Archive for the ‘Law School (Law Reviews)’ Category
Free Advice to Incoming Law Review Boards
posted by Dave Hoffman
While academics angst, law journal editors toil to manage the fire hose of submissions, real and fake expedites, and the uncertainty that comes with a new job. Many journal editors now seem to have the goal of “improving their ranking“. Seven years ago (!) I wrote some advice on that topic. It seems mostly right as far as it goes, but I want to revise and extend those comments below, in letter form.
March 4, 2013 at 6:53 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship)
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The Pacific Legal Foundation May Challenge Law Review Affirmative Action
posted by Dave Hoffman
Via Josh Blackman comes this news:
“The Pacific Legal Foundation has sent requests under the California Public Records Act (the equivalent of FOIA) to the University of California Berkeley and University of California Davis, seeking information about how they use race and gender in making decisions about what articles to publish. You can download the requests here: [UC Davis PRA request; UC Berkeley PRA request.] The letters were sent to the Dean of the law schools, and carbon copied to the Editor in Chief and the Faculty Adviser.”
The PLF demands a response by March 2.
February 23, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Does Blind Review See Race?*
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
In a comment to my earlier post suggesting that law review editors should seek out work from underrepresented demographic groups, my co-blogger Dave Hoffman asked an excellent question: Would blind review remedy these concerns? It seems to me that the answer here is complicated. Blind review would probably be an improvement on balance, but could still suffer from — err, blind spots. Here are a few reasons why.
The paradigmatic case for the merits of blind review comes from a well-known study of musician hiring, published about a decade ago by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse in the American Economic Review. Goldin and Rouse gathered data on symphony auditions, and found that blind auditions — that is, ones which concealed the gender of the auditioning musician — resulted in a significantly higher proportion of women musicians auditioning successfully. As Rouse commented,
“This country’s top symphony orchestras have long been alleged to discriminate against women, and others, in hiring. Our research suggests both that there has been differential treatment of women and that blind auditions go a long way towards resolving the problem.”
The Goldin-Rouse study shows that blind review can be a useful tool in combating bias. Would a similar review system work in the law review context?
Well, maybe. Read the rest of this post »
February 18, 2013 at 7:11 pm
Tags: blind review, gender, law reviews, Race, unconscious bias
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Race
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In Defense of Law Review Affirmative Action
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
As you may have seen, the new Scholastica submission service allows law reviews to collect demographic information from authors. A flurry of blog posts has recently cropped up in response (including some in this space); as far as I can tell, they range from negative to negative to kinda-maybe-negative to negative to still negative. The most positive post I’ve seen comes from Michelle Meyer at the Faculty Lounge, who discusses whether Scholastica’s norms are like symposium selection norms, and in the process implies that Scholastica’s model might be okay. Michael Mannheimer at Prawfs also makes a sort of lukewarm defense that editors were probably doing this anyway.
But is it really the case that law review affirmative action would be a bad thing? Read the rest of this post »
February 16, 2013 at 2:07 pm
Tags: gender, law reviews, Race, scholastica, unconscious bias
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Race
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Affirmative Action for Law Scholarship
posted by Dave Hoffman
There are several issues in this unfolding story about Scholastica, law review submissions, and “diversity” preferences. Let’s break them out.
- I’m shocked! Shocked!: Over at Prawfs, Professor Mannheimer and various anonymous commentators think that Orin, Josh and I are naive. Everyone knows that law reviews routinely take race, gender and sexual orientation into account when choosing between articles. Indeed, Josh got an email from a former editor at the California Law Review saying that the practice “is nothing new and not exactly a secret.” Well, shucks. I guess I’m the sucker here. Even if this had crossed my mind, I would have naively thought that law faculties would never permit law student boards to make decisions about articles based on race, gender and sexual orientation without clearly thinking through whether such practices were legal, and without setting forth an explicit and public set of guidelines vetted by university counsel’s office. Honestly, the idea that California, NYU, Boston College, and other law reviews are thinking about my sexual orientation when they go forward with a “board review” is so unbelievably offensive that I’m still having some trouble wrapping my head around it. So, yup, I’m shocked.
- But everyone else is doing it: On the prawfs thread, several anonymous commentators stated that diversity preferences (however defined) are no worse than preferences that boards already express for (or against) elite school letterhead. There are two points to make here in response. First, the best law journals already engage in blind review, and using letterhead as a proxy for quality is antiquated and embarrassing. It’s not a defense of a bad practice that another bad practice exists. Second, though it’s not well thought out and should be abolished, at least the intuition behind letter-head bias is rationally related to what I thought the law review’s ends were: to select the best piece of scholarship. But what’s the intuition behind picking people, not papers? That law review placement is a “good” owned by the law review that wise and benevolent boards should redistribute in the ways that seem best to them?
- Scholastica’s just an enabler: I can’t quite figure these folks out. They commented yesterday that they were just giving reviews what they wanted. But then some editors wrote me to say that they didn’t want this widget – and that they only clicked on it because it was so easy to do. Indeed, Iowa appears to have de-clicked the widget yesterday in response to this thread. In the best possible light, it seems to me that Scholastica’s developers are simply importing other disciplines’ norms and preferences into the law without thinking carefully about how you might want to have different tools for faculty editors than unsupervised student boards. But maybe that’s not the light to see Scholastica in. As I wrote yesterday, their high price, preference for a different kind of scholarship, and exclusivity campaign might suggest that far from being merely a “platform”, they are hoping to use digital architecture to change law review behavior. I’d love to hear more from them about what their goals were and are going forward for legal scholarship.
- Until such questions are answered, my view is that of a commentator from yesterday: vote with your feet. Don’t use Scholastica unless the journal absolutely insists, as very, very few do. Consider also sending emails to the faculty advisors of journals that are exclusive to ask them if they are on board with this potentially radical, and radically troubling, shift in law review standards and selection processes.
February 14, 2013 at 9:52 am
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Scholastica & Law Review Selection
posted by Dave Hoffman
As several commentators noted (most in private emails, because they are afraid of negative consequences in the submission market), a very disturbing aspect of Scholastica’s new submission process is that it appears to facilitate and encourage law reviews to use sexual orientation, race, and gender in selection decisions. Josh Blackman has investigated, and written a very useful follow-up post which I hope you all will read.
My own view is that whatever the merits of law reviews giving “plus” points to authors at less prestigious schools,* providing plus points on account of race, gender, and sexual orientation is a terrible, terrible practice, especially if the plus points are awarded in an opaque manner by a largely unsupervised student board at an instrumentality of the state. Scholastica appears to take the position that it’s just giving journals what they want here. Would it feel the same way if journals were planning to use sexual orientation and race as negative factors? (Which, from a certain perspective, is exactly what they may be planning on doing.)
Mike Madison, writing on this topic in the fall, suggested that Scholastica is leading the charge toward a privatization of legal scholarship, with all of the associated pathologies (lack of transparency, etc.) That sounds right. Why, again, are faculty at schools like California (Berkeley), NYU, Iowa, and USC on board with this development?
*This too is a bad idea, but that’s a topic for a separate post.
February 13, 2013 at 5:24 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Against Scholastica
posted by Dave Hoffman
Like many of you, I’ve an article out in the Spring submission season. (More on that in a separate post later.) Let the agonizing begin! Seriously, where’s the thread?
This year, in addition to ExpressO, email, website submission, Redyip, and printed copies, we’ve a new way to deliver our articles to their ultimate masters: Scholastica. You may have learned about Scholastica when your favorite law review wrote you to inform you that they were exclusively taking submissions through that system, or when your associate dean told you that the institution would prefer not to pay pay more per submission than ExpressO for a substantially similar service.
Here are some key things you might not know:
- As far as I can tell only two of the top fifty journals – NYU and Iowa – are exclusive to Scholastica. “Exclusive” for other journals appears to mean “we’d prefer.”
- Scholastica is very hostile to the currently way that legal scholarship is selected — they push double-blind peer review and don’t very much like student editing. This isn’t surprising, because as far as I can tell, none of the developers went to law school, served on a law review, or writes for legal audiences. They are, respectively, a sociology graduate student, a former historian, and a political scientist. There are many things one could say in defense of our current multiple-submission, student-selection, system. None appear on the Scholastica page.
- Scholastica asks for your sexual orientation and other demographic information (include a free-form place to talk about “additional comments that demonstrate diversity”) and then provides that information to each submitting journals that request it. Apparently the theory is that journals will want to take identity politics into account when making selection decisions. [For more, see blackman's post on this topic, which I hadn't seen before writing this.]
- Did I mention that Scholastica is more expensive that ExpressO and infinitely more expensive than emailing the journal directly?
I think Scholastica might be a good deal for journals – it takes care of publishing problems, and it will significantly reduce the flow of submissions. I can also see why graduate students from other disciplines would find our tiny corner of the world to be odd. But I don’t see why anyone would ever submit through their system unless absolutely forced to, especially when they appear determined to import some unattractive aspects of other disciplines into legal academic publishing, which is already quite ugly.
What I don’t particularly understand is why faculty of the institutions running law reviews which are now exclusive to Scholastica are permitting this radical turn, which almost certainly will result in more concentration of prestige publication in the hands of prestige authors (who have the money to pay for multiple submissions at $5.00 each). Er. Reading that sentence again, I guess I understand after all.
That all said, Scholastica, please don’t lose my submission to NYU! I’ve never even gotten a rejection from those folks – maybe this year you can gin one up?
February 13, 2013 at 9:14 am
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Recalling Cardozo Law Review’s “Bork Book”
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
I never knew Robert H. Bork (1927-2012) but as a rising 3L and law review editor at Cardozo in the summer of 1987, my classmates and I met his intellectual heft and political salience. Just after President Ronald Reagan announced his nomination of Bork to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in late July, it was obvious that the country was headed for a passionate debate on justice writ large (e.g., abortion, antitrust, civil rights, free speech, you name it).
Sensing an opportunity to discipline the discourse, we decided to collect and publish a dozen essays and four reports assessing Judge Bork’s jurisprudence from every angle. Well-advised throughout by our professors, David Rudenstine and Monroe Price, we solicited extant or original pieces by such luminaries as Ronald Dworkin, Steve Gillers, Mary Ann Glendon and Michael McConnell, as well as reports of the White House, Public Citizen, a research group commissioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee (led by Christopher Schroeder and approved by Floyd Abrams, Clark Clifford, Walter Dellinger and Laurence Tribe) and a DOJ response thereto.
Fifty of us, new 2L staff and 3L editors, spent an intense two weeks collating and editing the contributions. Then four of us (Jim Nobile, Allen Applbaum, Jeff Stamler and me) flew to Lincoln, Nebraska, site of the leading printer of law reviews, Joe Christensen Inc. We spent several more days and sleepless nights scrutinizing the page proofs before giving the print order. After 10,000 copies were printed, Jeff and I flew back to New York while Jim and Allen drove a rented U-Haul to Washington D.C. where the town was abuzz with debate and Senate hearings would shortly begin.
Meanwhile, back in the nation’s capital, another classmate, Barbara Braucher (who later married U.S. Attorney General Ted Olson and still later perished aboard one of the hijacked airplanes on 9/11) had been making her rounds in the Senate, where Barbara had many connections. She alerted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including its chairman Joe Biden, that our law review issue, addressing every important topic and viewpoint in a compact 530 pages under a single two-inch spine, was on its way.
Upon their arrival in Washington, Jim and Allen toted several boxes directly to the awaiting Senators. Standing on the steps of the Capitol when delivering the books, the New York Times interviewed our classmates about this effort. The story (here) ran the next day, along with a cute quote from Allen and a photo of the group.
The special issue, released in early October ahead of the hearings, sold briskly at many book shops around Washington and New York that fall. It was clear during the hearings that many Senators had read our product. In the years after, it was even clearer that Judge Bork had, as he cited to our “Bork book” often. The issue was volume 9, no. 1 and was a great start to our third year of law school and one of many innovative academic undertakings for which the Cardozo Law Review became known over ensuing decades.
December 19, 2012 at 3:53 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Law School, Law School (Law Reviews)
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Legal Peer Review Journals: Time to Reject/Accept/R&R?
posted by Dave Hoffman
One of the advantages of student-edited law journals is that the turn-around time for acceptance or rejection is typically relatively fast – if you are going to hear, you’ll know within a month or two 95% of the time. The same can’t be said for peer review journals in other fields, which are famously very, very slow.
What about peer reviewed journals that focus on law, and which regularly publish the writings of American law professors? After the jump, I’ve listed the the top fifty peer and referreed journals, by combined impact factor (W&L) rank. I’d be curious to hear from readers who’ve submitted to these journals regarding how long it took to get a substantive response (whether acceptance, rejection, or R&R). I’ll participate in the comment thread if others do – I’ve submitted to JLS, JELS, and JLEO, and JLA, and have generally positive views about those journals’ ability to get back with some answer in a reasonable amount of time.
September 6, 2012 at 5:52 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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Subsidizing Student Scholarship
posted by Dave Hoffman
In recent discussions about reforming law review submissions to decrease the burden on editors, authors have been treated more or less as a unit. The argument goes that all authors submit too many articles, creating a mountain of paperwork for poor editors to sort through. But of course not all authors are similarly situated – letterhead bias distinguishes between professors; practitioners have little time to polish pieces and consequently rarely make it to board reviews; and many journals exclude student authors entirely.
Notably, excluding student authors is a foolish rule that testifies more to student editors’ insecurity than to any thoughtful judgment about the quality of scholarship produced by particular authors. (I’ve made this argument repeatedly here and to every Law Review editor I speak to – I won’t bore you with it again.) Assuming that this bad policy is on the way out, I wondered whether law schools ought to be in the business of subsidizing scholarship by, say, paying for submissions on expresso.
Of course, we already subsidize scholarship in a sense by creating a system of writing seminars and guided research credits. (In my view, such credits could and should be better spent). But direct subsidies are relatively rare. When I was at Harvard, there was no money available for what was then a hard-copy mailing process. Mike O’Shea and I were lucky enough to get Olin Center funding to mail out this piece. Later, I heard that Elena Kagan made funding generally available. I’ve no idea how common that practice is – Temple, for example, limits its BePress account to faculty.
Some schools obviously have sufficient resources so as to make the choice anodyne. For others, the pros and cons are worth discussing:
Pros:
- Students who can publish at an outside journal get a resume item of some use, and not incidentally increase the likelihood that someone will actually read their work.
- We pay for similar resume-enhancing items – like clerkship letter postage – which benefit only a few members of the class.
- Spending law school funds on direct student services is generally a good thing!
- The cross-subsidy argument in con #2 applies as strongly to paying for faculty scholarship. What’s good for the goose….
Cons:
- The world doesn’t need more law review submissions – and paying for submissions creates moral hazard for students just as it does for their professors.
- Taking tuition dollars and giving them to students to produce scholarship, so as to produce resume credentials, effectively is a wealth transfer to students who need help the least. Exactly like the clerkship process, schools end up pouring resources into the most credentialed members of their class.
What do you think?
August 7, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Posted in: Law School, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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Preemption Checks
posted by Dave Hoffman
I was signing a law review copyright agreement today. It states that the Authors covenant that they “shall check on a bi-weekly basis to ensure that the Article has not been preempted. If the Article has been preempted, the Authors shall notify the [Law Review] no later than 48 hours after discovery of the Preemption.” Preemption is further defined as the “publication of another article, essay, or other piece in a legal publication that contains, in significant form, the original ideas of the Authors.”
This is perfectly fine, as far as it goes. I can see why the law review would want to know if someone has been writing in the space occupied by my article, and I can further understand why they’d want me to do the checking for them. But it’s long been my view that there is basically no such thing as article preemption — a necessary adjunct to the concept that there’s nothing new under the sun is that you can always find some way to write around existing scholarship. Indeed,the fretting by junior scholars (and law journal editors) about preemption is a signal that they overvalue novelty. False novelty, along with quick and dirty normativity, is one of legal scholarship’s primary sins. Junior scholars should be happy to see writing in their field that “covers” a topic that they are working on. It will give them something to frame around, to react to, and will ensure that there are consumers for whatever they end up coming up with. Of course, you should cite to articles which talk about similar topics, and you need to make very clear what your distinct contribution is. But completely preempting articles? I don’t think they exist.
April 17, 2012 at 8:25 am
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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The Tragedy of Anonymous Comment Threads
posted by Dave Hoffman
Shame About Submissions Is For Suckers
Prawfs is running its annual Law Review Angsting thread. Like many such threads, it is dominated by anonymous commentators. That struck me as odd, and I said so. Several anonymous commentators immediately objected that I wasn’t understanding the reputational risks involved. They said that for pre-tenure scholars, “there is a distinct risk in publicly announcing that you have an article submitted for publication, at least before it is actually accepted.” The argument goes that the piece it isn’t accepted, and the person goes on the lateral or entry market, then the world will know that they are shopping around already rejected goods. Another commentator that if you talk about your article not getting offers, you might sway law review editors against the piece. Failure reeks.
I found these arguments surprising, and weak. But I don’t want to hijack Prawfs’ thread, which is now moving onto further productive hand-wringing. So, here goes.
1. This strikes me as a commons tragedy of sorts. If the norm was to sign your name as a part of an effort to be transparent about an obscure process, and both successful and unsuccessful authors repeatedly shared information about their processes, then journals wouldn’t take adverse inferences. But since that’s not the norm, people who do sign their names are fearful of being singled out as lemons. (I think that the real chance of a journal taking this kind of inference is approximately negative 1 billion. They can’t even manage to read real articles in front of them. Or be prepared for class. They are not reading the seventh page of a Prawfsblawg comment thread.) Similarly, if being open about your identity was encouraged, academics wouldn’t have the reaction that the commentators worry about. But it isn’t. So each individual commentator, acting in their perceived self-interest, is anonymous. The quality of information decreases. Free-riders abound.
2. In Paul Horwitz’s magnificent post, Courage, Prudence, and Tenure, he noted that young scholars are often too prudent and insufficiently courageous. He also said that it’s the job of more senior academics to push courage. This, I think, is a very small example of that phenomenon. Look. You can be as tactical and careful and strategic as you want. You can fret till the sun goes down about every shadow behind every bush. And that kind of strategic maneuvering might – might – pay dividends at tenure time. But it strikes me that if you live your life in that kind of crouch, you probably will not produce exciting scholarship, or be an inspiring teacher, or contribute meaningfully to the institution you are at. You probably will be an uninteresting blogger. In this regard, I think sometimes about an academic who, when he started teaching, had a ton of interesting ideas. You know the type. But he never amounted to much as a scholar in part because he was so very afraid of what others thought about his work. Would people realize he didn’t actually know what he was doing? That his ideas weren’t as shiny in written form as they had been when he first spun them out over coffee? What if he didn’t achieve his potential? Better, he convinced himself, not to write than fail to be a once-in-a-generation-colossus.
3. And even if you are fearful of seeming to fail, waiting for law review editors isn’t failure, and you shouldn’t see it that way. Law review submissions is a weird process – there is zero feedback, the timing is peculiar and random, the stakes feel high. People invent all kinds of reasons why it works the way it does, and what you can do to get control. Struggling with submissions is the norm, even for very accomplished people at very elite institutions. The person who gets three offers in two days is the exception. And it is the norm for established teachers and newbies alike. I’ve waited 18 months for a peer review process to end with an acceptance. And last year, we waited for Stanford Law Review for four, excruciating, months. This year, I’ve had an article out for a month – with basically no word – and another for a week – again, silence. The commentators at Prawfs make it seem like I ought to feel embarrassed or ashamed. I don’t. And if you are waiting for an acceptance, you shouldn’t either. It will come. Or it won’t. While you are waiting, you can write something else. Get back to work.
March 15, 2012 at 12:36 am
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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Stanford Law Review Online: Don’t Break the Internet
posted by Stanford Law Review
The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a piece by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post on the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Don’t Break the Internet, they argue that the two bills — intended to counter online copyright and trademark infringement — “share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.”
They write:
These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.
Read the full article, Don’t Break the Internet by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, at the Stanford Law Review Online.
Note: Corrected typo in first paragraph.
December 19, 2011 at 3:14 am
Tags: banks, credit card companies, DNS, DNS filtering, domain name seizures, domain name servers, domain names, financial institutions, Intellectual Property, Internet, internet security, internet stability, IP, IP addresses, IP rights, online advertisers, PROTECT IP Act, search engine censorship, search engines, SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, World Wide Web
Posted in: Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Intellectual Property, International & Comparative Law, Law Rev (Stanford), Law School (Law Reviews), Movies & Television, Property Law, Social Network Websites
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Stanford Law Review Online: The Drone as Privacy Catalyst
posted by Stanford Law Review
The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a piece by M. Ryan Calo discussing the privacy implications of drone use within the United States. In The Drone as Privacy Catalyst, Calo argues that domestic use of drones for surveillance will go forward largely unimpeded by current privacy law, but that the “visceral jolt” caused by witnessing these drones hovering above our cities might serve as a catalyst and finally “drag privacy law into the twenty-first century.”
Calo writes:
In short, drones like those in widespread military use today will tomorrow be used by police, scientists, newspapers, hobbyists, and others here at home. And privacy law will not have much to say about it. Privacy advocates will. As with previous emerging technologies, advocates will argue that drones threaten our dwindling individual and collective privacy. But unlike the debates of recent decades, I think these arguments will gain serious traction among courts, regulators, and the general public.
Read the full article, The Drone as Privacy Catalyst by M. Ryan Calo, at the Stanford Law Review Online.
December 12, 2011 at 4:52 pm
Tags: academia, Brandeis, Constitutional Law, drones, Kyllo, Privacy, surveillance, UAVs, Warren
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Law Rev (Stanford), Law School (Law Reviews), Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (National Security), Technology
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Journal of Law and Courts
posted by Dave Hoffman
There’s a new venue for peer-reviewed articles about law — the Journal of Law and Courts. As Chris Zorn explains:
“The Journal is edited by David Klein, of the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics, and published by the University of Chicago Press. The JLC is a double-blind peer-reviewed, single-submission journal, indexed by Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw, EBSCO, JSTOR, and others. While formally an APSA section journal, the JLC aims to be the premier outlet for the publication of work on law, courts, and things judicial from a wide range of perspectives. More information about the journal and instructions for authors can be found here.
Submissions are being accepted now, via the journal’s Editorial Managerpage. We anticipate publication of the inaugural issue in spring 2013.”
Seems like a great forum!
November 15, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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What Difference Presentation?
posted by David Udell
David Udell is the Executive Director of the National Center for Access to Justice and a Visiting Professor from Practice at Cardozo Law School.
In my line of work, I have seen many efforts in the political realm to shut down civil legal services for the poor, and have continually worked to combat such efforts. In 1996, when the Gingrich Congress barred federally funded legal services lawyers from bringing class actions on behalf of the poor, I left Legal Services for the Elderly in order to finish a lawsuit on behalf of widows and widowers who were suing to compel the United States Treasury to fix its practices for replacing stolen Social Security payments. When I later moved to the Brennan Center for Justice, I helped bring a lawsuit against the rules that barred legal services lawyers from participating in such class actions, I filed another lawsuit against similar rules that barred law school clinic students from bringing environmental justice cases in Louisiana, and I built a Justice Program at the Brennan Center dedicated to countering such attacks on the poor and on their lawyers.
In their March 3, 2011 draft report, What Difference Representation? Offers, Actual Use, and the Need for Randomization (“the Study”), authors D. James Greiner & Cassandra Wolos Pattanyak are right about the importance of developing a solid evidence base – one founded on methodologies that include randomization – to establish what works in ensuring access to justice for people with civil legal cases. They are right again that in the absence of such evidence, both the legal aid community and its critics are accustomed to relying on less solid data. And they are smart to “caution against both over- and under-generalization of these study results.” But, unfortunately, the bare exhortation to avoid over- and under-generalization is not sufficient in the highly politicized context of legal services.
While the authors obviously do not have any obligation to arrive at a particular result, they can be expected to recognize a need to avoid statements that have a high probability to mislead, especially in light of the likely inability of much of the Study’s audience to understand the authors’ methodology and findings. In fact, because of the Study’s novelty and appearance in a non-scientific journal, it will be relied on to analyze situations where it doesn’t apply, and by people who have no background in social science research, plus it will be given disproportionate weight because so few comparable studies exist to judge it against. It is these factors, in combination with the politicization of legal services, that make it crucial that the authors’ assertions, particularly in the sections most likely to be seen by lay readers (the title and the abstract), do not extend beyond what the findings justify.
March 28, 2011 at 8:04 am
Posted in: Civil Rights, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Practice, Law Rev (Yale), Law School, Law School (Law Reviews), Symposium (What Difference Representation), Uncategorized
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GW’s Junior Scholars Finalists
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
Thanks to my colleague, Lisa Fairfax, GW has finalized the program for this year’s Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop and Prize (detailed here). Of the more than 100 papers submitted, the following dozen presenters were chosen. [Commentators appear in brackets; I've shortened some paper titles.]
The workshop will take place at GW on April 1 and 2, 2011. We are delighted by the submissions, congratulate those chosen, and stress that making the selections was difficult because of the volume of amazing papers. We encourage everyone interested to attend and look forward to the weekend.
Adam Leviton (Georgetown), In Defense of Bailouts [George Geis (Virginia) & Art Wilmarth (GW)]
Jodie Kirshner (Cambridge), A Transatlantic Perspective on Regional Dynamics and Societa Eurpoea [Francesca Bignami (GW) & Theresa Gabaldon (GW)]
Alan White (Valparaiso), Welfare Economics and Regulation of Small-Loan Credit: Lessons from Microlending in Developing Nations [Michael Pagano (Villanova) & Lawrence Mitchell (GW)]
Nicola Sharpe (Illinois), Corporate Board Performance and Organizational Strategy [Deborah Demott (Duke) & Michael Abramowicz (GW)]
Julie Hill (Houston), The Rise of Ad Hoc Bank Capital Requirements [Anna Gelpern (American) & John Buchman (E*Trade Bank & GW Adjunct)]
Michael Simkovic (Seton Hall), The Effects of Ownership and Stock Liquidity on the Timing of Repurchase Transactions [Richard Booth (Villanova) & Henry Butler (Mason)]
Michelle Harner (Maryland), Activist Distressed Debtors [Donna Nagy (Indiana Bloomington) & Lisa Fairfax (GW)]
Saule Omarova (UNC), The Federal Reserve Board’s Use of Exemptive Power [Patricia McCoy (Connecticut) & Arthur Wilmarth (GW)]
Heather Hughes (American), Suburban Sprawl, Finance Law and Environmental Harm [Scott Kieff (GW) & Lawrence Cunningham (GW)]
Robert Jackson (Columbia), Private Equity and Executive Compensation [Norman Veasey (Weil Gotshal) & William Bratton (Penn)]
Brian Quinn (BC), Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Post Closing Price Adjustments in Merger Agreements? [Gordon Smith (BYU) & John Pollack (Schulte Roth)]
Mehrsa Baradaran (BYU), Reconsidering Wal-Mart’s Bank [Heidi Schooner (Catholic) & Renee Jones (BC)]
This is one of many events sponsored by GW’s Center for Law, Economics and Finance.
February 28, 2011 at 8:53 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Talk, Securities, Securities Regulation
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Georgetown Law Journal, Issue 99.2 (January 2011)
posted by Georgetown Law Journal
Articles
How International Financial Law Works (and How It Doesn’t)
Chris Brummer
Kurt T. Lash
Adam J. Levitin
Explaining Plurality Decisions
James F. Spriggs II & David R. Stras
Notes
The Barracuda Lacuna: Music, Political Campaigns, and the First Amendment
Sarah Schacter
Catherine Chiantella Stern
David S. Yellin
February 4, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Posted in: Law Rev (Georgetown), Law School (Law Reviews), Uncategorized
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Iowa Law Review, Volume 96, Issue 2 (January 2011)
posted by Iowa Law Review
Articles
The Coercion of Trafficked Workers
Kathleen Kim
IP Misuse as Foreclosure
Christina Bohannan
Consent to Retaliation: A Civil Recourse Theory of Contractual Liability
Nathan B. Oman
Automation and the Fourth Amendment
Matthew Tokson
Essay
No Middle Ground? Reflections on the Citizens United Decision
Randall P. Bezanson
Notes
Princo, Patent Pools, and the Risk of Foreclosure: A Framework for Assessing Misuse
Phillip W. Goter
Holden Caulfield Grows Up: Salinger v. Colting, the Promotion-of-Progress Requirement, and Market Failure in a Derivative-Works Regime
John M. Newman
Is Senator Grassley Our Savior?: The Crusade Against “Charitable” Hospitals Attacking Patients for Unpaid Bills
Amanda W. Thai
January 20, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Posted in: Law Rev (Iowa), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Law Talk, Uncategorized
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Credit Where Credit is Specifically Due
posted by Joseph Blocher
An Andy Rooney-esque musing to close out the week: Why do we tend to acknowledge useful feedback from colleagues in a single “thank you” footnote at the beginning of an article, instead of at specific points throughout? The former seems to be the preferred practice, but the latter seems more appropriate in many cases, and I’m not sure why it’s so rare.
My own impulse is to treat colleagues and outside readers just like any other source, and to drop footnotes indicating their specific contributions. If someone gives me an idea that I would have footnoted had it been a published source, it seems that the person should get credit in precisely the same way—that is, at the spot in the article where the idea appears. And while my impressions are admittedly totally unscientific, it seems to me that such footnotes (i.e., “Many thanks to X for bringing this point to my attention.”) are pretty rare.
Maybe the single “thank you” footnote ensures that all the people who contributed to the article will have their names noted by casual readers, who are unlikely to scan any footnotes beyond the first. Or if the purpose of footnotes isn’t so much to give credit as it is to help interested readers pursue their own research, maybe it’s less troubling when a human source goes uncited, since readers are presumably unlikely to follow up with individual people directly. Or perhaps most feedback from colleagues and outside readers is not specific enough to be attributed to any one part of an article.
All of those strike me as plausible explanations, though I’m not sure any of them accurately explains why authors do things the way they do.
December 10, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Posted in: Just for Fun, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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