Archive for the ‘Law School (Scholarship)’ Category

GW Fin Reg Conference Nov. 6

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As financial regulation reform reaches its apogee, we at GWU are delighted to host a roundtable on Friday Nov. 6 at the Law School (2000 H Street, NW, Washington, DC).   An outline of the Program, co-sponsored by the Institute for Law and Economic Policy, follows, along with how to register.  Note that participation of some panelists is subject to the legislative calendar. Read the rest of this post »

  October 26, 2009 at 11:22 am   Posted in: Current Events, Law School (Scholarship), Securities Regulation   Print This Post   No Comments

What Factors Correlate With Veil Piercing Success?

posted by Dave Hoffman

If you’ve made it through the content of complaints, some data about who gets sued, and descriptive statistics about wins and losses, you basically are pot committed to this veil piercing project. In this post, I’m going to exploit that commitment by describing the results of our statistical analysis of two different kinds of success that plaintiffs may achieve in veil piercing cases: (1) on motions; and (2) at the case level. If you don’t care to follow me beyond the jump, here’s the bottom line (from our abstract):

“Voluntary creditor causes of action promote veil piercing; LLCs are in very limited circumstances better insulated from veil piercing claims than corporations; undercapitalization is strongly associated with success while conclusory grounds like “façade” and “sham” are not; and defendants’ legal sophistication is predictive of plaintiff failure. Extra-legal factors play a more striking and counterintuitive role. Plaintiffs suing companies with few employees are much more likely to win veil piercing motions, and obtain relief in cases, than plaintiffs suing companies employing many workers. This results holds even when controlling for legally-relevant variables. Contrary to both theory and previous empirical work, we also find that judicial liberalism is inversely related to the likelihood of plaintiff success.”

Read the rest of this post »

  October 9, 2009 at 6:51 am   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   One Comment

What Does Veil Piercing Success Mean Anyway?

posted by Dave Hoffman

If you look at opinions, winning in a veil piercing case is pretty easy to define: did the court agree to pierce the veil, reaching through an entity to its shareholders. If you were inclined, you could model success at those terminal moments in cases, asking which factors (described in the opinions) correlated with courts agreeing to pierce.

There’s value in this approach, not least because opinions shape reality. But there’s a problem too.  Not only are opinions unrepresentative, but they come late in cases.  The result is an extreme form of selection.  It’s not clear (to me, anyway) what the null hypothesis regarding the effect of independent variables  ought to be for late-stage dispositions.

Dockets offer the promise of a different approach: asking which factors correlate with success or failure early in cases.  Further, assuming that adjudicated motions teach the parties about the strength of their cases, and that they settle strategically, we can even start to learn from the timing and incidence of settlement.

In this post, I’m going to relay some descriptive statistics about the veil piercing successes that plaintiffs achieved in our data. (I’m continuing to pull the data and some text from our paper.)  To those who are getting annoyed by all of these posts, I’m sorry!  I’ve been living with this project for a long time — I’m excited to finally share it publicly.

Read the rest of this post »

  October 8, 2009 at 7:24 am   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Practice, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   2 Comments

This Just In: Women and Men Equally Good at Judging

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

On the last page (31) of a new empirical article by law professors concerning the role of gender among judges, the following conclusion appears: “we find that women do just as well as the men [sic] in terms of basic judging measures.”  I am not surprised and wonder: (1) what portion of the population, among laypersons or lawyers and certainly legal academics, would really be surprised by this; (2) whether we need an empirical study before drawing such a conclusion; and (3) whether any empirical study, this one included, can realistically provide evidence for (or against) such a conclusion.

The piece, reportedly stimulated by something Justice Sotomayor said about the role of gender in judging, spends the previous 30 pages: (1) reviewing literature about possible differences in attitudes and experience judges may have, according to gender; (2) summarizing data on state high court judges, 1998-2000 (and adding a smaller bit of data on federal judges), concerning numbers of opinions they write, how often they are cited by other courts, and how often they filed panel opinions disagreeing with panel judges of their own political party; (3) summarizing data about such matters as where judges went to law school and marital status; (4) reporting elaborate regression analyses of these data; and (5) testing various hypotheses, using these factors and resulting relations among the data, to tell us whether men or women are better judges (measured by things like opinions produced and citation frequency).

To be fair, the paper’s four authors acknowledge, in the end, limitations of the empirical methodology they use, emphasizing weaknesses in the inputs, and the meaning of resulting outputs.  In addition, the paper manifests requisite hallmarks of good academic work: a literature review, statistically testable hypotheses, reports of the statistical analysis plus qualifications and modesty about the entire undertaking.   

Furthermore, of course, in principle, the quest is valiant, for confirming hunch and intuition with statistical data is a vital exercise and tradition in academic research. And this paper may provide more support for its assertions than I could offer for claims I may make, like, in contract law: (1) Ellen Ash Peters was a more thorough and convincing judge than Learned Hand; (2) Judith Kaye was at least as persuasive and clear as Oliver Wendell Holmes; and (3) Benjamin Cardozo was superior to all of them on all counts. 

Even so, this paper puzzled and troubled me like few others ever have.    It led me to wonder whether all the work that went into preparing it, and my hour reading it, was worthwhile, and whether we have learned anything from it.

NB: The paper, oddly entitled Judging Women, by Stephen Choi (NYU Law), Mitu Gulati (Duke Law), Mirya Holman (Duke Law/UNC Econ/Pol), Eric Posner (Chicago Law), can be found here.

  October 5, 2009 at 8:42 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Fin Reg Events

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Policy formulation benefits from academic knowledge, often showcased at timely conferences, and there have been plenty of contributions this year and last concerning financial regulation reform amid the economic crisis. Late last fall, I posted a list of conferences pending then, including GW Law’s Panic of 2008 Conference, which will result in a book to be edited by my GW Law colleagues, Larry Mitchell and Art Wilmarth.

This season, there are several noteworthy forums, including at Pitt and Seton Hall Law Schools and, just two weeks ago, an Institute for Law and Economic Policy conference in which I participated, featuring Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia), Kenneth Feinberg (US special compensation master), Lucien Bebchuk (Harvard), Charles Elson (Delaware), Jill Fisch (Penn), Harvey Goldschmid (Columba), Frank Partnoy (San Diego), and a dozen others.

At GW Law, we will host a follow-up to our Panic of 2008 conference on Friday November 6, co-sponsored by ILEP, featuring academic contributions from Jim Cox (Duke), Don Langevoort (Georgetown) and Art Wilmarth (GW), plus participants from Treasury and the SEC and Senate and House Committees having jurisdiction and from the media (including Ed Andrews, New York Times). Discussion will concentrate on the emerging legislative agenda, along with enforcement (federal, state and private).

A notable interactive on-line interchange will by hosted by Steven Davidoff (University of Connecticut), using his platform as editor of the New York Times on-line deal forum. The description suggests a provocative discussion showing skepticism about standard interpretations of the crisis and pending prescriptions for reform. Notable participants include David Zaring (Penn/Wharton, co-author of an article with me on the subject, forthcoming in GW Law Review), Joseph Grundfest (Stanford), David Skeel (Penn) and Lynn Stout (UCLA).

As the Administration and Congress write legislation, ideas and input from events like these, seeming to be on the sidelines, can be important and useful. Tune in.

  October 5, 2009 at 7:05 am   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

A Dispositive Defense of Student Law Reviews

posted by Dave Hoffman

There is no way that this would happen in a student journal.  Delays?  Sure.  Bad edits?  Absolutely.  But this nonsense and collusion?  I think not.  Only non-lawyers would put up with this.

How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps

(H/T: Leiter.)

  September 5, 2009 at 7:01 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   12 Comments

Sabbatical Blogging

posted by Dave Hoffman

This semester, I get to take my first sabbatical. As Larry observed, law firm sabbaticals are a thing of the past, and so lawyers might see this opportunity as yet more evidence that academics are insulated, head-in-the-clouds, wastrels. Perhaps, though it might help to see the sabbatical, like tenure, as simply a form of alternative compensation for professors, rather than a serious spur to productivity. And, like tenure, the sabbatical is a relic: while many years ago, a regular sabbatical policy was commonplace, now it’s my sense that it’s somewhat more rare.

I’ve got to say, I find the prospect of a fall with no duties other than those I set for myself more than a little terrifying. Putting aside the absence of structure, and colleagues to talk to, there’s the problem of figuring out which kinds of projects are the right size. If I pick something too big, I’m not going to finish (and thus feel pretty bad about having nothing to show for the immense privilege that the Law School and its stakeholders have extended me). If I pick something too small, well, you get the idea. So I’m looking for the sabbatical goldilocks. As I’ve learned, painfully, promising goldilocks projects in the empirical world are often (forgive me) wolves in sheep’s clothing. You start collecting data, and before you know it it’s two years later and you realize you never fully specified your research question. Yikes!

Some folks use their sabbaticals to do something entirely different, e.g., hiking the Appalachian trail (no, seriously); writing fiction; constructing toasters from scratch. I fear I’m more conformist than that. Apart from some personal business, I’ll probably be spending the fall writing more articles, coding more data, thinking about how to be a better corporations teacher, and blogging a little bit more often than I did over the summer.

I do have two larger intellectual projects that I’m going go try to fold in. The first is to read (again) the works of the Situationalist project. I’ve read several of the project’s papers – in one case, multiple times – but I still don’t think I really understand many of the claims, and, more importantly, the project’s motivation. Since there are tons of brilliant folks affiliated with the group, this obviously is a situation that I’ve got to remedy.  Second, I want to read at least a large sample of the articles that Herb Kritzer identifies here as fruits of pre-1940 empirical legal studies work. One of the few abiding disadvantages to not having a PhD is is a missing sense of the intellectual history of your field. That problem is particularly acute in ELS, where (to read the dates on citations in most recent papers) nothing useful was written before 1995.

I suppose that’s it. I’m not training to climb Everest. I’m not going to reorient my scholarly path. I’m not taking on a court case (though the amici in Jones appear to be having tons of fun). I can’t imagine that I’ll pick up a new hobby. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending more hours working than I do when I’ve got classes to teach!

  September 2, 2009 at 6:16 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Teaching   Print This Post   7 Comments

Concurring Opinions Book Reviews

posted by Daniel Solove

Sandy Levinson has a thoughtful new essay lamenting the dwindling number of book reviews of books about the law — The Vanishing Book Review in Student Edited Law Reviews and Potential Responses, 87 Tex. L. Rev. 1205 (2009).  He discusses how the Michigan Law Review used to run 30 to 40 book reviews in its book review issue but now is running only about 10 to 15. He notes that among the top 20 law reviews, in 1987-88, they published about 125 reviews; in 2007-08, they published only 42 reviews.

Brian Leiter notes, in the title of his post about Levinson’s article, that “academic law needs more fora for serious book reviews.”

Beyond law reviews, the number of book reviews in newspapers is rapidly diminishing.

This is why we’re starting a new project at Concurring Opinions — we’ll serve as a forum for book reviews.

We will accept submissions from our readers — law professors, lawyers, law students, and academics in other fields are welcome to submit reviews.

The reviews we envision would be approximately the length of a New York Times book review — somewhere between 500 to 2000 words.

We will try to accept as many reviews as we can, but we will exercise editorial discretion if we think a review isn’t appropriate for our blog.  We’re aiming for serious reviews.

If you’re interested in writing a book review for us, we recommend that you first email us with a brief description of what book you’d like to review and your background, as we don’t want you to go through the work of writing a review only for us to think it doesn’t fit with our blog.  Emailing us in advance won’t guarantee acceptance, but we would hope to give you a good indication of whether we’d be interested in your review.

We believe that there’s a need for serious yet short book reviews, ones that aren’t as long as those published in law reviews.  That’s why we’re starting this project.  We expect it to be ongoing, so if you’ve read a law-related book recently and want a forum to publish your views about it, please think about doing a review for us.

If you publish a book review here, you keep copyright in your work, so you can use it, publish it, and disseminate it later in whatever way you desire.

So please email us if you’re interested.

  August 18, 2009 at 7:21 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   One Comment

Sample Law Review Submission Cover Letters

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Following this post are four sample law review submission cover letters I have used in recent seasons.   I provide them after detecting an absence of any samples existing on the Internet and reviewing various posts and comment threads addressing the subject that leave readers conflicted about what a cover letter might accomplish. 

There is considerable Web commentary on many aspects of the law journal submission process, which Dan Solove helpfully collects here.  Few address cover letters directly, and those are humorous, sarcastic, or questions without comments.There is a  sample cover letter on page 288 of Eugene Volokh, Academic Legal Writing, but I could not find a single one on the Web.

When discussed, there are conflicting impressions and advice. Co-op guest blogger Elizabeth Nowicki urges writing “a crisp one-page cover letter” though Trevor Morrison and my GW colleague Orin Kerr, disagreed, opining they are useless.   Scott Dodson opined that, if a famous professor read and admired a piece, to say so in the cover letter, but an articles editor said that will not be believed unless the famous professor communicates that directly.   (Some other conflicting views appear in this thread addressing more general issues.)

What should a cover letter say? All the wrangling aside, some consensus appears as follows:

Basics. Obviously, submissions must indicate author’s name and contact information (mailing address, phone, email) and article title. Unless submitted in an electronic format that transmits this information, the cover letter is the place.

Word Count. Many journals request stating the piece’s word count, including footnotes. In addition, many journals since 2005 have express word count limits or preferences, and request cover letter explanations for approaching or exceeding the guidance.

Brevity. Keep it short, usually a single page of three paragraphs, never more than two, and then only if justified by background research and context otherwise not evident from the piece.

Main Point. State the piece’s thesis, explain its uniqueness and importance.

Prior Work. Reference your prior works, when relevant, not necessarily journal prestige, although not holding this back when relevant. (Those without prior publications may need to explain a bit more why they are pursuing scholarship, perhaps even referencing relevant credentials.)

You. Mention brief biographical data only if relevant to the piece, such as your role in the relevant discourse (or the foregoing caveat for new scholars).

Style. The cover letter should be thoughtful and sober.  You can try to entertain, but beware that attempted humor can backfire. Above all, avoid gimmicks, including strong sales pitches, exaggerated statements of importance or things unrelated to the piece. Read the rest of this post »

  August 4, 2009 at 9:07 am   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   7 Comments

A Half-Baked Idea on the Evolution of Legal Scholarship

posted by Nate Oman

Having fallen into a black hole of writing for the last couple of months, I am now trying to emerge to do a bit of blogging. Over the summer I’ve had the good fortune to be part of an interdisciplinary reading group at William & Mary on the financial crisis. Yesterday one of the economists in the group, Till Schreiber, gave a fascinating presentation on the current state of macroeconomics and fiscal policy. One of the striking things to me was to see how little research has been done for the last generation or so on fiscal policy. An enormous intellectual effort has gone into thinking about monetary policy. I was frankly a bit shocked, however, not just at the amount of disagreement there was about such basic questions as the size of the fiscal multiplier, but even more at how thin the research on the topic was. One theory we batted around as to why this was so is a simple matter of the incentives that economists face. Those writing papers on monetary policy had a ready and sophisticated audience among central bankers. Indeed, those doing good work in monetary policy could hope to actually do monetary policy someday. On the other hand, the chances that the average congressman making fiscal policy could read, understand, or even be interested in sophisticated work on fiscal policy was minimal to zilch. Likewise for the chances that an academic expert on fiscal policy would be come a congressman or Senator.

I wonder if there is a similar bias at work in the legal academy. One story that you might tell is that relative to legislators judges are going to be more intellectually sophisticated when it comes to the law. Accordingly, one would expect to see more pieces explicitly addressed to judges than to legislatures. Hence, doctrinal scholarship would dominate over more straight forward law reform proposals. I think that there may have been a point in time at which this was true, but it seems to me that the trend in legal scholarship has been to move away from work that is explicitly addressed to either judges or legislatures. One way of understanding this might be simply in terms of the rising sophistication of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Sticking with the analogy to economists, however, I wonder if the turn away from work more explicitly aimed at judges might be a result of the ideological divergence of the judiciary and the legal academy since the early 1980s. The academy, of course, has always steered left and given that since 1968 only three of the ten presidential terms have been served by Democrats the federal judiciary at least has been moving to the right. Hence, one might tell a story of the rise of “law and ….” scholarship as the academy’s response to their increasing awareness of their ideological irrelevance to what was going on in the courts.

Just a thought.

  July 31, 2009 at 8:59 am   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), Politics   Print This Post   No Comments

Does Law and Economics Destroy Law Students’ Sense of Justice?

posted by Dave Hoffman

A draft paper by Raymond Fisman (Columbia Business),  Shachar Kariv (Berkeley Economics) and Daniel Markovits (Yale Law) has gotten surprisingly little attention given its potentially radical implications.  Maybe it’s the title: Exposure to Ideology and Distributional Preferences. I would have gone with something different.  Perhaps “Law and Economics Eats Law Students’ Hearts.”

The authors looked at first-year students at Yale Law School taking contracts and torts.  They labeled the students’ professors by their purported tendency to emphasize economic and “humanist” rhetoric in class.*  They then used the natural experiment of law school sorting to determine the effect that exposure to economic ideology had on law students’ distributional preferences in the dictator game. That is, did students taught by economically-minded professors behave differently than those taught by professors disposed toward humanism or critical-legal studies?

The bottom line: students taught by economically-minded professors were both more selfish and more likely to see fairness as a form of kaldor-hicks efficiency.  By contrast, students taught by humanists were more generous and also  likely to see fairness as a matter of equity.

These are important results for those interested in legal education.

• First, and most obviously, it suggests that our preferences for altruism and the content of fairness are highly manipulable — one semester of teaching by a professor – at Yale, no less – can affect them.  I admit to being a bit surprised by the size of the effect, given the mixed results from earlier work on the relationship between economics and altruism.  It’s also surprising that Yalies are so impressionable!  I wonder whether the effect persists past a semester, and whether better coding of actual classroom discussion would have changed the results.
• Second, it suggests yet more reasons for researchers to think hard about the effect that law school teaching has on the content of legal doctrine.  As I’ve argued, it’s quite likely that some law school professors who never published a lick have had more effect on substantive legal doctrine than those who’ve written reams, simply by influencing how their students (who went on to be lawyers and judges) thought about the content of rules and the byways of arguments.  We should do more work like this!
• Third, and most personally, this makes me nervous.  I’m a highly socratic teacher who places lots (and lots) of emphasis in the first-year on efficiency-arguments and on the need to look beyond questions about distributional equality in the present case.  I thought that by doing so I was helping students to think critically about the dynamic nature of contract law – the relationship between contract rules and market price; the usefulness of an intelligent system of defaults; the importance of getting beyond gut intuitions.  But maybe I’m also indoctrinating the students to grab more of the pie for themselves.  Nuts.

*The method they used to code economic preferences was, to be frank, a little mystifying.  They gave points for PhD’s in economics, but had to make exceptions for Alan Schwartz, PhDless but L&E to the bone, Guido, for obvious reasons, and both Robert Gordon and Carol Rose, who are similarly off-set.  Why not simply ask the professors themselves how much they emphasized economic rhetoric in class?  Or the students?

  May 18, 2009 at 6:17 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Contract Law & Beyond, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions   Print This Post   4 Comments

On Showing Up

posted by Michael Madison

My post on the challenges facing the law school Research Dean contained an implicit and unexamined assumption regarding a gap between the interest of the individual faculty member in producing and distributing research and scholarship, on the one hand, and the interest of that faculty member’s law school in the research and scholarly activities of its faculty, on the other hand.

I’m convinced that these interests are distinct, though they overlap. Here’s a possible example of the gap in action: At your law school, do faculty members regularly attend and participate in workshops presented by speakers who specialize in fields other than their own? Do they make, in other words, what might be characterized as “karmic” contributions to the intellectual life of the school? Are they good scholarly citizens?

Not everyone is always available to show up, and having too many people show up could undermine the value of the workshop. Yet there are folks who don’t show up because they don’t care, or can’t be bothered, or don’t see the value in taking time to kick around the ideas of someone who can’t help them with their own work. I believe that the interest of the individual (absent) faculty member may be served by that judgment, at least in a sense, but the interest of the school is not. A lively workshop culture means an intellectually engaged faculty, which can have tangible benefits for those local faculty; which can generate reputational benefits among other law schools; and which can have payoffs in the classroom for students.

In short, I’m aware of a kernel of Chandler’s Visible Hand at work in my Research Dean-ing. Other things being equal, I’d like to get more colleagues to attend more workshops.

Am I overstating the case? Have my metaphors run roughshod over important distinctions?  I admit that I like going to workshops, even workshops in fields far removed from mine, and not just because it’s part of my role as Research Dean. It’s entirely possible that my view of the matter is colored by my own idealized vision of an academic community. I also recognize that by putting “karmic” participation in the life of an institution onto the table, I complicate the sizable expectations that already confront would-be and new professors. Institutional interests have distributional consequences.

Thoughts?

  May 15, 2009 at 5:53 am   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Heart of a Center

posted by Jacqueline Lipton

So here’s a question for people thinking about the nature of law schools and the nature of scholarship (and with thanks to Mike Madison for picking up on my invitation to blog more about his research deanship).

I’ve talked to a lot of folks at a lot of schools with different philosophies on law school centers.  Even folks within the same school often have widely divergent views about what law school centers can and should be doing for the overall law school enterprise.  And of course, it must be acknolwedged that centers can serve a variety of different functions within a law school – and different individual centers can have different individual roles.

So my question is whether there is any way to get to the heart of the center question.  Are there one or more key ideals that all centers in law schools should be able to live up to, or to contribute to the school?  And, if so, is it something other than:  “It’s a marketing device to attract faculty/students.”  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I’m asking the question out of legitimate interest.)

We’ve been talking about this recently at my school and the question is of particular interest here because we have a number of different centers that were set up under vastly different conditions for vastly different purposes.  Some are research focused and obtain grant funding.  At least one has a private endowment.  Some take advantage of collections of faculty who specialize in particular subject areas.  Presumably none of them are cost-neutral for the school, although none of them drain big bucks out of the budget either.

There are always political questions within faculty about centers and the role of faculty who happen to operate as center directors (I plead guilty to the charge of being a center director).  “Why does s/he get [a lighter teaching load/a director's stipend/a dedicated administrative support person/_______]?”  Pick one or fill in the blank.

But politics aside, what do centers ideally contribute/potentially detract from a school? Read the rest of this post »

  May 12, 2009 at 2:17 pm  Tags: law centers  Posted in: Education, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   One Comment

The Law School Faculty as a Commons

posted by Michael Madison

What’s the connection between law professors and stand-up comics?

My last post pointed to a recent short piece on comics and the relationship between “anti-plagiarism” social norms that encourage comic creativity and the emergence of those norms in the context of commodified comedy.  Comics sold and consumers bought LPs by the boat-load. The success of record albums had a clear if unmeasurable impact on comics’ incentives to produce and innovate.

A generalizable point is this: Record album sales are an objective and observable characteristic of this particular environment. The data is mostly external to the comics themselves. What scholars describe as social norms among comics are, by contrast, mostly subjective. Norms are personal to each comic. We “observe” the existence of social norms them by inferring their existence from regular behavior and from anecdotal reports. That interplay between observable, objective, and “external” dimensions of an innovation environment and subjective, “internal” dimensions of that environment is central to understanding its mechanics.

In fact, that interplay is probably central to understanding the mechanics of any cultural context. It’s a central theme in the work that I’ve begun on “cultural commons” with Brett Frischmann and Kathy Strandburg. And it connects stand-up comedy and law faculties. More below the fold.
Read the rest of this post »

  May 11, 2009 at 8:33 am   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Law School, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   One Comment

The Beauty of Casuistry

posted by Nate Oman

When I get asked by non-lawyers about teaching law school (and this happens about once or twice a year) I tend to tell them a certain kind of myth about the case method.  I try to throw my students into the particulars of the common law and force them to engage in a casuistic process of pushing the limits of their intuitions by testing them against new, but slightly different fact patterns.  Likewise, when a student asks me something like “Yes, but what does reasonable reliance really mean?” my answer is generally that they have to look to the cases.  I can’t give you a set of abstract principles that answer that question, I say, what you have to do is find a case with a fact pattern similar to yours and then either distinguish it (if it is bad for you) or argue that it covers your case (if it is good for you).  In my more nominalistic moments, I will insist with what I hope is a suitably wild-eyed look that there really is nothing else there when it comes to many legal concepts.  It is just the cases.  Just the particulars.

Read the rest of this post »

  May 8, 2009 at 8:43 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Exploring Commons Institutions

posted by Michael Madison

Thanks to Deven for the generous introduction and to Dan and the Co-Op team for inviting me to spend some time here this month.  The introduction intentionally saves space by not including a couple of things that I’ll talk about during my stay:  My other blogs, and my appointment as Research Dean at Pitt.  Both have something to do with my current work on commons institutions.  Over the course of this guest stint I hope to explain some of the connections and to generate suggestions and feedback that might help me see others.

 

Read the rest of this post »

  May 6, 2009 at 8:08 am   Posted in: Blogging, Intellectual Property, Law School (Scholarship), Property Law, Sociology of Law, Technology   Print This Post   One Comment

Orwell on Law Scholarship

posted by Neil Richards

I recently rediscovered George Orwell’s wonderful essay “Politics and the English Language,” which I read years ago in college but had essentially forgotten. Rereading it years later, I was struck by how much it had to say about the business of writing legal scholarship. In the essay, written in 1946, Orwell makes the case that over-complex and vague language in nonfiction writing leads to laziness of thought and poverty of discourse. (A copy of the essay is here, but Orwell is better read, I think, on paper than on a computer screen.)

Orwell makes the case for simplicity and directness in nonfiction writing, for the avoidance of tired and misleading metaphor, and the rejection of words chosen to confuse the reader or create deliberate ambiguity. Reading the essay made me think immediately of law scholarship, especially scholarship written by beginning legal scholars (including some of mine). Law professors often adopt tired or jargony metaphors (”slam dunk,” “atmospherics”) or use needlessly complicated words (many uses of “deontological”). Part of this trend, I think, is the feeling among untenured scholars to appear smart and able to use fancy words – to sound like a scholar. This can be a reinforcing trend – when your colleagues use needlessly complicated words, there’s often a feeling that you need to as well, in order to seem as scholarly as everyone else. Another overuse of complicated words can occur to hide meaning, or to avoid engaging in serious analysis. Lots of euphemisms (”transaction costs”) would seem to fall into this category.

Orwell concludes his essay with a summary of his rules for good nonfiction writing:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

My point is not to pick on legal scholarship, as much as to suggest that a simpler and more direct style in legal scholarship (and legal discussion generally) should be the way to go, and that there’s a lot for all of us to learn in Orwell. As he puts it, language should be “an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” When we make our arguments simply and directly, and we don’t hide behind euphemism or wordiness, readers can undersand what we say and agree (or disagree) more readily. There’s a lot to like in such an approach, and it reminds me of some scholars whose work I admire whose work really embodies this approach to writing. Orin Kerr (GW) and Eugene Volokh (UCLA) come to mind. I often disagree with the arguments in their work, but their plain style makes disagreement more obvious, and allows for a more direct, lively, and constructive disagreement.

  April 29, 2009 at 5:26 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   5 Comments

Thoughts on conference format

posted by Sonja Starr

Like most academics, I attend conferences fairly often, and enjoy some of them more than others. I wanted to share a few thoughts on format features that tend to make conferences a better experience from my perspective, and to invite commenters to share their views. I have enjoyed conferences that follow a variety of different formats, and I think format diversity is good, for reasons discussed below. Still, there are a few features that I tend to prefer and would like to see more often:

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  April 27, 2009 at 6:01 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Efficient Browsing and the Legal Workshop

posted by Nate Oman

A consortium of top law reviews has just launched a new site, the Legal Workshop. (Solum gives his thoughts here) Unlike sites such as the Harvard Law Review Forum or the Yale Pocket Part, the Legal Workshop will publish shortened, popularized versions of articles that appear in the reviews. I heard about the idea a couple of weeks ago, when Georgetown Law Journal asked that I produce a shortened version of my forth coming article in their journal for the site. It strikes me as a very good idea, regardless of whether it excites the general public (an apparent goal of the project, and one about which Solum rightly expresses skepticism). As a professor, I suspect that this format will ultimately prove more useful to me than that adopted by say the Yale Pocket Part. The reason is that it helps me solve a problem: consuming legal scholarship.

I run into two problems. First, the volume of things that I am potentially interested in vastly exceeds my ability to read it. The result is that there are lots of things that I don’t read but would like to. Indeed, given that I am a particularly slow reader, this is a bigger problem for me than for my co-bloggers, all of whom seem much better read than me. (My excuse is that I had a learning disability as a child, didn’t learn to read until I was about 12 years old, and am still very slow.) The result is that much of the scholarship I read is directly related to a something that I am writing at the time. It is simply difficult to read much else. This feeds into my second problem: namely that most of my ideas (to the extent that I have ideas) come about serendipitously. I can plan and organize research on a particular idea. It is difficult, however, for me to plan and organize research on finding an idea. For me at least, the most effective way of stumbling on to new ideas is to read randomly what interests me and then engage in intellectual day dreaming. It can be time consuming.

I think that a large part of what counts as thought is simply arbitrage. It is taking ideas from one area and applying them to a new area. This structure, however, means that often the most useful research that you do is unrelated to any research project. Another way of putting this is that new research projects develop when I am thinking and reading about something else and then find a connection. (For example, my Georgetown piece, which looks at generality and specificity in contract law grew out of an analogy I saw between contract law and Federalist No. 10.) There is thus a sense in which intellectual browsing is immensely important for research. I need a way of dabbling and dreaming efficiently.

The “problem” with something like the Pocket Part is that it rather than decreasing the cost of browsing, it simply increases my ability to analyze a particular argument in greater depth. There is a sense, however, in which I don’t really need help doing this. This is what I do when I do specific searches of the literature and amass all of the articles on a particular topic. The Harvard Law Review Forum doesn’t really make this process any easier, even if it provides a home for good material that might otherwise not be written. It’s good but it simply doesn’t do anything to reduce my browsing costs because the new material that it generates in some sense requires or assumes that I have already read the articles in the main journal. That, however, takes time. Ideally, however, the Legal Worship should increase the efficiency of my browsing. What I am hoping is that it will let me consume more ideas than I would get from either skimming SSRN abstracts (broad but shallow) or reading long-form articles (deep but time consuming). I am hoping that it will open me up to more moments of serendipity, which is what I ultimately need.

  April 21, 2009 at 8:18 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   No Comments

Hiding Your Scholarship

posted by Corey Yung

Before I started my career as a legal academic, I, as I expect a lot of new professors do, went to the AALS New Law Teachers Workshop. I definitely recommend going there as I learned a lot from more experienced academics. Some of what I learned seemed trivial, but was very important (i.e., how much reading you should assign per class). Other advice has really made me a better scholar (i.e, when you are angry or riled up about something, start writing). There was one piece of advice, however, that left me a little baffled.

One of the leaders of my subject-specific breakout sessions cautioned us new academics against ever sharing drafts of scholarship with any members of the senior faculty at our respective schools. This meant that we shouldn’t ever show written drafts to tenured professors and we definitely should not present works-in-progress to faculty. The chief reasons for the warning were that only bad things could emerge from faculty seeing your work before it was in a polished state. Primarily, your fellow faculty would form an image in their minds based upon the flaws in early editions of your work and that impression would not dissipate upon completion of your writing. I was flabbergasted by the advice. As someone who had published a couple of things before being hired, one of the things I was most looking forward to was having senior people actually read my work. As a practitioner, it had been almost impossible to get anyone to seriously scrutinize my writing.

So, when I heard this cautionary advice, it went against my strong intuitions about academia. I have to admit that so far I have completely ignored it. Last week, I just gave my second works-in-progress presentation which was open to the entire faculty at my school. That presentation concerned an early-stage empirical project that represents a new direction in my scholarship. Because it was based upon early data and was in an area which is outside of my normal area of expertise, the dangers should have been highest. However, as has been the case with all of my interactions with my faculty, I found the response to be incredibly supportive and helpful. Afterward, I scheduled yet another presentation for later this semester on another article that is still in progress.

Now that academics often post very early works on SSRN, the fears of my section leader seem even more strange to me. Am I missing something? Or are some law school environments more dangerous for junior scholars? Should this note of caution continue to be propagated or is it a relic of a different era?

  March 9, 2009 at 2:37 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   9 Comments

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