Archive for August, 2007
Modern Work
posted by Frank Pasquale
I recommend the Stanford podcast “Doing Good Work” (available on iTunes) for anyone thinking about work/life balance. Joanne B. Ciulla, author of The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, gave a particularly polished presentation. She questioned the gap between “forced leisure” for many at the bottom of the income scale and nonstop work for some at the top. Francis Green’s Demanding Work: The Paradox of Job Quality in the Affluent Economy documents some of these trends:
In most affluent countries average pay levels have risen along with economic growth, a major exception being the United States. Skill requirements have increased, potentially meaning a more fulfilling time at work. Set against these beneficial trends, however, are increases in inequality, a strong intensification of work effort, diminished job satisfaction, and less employee influence over daily work tasks.
Ciulla doubts that modern employers can do much to improve employee loyalty, at least among cynical GenX’ers and GenY’ers. She questions efforts to develop a “civil society” of affinity groups within the workplace, claiming that in today’s economic climate workers should be focusing on cultivating professional contacts outside their firm who can provide job leads when the almost inevitable “downsizing” or “reorg” arrives. She claims that the most important part of work life remains the maintenance of mutual respect–a theme Richard Sennett develops gracefully in his Respect in a World of Inequality.
August 26, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Posted in: Law Practice
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Firm Decides To Put Billable Hours On Hold
posted by Deven Desai
The cry that the billable hour is dead or makes little sense seems to go up every year with little action taken, but Ford & Harrison, a good-sized firm in Atlanta, has taken the idea to heart and decided to suspend its minimum billable hour requirement for first year associates. The firm claims that first year associates will have more time to train without worrying about whether they meet the billable minimums. As such they will be able “to spend their time observing depositions and witness interviews and attending hearings and litigation strategy meetings.” If it works, the idea should keep clients happy as well (a stated goal of the program). The firm pays $125,000 for incoming associates which is less than the $160,000 large firms in larger markets pay. Still I wonder whether a large firm could emulate the model to its advantage. Of course the cost of law school and living costs in a large city matter, but I wonder whether a first year would take the lower pay if it meant less billable hours and more training.
Now, before law students get excited by the idea of less work, consider that the amount of work could be the same or even increase. The key difference is the quality of the work may improve. After all those who end up on a year-long document review could bill eight to ten hours a day, be paid well, and have less stress. In contrast, the model Ford & Harrison is using is based on medical training. Those folks are paid much less, work quite hard, and then are rewarded with more of the same if they want to specialize. I think the analog to medicine has flaws (for one thing patient and client management do not map onto to each other all that well). Nonetheless, the idea that one could have a slightly more sane life, enjoy the job, and not worry that the learning and training one must have in the first year—if not years—of practice were somehow counterproductive, is a great one. Hopefully, Ford & Harrison will lead the way. It’s an idea to watch.
August 26, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Posted in: Uncategorized
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The Inequality/Insecurity-Industrial Complex
posted by Frank Pasquale
If you want to see a film where lawyers are unabashedly portrayed as “the heros,” the free-wheeling documentary Manda Bala would be a great choice. Brazilian AG Claudio Fonteles and other attorneys pursue a corrupt politician for years. I won’t spoil the ending, but rather focus on how the film’s other main theme–the kidnapping crisis in Sao Paulo–challenges the idea that lawyers drag down the economy by redistributing (rather than creating) wealth.
Sao Paulo’s population of 20 million is a study in extremes. Millions lack basic infrastructure, but there is more money concentrated there than the rest of Latin America combined. Recalling Lang’s Metropolis, the upper class lives in high-rises and country houses, maintaining a massive fleet of helicopters to avoid the favelas and traffic below. The helicopters aren’t merely a convenience: an epidemic of kidnapping has made driving (even in bulletproof cars) extremely dangerous. The movie draws an uncomfortable parallel between the politicians who siphon off state funds designated for the poor northern provinces, and the kidnappers who demand ransom from wealthy urbanites: “One steals with the pen, the other with the gun.”
August 26, 2007 at 7:41 am
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Lat-itude for Fair Use?
posted by Frank Pasquale
By now the Nixon-Peabody theme song is all over the blogosphere. Denise Howell chronicles the epic here; to abridge:
1. Law firm commissions song.
2. Song is silly (think “Up With People” meets Sheena Easton meets B of A’s version of U2′s One).
3. Song is leaked on YouTube.
4. Dave Lat of ATL mocks it.
5. YouTube blocks it.
6. Lat hosts it on his own site.
As a legal matter, Lat’s defiance is interesting because it highlights a key weakness in the legal regime designed to immunize ISPs (and intermediaries like YouTube). It’s easy for any copyright owner to bluff YouTube into taking down a video of IP it claims to own–even if the video is clearly fair use. That’s one reason why Professor Malla Pollack wrote what has to be one of the best-titled articles of the year: “Rebalancing Section 512 to Protect Fair Users from Herds of Mice-Trampling Elephants, or a Little Due Process Is Not Such a Dangerous Thing.” (PS: Don’t miss Pollack’s exceptional work on the First Amendment, either!)
Of course, given industry capture of the Copyright Office and the relevant committees on Capitol Hill, it’s not likely you’ll see reforms like Pollack’s adopted anytime soon. In the meantime, someone like Lat might be characterized as a fair use enabler. I don’t know if he’d win a fair use claim in court, because even though he commented humorously and incisively on the song in question, a skeptical court might respond that he didn’t need to put the whole song up in order to do so. However, he may well have provided the raw material necessary for anyone to make an unmistakably fair use of the material. The song almost certainly would not have been licensed by Nixon Peabody–so where could they turn but the blawgosphere’s Walter Winchell?)
Dan Burk and Julie Cohen realized long ago that a “fair use infrastructure” would be needed as law & technology enhance owners’ control over works. It looks like bloggers, instead of government, will be the ones providing it.
August 25, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Posted in: Intellectual Property
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AltLaw
posted by Daniel Solove
A terrific new free legal research tool has just been released — AltLaw:
AltLaw is a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School. AltLaw was written by Stuart Sierra and Paul Ohm, with help from Luis Villa, and produced by Tim Wu.
AltLaw allows you to search the past 10 years of federal appellate and Supreme Court decisions with advanced search capabilities, such as Boolean searching, proximity searching, and the use of wildcards.
The site describes the purpose of the project:
The law is meant to belong to the people, but it can be surprisingly hard to find. Case reports, a major part of the laws of the United States, are hard to get at, and even when on the Internet, rarely searchable. To get full access you generally need either a library of law reports, or an expensive subscription to an online database, which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.
AltLaw is a small effort to change that—to make the common law a bit more common. AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports. It is a resource for attorneys, legal scholars, and the general public.
Check out AltLaw — it’s quite nifty. I hope it continues to grow. Right now, it doesn’t have district court opinions or state court opinions, but perhaps one day soon it will.
August 25, 2007 at 10:52 am
Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)
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The Problems With Terrorist Watch Lists
posted by Daniel Solove
From the Washington Post:
The government’s terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list’s effectiveness.
A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a “substantial bearing on homeland security,” though officials would not be more specific.
There are so many problems with the list, it’s difficult to know where to begin. First is the lack of transparency:
Few specifics are known about how the system operates, how many people are detained or turned back from borders, or the criteria used to identify suspects. The government will not discuss cases, nor will it confirm whether an individual’s name is on its list.
The second problem is that it is unclear what the purpose of the lists are. According to the Post:
The government says the database is a powerful tool for identifying and tracking suspected terrorists and for sharing intelligence, and that its purpose is not necessarily to make arrests. But the new details about the numbers, disclosed in an FBI budget document and in interviews, raise questions about the database’s effectiveness and its impact on privacy, critics said. They argued that the number of hits relative to arrests was alarmingly high and indicated that the threshold for including someone on a watch list was too low, potentially violating thousands of Americans’ civil liberties when they are stopped.
If the purpose isn’t to identify terrorists to arrest them, then what’s the point? The Post quotes an FBI official as saying:
“A lot of times it’s not to our advantage to make an arrest,” FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said. “We don’t want the subject to know what we know. It doesn’t mean we’re not paying attention. On the contrary, it shows that we’re being very proactive in trying to identify threats.”
So the point is to make some kind of a statement to the suspect, as in something like: “We think you’re up to no good, so let’s detain you a little bit each time you fly or cross the border. We won’t tell you precisely what we know, but we know you’re up to no good. So there!”
The article tells the story about a man who is continually detained:
August 25, 2007 at 10:06 am
Posted in: Privacy (National Security)
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How To Generate Nonsense Controversy
posted by Deven Desai
Dan’s post about Four Books A Year noted a recent poll about U.S. reading habits. One may question the survey and ask what about other reading material that may fill any alleged gap, but the attempt to turn the poll into a statement about whether one party is somehow deeper than the other is foolish. Unfortunately Pat Schroeder has tried to do just that by blaming Karl Rove for focusing on simple slogans and claiming that liberals “can’t say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion.” As Dwight Garner put it “Tony Fratto, more or less knocked that one out of the park: ‘Obfuscation usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I’m not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals.’” Furthermore, it is not as if Democrats have avoided a good slogan (remember “It’s the economy, stupid.”?) It is just that the Republicans have been better at using them. There may be a host of reasons for that of late but to say that conservatives don’t read is silly or that reading somehow prevents myopic arguments is silly. Just go to San Francisco and you will see what I mean. I love the Bay Area, but honestly reading does not cure foolishness. Indeed reading does not cure folly for either side of political spectrum. As the movie A Fish Called Wanda put it:
Wanda …you think you’re an intellectual, don’t you, ape?
Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don’t understand it.
Now there is something to the idea that the Republicans have been better at framing the debate. The recent excitement for Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate–The Essential Guide for Progressives (Lakoff is O.K. but not as interesting as Richard Lanham or anything Kenneth Burke has written. For that matter take a look at James Boyd White’s work especially When Word’s Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community) and the writings of James Carville have tried to offer better ways for Democrats to use language to their advantage. Ironically (and somewhat painfully), Ms. Schroeder missed that part of the literature and went for an inaccessible metaphor (or perhaps worse one that resonates only with a small chunk of true believers). To illustrate this idea consider the work of Frank Lutz of whom Al Franken wrote “Language is like music. Unfortunately, the Republicans have a Paul McCartney and we Democrats got stuck with Yoko Ono.”
August 25, 2007 at 2:02 am
Posted in: Uncategorized
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The Chicken and the Eagle
posted by Nate Oman
Do free-marketeers need their own judicial pantheon? In a recent forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, argued that conservatives and libertarians ought to induct Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States into such a pantheon. She gave the example of Gideon’s Trumpet, Anthony Lewis’s account of the lone and unrepresented prisoner who fought his case to the Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright and won the right to a lawyer. This story, she argued, has provided a central emotional text for many a liberal lawyer. Schechter ought to be the same thing for libertarians and conservatives.
I learned my con law in the hallowed halls of establishment liberalism where Frankfurter once walked and where Tribe taught us the traditional story of Schechter. This was the case where the final retrograde forces of Lochner-ism struck down the New Deal in the name of nineteenth-century notions of commerce and non-delegation. Tribe, being a very smart and thoughtful doctrinalist, gave us a more nuanced account of the case than one might expect from an institution whose identity is tied up in sacred myths of the New Deal braintrusters, but I don’t recall that we were invited to feel any sense of relief or triumph over the decline of the National Recovery Administration. (One could contrast this to Tribe’s eloquent and moving indictment of the system of segregation struck down in Brown.)
August 23, 2007 at 11:29 am
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Politics
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Beware the Teenie Weenie: Social Norms and Expressive Culture
posted by Neil Richards
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about intellectual freedom lately, as part of a project on the overlap between intellectual privacy rules and First Amendment values. I’ve also come across some pretty weird stuff, like this story from the German media about a children’s book deal that fell through. A famous German children’s book author was trying to get a book deal to publish a translated version of her illustrated children’s book in the US. Unfortunately, the deal didn’t happen after an irreconcilable disagreement arose over a picture appearing in a museum scene in the book. As the article puts it rather cheekily:
What could possibly have got the suits at [the publisher] so hot under the overly starched collar? A painting depicting a gratuitous Roman orgy being viewed by wide-eyed 5-year olds? A massive bronze phallus gawped at by an awestruck group of pre-teens? Hardly. Apart from a tasteful nude reclining in a slightly blurred watercolor in the background, the main offending artifact was a tiny male statue and its microscopic penis.
Apparently, the offending image was less than half a millimeter in size, but the publisher insisted on its removal for fear of a backlash from offended parents.
We could dismiss this as a fairly silly story about the lunacy of the publishing industry, but I think there is a serious issue here. This is not an issue of censorship, because the government is not involved in making the book unavailable. But one of the problems with the way we tend to think about speech, is that we are fixated on the model of legislative rules that get remedied (or not) by judges. If we’re really interested in promoting an expressive culture, we need to look beyond this judicial anti-censorship model.
The teenie weenie case points up the critical role of social norms in helping to define the contours of our expressive culture. Theories of free speech focus a great deal on legal rules even though most people’s decision to speak or not speak on questions is principally mediated by the concern of how others (employers, friends, strangers, book publishers) will act towards us depending upon what we say. The norms of the book publisher in this case meant that this book was not made available for the US market.
What’s the harm with that? Well, the ability to think for ourselves requires access to a wide variety of materials. When books aren’t published because they are offensive, we are deprived of what they offer. This case involves just one book, but the aggregated effect of small decisions like this really determines the intellectual space that our minds inhabit. The social norms which this decision seems to reflect would (if strong enough) push certain notions of art out of children’s literature, and could have an effect on how children come to see the world, the nature of art, and the human body. Publishers of books are in business to make money, but they should also realize (as reporters and librarians frequently do) that they occupy a social institution that has real effects on our expressive culture. Our expressive culture depends on publishers fulfilling their professional role as guardians of free speech as well as profit-maximizers. Wimping out because of possibly imaginary fears of angry parents does us all a disservice, at least if we care more about an open-minded culture than protecting people (even little ones) from the teenie weenie.
August 23, 2007 at 9:44 am
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Culture, First Amendment, Humor, International & Comparative Law, Weird
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The Law and Economics of the Doping Scandals
posted by Dave Hoffman
Peter Singer has written a usefully provocative essay, “Why Not Let Doping Close the Gene Gap,” in which he questions the conventional wisdom on steroids’ moral harmfulness. Singer points out that prohibiting doping puts those with inferior genes at a disadvantage, and that the current line between that which sports leagues prohibit and that which they do not is hard to defend. Thus, why not permit athletes to take drugs, whether or not those drugs harm them.
Singer’s arguments are (as they often are) hard to cabin. If steroids, why not artificial legs, lungs, hands, eyes. Though, if not steroids, why caffeine, IVs, Gatorade, and pickle juice. I was left feeling kind of stuck in a swamp, and so I thought, as I often try to do when confronted by a vexing legal problem, WWPD? What would Posner do?
We could ask him, but he’s a busy guy. So, let’s see if we can gin up a back-of-the-envelope look at the law and economics of sports doping.
August 23, 2007 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Corporate Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Employment Law, Humor
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The Second Concurring Opinions Intern Contest [BUMPED]
posted by Dave Hoffman
This summer, as you may know, we’ve been assisted by our terrific intern, Sam Yospe. Sam has drafted the useful legal news summaries, helped with various empirical projects, labored mightly to improve the census, written a substantive post on juries, and has a few more projects in the pipeline. Overall, I think we all feel that the “experiment” of having a blog intern has been a resounding success. As Sam is leaving us to start law school at GW, we thought we’d try to find a replacement who can (we hope) build on the tradition Sam has begun. Thus, I am pleased to announce the Second Concurring Opinions Intern Contest, or SCOIC for short.
Are you a law student who wants to build your resume, get involved in blogging, and can commit around five hours a week during the coming school year? SCOIC can make your dreams come true. Learn how, after the jump.
August 22, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Posted in: Administrative Announcements
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Is the Fall Law Review Submission Window Moving Earlier?
posted by Daniel Solove
An editor at a top law review emailed me with the following:
From our records, it looks like the submission season started about two weeks earlier this year than last year. We keep a daily log of submission numbers, and the uptic this year was on July 24, with the real flood starting on August 2. Last year the uptic was August 1, and it built up gradually until the big flood starting August 15.
The earlier dates have created a backlog for us. We were not expecting things to move earlier, and most of our committee members have been on vacation since early August and are not returning until school starts. We have about twice as many articles awaiting review now than we did in February when we began our review process. I have received numerous expedite requests that the committee simply cannot handle.
I don’t know if other schools were expecting the earlier submission dates, but I’d be interested to find out whether they were and how they have dealt with it. And I think the early movers are doing quite a disservice to themselves (by being unable to expedite) and to others (who will have to wait until we clear the backlog before their articles are read). If you had asked me over the summer, I would have strongly encouraged authors to wait until at least the week before Labor Day to submit their articles. Now, I’m hoping more of them wait until mid-September.
I’ve generally thought that the fall window began around the third week of August, at the time when law students were returning to school. Is it moving earlier? From the editor’s email, it appears that more professors are submitting in the beginning of August and more law reviews are reviewing and extending offers in early August.
August 22, 2007 at 10:41 am
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Only Four Books a Year
posted by Daniel Solove
Four books a year . . . that’s what the average person reads according to a new survey. From the AP:
One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.
The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.
“I just get sleepy when I read,” said Richard Bustos of Dallas, Texas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.
That choice by Bustos and others is reflected in book sales, which have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.
Some other interesting parts of the article:
August 22, 2007 at 9:17 am
Posted in: Articles and Books
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On Whose Authority?
posted by Deven Desai
Frank’s post, Dead Writer’s Society, at Madisonian about the use of authors’ names as brands well after they are dead is one that strikes close to home for me. I have just submitted my article on the topic, Property, Persona, and Publicity, to law reviews. So if someone wants to dive into issues of ownership and management of digital property and how the right of attribution as a trademark or trademark-like right offers too much power to heirs, take a look. I could go on but there are other posts to note.
So part of Frank’s post and an interesting point about the dead man writer is whether “readers might start caring less about the original author regardless of whether the contracted books are better or worse than the original authors’.” That idea reminded me of Dave’s piece about Wikiscan, and Neil’s post on wikipedia, consensus, and truth. In short, where does authority lie? Is consensus the key? Neil’s idea that facts will sort well but less concrete notions on Wikipedia will always face problems is probably right. Still my friend John Scalzi had a run in with “facts” when he tried to write about a dead writer, Fred Saberhagen. Despite using Harlan Ellison as a source, the update was not allowed. Maybe the wikiscan tool that Dave highlights will allow for more trusted sources and better posts. Yet, I seem to return to Zittrain’s Generative Internet whenever ideas of authority and trusted sources come up. I wonder whether the drive for some ideal, pure version of information or a safe version will push out the open, collective knowledge systems such that the quality of information will go up, but breadth of view will go down. Then again maybe Neil has it right: relatively innocuous facts will survive, but the harder questions may need a different forum.
August 22, 2007 at 4:10 am
Posted in: Intellectual Property
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A Sample Law Review Submission Policy
posted by Daniel Solove
I recently came across the following law review submission policy and was astounded by its candor. Check it out for the real truth behind law review article submissions.
Submissions
We thank you for your interest in submitting to Pulp Law Review. Please read our submissions guidelines carefully.
Pulp Law Review accepts electronic submissions via our online submission system. We require you to put all your documents (CV, cover letter, article) into one file so that it messes up your margins and pagination and makes your life difficult. We do this to ensure that only those who really want to spend the time and aggravation submit to us.
In order to increase your cost and delay your submission, Pulp Law Review will only accept hard copy submissions from ExpressO. We do this because we are a very highly ranked law review, so we can get away with it.
Selection
The Pulp Law Review desires to publish articles of outstanding quality that make meaningful and original contributions to legal scholarship. Because we would not be able to fill our six issues under this standard, we have decided to also accept articles that rehash existing scholarship but that do so with clever framing, articles that sound really profound, or articles that discuss trendy theories (extra points if your article gets these theories right, but we’re unlikely to know if it does).
In considering your article, we use an objective point system for assessing scholarly quality. Articles receiving over 100 points are generally accepted. Here is how it works:
1. Are you from a highly-ranked law school? If yes, add 20.
2. Have you published in highly-ranked law reviews? If yes, add 30.
3. Is your name Cass Sunstein? If yes, accept immediately.
4. Does your article have a nifty title? If yes, add 10.
5. Is the introduction good? If yes, add 40.
6. Do the footnotes need a lot of editing? If yes, subtract 50.
7. Does your article have more than 6 parts? If yes, subtract 10.
8. Do you thank a bunch of big shots in your introductory footnote? If yes, add 10.
9. Is one of our professors personally hand-carrying your article to us along with free coffee and donuts? If yes, add 20.
10. Are you submission #457? If yes, then you’re our lucky lottery winner and your article is accepted on the spot.
Book Reviews
Pulp Law Review welcomes book review submissions. A book review is basically the same as an article; however, it differs in that it that spends a few sentences discussing a book before launching into the author’s thesis.
Submission Length
We firmly believe that the ideal length of a law review article is 0 words. However, we will accept articles of greater length under exceptional circumstances. Under no circumstances will we accept an article in excess of 35,000 words.*
* Except if you’re on our list of big shot authors.
August 22, 2007 at 12:02 am
Posted in: Humor, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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From First Amendment Absolutism to Financial Meltdown?
posted by Frank Pasquale
There is a very interesting post by William Birdthistle on potential rating agency responsibility for the subprime mortgage meltdown contagion. As the WSJ reported,
In 2000, Standard & Poor’s made a decision about an arcane corner of the mortgage market. It said a type of mortgage that involves a “piggyback,” where borrowers simultaneously take out a second loan for the down payment, was no more likely to default than a standard mortgage. While its pronouncement went unnoticed outside the mortgage world, piggybacks soon were part of a movement that transformed America’s home-loan industry: a boom in “subprime” mortgages taken out by buyers with weak credit.
Here come the regulators. Some economists are quick to criticize the ratings agencies:
[T]the real-estate bubble of recent years, like the stock bubble of the late 1990s, both caused and was fed by widespread malfeasance. Rating agencies like Moody’s Investors Service, which get paid a lot of money for rating mortgage-backed securities, seem to have played a similar role to that played by complaisant accountants in the corporate scandals of a few years ago. In the ’90s, accountants certified dubious earning statements; in this decade, rating agencies declared dubious mortgage-backed securities to be highest-quality, AAA assets.
But there’s a big difference between accountants and raters: the latter get first amendment protection for their assessments. Is this a wise extension of the first amendment? It’s a difficult question, but I think the new scandals will lead to increasing calls for regulation, if not liability, of the ratings agencies.
August 22, 2007 at 12:00 am
Posted in: Corporate Law, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Securities
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Law Review Article Submissions Resources (Fall 2007)
posted by Daniel Solove
The fall law review submission window opens in mid-to-late August, so I thought I’d reprise an earlier post with some useful resources for submitting articles.
Article Submission Length Restrictions
Emory Law School’s Library has a very useful chart of article length restrictions at the top 35 law reviews.
The general consensus is that many top law reviews have an article length limit of 35,000 words and a preference for no more than 25,000 words. Virginia Law Review has the strictest policy, with a limit (not just a preference) of under 25,000 words. All the rest have either no upper limit or a 35,000 to 40,000 word limit. As for preferences, the range is between 25,000 to 35,000 words, with most at 25,000.
Law Review Contact Information
1. Emory Law School’s Library maintains contact information, including email addresses, for the top 25 law reviews.
2. JURIST has links to countless law review websites.
3. LexisNexis Directory of Law Reviews
Law Review Rankings
Washington & Lee’s Law Library has a comprehensive ranking of law reviews based on citation counts.
Electronic Submissions
1. ExpressO provides for electronic submission to over 550 law reviews. However, a number of the top 25 law reviews still require either paper submissions or electronic submissions via their own website. For those law reviews not allowing an ExpressO electronic submission, ExpressO will print out the article and send it to these journals in hard copy. It costs extra for these submissions.
Chart of Law Review Submission Policies and Webpages
After the break is a chart of the submission policies and submission pages for several top law reviews.
August 21, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Do Lawyers Know Anything?
posted by Nate Oman
I recently completed a short essay that will be included in collection of papers by a group of political philosophers. My topic was the relationship between religious thought and markets. I had originally thought that I would try to write a philosophical piece myself, starting with theological and economic first principles and then relating them to one another. As I thought some more about it, however, I decided this was not such a good idea. Although I like to play at philosopher (or historian or economist…) from time to time, at the end of the day I am just a lawyer. I am slowly coming to realize that there is no intellectual shame in this.
So rather than starting with first principles, I started with two concrete disputes over property and contract and used the arguments and resolution of those cases as a way of building upward toward more generalized claims. I wrote:
Often, discussions of capitalism proceed at a very high level of generality, speaking of entire social systems. Looking at the issue through the lens of the law, however, allows us to approach it from the opposite direction, denaturing the question of capitalism into the concrete legal institutions that make markets possible. Most people including those who think deeply about economics have a tendency to assume that property and contract are static, simple institutions . . . . The reality, of course, is that what we mean by property and contract changes from place to place and epoch to epoch.
Hardly the most startling insight in the world, but it does raise the question of what it is that one knows when one knows the law. As a young man, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. fell for Emerson and the transcendentalists in college and considered himself a philosopher. The Civil War beat the transcendentalism out of him and returning from the battlefields of Virginia he enrolled in law school. I don’t think that he ever gave up his ambition to be a philosopher, however, and a few years after graduating from law school he sent a copy of one of his first law review articles to a very aged Emerson with a letter. The letter said something to the effect that if one went far enough into the law one found one’s self doing philosophy.
Last December the First Things blog had a rambling post about whether or not lawyers are intellectuals. Although the post ultimately petered off into a random discussion of the Volokh Conspiracy, literary theory, and science fiction it raised an interesting question. After noting that engineers and journalist, while smart (at least the engineers), are not intellectuals, the post said:
Still, I’ve always imagined that the law so closely parallels intellectuals’ activity — the work of philosophers, theologians, and literary critics — that there is an intellectual tendency that exists in the legal mind by its very nature.
There is something to this, I think, but it misses the point. Philosophers and theologians (who knows what literary critics do) start with generalities and theories and only gradually — if at all — descend to the particular and the concrete. Lawyers — at least common lawyers — start with cases, the particular and the concrete and only gradually ascend the ladder of abstraction to rules, doctrine, and — perhaps — theory. As Holmes noted, one may end up in roughly the same place as the philosophers but the road travelled to that place will be different. The question is whether or not the particular route taken matters, and if so how.
In the mean time, I take solace in the fact that law profs are paid better than philosophers. The absence of intellectual respectability has its compensations.
August 21, 2007 at 11:50 am
Posted in: Legal Theory
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Whatever
posted by Scott Burris
I’ve been working on a business for when I get tired of being a law professor. False memories. There’s a huge potential market. Everyone has missing pages in the scrapbook, things we’ve always wanted to do but never managed — that grand April affair in Paris, climbing K-2, or perhaps just nobly and diligently overcoming some childhood adversity. False memories have a bad name in law: we don’t like it when a victim remembers abuse that never happened, or an eye-witness realizes that the short Black defendant is the tall White gunman he saw pull the trigger. But why not harness that power for good? My idea is to help people recover detailed memories of things that, if you want to be technical about it, never actually happened. From the point of view of present emotional value, a false memory is just as good as a real one, so why confine your remembrance of things past to that poor parade of things that actually passed you?
Well I thought this was a pretty good idea, until last week, when a New York Times editorial reminded me that this sort of fantasy is already a mainstream business. Working in public health law, I should have realized a long time ago that most of what passes for the facts beneath our health policy are, in fact, things we know for sure that just ain’t so. (Wait, I just recovered a memory of having this precise insight fifteen years ago, during a magical week in Paris). Anyway, in this editorial, the Times catalogued the myths that shape health care politics in America today. Here’s a bit:
Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report … ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it.
August 21, 2007 at 8:11 am
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Health Law
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Wikipedia, Consensus, and Truth (or at least Gary Coleman)
posted by Neil Richards
Dave’s post on WikiScanner reminds me of an article last week in The Times about the other juicy revelations that Wiki-Scanner has uncovered, such as self-editing by the CIA, the Vatican, the British Labour Party, and a number of big corporations. The article goes on to argue:
There is no necessary reason that Wikipedia’s continual revisions enhance knowledge. It is quite as conceivable that an early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is there. Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.
This is a good (if a bit grumpy) criticism of the Wiki model. Wikis do seem to gravitate towards consensus, and as such are really efficient aggregators of facts. Where facts are not in dispute, Wikis do a fantastic job. For example, if you wish to learn about The Simpsons, Doctor Who, or the geneaology of the House of Windsor, Wikipedia is a great resource.
But for the important questions, it is quite different. Any time judgment or contested notions of truth come into play, people are quite naturally going to assert their own view of reality. Wikipedia is just another context (albeit a highly-manipulable one) in which these fights play out. In addition to consensus, money, energy, and persistence can affect how the “truth” is presented. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that Wikipedia entries are being manipulated in this way. If anything, it’s more surprising that people seem to believe that Wikipedia entries can give them easy truth on complicated questions that require judgment, reflection, interpretation, and thought. Even Encyclopedia Britannica can’t do that, though it may be a little less subject to manipulation in the name of good PR. But then again, Britannica is probably not as strong on Gary Coleman’s appearance on the Simpsons (episode 235, in case you were wondering).
August 21, 2007 at 1:06 am
Posted in: Wiki
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