminal contempt is serious business: turning a paternalistic admonishment (according to the article) into an open-ended obligation not to consume alcohol is, in my view, questionable.

Second, it makes me uncomfortable when a Judge serves as the police (searching out evidence) the prosecutor (questioning witnesses and forcing them to admit statements against interest) and the jury all at once. This is more problematic given that this particular Judge was insulted personally by the photo captions. Isn't this just the sort of targeted justice that the Eighth Amendment was designed to prevent?

Third, the story ends by telling us about a third of the students, who appeared before the Judge accompanied by counsel. Smart move.

Martone looked down from the bench and said, 'I think you're sincere. And your attorney says you're sincere.' He then doubled Senopole's hours of community service, to 100, but gave her 10 days of jail time -- fewer than the other girls -- and let her serve them one at a time, on weekends, 'so it doesn't interrupt your studies.'

What’s the lesson here? Not to try to criticize judges (like professors?) with gossip? Not to drink? Or not to be pro se?

Posted by hoffman at 12:00 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Is Smoking Child Abuse?

BBC (among others) reports that California will treat second hand smoke as a form of toxic air pollutant. I assume this will empower a new gang of regulators to join the "war on smoking." I wonder about the effects of these sorts of decisions on smoking parents.

Courts have begun to confront the argument that smoking around children is a form of child abuse. This claim appears to have surfaced repeatedly in child custody battles, but I don't think it has become a common basis for state intervention in families. With findings like those in California, I suspect that more states will seek to intervene when parents smoke at home. State involvement can sometimes take a positive form - counseling, for example - but it can also result in removing children into foster care. When the household problem is smoking, I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Second hand smoke is bad for kids. For children with special health problems, such as asthma, it can be devastating. So there is little question that when parents smoke at home, they are doing harm. This might suggest that smoking ought to be considered abuse per se. But should it?

First, I'm uncertain whether the health effects are serious enough to constitute abuse. Parents do lots of crappy things to, and around, their kids. Does smoking cross the line? Second, I don't totally trust state intervention in families. When the household situation is dire, a state must step in to protect children. Perhaps I'm a cynic, but the repeated evidence of incompetence and neglect by some of these family agencies makes me nervous about their involvement except where truly necessary. Third, I'm not convinced that we want mandatory abuse reporters - doctors, psychologists, social workers and (in some states) lawyers - to report every parent who admits smoking around her child. Mandatory reporting damages relationships with clients, reducing trust and, ultimately, the effectiveness of professional services. This damage is justified only when it prevents truly serious harms.

Then there is the slippery slope problem. Once smoking is viewed as child abuse, prosecutions are likely to follow. And in some jurisdictions, convicted child abusers are subject to Megan's Law notification.

I don't have a problem with parents introducing evidence of smoking in disputes over custodial and visitation arrangements. In these cases, the child will typically end up in the custody of at least one parent. I think smoking around kids is a bad thing. Smoking around a child with respiratory problems seems clearly abusive. But should smoking around a healthy child be the basis for removing her from parental custody? I don't have the answer, but I'm not happy with either result.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 12:17 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

Justice Scalia's CLE

I had the great privilege of attending the CLE that was the subject of this week's ABC story. Justice Scalia led several of the discussions/lectures, a task which required him to be an active presenter for several hours each of the two days of the conference. Details of the conference are made clear in a letter Federalist Society President Gene Meyer wrote to the President of ABC News. I am floored that anyone thinks there is anything the least bit improper about Scalia's attendance. Still more am I surprised that this passes as "investigative" reporting, given that the Federalist Society advertised Scalia's attendance at the Conference and that the same was reported by the AP immediately after Chief Justice Roberts was sworn in.

Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU, is quoted in the story as saying that Scalia should not have taken the trip for "several reasons," including the Federalist Society's "decided political-slash-judicial profile." Few, if any, groups would fail to be disqualified from having a sitting judge speak to their members under this heretofore unheard-of test. Certainly the ABA and the ACLU have "decided political-slash-judicial profile[s]" and yet -- properly -- nobody has raised any question of the propriety of speaking to such audiences.

The public ultimately is much the better for groups' opportunities to interact with Justices, barring extreme cases where the group in question is pursuing an ex parte contact in a case pending or about to be pending before the Court. This proposition, which has been accepted for decades if not forever, is all the more applicable for situations like the conference in question, because it was an opportunity for the participants to learn interactively about a subject interesting the Justice, as opposed to the more typical event where the Justice simply gives a speech.

Of course this is not the first time critics of Justices have fabricated ethical concerns as a way of encouraging opposition to Justices whose philosophies the critics oppose. Scalia himself was the target of such a campaign recently in the Cheney duck hunting episode, prompting criticism by Gillers among others, and ultimately resulting in Scalia's release of an extraordinary memo defending his non-recusal in the case and pointing out that ethical rules had never before required refraining from the behavior for which he was being criticized. Similar questionable invocations of ethical concerns appear in the Haynsworth and Fortas confirmations, Fortas's criticism perhaps less questionable than the others.

UPDATE: Here are two posts discussing the report: one from SCOTUS Blog and another from the VC.

Posted by Mike_Dimino at 05:13 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

RateMyProfessors and Subverting Hierarchy

Back in May, Kaimi commented on Prawfs about Ratemyprofessors.com. Law students came somewhat late to the site, but my anecdotal sense is that there has been an explosion in ratings in the last six months. For most law schools in the country, multiple professors are now listed and rated. Most law school ranking sites have an anonymous student “moderator,” which would seem to suggest that RMP is trying to defend itself against defamation suits. If that’s the case, it would be fascinating to see what directions the moderators have received. From a brief review of the ratings of lots of law profs., I can’t believe that the directions are particularly restrictive. There is some nasty stuff out there.

Recently, I came across this article analyzing why undergraduates comment on and use RMP. The money paragraph:

[Students] want to provide information to others, and they also feel part of a community of posters. Primarily, students appear motivated to post ratings for teachers who are perceived as being either very good or very bad. This explains why the number of ratings per professor did not show linear correlation with the perceived quality of that person's teaching. The data show that the only significant relationship with regard to the number of posts was that of the "hotness" rating. Professors with higher hotness ratings received more ratings on average. However, while perceived hotness seems to relate to the propensity to post ratings, this factor did not seem to affect the average quality rating as there was no significant relationship between hotness scores and overall quality scores. This suggests that perceived attractiveness of professors is related to students' propensity to post about them, but is not sufficient to influence what is posted.

As far I can tell, the lack of correlation in this study between attractiveness and quality rankings is anamolous.

I wonder what would have happened were law students to be asked why they post on RMP. My suspicion is that law students, unlike undergraduates, are more motivated by feelings of powerlessness and a desire to sanction (with online gossip) professors who take particular advantage of the (conservative) hierarchy that the Socratic dialogue offers. As Duncan Kennedy explained in his little red book, "it is meaningful to oppose [hierarchy] by talking, by joking and refusing to laugh at jokes, through the elaboration of fantasies as well as through the elaboration of concrete plans for struggle." That is, I bet at least some law students use RMP as a way to implicitly whittle their professors down to size.

But maybe that is giving students too much credit. It's not clear to me whether the student who thinks that I "bounc[e] around the classroom like a leprechaun" was hoping to subvert traditional ideas of law school classroom management. Maybe s/he just didn't like me much.

Posted by hoffman at 12:24 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Disney-o-rama!

Go read the Disney posts at Conglomerate.

Gordon Smith, Christine Hurt, Larry Ribstein, Steve Bainbridge, and Elizabeth Nowicki. Good stuff.

Posted by oman at 12:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Teaching Away the Right to Privacy

I've never liked the Supreme Court's Vernonia School District line of cases. These decisions authorize public schools to do random drug testing of students participating in extracurricular activities, without the slightest suspicion that the children ever used drugs. You don't want to be tested for drugs? Don't do extra-curriculars. Of course, extra-curricular activities are important in many ways, not least in terms of college applications. For many kids, then, there is little choice but to submit to these searches.

Schools seem to have taken up the Court's offer. I haven't found hard data on the number of schools using random drug tests but locally - in the Birmingham area - I know the "top three" school districts (judged by test scores and affluence) have such programs. (And two of the three test for tobacco use, in addition to drugs and booze.)

Why don't I like these schemes? A few reasons. The first one is related to the right of privacy. I don't think the government should be in the business of searching people in any fashion - let alone sorting through their urine - without suspicion of misconduct. Although I'm not fond of other suspicionless searches the Court has authorized - for example, railroad employess may be tested after a rail accident - at least these testing programs have a narrower scope. Any policy that samples every child in extra-curricular activities - that is, the vast majority of students in these high powered schools - comes awfully close to imposing universal testing.

There are other reasons I don't like these policies. I think they reflect outsourcing of parental responsibility. You want to test your kid for drugs? Go ahead. But it's inappropriate for a school to impose these intrusions on all children, including those whose parents don't buy into a surveillance-as-parenting approach. (Parents can decline to have their kids tested, in most districts, but the children still don't get to be on the debate team.) I'm also not confident that random testing works - though I'm less certain on this point.

Watching the privacy debates of the last few weeks - domestic spying, Google subpoenas, etc - I've come upon yet another reason to dislike Vernonia. I suspect that suspicionless testing programs train children to believe they don't have a right to personal privacy.

Schools are in the business of teaching, signaling, and modeling social rules and values. These testing regimes convey an important civics lesson, and tell students something about the role of privacy in American law and culture. I worry that, as a result, more and more children graduate from high school with no sense that the Constitution explicitly and implicitly protects individuals from searches by the government. Based on personal experience, they may concluded that there is no right to privacy.

I wonder if this next generation will take less offense at warrantless domestic wiretapping or if they'll be sanguine about the routine tracking of citizens by government. Perhaps they'll be less concerned about bodily autonomy in other areas. What's the big deal about abortion regulation, if your body is just another site for governmental regulation?

Time will tell. But as our government reframes American life as a series of never ending wars - drugs, illegal immigration, porn, terrorism - schools seem to be reframing privacy as hopelessly out of date.

UPDATE: I have changed my spelling of Vernonia. I have also attempted to reprogram my brain which believes the case is called "Veronia."

Posted by Dan_Filler at 12:07 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Families, Corporations, and the Blackberry

11D has an interesting post on the pressure that her husband has been getting to carry a Blackberry around with him and go to the bar with the "team" from work on Friday nights. 11D summarizes her anger thus:

Let me get this straight. He’s gone from the house for 60 hours per week. He sees his kids for an hour per day. And now he’s supposed to be checking his e-mail, while he watches his kid’s soccer game. The people that he spends 10 hours a day with are making him spend more time in the evening with them, so they can do jello shots and pat each other on the back for closing all those deals. As he’s pounding shots and head butting the other guys, the kids and I are supposed to amuse ourselves.

After I processed this information, I arranged the words, words shit, fuck and damn, in all sorts of unique combinations.

As well she might. (In particular, the notion that one gets pressure to socialize with co-workers rather than going home to your family strikes me as a bit ludicrous). The pithy conclusion to her expletive studded outrage is that "Corporate life is the enemy of the modern family."

On one level I agree with her. The super-turbo-charged-24/7/365-at-the-office career is the enemy of the family. On the other hand, I always get suspicious of big generalizations about "corporate life." I find that one moves rapidly from the reality of corporate life (which is actually remarkably diverse) to the imaginary world of unremittingly eeeveel corporations created by humanities majors and others who think that they know what corporations are "really" like because they saw Oliver Stone's Wall Street.

Consider, the Blackberry that 11D maligns. One can think of the Blackberry as symbolizing any number of things. 11D sees it as the symbol of a workplace that recognizes no limits on the demands that it may decently make on its employees. However, one might just as easily see it as evidence of other things.

In particular, I tend to think of the Blackberry as the symbol of the triumph of networks over hierarchies. The corporation of the 1950s or 1960s was an imperial bureaucracy with clear lines of command and control that regimented and controlled the work of its employees. It was rigid, tightly-controlled information, and was structured around the basic notion of economies to scale. These were the behemoths that were torn to shreds in the hostile take over binge of the 1980s.

What has emerged to replace them are flatter more flexible organizations based around networks rather than hierarchies. The notion is that communication and decentralization are ultimately better at problem solving than command and control. I don't want to get all business-consultant gushy about this move. Corporations are still hierarchical and to a lesser or greater extent they remain rigid. Indeed, some companies have switched back to an earlier, more rigid format after getting burned by an overly sanguine reliance on networks. Still, Ronald Coase's basic insight about the nature of the corporation continues to bear fruit: Corporations are essentially islands of hierarchy in a sea of decentralized market activity. The hierarchy is a mechanism for dealing with transaction costs. When those costs fall -- as they have dramatically in the last ten or fifteen years -- hierarchies drop with them. In its place we get a more flexible workplace, where the borders of organizations are permeable and sometimes indistinct.

Which brings me back to 11D's assertion -- "Corporate life is the enemy of the modern family." What kind of corporate life is she referring to? Does it matter? What are the real implications of daddies with Blackberries?

It seems to me that flatter organizations contain problems and opportunities for families. First the problems: They are less secure. Pensions are out and 401(k)'s are in. A life-time employer is increasingly a thing of the past. Second, they can be much more competitive, which puts pressure on workers to adopt the super-turbo-charged-24/7/365-at-the-office model. Third -- to put this bluntly -- they are not kind to dumb people. Increasingly, there are fewer places for dull but contented cogs. The great advantage for families is flexibility, and -- at least in some places -- a reward system based on results rather than face-time, the billable hour, or some other purely temporal metric of contribution to the corporation. Or at least that is the promise of the Blackberry...

Posted by oman at 06:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Blogging and profanity

As I read through Dan Markel's thoughtful post about SSRN, over on Prawfs, I stopped and lingered over his use of the phrase "shitty first draft." Although I have not really been conscious of this before, profanity seems largely taboo, at least within the law blogging community. Not that it's forbidden, mind you, but blogs feel positively Southern in this respect. (People surely curse down here, but typically only in the most informal social settings.) I didn't think about Dan's post again until I was skimming comments to one of Eugene Volokh's posts and witnessed Greedy Clerk get chastised for describing Alito's selection as "a clear 'fuck you' choice to the Democrats."

I must concede that my sympathies lie with the swearers. Perhaps I was a free-range child, but I grew up cursing and loving it. Then I happened upon a job in a public defender office. Let's just that say that when it comes to the use of lewd and profane language, those proverbial sailors and truckers will have to take a number.

I fully concede that cursing is no substitute for creative word choice. But I also think that both Dan's and Greedy Clerk's use of profanity convey an idea with particularity.

Why is it that we're so shy when it comes to dirty talk? I suspect that lawyers generally (excluding, for the most part, trial lawyers) are risk averse, and law profs exceptionally so. Among other things, there are tenure committees to worry about. And I suspect that more than a few law profs dream about becoming federal judges. (I am pleased to say that my own fantasy life does not feature any Article III moments.)

I'll probably stay decent as long as I'm visiting here at Co-Op (after all, I am staying at someone else's house!) But don't think I won't be swearing up a storm in my head.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 10:09 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Being Eugene Volokh

Blogs are such a new phenomena (and perhaps such an ultimately ephemeral one) that it seems a bit odd to think about the history of blogging, but remember back to the very early days of the blogosphere when The Volokh Conspiracy was on blogspot? Well, I was recently revisiting the archives from my first blog (because -- hey! -- blogging is about nothing if it is not about narcissism), and I tried to follow some of the links to the old Volokh Conspiracy archives. As it turns out http://volokh.blogspot.com no longer has anything to do with The Volokh Conspiracy. Rather, it is now a blog called "The SEO Reviewer" which promises to provide readers with "the latest information regarding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and is a repository for Search Engine Press Releases." One can only assume that the SEO Reviewer chose their blogspot identity as a way of maximizing their traffic by capitalizing on the efforts of Eugene and company. Was there some sort of a contract here? Is there some sort of a tort?

Posted by oman at 07:56 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Perils of Being a Denver Broncos Fan

This bizarre story on CNNSI.com chronicles how a Pennsylvania high school teacher belittled a student who came to school wearing a Denver Broncos jersey after the Pittsburgh Steelers routed the Broncos on Sunday. What the teacher did, if true, is outrageous, but the photo of the student and his expression are a bit over-the-top as well.

Posted by Daniel Solove at 07:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gonzales's Tortured Logic on NSA Surveillance

Attorney General Gozales brought out some new arguments in defense of the warrantless NSA surveillance program. He should have kept these arguments in the bag, as they are flatly wrong. For example, according to the AP:

Gonzales told his audience: "You may have heard about the provision of FISA that allows the president to conduct warrantless surveillance for 15 days following a declaration of war. That provision shows that Congress knew that warrantless surveillance would be essential in wartime."

Indeed, FISA authroizes electronic surveillance more generally "for a period not to exceed fifteen calendar days following a declaration of war by the Congress." 50 U.S.C. § 1811. But how does this justify warrantless surveillance that continued far beyond 15 days and that continues to this day? Notwithstanding whether the Authorization to Use Military Force is the equivalent to a declaration of war, this FISA provision indicates that FISA explicitly contemplated the situation the President faced and established a rule -- he could engage in warrantless surveillance for 15 days. I have yet to understand how a provision that allows the President to engage in warrantless surveillance for 15 days can be used to justify indefinite warrantless surveillance. Give 'em a nickel, and they take a dime dollar unlimited amount.

Here's another gem:

The reasonable basis standard, said Gonzales, "is essentially the same as the traditional Fourth Amendment probable cause standard."

Nope. The standard is entirely different. The reasonable basis standard is far lower than probable cause. This is not some esoteric fact about Fourth Amendment law, but it is basic knowledge of the law that Gonzales should know.

Posted by Daniel Solove at 06:51 PM | Comments (51) | TrackBack

Are Exploding Offers So Bad?

Jennifer Mnookin, at Law and Culture, has a good post about the use of exploding offers in law faculty recruiting. I agree with her fundamental points, that such offers a) aren't very nice (though I'd take issue with her term,"outrageous"); and b) are potentially counter-productive, insofar as they may lead a candidate to accept the exploding offer but leave the school prematurely due to bad feelings.

But here's the thing. Recruiting - professors, law clerks, engineers - is a competitive business. Despite the overall size of a given year's hiring pool, law schools are competing over a relatively small number of canidates. And it turns out teaching candidates focus on relatively consistent features in developing their job preferences. The first and most obvious is school prestige, and the related benefits of faculty and student quality. Another important recruiting advantage, as I have suggested, is location. So what are the rest of the hoi polloi, those lower ranked or off-the-beaten-track schools, to do?

Exploding offers, though unpleasant from the candidate's viewpoint, are a strong recruiting tool. First off, as one of Jennifer's commenters suggests, they sometimes work. There is a risk that the recruiting school will unnecessarily lose its favored candidate, but if the hiring committee is making sharp assessments, its targets will frequently receive competing offers from more attractive schools. In such cases, an exploding offer may be the only route to an acceptance. And when a candidate does say no, the short deadline allows the school to quickly pursue backup candidates. On balance, particularly where a school has a strong second choice candidate, I suspect that exploding offers yield better faculty hires.

And what about the lingering bad feelings? Two things. First, I'm not sure that all candidates facing an exploding offer experience this. In order to feel mistreated, a candidate has to believe she has some sort of entitlement to the better job. I can't speak for those folks in play at the most elite schools, but few of the candidates I've seen - even those we lose to other schools - have the self-confidence (may I even suggest ego?) to feel entitled to a chance at the "better" job. opportunity to the "better" school. Second, even if a candidate does feel anger at her new employer, in many cases she will have little long-term recourse (other than leaving the field.) Many excellent entry-level candidates don't turn out to be nearly as insightful or productive as expected. And while there is some lateral mobility in law teaching, it is surprisingly limited.

I personally believe that good treatment of candidates produces positive karma - for the school and for individual relationships. But since you can't cash karma at the end of the month (or mail out a karma glossy during US News ranking season), I'm sympathetic to those deans who disagree with me.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 02:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Trump's Net Worth

This article press release details Donald Trump's new defamation suit against New York Times reporter Timothy L. O'Brien and Warner Books, Inc., for, saying that Trump was not a billionaire in the book The Art of Being the Donald:

The lawsuit alleges that in publishing these false statements, O'Brien and Warner deliberately chose to ignore, among other things, voluminous and comprehensive financial information that Trump made available to them prior to the publication of the book, which confirmed conclusively that Trump's net worth is in the billions of dollars. Indeed, Forbes Magazine rigorously analyzed the very same books and records and other financial data that O'Brien and Warner chose to ignore, and concluded that Trump's net worth conservatively is at least $2.7 billion.

What I know about the topic of Trump's net worth comes largely from O'Brien's NYT articles on the topic, which (not incidentally) were quite skeptical of Forbes' approach to valuation. I also am surprised that Trump would be interested in exposing his books to public scrunity, which (presumably) O'Brien and Warner could insist on as a part of their defense. Shucks, as a plaintiff, Trump might not even be able to obtain a protective order in N.J. State Court. [Being unfamiliar with local practice, this is just a guess, but Trump's privacy claim is weaker than it would be if he had been forced to court as a defendant.]

Nevertheless, you've got to give Trump style points for being willing to double-down his bets:

The lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Camden, New Jersey, seeks $2.5 billion in compensatory damages and $2.5 billion in punitive damages....

Posted by hoffman at 02:00 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Welcome

What do you get when you combine an astounding 33 female law professors and a blog? You get Feminist Law Professors, a meta-group blog that looks to be a must-read. The blog looks like it is mostly an Ann Bartow creation, but the sidebar credits include a number of very interesting names. Welcome to the blogosphere, FLP!

Posted by Kaimipono at 01:21 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Going Digital: The Future of Reprints?

One of the great things about law review articles is that you can order a batch of reprints -- separately-bound copies of your article that you can send out to a list of your colleagues. I have a large and growing database of various professors, policymakers, journalists, and others who receive copies of my articles -- a fact that is not without some irony, since many of these people are in the information privacy law field, and I have written extensively on the problems posed by databases. Thus, ironically, I maintain a database with one of the most extensive collections of people who criticize databases.

It is common practice among law professors to send out reprints widely, as this is a way to present one's scholarship to others in a highly-readable format. But reprints come at a considerable cost. Recently, I got the price quote for a reprint order for a soon-to-be-published article. Under the pricing scheme, I get 40 free reprints, but that's not nearly enough for my database, which includes hundreds of people. For 200 extra reprints, it would cost about $744 and for 400 extra it would cost $1059. Wow! I nearly had a heart attack . . . and I'm not even the one paying the bill -- my school picks up the tab. Anyway, if I handed a bill for over $1000 to my dean, the keys to my office might not work the next day. Plus, there's the cost of postage, envelopes, and stationary.

So here's my idea. I'm thinking of moving toward a system of electronic reprints. I could send out a PDF version of the final article in an email to everybody in my database. In other words, I'd shift from being a junk mailer to a spammer. . . .

In my email, I'd include the text of the letter I would have sent to accompany the reprint, attach the article in PDF format, and possibly include a link to the final version of the paper on SSRN. I'd still order some reprints -- about 50 to 100 -- and offer to send hard copies of the reprints to anybody who requested them. My guess is that I'd get a few people requesting the actual reprint, but most people interested in reading the article would just print it out from the attached digital version.

The pros to moving in this direction are:

(1) It's much cheaper.

(2) There's less wasted paper. Many reprints wind up in the trash. Under the digital system, only those who really are interested in the article will print it out.

(3) It's much easier to send out a reprint -- no signing hundreds of letters.

Cons:

(1) Some people might really prefer reading the reprint rather than a printed-out version in the same formatting. And they might feel that it is an imposition to ask for a reprint. Or perhaps too many would ask for the actual reprint. Supplies would be low, and reprints cannot be ordered after the article is printed.

(2) Some people might find the email to be an annoyance. People are used to the current practice of sending physical copies, so they might not mind receiving something in the mail. I fear, however, that because people might not be accustomed to receiving a reprint by email, they might take offense to it. For some (hopefully not many), the email may add further unwanted clutter to their already burgeoning email inbox.

So I pose the question: Should I move to a digital reprint system? For those who receive reprints in the mail, would you have a strong preference for reading the actual reprint as opposed to a printed-out copy with the same formatting? Do you even read the reprints you receive?

Posted by Daniel Solove at 01:17 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

O Canada!

Today Canadians go to the polls to see if the ruling Liberals remain in power, or if they will be ousted in favor of the Conservatives. (For those who don't closely follow such things, Canada is a small country south of Detroit.) The Liberals have been in power for a long time, and aside from the normal woes of prolonged incumbency (in-fighting, intellectual exhaustion, voter fatigue, etc.), the Liberals are also reeling from a scandal over the funneling of government advertising money in Quebec into Liberal coffers. The Conservatives are sharpening their knives and trying their darndest not to make any anti-Quebec jokes in public.

The Liberals are pinning their hopes on America, or more precisely, Canadian aversion to America. Aside from (eastern) Canada's cultural dislike of America, the Liberals have been pitched a great slow ball by the Bush Administration, which in its role of protectionist pander to the American timber industry has been flouting a final ruling to the effect that US soft-wood tarrifs against Canada are a blatent violation of the its NAFTA treaty obligations.

While most Americans are likely to react to this issue by saying, "I didn't realize that Canada was -- you know -- technically a separate country," it has been a very big deal north (or south if you are in Detroit) of the border. Interestingly, the American judiciary has also popped up as an issue in the campaign:

[Martin, the Liberal PM] seized this week on Harper's [the Conservative challenger] criticism of judicial activism, warning that the Conservatives would try to circumvent the courts. Helping Martin, the attorney general of Ontario, Michael J. Bryant, accused Harper of wanting to "Americanize our judiciary."

What they are arguing about here is the Canadian Supreme Court's decision on same-sex marriage. Now regardless of how one comes down on the merits of Canada, same-sex marriage, or the evils of the United States, this is a bizarre rhetorical game. Whatever judicial involvement in contentious social issues may be, it is as American as apple pie. (And yes, I realize that they have apples in Canada too. The Bush Administration is probably secretly funding covert Canadian crop destruction at the behest of Washington apple farmers.) Indeed, it seems to me that strong judicial review has been one of America's few constitutional exports. Most places have not been too impressed by the separation of powers and a strong independent executive. In this sense, the Westminster model has been much more successful around the world than has been the American model. What countries -- notably Canada and Israel -- have self-consciously borrowed from the United States are strong, independent judiciaries dedicated to the legal elaboration of fundamental rights.

Hitting Harper for secretly wanting to Americanizing Canadian health care might be a bit plausible. As for the Canadian judiciary, it strikes me that it has already been Americanized...

Posted by oman at 11:01 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

On Conservative and Liberal Labels

My most recent post has engendered some discussion on a point tangential to its purpose, but important nonetheless -- how to determine whether a particular Justice (or, I imagine, judge or individual for that matter) is conservative or liberal, or somewhere in between. Can we agree in any significant percentage of cases that an individual belongs at a particular place on that spectrum?

I think the answer is no, because such categorization depends on context, and each of us subjectively chooses the context.

Focusing on categorizing judges, now, each of us, I imagine, wants to see conservative and liberal as labels indicating the direction in which the given judge deviates from the ideal. Thus Judge Bork sees originalists not as "conservatives," but as simply applying the law, and I am sure others on the left are the mirror image. If you're an originalist, therefore, a conservative is one who deviates from originalism to achieve conservative results, and a liberal is one who deviates from originalism to achieve liberal results.

But because we have no agreement on what is the proper way to interpret legal texts, including constitutions, any labeling system dependent on evaluating a judge's agreement with the "correct" results is not likely to be effective in general conversation. There are two alternatives I see. First, you could make the label purely relative, being explicit about context. In that manner we could quite sensibly (if over-simplistically) refer to the most conservative Justice on a certain issue, or even the most conservative Justice overall on the current Court.

Second, the inquiry could be more self-consciously empirical, in that a Justice will be scaled liberal or conserrvative based on the percentage of cases in which he decides cases in a liberal or conservative direction. Thus, we would rank Justice Ginsburg as 60% liberal, and Justice Scalia as 34% so. Such an effort has the promise of being relatively objective, but even there there are problems with determining how liberal one must be to be a "liberal" and so forth. For example, Epstein & Segal (from whom I got those figures, see p. 126) characterize Justice Ginsburg as "moderately liberal for voting liberal 60% of the time, but characterize Justice Scalia as "very conservative" and "extremely conservative" for voting conservative 66% of the time.

These debates are played out in plenty of areas besides the judiciary, and rarely do we agree on resolutions because we rarely agree on the proper context. Is academia liberal, for example, because such an overwhelming majority votes Democratic? Or is it conservative because taking a world view American academia is less liberal than much of the rest of the world?

Posted by Mike_Dimino at 10:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Confessions of a Stack Rat

I've been thinking a lot, recently, about the purposes of law libraries. In part that's because of Dave Hoffman's insightful post about these institutions. The bigger reason is that I'm on the library director search committee for one of the two law schools Dave mentions: the nascent Drexel University College of Law. (Reading between the lines: I will be joining Drexel Law this fall as an inaugural faculty member.) In this context, I've confronted an issue that is front and center for librarians - the rise of the digital collection.

I have mixed feelings about digital libraries. On the one hand, there is the nasty truth of the matter: I do most of my research on my computer. I rely on Westlaw and Lexis for most case and law review research. I use the many other fabulous databases to uncover articles in other disciplines. And then there is the world's easiest (if not always most reliable) way to learn stuff: Google. The ABA, however, rightfully requires a core collection of materials for those without access to digital collections, and I think there are good pedagogical reasons to train law students to do book research. Also, while this will change, today's fully digital library has a gaping hole in the area of treatises and monographs.

And what about serendipity as research method? How many of us have discovered important books simply by browsing through a call number? John Searle's Speech Acts may be off the shelves (presumably relaxing in the cluttered office of an English professor), but what of the other 200 books adjacent to B840 .S4 1977x? We lose access to valuable knowledge when we lose the Eureka moment of the unexpected book discovery.

For a stack rat like me, more is at stake though.

There is something awesome, exciting, even breathtaking about settling into the long rows of books, gaping here, pawing there. I'm not sure when this passion started, though it certainly grew during my years as a work study student in Brown's John Hay Library (that's the Hay, but not me, in the photo.) I would spend hours "reshelving" books in the endless closed stacks. Sitting on a stool, gazing at the racks, I communed with the truly special collections. There were classics: fragile volumes of Leaves of Grass. There were quirks: Tyrrell Mendis's can of poetry (82 x 8 cm. rolled in a cylinder, according the now digitized card catalog.) And there was, well, tacky: a first edition of Suzanne Somer's poetry volume, Touch Me.

I will do my duty in hiring a new library director who lives in the present, complies with ABA and AALS guidelines, and services the research needs of students, faculty, and lawyers. But I hope our new librarian won't be insulted if, once in a while, I wander off to one of those grand old libraries (will they soon call them book museums?) Drexel is only two or three blocks from the Amtrak station, and from there Providence is a straight shot. I'm not sure I need to browse Somer's newer oeuvre, such as Eat, Cheat and Melt the Fat Away, but a few quiet moments in the H.P. Lovecraft collection might do this boy good.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 12:02 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Three Cheers for Law Reviews

Law reviews get little respect both within and outside the legal academy. For those unfamiliar with the system, legal academics publish their articles in law reviews, which are edited and run by law students. Law students select the articles, not professors. In contrast, journals in most other fields are peer reviewed and edited.

The conventional wisdom is that it is immensely silly and problematic to have students selecting and editing our articles. But while I have many gripes about the current system, there are actually many virtues to the law review approach that are not being stated. So I aim to be contrarian and (ironically) defend the status quo.

1. Article Selection. One argument is that a peer-edited system would be better in article selection. On the surface, it does seem quite odd and almost absurd for professors to have students do the article selection. Critics of the law review system say that students often don't have sufficient knowledge about a field to appropriately assess the quality of articles.

But with student-selected articles, it is not as though peer assessment is vanquished. It just occurs after publication. To the extent that we use law review placement as a proxy for article quality, we've got ourselves to blame. I do think that there is a rough correlation in article quality and placement -- the system isn't perfect, and many mistakes are made, but I wonder whether perfection is possible or efficient. To the extent that we doubt law review placement as a proxy for quality, then we can discount it and assess articles on their own merits. In the end, I think that the objection is really about the fact that other professors (not ourselves and our friends, of course) will not appropriately assess the correlation between law review placement and article quality. In a sense, this is an argument that we don't trust the judgment of our peers. But that shouldn't mean we blame the law reviews -- we should blame ourselves.

And suppose a bad article gets published. So what? Yes, a few trees were destroyed, but law reviews have limited print runs. It just means that the peer assessment of an article occurs after publication rather than before. We're accustomed to a significant gatekeeping at the publication level, but perhaps this is due to the fact that throughout most of history, publishing was very costly, and so scarce publication resources had to be appropriately allocated. It made sense to have the vetting be prior to publication. But today, getting published is easy. We can still carry on the tradition of vetting prior to publication, but times are changing, and having something in print no longer has the same level of gravitas and authority it had before. This changes the meaning of what it means to be "published," but it doesn't necessarily mean that fewer quality papers will be produced or that it will become harder to identify quality papers. We'll find other ways beyond the publishing gatekeeping function to separate good from bad scholarship.

2. Article Content. Another argument is that students don't know much about the field, requiring us to add in lots of background information. As Manfred Gabriel writes at Law & Society weblog:

Student-edited scholarly journals are an anomality in academia. Student editors are bright kids, certainly; but kids. They’ve been at it for two or three years and are put in the position of selecting pieces supposed to advance jurisprudence, scholarship, and justice. The effect is that the average law-review article has to spend about 30 pages explaning the subject matter to the student editor, and why it matters, before ever getting to a new idea or synthesis. This affliction of law-review articles becomes painfully obvious when you compare them to articles in peer-reviewed journals, as you would find them in philosophy, for example. The approach there is that a scholarly article should be written for scholars and the reader can be expected to know the lay of the land.

But is this a bad thing? What’s so wrong with some background? I don’t believe that having background in an article will hurt readability and it will not necessarily ruin the scholarly value of an article. Why is it better that a reader must be expected to know the lay of the land when the land can be explained rather simply in 10 to 20 pages? Of course, not all articles should have to set forth background, but for important ones, why not provide a little background if it will increase readership dramatically?

In other words, I certainly agree that articles shouldn’t be required to provide background, but a little background doesn’t hurt sometimes. And I find that really good articles have a way of integrating background into the argument — putting a gloss on the background that is new and useful. In short, maybe having to write for folks who need to learn “why [an idea] matters” is a good thing. And it need not take 30 pages if well-done . . . and those pages need not be extraneous waste to scholars versed in the field either.

3. Submission Process and Editing. Law professors often complain about the process of submitting law review articles, but it is actually a process that is very efficient for us professors. We send our articles out to dozens of law reviews for simultaneous review.

In contrast, for peer reviewed journals, one has to send out an article to each journal one at a time, and wait for an eternity while the piece is reviewed by peer reviewers. If it is rejected, the process must start up all over again at the next journal down the list.

Publishing in a peer-edited journal can take a long time. Student-edited journals have the virtue of speed. That helps us. We shouldn't be complaining. In fact, I doubt that the peer reviewed model will work well for legal scholarship, which often discusses current legal issues and controversies. Getting an article published quickly has a significant value.

But, some might object, the student editing must be vastly inferior to peer editing. This objection, however, assumes that no peers review and edit a law review article. Not true. Many professors have circulated their articles to numerous colleagues and have extensively workshopped their articles before several law school faculties.

If we professors had to do the article selection and editing, I wonder how good of a job we'd do. After all, we're quite busy and may not want to carefully read each sentence to catch typos or small errors and omissions. We might also be biased in selecting pieces, as it is hard to turn down a good friend or colleague.

Student editing can be haphazard, but sometimes it can be quite good. Some student editors at top law reviews are interested in becoming professors and are just a few years away from entering the academy. They are thus eager to work hard and to impress, and they're not too far away from being a peer. While I've certainly had my share of bad editing, I've also had my share of good editing. I've had student editors who have gone the extra mile on a piece, an extra mile most professors wouldn't have the time or inclination to do.

Therefore, I believe that law reviews should get some more respect. [For those of you skeptical of an ulterior motive, I have no plans to send out an article this spring. Come to think of it, I should have been much more shrewd about the timing of this post . . . ]

In short, the law review system isn't perfect, but it's not that bad either. It even has its virtues.

Related Posts:
1. Oman, A Modest Defense of Law Reviews
2. Solove, Does Scholarly Writing Have to Be Tedious?
3. Solove, Swiftly Shrinking? Toward the Lilliputian Law Review Article

Posted by Daniel Solove at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Criminal Prosecution for Scientific Fraud

I spoke to a reporter at the end of last week about the criminal prosecution of scientific fraud. I'm not sure how coherent my end of the conversation was at the time, but I thought the topic was interesting enough to return to it briefly here.

Let's put aside potential investigations and prosecutions by the federal Office of Research Integrity (part of DHHS). Granted, the ORI has claimed an extraordinarily broad mandate (funded and unfunded applications!), which might be worth returning to one day. But on the whole, such cases seem to me to be a fairly mundane application of the general contract fraud principles.

Instead, I’ll concentrate on a free-floating action in fraud against a scientific investigator for having misled potential patients. Thus, consider the scenario of a doctor faking an experiment to show that Drug X prevents heart attacks and has no side effects, when, in fact, it has no preventative powers, and it causes immediate hair loss. Is that doctor criminally liable? Civilly?

I'd guess that to the extent that general fraud often requires an intent-to-induce element, most scientists would be able to successfully assert that they did not intend for patients to rely on their work. In the civil context, I also assume that a consumer’s action would fail on the “justifiable reliance” end. If this weren’t true, I imagine that most scientific papers would end with a disclaimer that they are not intended to be relied upon, and that patients ought to consult their physicians (etc.)

But let's put aside the doctrine for a moment and consider the policy arguments for attacking scientific fraud with prosecution. There are at least two reasons to think this is a bad idea (again, apart from the government-contract fraud case).

First, I worry about chilling the wide co-authorship norm that is widespread in scientific literature. Hwang Woo Suk's now-discredited cloning article in science had 24 co-authors, including this apparently innocent scientist at Pitt. While not each and every author faces the same legal risk, the possibility that a co-author’s wrongdoing will result in a scientist facing hard time would inevitably raise the costs for collaboration across universities and borders. These costs are particularly unnecessary in the scientific field, where private enforcement is likely to be effective. Not only is the gold-standard in scientific methodology replicability – meaning that much work will be double-checked – but the reputation costs for falsifying data are severe.

Second, I wonder about proof. Few cases are going to be as spectacular as the Korean cloning fiasco, which has resulted in a nationwide self-examination . Most cases are going to be considerably closer, and the untangling of scientific fraud, like the untangling of corporate fraud, may entail unusually complex demands on jury decision making. I'm a big defender of the jury system, but that defense doesn't require me to be blind the possibility that juries will allow scientific-fraud cases to turn into morality plays. Top scientists, like top executives, are likely to be arrogant and abrasive, and run the risk of pro-prosecution jury nullification.

Thus, at least on first glance, I'm not convinced that expanding civil or criminal liability for alleged fraud in scientific publications is a good idea. But I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong...

Posted by hoffman at 11:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Portrait of the Lawyer as a Young Man

Last week, the WSJ Law Blog had a quick write-up on Douglas Litowitz's recent book The Destruction of Young Lawyers, which seems to be a fabulously original stream of assertions to the effect that there are a lot of unhappy junior associates in big law firms. Shocking! Just shocking!

Now I should point out that I am a young associate at a big law firm, and I admit that I am from time to time quite miserable. It is a high-pressure job. The hours are long, and frequently your days consist of high-stakes boredom, which combines stress and monotony in a rather toxic cocktail. Some of this is structural. Big-time litigation is not possible without massive priv reviews. The billable hour creates a really cruddy set of incentives for young attorneys from a life-style point of view. However, I think that these structural defects in the legal market -- especially at "elite" firms on Wall Street or K Street -- have less to do with the spiritual misery of young lawyers than two other factors: lack of interest in the law and the mismatch between the dominant myths about the legal profession current in law schools and the reality of the legal profession in practice.

Of these two factors, I think that the first is more important. Lots of people go to law school who really have no business being there. The reason is that they have no interest in the law. I suspect that this may be even more decidedly the case at elite law schools than elsewhere, although I admit that this is no more than a guess. Our universities produce a tremendous number of graduates in the humanities and the social sciences who have no marketable skills beyond some smattering of writing ability and critical thinking. (There is no shame in this. I studied mainly philosophy as an undergraduate, and I am very glad that I did. On the other hand, when I graduated none of the Big Five Epistemology Firms were hiring.) Some significant subset of these essentially skilless graduates are united by equally strong aversions to mathematics and business. So they go to law school, which they vaguely understand to be different than business (what they see on The Practice doesn't look like business). More importantly, law school is reputed to be equation-free. They didn't even have to study math for the LSAT. When they get to law school, they discover to their everlasting professional consternation that what you study in law school is the law. As it turns out they find the law boring. Learning its substance, structure, folkways, history, or theories holds no real interest for them. But hey, they got into Harvard Law School, so they couldn't not go, right? Three years later they emerge from saturation in a field whose only initial recommendations were "not business" and no math to find that they go into practice and spend their time with...the law. Misery and alienation result.

The second factor is the mismatch between the myths of the profession that dominate law schools and the reality of the profession in practice. In law school, the archetype of lawyerly virtue is the civil rights lawyer. A real lawyer is someone who represents the down-trodden and oppressed and uses the courts to transform the world into a better place (generally defined in vaguely leftist -- but hardly radical -- terms) through the application of justice. It is a heady myth, and there is much to be said for representing the down-trodden and oppressed. It gave me great pleasure to file a complaint earlier this month against a state prison system on behalf of some indigent prisoners. In practice, however, lawyers are mainly the handmaidens of commerce. They mainly represent businesses in their disputes and negotiations with other businesses. Alternatively, they sue businesses (here the plaintiff's lawyers can act out a sort of tawdry second-string version of the civil-rights lawyer myths) for business related sins. Some of these are fairly simple, and can capture the imagination of someone who was initiated into the profession with myths of heroic civil rights lawyers. Everyone can understand the drug company that negligently poisons thousands. But more often than not, even the suits against businesses behaving badly involve arcane, businessy wrongs like violations of the securities regulations. The problem is that the law schools have not equiped their graduates with a set of myths that render the overwhelmingly commercial activities of most lawyers meaningful or ennobling. The results are the hoards of young associates who pine away in self-loathing, convinced that they have "sold out."

The sad thing, of course, is that a good part of the spiritual misery of young lawyers is unnecessary. The law is fascinating if it is chosen for its own sake rather than as a default option for English majors desperately seeking a middle-class lifestyle, and commerce has its own nobility and dignity. The misery of priv review and the billable hour, alas, remain.

Posted by oman at 09:13 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

How to Blog Anonymously and Get Rich

Andrew Raff has a funny post about how anonymous bloggers are striking it rich with their blogs. After discussing David Lat's (aka A3G) story as well as others, Raff writes:

Here's the short lesson:
Step 1. Write a funny anonymous blog.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit.

Perhaps Juan Non-Volokh of the VC is working on a six-figure book deal as we speak.

Hat tip: How Appealing

Posted by Daniel Solove at 06:45 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Consequences of Misleading the Judiciary Committee

Edward Lazarus's column on Findlaw this week discusses the constraints Chief Justice Roberts and Judge Alito have placed on their behavior on the Supreme Court by their Judiciary Committee testimony. Specifically, Lazarus argues that should Roberts and Alito turn out to be more doctrinaire than the moderate conservatism displayed in the hearings, the consequences would be "longstanding and grave." (Lazarus does not elaborate on the nature of those consequences, which could range from possible impeachment, to restrictions on the Court's power by legislation, to a loss of confidence among members of the public, to demands for even more specific promises from future nominees, etc.)

I am not confident that Lazarus is correct as a general matter, though he may be as to his principal example -- voting to overturn what is left of Roe v. Wade. I see little evidence, for example, that Justice Ginsburg is suffering any ill effects from Congress though she has done little on the Court to justify her image in 1993 as a "moderate liberal." Similarly, though all nominees routinely profess to understand that the law is more than their personal policy preferences, once on the Court they routinely break that promise. (As Justice Scalia said in a related context, campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment. See Republican Party v. White, 536 U.S. 765 (2002).)

If I am correct, there could be at least three reasons there are few repurcussions thus far for reneging on Judiciary Committee commitments. First, Republicans may lack the guts to use ideology in the way that Senate Democrats do. We'll see whether this is true the next time a Democratic President nominates a potential Justice, but the Republicans' acceptance of Ginsburg indicates it might be true. Second, a determined minority can prevent Congress from taking just about any official action, so even opposition to a Court decision can be expected to result in no action so long as at least one committee in one house supports the Court's decision. And of course impeachment is practically impossible. Third is the most obvious: Because the statements nominees make are so general, no behavior could constitute breaking that "promise."

Posted by Mike_Dimino at 06:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

NYT Profiles A3G

In the New York Times today, there's an interesting profile of David Lat (aka A3G), the author of the blog Underneath Their Robes and soon-to-be author of the popular political gossip blog Wonkette. Some highlights include the reaction of the U.S. Attorney's office where Lat worked when he revea