« February 12, 2006 - February 18, 2006 | Main | February 26, 2006 - March 04, 2006 »

Starbucks' Secret Menu

Everyone has a different perspective on Starbucks. In a place like San Francisco, with a strong independent cafe culture, it's seen as Corporate Joe. In Birmingham, though, Starbucks helped balloon the city's tiny pre-existing cafe community. Enough cultural commentary. My main goal with this post is to alert interested Starbucks consumers to a few attractive menu items that have inexplicably been left off the menu. (I speak primarily for the Birmingham stores, but in my experience these items are generally available nationally.)

For for the frugal and/or low intenisty addict: the Short coffee. It's served in the same cup as the kid's hot chocolate. And you always thought that it was nonsensical that Starbuck's small was called tall. It isn't; they just don't want to explain matters to you.

For cafe au lait lovers: the Misto. Cafe au lait fans will love the Misto because, well, it is a cafe au lait. Half cup of coffee, topped with steamed milk. Ask for it extra foamy.

For people who have strong coffee preferences: the French Press. They don't tell you this, but for 3 or 4 bucks, they'll serve you up a french press made of any coffee in stock. So when the coffee of the day is House, and you just gotta have Sumatra...it's your choice. And you'll have enough to share with a friend.

Take control of your Starbucks experience. Order off menu.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 09:53 PM | Comments (56) | TrackBack

John Paul Stevens In Picture And Song

If you haven't heard this Air America spoof of Hang on Sloopy - retitled Hang on Stevens - it's worth a click. I can't imagine that Stevens, a Republican (OK, a Hyde Park Republican, but still...) would have predicted this fate 30 years ago.

And if you haven't yet seen this wonderful childhood photo of the Justice at his dad's hotel (known, eponymously, as The Stevens, but since transformed first into the Conrad Hilton, and later the Hilton Chicago, and shown at right) take a look. According to this article, he's the kid on the left.

UPDATE: It seems that you can't create a permanent link to the photo. To see an enlarged version go here and search keywords for "Stevens Hotel Two Boys". The photo is entitled "two young boys playing a games, sitting at a small table in a playroom at the Stevens Hotel." But the picture actually has three boys, and the aformentioned descriptive sentence actually has a grammatical error.

UPDATE 2: I've altered the pictures so that everyone can now see both the kid-pic and the hotel.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 01:32 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Government Issue Porn

It's no surprise that the Attorney General is turning up the heat on pornography. (Christine started us talking about DOJ recordkeeping rules last week, and the Google issue bubbled up a few weeks before.) Porn is an anathema to the GOP's base, and with few supporters (other than those card carriers over at the ACLU and the 34 million (soon to be 40 million) anonymous consumers hunkered down behind their monitors), such attacks are an easy way to satisfy social conservatives. Perhaps Alberto Gonzalez will take the same approach as Reagan's AG, Edwin Meese: preparation of a Porn Report. The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography Final Report (available, at least in part, here) was more than a condemnation of pornography; it was a complete reference volume on the field. History, law, a feminist critique of objectification - everything was there in one intimidating tome. To prove that world was filled with truly porny porn, the Commission produced serious evidence: loads of material extracted from genuine dirty books and magazines. This was one racy government document; I can only imagine the lines at those designated library repositories. Sales must also have been solid. Just as happened with The Starr Report, a commercial publisher stepped in and republished the fat government document. (The flashy book cover, to the right, is the reprint.)

The moment is ripe for a new update - Porn 2K, perhaps - but times and technology have changed a great deal in the interim. Nowadays, a report need not take the form of a paper book that gathers dust in the Government Document Collection. Like many government publications, it can be distributed on the web - complete with hypertext links to sources. Imagine the manifold ways that a Gonzalez Report might show the nature and extent of pornography in America. If the Meese Report soldiered through, making its case through the use of dry text, a new hi-tech report could provide readers with link after link to graphic, vulgar, offensive, genuinely nasty smut. And the nature of this smut has changed! Pornography, like everything else, has gone the way of the celebrity. So what atrocities might be exposed in this report?

Why not link readers to a Paris Hilton amateur sex video, a honeymoon sex tape from Survivor Jenna Lewis, or that aging chestnut, When Pamela Anderson Meets Tommy Lee? Then there are celebs-in-the-buff. The Report will need to connect interested citizens to the many celebrity websites, featuring Jennifer Aniston Nude! Angelina Jolie Nude! Scarlett Johansson Nude! ... well, you get the idea. Not all famous women have been caught in that primal state, but that doesn't slake consumer interest. The report may then have to direct concerned readers to shady sites featuring fake nudes, where a famous woman's head has been attached to a random (but robust) figure. These websites might be the biggest problem of all. Can their owners produce an ID proving that the torso floating below the starlet's fetching face is really 18? Millions of Americans will want to know.

Perhaps the Commission could hire Stephen Bates, a primary author of the Starr Report who previously wrote for Playboy. After all, we'd certainly expect that the millions of people downloading such a timely study would be reading it for the articles!

Posted by Dan_Filler at 12:01 AM | TrackBack

The end is near, and so I face my final curtain

Many thanks to the regular crew at CO, particularly Dan and Dave, for inviting me to comment this past month. I have had a wonderful time and look forward to returning. Thanks also to the many readers who have taken the time to contact me, comment on my posts, or simply to read them. It is wonderful to be part of the electronic community of legal scholars, students, and the interested public, and I am indebted to those who asked me to take a role. Best wishes, and please continue to call and e-mail.

Mike

Posted by Mike_Dimino at 04:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hallucinogenic Tea with Chief Justice Roberts

Earlier, I posted on the interesting position taken by the new Chief Justice on the Gonzalez v. Oregon case, which involved the Controlled Substances Act. There, he joined Justices Scalia and Thomas in a reading of the federal law that would have effectively ended Oregon's experiment with physician assisted suicide. Now, in Gonzalez v. O Centro Espirit a Beneficente Uniao Do Vegetal, he authors a major opinion reading the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) narrowly to allow a church to import hallucinogenic tea. What gives?

In the Oregon case, the majority rejected a broad reading of the CSA so that it was compatible with Oregon's Death With Dignity Act. I call this technique of reading statutes narrowly to permit subnational disagreement "interstitial empowerment." By contrast, in the hallucinogenic tea case, he brushed aside the argument that Congress' mention of peyote was meant to be exclusive--therefore licensing judicial creativity in spelling out future exemptions to the CSA based on religious-observance grounds. Justice Roberts devastates the federal goverment's arguments about the need for uniform federal law: "it echoes the classic rejoinder of bureaucrats throughout history: If I make an exception for you, I'll have to make one for everybody, so no exceptions."

So, why was Justice Roberts unwilling to interstitially empower ailing individuals but adamant about doing so on behalf of this church? Why a stickler about uniformity in one case, only to poo-poo it in the next one?

One explanation is that he's more morally comfortable with a religious group's rather unconventional practices involving drugs than he is with sick people killing themselves with drugs. In other words, he is outcome-determinative because of his moral upbringing. This would be the take of the critical legal scholar or perhaps the attitudinal approach popular in one wing of political science. There is some basis for this account: he signs Scalia's dissent in Gonzalez in which Scalia goes out of his way to reaffirm the national government's power to cultivate national moral standards. Still, I haven't seen enough to say that his person religious views are driving his interpretive decisions.

Another possibility is that he sees an individual right more clearly and directly at stake here--namely free exercise, well established in the case law if disfigured by decisions like Employment Div. v. Smith (ironically, another Oregon case), whereas there is no right to die except in a hypothetical extreme case. That is to say, his conception of rights tips the balance of interests. And yet Roberts seems more interested in rights than in powers.

The third possibility, and I think the most plausible one, is that he's a nationalist through-and-through (and only a part-time supporter of state's rights if it doesn't implicate broad notions of federal power). The enactment of RFRA makes all the difference in the world, and he's willing to narrow the CSA by reading the two synthetically in ways that favor RFRA rather than the CSA. Where others see a certain amount of confusion in federal law as a result, he sees elegance. When, however, the state seeks a close reading of federal law, it pushes his nationalist button hard: he sees disarray, diffusion of federal interests, and a general nightmare.

There is some dovetail with explanation two: to the extent that no federal right to suicide exists, the strong federal interest weighed in favor of the U.S. position in that case; to the extent that religious exercise is a federal interest, the First Amendment plus RFRA equals two federal interests. And, of course, since every judge is a product of his environment, one would expect that he would appreciate federal interests more viscerally given his career.

One nagging difficulty with this account is that as the Oregon case was finally framed, it should have appealed to Roberts' nationalist impulses: the majority saw a separation of powers issue of grave importance if the Attorney General could, with a stroke of the pen, rewrite federal law. Yet he would not budge. My best rough explanation is this: with Roberts, national interests beat state interests, and among federal interests, executive prerogative beats congressional oversight. Lawyers should frame their arguments accordingly.

This is where being a non-originalist is a mixed bag, since there is significant historical support for the idea that the rights created by the states were meant to be respected. The good news is that on those rare occasions when Congress is so moved that it acts to extend liberty via federal statute, the new Chief may be sympathetic to that exercise of sovereignty (it's too early to say for sure, but this may be a positive sign for the future of federal civil rights statutes). The bad news is that when state or local governments act to extend notions of liberty, he may be less inclined to engage in sophisticated analysis to empower them.

Posted by Robert_Tsai at 01:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

When Punishment Breeds Crime

The NY Times has an important article today about the extent to which ex-offenders are burdened by court costs. There have been some further comments on the issue here. I know what many folks will say: criminal offenders, not society, should pick up the secondary costs of their behavior. Clearly, it is appropriate for people who have money to pay for court costs and perhaps even the cost of incarceration. But most people who commit crimes are poor. So while justice may demand offenders to pay, common sense requires that courts be very careful in assesssing such charges.

There are at least two reasons why indigent offenders should be assessed minimal, if any, costs. First, as a practical matter, these individuals will take a very long time to pay up. In many cases, this means that they will remain on probation - with all the associated administrative costs - for longer than the sentence otherwise demands. (Probation often remains open until all costs are paid, irrespective of the underlying sentence.) Aggressive judges actually incarcerate offenders for non-payment when they find (sometimes incorrectly) that the offender had money but simply didn't share it with the courts. Incarceration is incredibly pricey. It's a reasonable expense to stop serious crime, but excessive when the only "crime" is a failure to contribute $100 to the public fisc.

A second problem with these fees, even for those who can marginally afford them, is that they can tip poor offenders over the brink. Among the poor, criminal convictions and incarceration create very dark economic futures. There has been some important literature showing that incarceration - and particularly the poverty that follows when offenders leave jail - damages offender communities and leads to further crimes spikes. This in turn leads to more incarceration. Ex-offenders are already saddled with a large bundle of economic and social sanctions, often termed collateral punishment or civil disabilities. They have trouble getting jobs, housing, licenses, and other things essential to earning a living. Earning a living, in turn, is typically a precondition for staying out of trouble. To the degree that these fees make economic survival more difficult, they are counterproductive: they produce crime.

This is not a bleeding heart versus tough love issue. It is a matter of pragmatism. Bernie Ebbers should share the costs of his trial and punishment if he has some cash lying about. But while there may be moral arguments for dunning the average John Doe, practical considerations suggest we shouldn't.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 01:16 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Straw Men In Advertising

I recently noticed that Rite Aid's prescription bag sports the following headline: "One in two women dies from heart disease. One drugstore is taking a stand." What is Rite Aid suggesting? Have CVS, Walgreens and Osco gone soft on heart disease? Do they condone the illness? It reminds me a bit of Outback's flummoxing motto: "No Rules, Just Right." Just what are the regulatory structures handcuffing the eager steak lover? What does a fellow have to do to get a Porterhouse over at Ruth's Chris?

I'm waiting to see what straw men will be identified next. Will Southwest Airlines boast that their cargo holds are mold-free? Will we learn that Crest does not cause teeth to turn indigo? It's time to have a talk with the marketing folks here at Alabama Law. I'm going to suggest that we stand up against irrational jury verdicts. Take that, Harvard!

Posted by Dan_Filler at 12:11 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Law Clerk Disqualification

There has been some to-do about this story concerning one of Justice Alito's soon-to-be clerks. In brief, the article quotes some academics who have a problem with the selection of Mr. Ciongoli, who is a former clerk of then-Judge Alito and a former aid to then-Attorney General Ashcroft. The article reports that Ciongoli had a hand in creating "the Bush administration's legal strategy after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks." As a result, some academics (Deborah Rhode is cited) question whether it is proper to have clerks who are perceived as "partisan" or who may be able to influence the way "his own work" is judged by the Court.

Stephen Gillers is quoted as saying that Ciongoli will likely be removed from working on cases that touch on his prior experience, as a way of mitigating the latter fear. I suspect that is in fact what will occur, but I don't know that it should, or that if Alito were to ask for Ciongoli's opinion he would be doing anything the least bit wrong. Is it unethical, for example, for a judge to ask for a clerk's opinion on a case that was decided the prior year by the court on which the clerk was then working? Obviously the current practice (though not always the historical one) is for judges to recuse when they have participated on a case. (There have been many examples of Supreme Court Justices participating in cases interpreting laws they had a hand in drafting or implementing before assuming the Bench.) But isn't the situation different when the only prior involvement is that of a clerk, and the judge would be able to evaluate his advice with a grain of salt?

I know of no statutory restrictions on the ability of clerks to participate in cases because of their prior experience. There is the danger of undue influence, but I think it is minimal, since (1) clerks see it as their job to advise their judges and not to deceive them or push for policy results, (2) judges retain the final decision, and (3) the chance that a judge's opinion will be significantly different from his clerk's is very small, at least as to an issue for which the clerk has developed a reputation.

I can see a large upside to allowing these clerks to participate in cases with which they are familiar. First, it eliminates a large amount of time that would be spent in gaining background information. Second, it is an inestimable advantage to have a clerk who has substantive experience in the field implicated by a particular case. Decisions are more likely to be correct and anticipate potential unintended consequences if the judge has the advice of someone who knows the field. Third, the prior experience is likely to alert the clerk to potential counter-arguments, so the involvement of the clerk may be as likely to fully inform the judge as to bias his understanding of the case.

All this is different, of course, from the situation where a clerk participates in a decision that may have an effect on the clerk's future employment, for example if the clerk's future firm is representing a party in the Court. If anything the problem is more severe in that circumstance, but there (to my knowledge) the involvement of the clerk is left completely within the judge's discretion.

Posted by Mike_Dimino at 10:39 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Take Your Case to the Supreme Court and Get a Website

So you're one of the lucky few, whose case has made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, your odds of getting your case to the Supreme Court are no better than winning Powerball these days. Your next step: create a website. You can parlay your luck at getting chosen by the Supreme Court and become a legal celebrity.

Over at the VC, Orin Kerr is collecting information about the websites of litigants in famous cases.

Here's Dudley Hiibel's website. Hiibel was the center of attention in Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, 124 S. Ct. 2451 (2004), where the Supreme Court upheld a statute requiring people to identify themselves during a stop. You can check out pictures of Hiibel and his attorneys. And you can even watch a video of the stop that gave rise to his case.

Here's Danny Kyllo's website. Kyllo was the defendant in Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), where the Supreme Court held that the police needed a search warrant in order to use a thermal sensor device to detect heat patterns in people's homes. At the website, you can see pictures of Danny Kyllo's house. You can even buy Kyllo's "just say no to thermal imaging" T-shirt.

Go to Orin's post and check out the comments for more websites.

[The picture above on left is Hiibel and the one on the right is Kyllo.]

Posted by Daniel Solove at 05:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Execution By Overdose

California is set to exceute Michael Morales tonight via a lethal overdose of barbiturates. This is hardly the glamorous end that most state legislatures have designed for convicted murderers. In years past, societies used corporal punishment - beatings, whippings, and the like - in response to crime. With the exception of the death penalty, American society has abandoned physical punishment, trading it in for incarceration. In the last century, we've struggled to figure out how to square the act of killing with this rejection of corporal punishment. We've often veered toward technological solutions, presumably because they appear less brutal - less like the destruction of a human body. Unfortunately, gas chambers echoed the tactics of Nazi Germany. Electric chairs just didn't work that well and the explicit pain accompanying death gave lie to our claim that we no longer punish the body. Finally, we moved to lethal injection which fit in with the modern scientific obsession of the age: medicine. Lethal injection looked very advanced, using a three step process of anesthetic, paralytic agent, and heart stopper. It was supposed to be painless, closer to shutting down a machine than killing a person. In practice, however, this sophisticated medical treatment plan was not quite so antisceptic. Like all medicine, sometimes it worked poorly. Sometimes people regained consciousness in the middle of the process and suffered.

Last night, Morales was supposed to be executed by lethal injection. Judge Jeremy Fogel, concerned about the potential cruelty of this approach, required that the state have an anesthesiologist on hand to insure that Morales never regained consciousness. The appointed physicians rebelled, however, and would not assist in the execution. So California has chosen to overdose Morales on barbiturates. There is something very mundane about execution by overdose, in part perhaps because it is so simple that a person could do it himself. And indeed they do, every day. Society has grand hopes for the death penalty. We hope it will dramatically decrease murder rates. We think that it will provide a just response to a horrible crime. We feel it will make the victims, and indeed society at large, whole again. Compared to these grand designs, death by overdose seems very sad and small. Notwithstanding the national drama, Morales will die just like hundreds of other addicts around the country. I hope it gives the victim's family some peace.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 04:45 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Career Consequences of a Notorious Reputation

The Wall Street Journal today had an article about the now famous email exchange I blogged about a few days ago where Dianna Abdala, a recent law school graduate turned down a job offer from an attorney, William Korman. The article discusses the fact that in some circumstances, people who are getting notorious reputations for being particularly rude or inappropriate aren't suffering any career damage:

We all know what happens when someone commits a particularly embarrassing gaffe in a private email conversation: The message gets forwarded, with each recipient instructing the next to "read from the bottom up." Indeed, this testy exchange skipped off servers as far away as China with a subject line attesting to its journey: "Subject: Fwd: FW: FW: Lawyers Behaving Badly." People also added comments, such as "Great lesson here… on email and how to ruin your career."

But not so fast. Certainly one could turn this into cautionary tale No. 1,346 about what not to commit to private email. But if you haven't learned that lesson yet, you haven't been paying attention -- or, more likely, you don't care that much. "I'm more worried about whether I've left my hair iron on than this little email exchange," [the law school graduate] told me over the phone.

These days, résumé building can be less about preserving a reputation than about acquiring one in the first place. Just ask Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the "Apprentice" contestant who famously said, "I'm going to crush my competition, and I'm going to enjoy doing it." She has parlayed her backstabbing into a television career and speaking engagements. "Who knew that being soo bad could be soo good$$!!," the show's Web site quotes her as saying.

"I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that this kind of behavior is naturally rewarded," cautions Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "But it does lead to success in some realms." And those realms can include the legal profession, sales teams, trading floors, entrepreneurial endeavors -- in other words, the corners of the business world where unmitigated gall can be more marketable than galling. "This could be great for [her] career if you think about it," he says.

Is having one's "unmitigated gall" displayed for the world to see a good thing? I sure hope not. While I certainly don't like to see people live life with a scarlet letter, I don't think they ought to be rewarded for being rude.

Of course, not all notorious reputations should be viewed as problematic. In my blog post, I mentioned perhaps the most famous email from the legal world to circulate throughout cyberspace -- that of the Skadden Arps summer associate. He wrote:

Congrats on the CFA. I'm sure you're about to make VP any day now.

I'm busy doing jack shit. Went to a nice 2hr sushi lunch today at Sushi Zen. Nice place. Spent the rest of the day typing emails and bullshitting with people. Unfortunately, I actually have work to do — I'm on some corp finance deal, under the global head of corp finance, which means I should really peruse these materials and not be a fuckup...

So yeah, Corporate Love hasn't worn off yet... But just give me time..

That email was followed by this one:

I am writing you in regard to an e-mail you received from me earlier today. As I am aware that you opened the message, you probably saw that it was a personal communication that was inadvertently forwarded to the underwriting mailing list. Before it was retracted, it was received by approximately 40 people inside the Firm, about half of whom are partners.

I am thorougly and utterly ashamed and embarassed not only by my behavior, but by the implicit reflection such behavior could have on the Firm. . . .

Although I cannot change what you and the other recipients saw, I do reiterate my sincerest apologies. I do and will take full responsibility for my actions in this incident, and I will do everything I possibly can to correct my mistakes and, more importantly, ensure that this and things like it will not happen again.

The summer associate's email has never struck me as particularly problematic -- just humorous. The summer associate was just talking to a friend and accidentally emailed others in the firm. He was also speaking a bit of truth as well, since summer associate positions are often rather cushy jobs. The law firms are trying to recruit attorneys, so they create a summer experience full of fun and frolic. Then, when one goes there permanently, they work 24/7 and pay back for the summer in spades.

The WSJ article has an epilogue to the story:

Despite that episode, [the summer associate] got a full-time position at Skadden and still works there today, though he is less publicly communicative than before: "I really can't comment on it in any way," he said last week. Added Carol Sprague, director of attorney hiring at Skadden: "He recognized that he had made a mistake and then really worked hard all summer and proved that he was an intelligent, hard-working person."

I'm happy for the Skadden associate. It is nice to know that Skadden was thoughtful enough to still hire him, even after the debacle. He'll never live it down, of course, as he's become part of the annals of law firm lore. But it is nice to know that he didn't suffer severe career consequences. And I'm sure he's no longer having long sushi lunches and doing "jack shit."

Posted by Daniel Solove at 12:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Law Review Article Submissions Outside the "Windows"

For law professors submitting law review articles, it has become common knowledge that there are two good times to submit -- in late February/early March when new law review editors are selected (the "March window") or in late August when law review editors return from their summer vacation (the "August window"). There has been a lot of discussion about when, precisely, the sweetest spot in a particular window is, but I want to raise a different question in this post. What are the merits of submitting pieces outside of the two windows?

I assume that submitting a piece in the mid-to-late fall wouldn't be wise, as most journals are nearly full. On the other hand, suppose a top journal has been particularly picky and is left with an open slot or two. Submissions have largely dried up, and then your piece comes in. The editors might think: "Well, it ain't great, but we're not likely to get anything much better at this late juncture, and we need to fill the space, so . . . ." If this is true, then submissions beyond the fall window are a risky gamble, but they could pay off big.

What about submissions during the summer? Suppose one were to send in a piece in late April, or May, or (gasp!) even June or July? What would happen? I wonder about this. The optimist thinks: "This is an ideal time. The journal editors are no longer inundated with millions of submissions, so they can take a bit more time to read the piece. They have already seen a bunch of submissions, so their expectations are more realistic (i.e. they expect lower quality). Therefore, it's a good thing to submit when it isn't rush hour for submissions." The pessimist thinks: "This is a terrible time. The editors will be busy with summer jobs and will not want to bother discussing pieces during the summer. Therefore, they will be less likely to suggest a piece for a full committee read during this time." Who is right, the pessimist or the optimist? Is it better to submit during a window or at another time? Does it matter? And is one window better than the other?

Answers from law review editors will be especially appreciated.

Posted by Daniel Solove at 12:01 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Qualitative Empirical Legal Research

A big welcome to the blogosphere for the new Empirical Legal Research Blog. I applaud the empirical move because I think this sort of research adds substantial value to the understanding of how law functions both internally and within society. As I've suggested in a comment over there, however, I do think that many people in the legal academy have come to conflate the idea of empirical work with quantitative work. As people in coordinate social science disciplines well know (because they, unlike most vanilla JD's, have had formal methodological training), the concept of empirical work includes both quantitative and qualitative work. This is not to say that the quantitative and qualitative camps are always so cozy. Number crunchers sometimes think qualitative work is too squishy or subjective. The qualitative folks sometimes think that the use of numbers creates a false aura of objectivity. But many serious empirical scholars - particularly those trained in recent years - understand that both types of work are necessary to further the grand project of increasing human knowledge. I hope the folks over the new blog take qualitative work seriously. I suspect that in the next few years we'll see qualitative researchers gain a stronger footing within the legal academy. At least I hope so.

Posted by Dan_Filler at 06:02 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Light Blogging This Week

I'll be blogging lightly this week, if at all, as I work to finish two projects with near term deadlines. A litte more near term, perhaps, now that I've read Christine's window post.

In the meantime, our readers may be interested to read this new Linda Beale post on Prawfs, and subsequent reader comments, that seem to be grappling with the question: "must blog posts be short and collegial to be good?"

Posted by hoffman at 05:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

ExpressO and the "March Window"

Thanks to everyone for letting me hang out here for a couple of weeks. I've had a great time, but I have to get back to my normally scheduled duties of teaching and blogging at the Glom. This week, I will join the hordes of others who will send out an article for submission. I still call this time of the year the "March Window," even though others have told me the emprical studies show that the actual window is between February 15 and February 24. So, just as I still "dial" telephone numbers and "turn" the TV channels, I guess I still send out in the March Window.

I will also be in good company sending out my article using ExpressO. I experimented with ExpressO in August, like Dan, and submitted to some schools by mail and some electronically. I am a Word Perfect user, and ExpressO's services are much more limited if you submit a paper in Word Perfect. For this short article, I used Word so that I could keep my transaction costs of send-out lower. This way, I'll be able to send out exclusively via ExpressO. I've said before that I don't understand why ExpressO is not based on pdf, like SSRN is. Using pdf seems like an intelligent choice for both senders and receivers; the format protects integrity, and any recipient without Adobe reader can downloand it for free. Oh, well. Probably by next January, when I'm sending out in the August window, the system will have changed!

Posted by Christine_Hurt at 10:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

More on the Democrats and a Contract with America

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post arguing that the Democrats should create a Contract with America. In today's Washington Post, an interesting article explores why the Democrats have no version of Newt Gingrich:

Where is the Democrats' Gang of Seven? Why isn't some spirited group of junior House Democrats capturing the public's imagination and sinking its teeth into the spreading Jack Abramoff mess? And where is the Democratic equivalent of Gingrich?

In Congress, reform often comes from the back bench. Junior members have the least to lose and the shortest -- and thus usually the cleanest -- records. These unlikely agents of change are often change's biggest beneficiaries. . . .

And yet, after languishing in the minority for more than a decade, the Democrats' back bench has yet to produce a Gang of Seven or an insurgent leader such as Gingrich, who inspired dozens of GOP House candidates in 1994. Most of the Democrats elected since the Republicans took over in 1994 simply replaced other Democrats. Moreover, none was really elected on a message of bringing "change" to Congress.

Posted by Daniel Solove at 12:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack