Archive for the ‘Law School (Scholarship)’ Category

Stanford Law Review Online: The Privacy Paradox 2012 Symposium Issue

posted by Stanford Law Review

Our 2012 Symposium Issue, The Privacy Paradox: Privacy and Its Conflicting Values, is now available online:

Essays

• A Reasonableness Approach to Searches After the Jones GPS Tracking Case by Peter Swire (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 57);
• Privacy in the Age of Big Data by Omer Tene & Jules Polonetsky (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 63);
• Yes We Can (Profile You): A Brief Primer on Campaigns and Political Data by Daniel Kreiss (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 70);
• Paving the Regulatory Road to the “Learning Health Care System” by Deven McGraw (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 75);
• Famous for Fifteen People: Celebrity, Newsworthiness, and Fraley v. Facebook by Simon J. Frankel, Laura Brookover & Stephen Satterfield (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 82); and
• The Right to Be Forgotten by Jeffrey Rosen (64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 88).

The text of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski’s keynote is forthcoming.

  February 13, 2012 at 1:04 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Stanford), Law Rev Contents, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Media Law, Military Law, Politics, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical), Privacy (National Security), Social Network Websites, Supreme Court, Technology, Tort Law   Print This Post   No Comments

Picking up where we left off…

posted by Nicole Huberfeld

My heartiest thanks to Dan for letting me stick around for another month.  I would like to renew the request I made here for thoughts on mentoring.  Though I appreciated the responsive post and comments that Paul Horwitz generated over at PrawfsBlawg, it did not create the kind of feedback that would allow me to facilitate more information about mentor/mentee opportunities.  So, please feel free to email me or comment here, and I offer again to aggregate any information I receive.

  January 4, 2012 at 12:46 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   One Comment

Adviser? Teacher? Sage? What is a mentor?

posted by Nicole Huberfeld

I think most of us engage in informal mentoring of our junior colleagues as new hires enter the academy, but I recently have taken on more formalized roles that have me pondering what it means to be an effective mentor.  Is it a matter of providing navigational guideposts for advancement toward tenure?  Advice about publishing strategies?  Providing a friendly eye for early drafts?  Teaching aid and advice?  Support for other decision-making, such as child-bearing, and attempting the elusive ‘work-life balance’?  I think mentoring can be all of these things, depending on the mentee’s personal and institutional needs, but I started to question my own assumptions when asked during a panel at SEALS last summer whether anyone really needs a mentor.  My gut reaction was yes, especially for women, minorities, and those who did not attend the usual professor-generating law schools (which are simply better at facilitating connections in the academy).  But, it seems like not many receive the kind of mentoring they desire.  Of course, some formalized inter-school mentoring opportunities exist, such as the annual SEALS conference, which is terrific for matching new scholars with mentors who provide substantive feedback.  Also, the AALS Women in Legal Education Committee has its own website, which is designed to facilitate mentee cold-calling of mentors who look to be a good match (which may be a unique approach).

All of that said, CoOp readers, what do you think makes a good mentor?  What are junior academicians seeking in this context that they can’t find?  And, what other mentoring opportunities are out there?  I would be most grateful for comments either here or by e-mail.  Finally, I would be happy to aggregate information and post it (if enough flows my way before the end of the month).

  December 28, 2011 at 12:29 pm  Tags: academia  Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Relationship Between Theory and Practice

posted by Daniel Solove

The longstanding attacks on legal scholarship all seem to assume a particular relationship between theory and practice, one that I believe is flawed.  Recently, I responded to one such critique.  There are others, with Justice Roberts and many other judges and practitioners claiming that legal scholarship isn’t worth their attention and isn’t useful to the practice of law.

It seems to me that those making these critiques assume that the primary value of legal scholarship should be to (1) describe current legal doctrine to make legal research easier for practitioners; or (2) influence an immediate and direct change in the law.  In an earlier post, I argued that #2 above is an unreasonable standard.  Legal change is slow, and rarely will one article have a direct influence.  Rarely does one thing have a direct influence — change typically occurs more through an indirect influence by numerous sources.  Only in the movies or in simplistic historical accounts will we see one article or book lead to dramatic changes.  Of course, it occasionally happens, but rarely.

In this post, I want to tackle claim #1.  The treatise writers and doctrinal legal scholarship of yesteryear has diminished, though it isn’t gone.  Last I checked, there were quite a lot of treatises written by quite a lot of law professors.  But there is today a lot more theoretical scholarship.  Is this scholarship valuable if it doesn’t help in legal research?

The answer is yes for many reasons:

1. As with all humanities, the value of any particular work is hard to quantify.  What’s the value of Kafka’s The Trial or works by Shakespeare?  What’s the value of reading history?  What’s the value of learning things that don’t have direct application to one’s career?  I believe there’s a lot of value.  Reading these works opens up new ways of thinking, sparks new ideas, and helps people understand the world differently.  This can indirectly affect one’s legal practice skills by enhancing creativity, improving one’s writing style, or making one see the facts of a case in a different light. It is interesting that many of the great jurists were also avid readers of literature.  Indeed, many of the great thinkers and writers throughout history had wide-ranging intellectual interests and reading habits.  Would people like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson be as creative if they had more narrow and workmanlike intellectual exploration?  Probably not.  Would Justice Holmes have been as great without his love of the humanities?  I doubt it.

2. There is a value in critiquing legal decisions and laws, even if the critique winds up remaining in dissent.  Why do justices bother to write dissents?  After all, it often takes decades if not 40-50 years for the Supreme Court to change the law.  They write dissents in the hope that one day the Court will see things differently.  They write them to make a record.  There is a value in criticizing legal opinions and laws even if it doesn’t immediately result in a change.  Indeed, many of the critiques of legal decisions and laws that I read in legal scholarship are very powerful ones.  Courts and lawmakers should pay more attention, as the scholarship often reveals logical flaws in reasoning, clear errors in applying precedent, assumptions that are based on faulty facts, assumptions that are wrong based on empirical evidence, or assumptions that are contrary to widely-accepted conclusions in science or social science.   Courts and legislatures may hide their heads in the sand, but that shouldn’t be a justification for criticizing legal scholarship — it should be a basis for criticizing courts and lawmakers.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 26, 2011 at 5:31 pm   Posted in: Law and Humanities, Law School (Scholarship), Legal Theory   Print This Post   7 Comments

The Usefulness of Legal Scholarship

posted by Daniel Solove

A reader of my post about the N.Y. Times critique of legal education writes, in regard to the value of legal scholarship:

I happen to be on the editorial board of a T14 law school’s law review, so I have to cite check and read articles regularly. Of those I’ve read, I can’t think of a single one I thought would be useful to a practicing lawyer. The problem is, in my experience, most seem to advocate a fundamental change in philosophy to an area of law that diverges from what precedent would suggest. To me, this seems extremely unhelpful, because A. Lower courts aren’t likely to accept a grand new theory that seems to contradict what SCOTUS is saying, B. As far as I can tell SCOTUS seems not to usually change its theory either, and C. I don’t think most policymakers tend to read law review articles.

This leads me to be inclined to believe that most law review articles are useless. Are you saying my sample is unrepresentative of what’s out there? Or do I simply have a narrower definition of usefulness? Could you perhaps suggest some articles from the past year that in your mind represented useful legal scholarship?

This commentator assumes that usefulness is the equivalent of being accepted by the courts.  I quarrel with this view for many reasons:

1. An article can have an influence on cases, even if difficult to demonstrate.  Many courts don’t cite law review articles even when they rely on them.  Judges are notorious for not being particularly charitable with citations.  They often copy verbatim parts of briefs, for example.  If a law professor relies on a scholarly work even in a minor way, the professor will typically cite to the work.  Not so for courts.

2. Most articles will not change the law.  Changing the law is quite difficult, and if most law review articles changed the law, the law would be ridiculously more dynamic than it currently is.

3. No matter what discipline or area, most of the things produced are not going to be great.  Most inventions are flops.  Most books, songs, movies, TV shows, art works, architecture, or anything produced are quite forgettable and will likely be forgotten.  Great lasting works only come around infrequently, no matter what the field.

4. Most people are forgettable too.  In the law, most practitioners and judges have been forgotten.  Only a few great ones are remembered.  Of the judges who are most well-known, it is interesting that many were more theoretical in nature and had a major impact in changing the law — typically in ways law professors might change the law.  Think of Benjamin Cardozo, who wrote many articles and books and who radically changed the law.  Think of Felix Frankfurter, a former law professor.  Think of Louis Brandeis.  Think of Oliver Wendell Holmes.  These were jurists who were thinkers.  They were readers.  They were literary.  They were writers of scholarship too.  Maybe the forgettable practitioners and judges are the ones who ignore legal scholarship.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 26, 2011 at 4:19 pm   Posted in: Jurisprudence, Law and Humanities, Law Practice, Law School (Scholarship), Legal Theory   Print This Post   6 Comments

“Mentoring” versus “Scamming”

posted by Dave Hoffman

Today in Contracts, I taught Vokes v. Arthur Murray, 212 So. 2d 906 (1968).  In Vokes, a “widow of 51 years”¹ sought to be relieved from her obligation to pay for dance lessons purchased from an Arthur Murray franchise.  She claimed that the defendant had lied to her about her abilities as a dancer – and, significantly, exaggerated her improvement.  She had an account with almost 2,000 hours of unused lessons outstanding, and she owed more than $200,000 (in 2010 dollars). Surprisingly, the court permitted that argument to go to a jury, reasoning that the studio’s superior knowledge, coupled with the defendant’s bad faith as illustrated by the facts, made this the kind of exceptional misleading “opinion” which might be actionable.

It’s a good teaching case.  But it got me to wondering about an issue tangentially raised by David Segal’s embarrassingly error-ridden and ideologically charged series in the Times about legal education, and more forcefully by the equally thoughtful Paul Campos. Both argue (ironically) that law schools are contributing to the problems of the legal profession by not raising higher barriers to entry.  Those barriers might be incidentally related to other worthy goals — experiential education, a single tenure system, and a more rigorous disclosure regime are all popular reforms that are very, very expensive.²  But sometimes reformers make a more direct claim: like the Texas lawyers of the 1930s, they claim that “Our bar, already overcrowded, is held out as an asylum for the lame, and the halt, and the blind from the law schools of this country.”  Law schools are failing students by encouraging them to apply (it’s a “scam”), taking their money (it’s really a “scam!”), not preparing them to practice (“scam! scam! scam!”), and then not supporting them in getting jobs (“SCAM!”)

But how far, I mused outloud in class, does this argument run?  Let’s say a student comes to your office hours early in the Fall semester.  They are lost.  Really, desperately, lost.  They are working all the time, but they can’t see the forest, the trees, the continent, the planet.  Law’s greek to them. What to do?  One view – let’s call this the Segal/Campos view – is that the morally right thing to do at that very moment is to 1) recognize that my livelihood depends on the students; 2) this puts me, like every provider of services, in a slightly compromised position when talking to a student about whether they ought to be in school; 3) realizing this, decide pretty quickly if I think that the student is a candidate for Bar passage and employment; 4) if not, tell the student that they’d be better off leaving school and pursuing other opportunities in today’s job market, or to take the Ayes-refund offer if it comes.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 22, 2011 at 11:27 pm   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions   Print This Post   40 Comments

“The first thing we do, let’s [train] all the lawyers.”

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

David Segal has a front-page, above-the-fold article in today’s New York Times, What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering.  Segal blasts legal education for failing to produce prêt-à-porter lawyers sized to fit the needs of everyone from Skadden Arps to solo practitioners.  Segal also denies the value of “pure” research — law review articles and other scholarly output that do not satisfy his requirements for immediate application to daily practice.  Gerard Magliocca and Alex Guerrero already commented on one of his examples.  As with Dick the Butcher’s suggestion in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Segal’s article is wrong on both teaching and research.

First, teaching.  I think that when law schools succeed at their mission they do produce graduates with skills ready for use in any legal environment.  It’s just that developing the skill set that Segal prioritizes (such as his opening example: filing a certificate of merger with a secretary of state) is not the sole, let alone primary, goal of legal education.  Those form-filling and filing skills are important, but best honed by firms that daily engage in those specialized, localized, and technical operations.  Law schools, in contrast, have the advantage in teaching the general skills and knowledge that firms of all sizes (as well as government agencies and corporations) have neither the time, inclination, nor resources to perfect.  But these organizations desperately need these things in the lawyers they hire: critical thinking, professional standards, ethical judgment, and historical perspective (to name a few).

Unlike medical schools and engineering programs, law schools do not set out to create technicians.  (I suspect that the best medical and engineering institutions don’t have this goal either, but this is the common comparison.)  Law schools, especially, should produce graduates comfortably inclined to question the status quo, challenge assumed truths, and think about the long-term implications of their actions as members of a learned profession.  Over time, one hopes that their training will combine with experience to produce in them judgment about when each skill should take a leading role.  Lawyers with these skills are needed in any age, but especially one that produced such colossal fails ranging from Enron to government-sanctioned torture.

Second, research.  I also reject Segal’s essentially anti-intellectual critique of research.  Last spring, I was asked by a high-level Russian official to write a report on a verdict in a criminal case.  That report explored the many departures from Russia’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights to be found in that verdict, but it also raised serious questions about fundamental aspects of Russian law.  The report could hardly qualify as research readily useful to the day-to-day activities of a practitioner at the bar of any American state or the present Russian one.  Nevertheless, I found that the research that I conducted, the exercise of drafting my report, and the report itself generated useful starting points for several discussions in classes that I teach on American law.  Those conversations ranged from an aspect of the famous Chenery case in my Administrative Law class to an editing exercise in a seminar on counterterrorism.  Needless to say, I hope it also makes a positive impact in Russia when it is released next month.

Those teaching moments were hard to foresee at the outset of my research.  But anyone who values knowledge for its own sake would not be surprised by the serendipity my Russian law work produced in my American law classrooms.  That the report led to invitations to speak to groups at universities and thinktanks in the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Belgium also suggests that what counts as valuable research might benefit from a less cramped definition than Segal and company provide.

  November 20, 2011 at 8:55 pm   Posted in: Education, Law Practice, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Uncategorized   Print This Post   7 Comments

Last Call For Papers — November 15th Deadline

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Junior Faculty Interdisciplinary Scholarship Workshop at Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis

March 22-23, 2012

The workshop will explore “Objectivity in the Law” and is open to non-tenured academics whose research is interdisciplinary in nature.  The normative value of objectivity runs through the purpose for most law, though social practices influence how laws are implemented.  Submitted papers should focus on a chosen area of law and examine that law’s objective purpose and the relationship between its purpose and its actual implementation.

To ensure each presenter receives extensive feedback, only six papers will be selected for the workshop.  Senior scholars from Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis and other law schools will be paired with presenters and serve as primary or secondary commentators on the papers.  Presenters will receive a small honorarium and will be reimbursed for their travel and hotel expenses.  The Law School will provide lunch and dinner on Friday, as well as breakfast on Saturday.

Interested participants must submit a 500 word abstract to Professor Cynthia Adams at cmadams@iupui.edu before November 15. Presenters will be notified before December 15. If selected, a participant must submit a full copy of the paper before February 17, 2011.

The program is also open to other scholars wanting to attend, read, and comment on the papers but not present. There is no registration fee.

  November 6, 2011 at 5:34 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   No Comments

Associate Dean for Research

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I have been appointed as the first Associate Dean for Research at my law school.  I am eager to hear from people with the same position (or the equivalent) at other schools to find out what they do.  Feel free to post comments here or email me, as I would like to learn more about how I can be a useful resource for my colleagues.

  November 1, 2011 at 9:58 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

NatArtFiMo (National Article Finishing Month)

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

It’s that time of year again. Your friends on facebook are pledging to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starting tomorrow. The idea is pretty simple:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of NaNoWriMo is the community support aspect. Folks post their successes to Twitter and Facebook. There are constant reminders to write. And it works rather well, as tens of thousands of eager amateurs manage to write 50,000 words in a month’s time.

Of course, I’m tempted to join the fun. (NaNoWriMo would be a great time to finish that Twilight fan fiction novel!) But I also know that there is a half-finished article calling my name, occasionally reminding me of its continued existence. What if there were also a National Article Finishing Month?

Now there is. Read the rest of this post »

  November 1, 2011 at 2:05 am   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), NatArtFiMo   Print This Post   3 Comments

Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network at Law and Society

posted by Sarah Waldeck

The Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network (CRN) is a newly-constituted group that seeks to bring together scholars across a range of fields who are interested in feminist legal theory.  This year CRN is hoping to organize a number of panels at Law and Society (LSA), which will take place in Honolulu, Hawaii from June 5-8, 2012. 

All are invited to submit paper proposals for these panels. There is no single topic or theme to which paper submissions must conform: they should simply relate to feminist legal theory in some shape or form. CRN particularly welcomes proposals which would permit it to collaborate with other research networks, which have organized around topics such as Critical Research on Race and the Law, or Gender, Sexuality and the Law. Also, because the LSA meeting attracts scholars from other disciplines, multidisciplinary proposals are welcome. CRN’s goal in organizing these panels is to stimulate focused discussion on papers on which scholars are currently working. Thus, while proposals may reference work which is well on the way to publication, CRN is particularly eager to solicit proposals for works-in-progress which are at an earlier stage, and which will benefit from the discussion that the panels will provide.

Paper proposals are due by November 14, 2011.  Instructions for submitting proposals are after the jump.

Read the rest of this post »

  October 30, 2011 at 8:56 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Job Talk Alternatives?

posted by Dave Hoffman

The hour-long job talk is the market standard measure of a candidate’s presentation skills.  As Solove explained,  ”[i]t begins with the candidate lecturing for about 20 to 30 minutes and is followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A.”  There are advantages to this format: it permits the candidate to get his or her thesis on the table before being interrupted by faculty, who, being who they are, aren’t accustomed to listening to other people talk and who would otherwise interrupt with the first thought that pops into their heads.  There are disadvantages as well — a shorter 20 minute grace period may be insufficient to make any particularly complex argument; a longer 30-40 minute speech risks boring the room.  Plus, to the very limited extent that the job talk is a good predictor of how well a candidate will teach, longer talks are particularly unrepresentative of a well-functioning and open classroom.

I thought I’d ask the audience whether they know of truly different models.  I know that in 2004, when I was on the market, Lewis and Clark had candidates speak to a full room of students and faculty (75+), with no constraints that I can recall on the Q&A.  (My god did I bombed that talk!)  Conversely, I’ve heard that some schools permit questioning from the first minute, but insist that all comments until the 30 minute mark be merely clarifying.  Whether and how that rule is enforceable is beyond my ken.  Some schools are rumored to entirely ban powerpoint.  Others, I hear, ask the candidates to teach as if they were talking to a classroom of law students.

But these are largely rumors.  Does anyone know of different models and have thoughts about what works particularly well?

I’ll add that I’d prefer that the thread not devolve into a criticism of the idea of job talks — though I agree with the critique in many respects.

  October 18, 2011 at 10:27 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   9 Comments

A Cite for Sore Eyes

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

For most of my academic career, my research and citation model has been relatively low-tech: I’ve simply typed my citations into Word documents (or sometimes found a research assistant to type them for me). And sometimes I paste in common sources from the footnotes in my older articles. That’s it. It’s pretty basic — not quite writing-it-out-longhand, but probably not a particularly effective method, given advances in technology.

After recently conversations with colleagues who seem enamored of one or more of the citation-management programs available, I’m dipping my toe into this area. I’m also wondering how widely used these programs are. Some law library and other websites have collected links and information on some of the available programs, or offer specific tips on how to use them. I’m still a neophyte, but some of these programs look intriguing — provided I can figure out how to use them. Read the rest of this post »

  September 18, 2011 at 8:14 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   7 Comments

Our Bar . . . is . . . an asylum for the lame, and the halt, and the blind from the law schools of this country. And they are still coming.

posted by Dave Hoffman

Sorry for the blogging hiatus.  I’ve been writing.  I’m sorry also to have missed the latest NYT attack on legal education — in the form of a misleading hatchet job on NYLS.  The article – one of a shoddy series by David Segal – struck an academic nerve already made sensitive by Justice Roberts’ dismissal of legal scholarship.

Of course, arguments about law school’s worth and scholarship’s consequence are evergreen – they drive blogging traffic and comments & promise to motivate engagement between blogs by practicing lawyers and the academy.  But quite often, unfortunately, these discussions go nowhere.

On law professor blogs, there’s a tone of tetchy defensiveness: “the market tells us that we’re worthwhile – just look at the continuing number of lemmings pounding at the gate!”, or “of course our scholarship is consequential, let’s count the citations”; or, “no one ever promised that a JD was a job guarantee!”; or, “what’s their BATLS?” [The last is a truly obscure negotiation joke if there ever was one.]

For reporters, it feels like the scene in the Wire when they are talking about what to cover in the coming year. Sure, you could talk about complexity and globalization and economic markets and the changing nature of legal practice.  Or you might talk about the relationship between ABA regulation, thoughtless paternalism, and resulting distributional inequalities in education.  But that’s a set of sprawling stories – lacking an obvious villain to muckrake.  Rather, then, the news blames the dickensian aspect of law schools.  Reporters write articles that stir the pot, but aren’t recognizable to insiders, making them less likely to actually motivate change.

Last, not least, the practicing lawyers often articulate resentment toward ivory tower academics who ignore the realities of “trench lawyering”. (This happens even when the “academics” in question are actually practicing lawyers.)  Basically: impractical law professors versus practical lawyers.

Why does this “debate” feel so tired?  I have a partial hypothesis: because we ignore history. I had a great research assistant, Alex Radus, collect quotes about the ferment about legal education in the 1930s-1940s.  (Which is highlighted in Prosser’s famous 1948 speech to Temple’s law faculty, Lighthouse No Good.“)  After the jump, you’ll see some fantastic quotes from that era and before, which remind us that “what has been will be again / what has been done will be done again /there is nothing new under the sun.”

Read the rest of this post »

  August 4, 2011 at 12:01 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   7 Comments

Outside Reviewers Stay Anonymous!

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Outside reviews of manuscripts are important to many publishing enterprises, from scholarly books and articles to general interest works of nonfiction.  Honest, objective and impersonal assessments are vital. 

That is best promoted when the identity of the reviewers is held strictly confidential, by editors and reviewers alike, with editors sharing only the substance of reviews to enable improving a manuscript. 

Contrary to this normative ideal, reviewers often seem to feel free to identify themselves, and even editors are sometimes sloppy in leaking identifiying data.   In just the past year, I have personally had several different unfortunate examples.  The upshot is the same: outside reviewers must stay anonymous.

Read the rest of this post »

  July 16, 2011 at 6:22 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   11 Comments

Don’t Quote Me.

posted by Dave Hoffman

In honor of the former speaker of the house, I’d like to preemptively suggest that anyone who quotes anything from my early work “The Duty to be a Rational Shareholder,” might be considered to be a liar in light of my later recantation in “Docketology, District Courts, and Doctrine.”  Further, those students of mine who quoted my own words back to me on their corporations and civil procedure exams are possibly in trouble, to the extent I’ve ever suggested, said or hinted that “those [words said in class] were inaccurate and unfortunate.”

I’ll let this serve as an open thread for other pre-recantations.

  May 18, 2011 at 5:23 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Help Wanted: Editing Contracts Monograph

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

I’m seeking editorial assistance from a few good Contracts scholars to provide a substantive review of the manuscript for my newest book, provisionally entitled Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter (noted here).

The manuscript, now nearly complete to become a 240-page book, has been professionally edited for content and style, is trimmed to scale, and earlier chapter drafts have been read by a half dozen colleagues and several anonymous peer-reviewers. At this near-final stage, I’m looking for overall substantive evaluation, including not only correcting errors and minimizing unnecessary quibbling, but promoting the work’s utility to teachers of contracts and their students.

I would be delighted by anyone volunteering to read a few chapters to provide feedback, but am also prepared to pay a stipend (from my advance) for a more rigorous read of the full manuscript giving specific corrections, observations and suggestions. Any Contracts professor interested in either role, please email me: lacunningham@law.gwu.edu, letting me know.

  May 16, 2011 at 6:10 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Book Reviews, Contract Law & Beyond, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Choosing Book Publishers: Academic, Teaching or Trade?

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Where to publish your latest book-length manuscript?  Law professors can position their books for publication in many different ways.  The target audience and a publisher’s program are the key factors in choosing a publisher. 

Do you want to reach students, teachers, scholars, policy-makers, the general public?  What publishers best target which groups?  Are they all equally good at marketing or are some more effective than others? 

Often it is clear where the book should  be published but sometimes a book straddles the markets, posing vexing decisions.  How do professors choose then?

Some books are clearly meant for the classroom, and should be published by the likes of Aspen, Foundation, Lexis or West.  Within that cohort, houses further distinguish between adoptables, targeted to professors who require the book, and discretionary student purchases, for supplemental reading.  

Other books are obviously written for a specialized academic market and should  be published by such university presses as Cambridge, Harvard, NYU or Stanford.  A small number undoubtedly show greater potential trade market appeal, and could be published by such houses as John Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Penguin or Random House.  

But what of the book that transcends one or more of these audiences, positions, and publishing programs?  Is it possible that some houses can deliver it all, as many authors say is true of such presses as Oxford, Princeton, Yale?

In particular, I have spent this past year writing a book on contract law stories in the news during the past several years.  Readers of this blog would recognize a dozen or more of them.  Read the rest of this post »

  April 13, 2011 at 11:17 am   Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   One Comment

Digital Law Books: II

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As we all migrate to the digital world, imagine the future of the law school course book by reflecting on its history, purposes, and promulgation over the seven generations since C.C. Langdell initiated our current mode of legal education in 1870.

Some see the future of digital course books as a radical shift, akin to the original revolution of Langdell’s Contracts casebook. Others dismiss it as a simple marketing maneuver, the way post-Langdell addition of notes, questions or problems might be regarded.

In a new essay, I look back at casebook history to find it suggests that digital course books are more likely to be something in between, an incremental but meaningful evolution. The essay, a chapter in a new book on the subject, engages with great innovations in law school course books over the past century-plus, highlighting historic contributions from luminaries across the century and today.

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  April 5, 2011 at 1:17 pm   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Education, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions, Law Talk, Teaching   Print This Post   No Comments

Randomization Uber Alles?

posted by Dave Hoffman

Jim and Cassandra write:

“To Dave, we say that our enthusiasm for randomized studies is high, but perhaps not high enough to consider a duty to randomize among law school clinics or among legal services providers.  We provided an example in the paper of practice in which randomization was inappropriate because collecting outcomes might have exposed study subjects to deportation proceedings.  We also highlighted in the paper that in the case of a practice (including possibly a law school clinic) that focuses principally on systemic change, randomization of that practice is not constructive.  Instead, what should be done is a series of randomized studies of an alternative service provider’s practice in that same adjudicatory system; these alternative provider studies can help to assess whether the first provider’s efforts at systemic change have been successful.”

I meant to cabin my argument to law school clinics.  And I do understand that there may be very rare cases where collecting outcomes will hurt clients (such as deportation).  But what about a clinic that focuses on “systemic change.” Let’s assume that subsidizing such a clinic would be a good thing for a law school to do (or, put it another way, we think it is a good idea for current law students to incur more debt so that society gets the benefit of the clinics’ social agitation).  Obviously, randomization of client outcomes would be a terrible fit for measuring the success of such a clinic.  It would be precisely the kind of lamppost/data problem that Brian Leiter thinks characterizes much empirical work.

But that doesn’t mean that randomization couldn’t be useful in measuring other kinds of clinic outcomes.  What about randomization in the allocation of law student “employees” to the clinic as a way to measure student satisfaction in the “learning outcomes“? Or randomization of intake and utilizing different client contact techniques as a way of measuring client satisfaction with their representation (or feelings about the legitimacy of the system?)  One thing that the commentators in this symposium have tried to emphasize is that winning & losing aren’t the only outputs of the market for indigent legal services.  Controlled study of the actors in the system needn’t be constrained in the way that Jim and Cassandra’s reply to my modest proposal to mandate randomization suggest.

  March 29, 2011 at 1:23 pm   Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Rev (Yale), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Symposium (What Difference Representation)   Print This Post   One Comment

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