PrawfsBlawg

Does PrawfsBlawg do ok on this?

I am a couple weeks late on this, but grading.

Eric Segall offers thoughts on how law schools can push back against political polarization, generating further comments from Ilya Somin.

I want to focus on the fifth of Segall's proposals:

5) The leading legal blogs, including this one (speaking to you Mike) should reach out to folks on the other side and invite them to write posts with different perspectives than the blog usually offers. Years ago, I presented this idea in person to Eugene Volokh and Jack Balkin, who both run highly visible and successful blogs. They rejected the idea out-of-hand saying that legal bloggers do this now simply by responding to experts on other blogs. But that response missed the point of my idea. It is the sharing of space, both physical and virtual, among folks with different views that is important because being in the other side's house reduces both extremism and dogmatism.

Is it pollyanna-ish of me to think that we have achieved something like that, albeit unintentionally and without trying. I think our group is genuinely--at least within the parameters of the legal academy but perhaps more broadly--runs the political spectrum. That includes those avoid political topics, those who match different "sides" on different issues, and those who think both "sides" are wrong on some things.

To that end, we as a group are exploring ways to continue and expand the breadth of the conversation on this blog and the featured non-heterogeneous voices.

Ruth Markel (Dan's Mom) on Unorthodox Podcast

Ruth Markel (Dan's Mom) appears on the latest episode of the Unorthodox podcast (around 15:00 mark), talking about Dan, grieving, her book, and her efforts on grandparents'-rights legislation.

Welcome, Steven Lubet

We are happy to announce that Steven Lubet has joined us as a perma-prawf. Steve is the Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor of Law Emeritus at Northwestern-Pritzker School of Law, where he directed the Bartlit Center on Trial Advocacy, in addition to teaching PR and Trial Advocacy, and authoring books on, among other things, Harper's Ferry.

Painting Constitutional Law: Thursday, February 16

For readers in the Miami area:

FIU College of Law will post Painting Constitutional Law: A Celebration of Xavier Cortada's "May It Please the Court" at 5:30 tomorrow (Thursday, February 16) at FIU College of Law. May It Please the Court is a painting series by Miami artist Xavier Cortada, representing ten major SCOTUS cases originating in Florida. My colleague Matthew Mirow and I edited a 2021 book, Painting Constitutional Law, featuring essays analyzing the paintings and underlying cases. This program brings both together. Speakers include Mirow, Cortada, and Jenny Carroll (Alabama), who wrote the essay on Williams v. Florida (jury size).

Please attend if you are in town and able. The event will be recorded and livestreamed.

Advice from an "Other Other Legal Academy" Tenure Committee Chair

Back in 2017, I found myself appointed to our Tenure Committee, the thirteen-person group that does the detailed work of tracking the teaching, scholarship, and service of pre-tenure professors on our now "unified" faculty (i.e., all "doctrinal," clinical, and legal practice skills professors).  The Tenure Committee makes recommendations to the full tenured faculty, which has the final faculty say on tenure decisions. I had to miss my first meeting because of a conference commitment and was horrified to find that, in my absence, the committee had elected me the chair.  That job ended this past June 30, when I went on phase-out, removing myself from the ranks of the tenured, and ending my eligibility to serve.

I was just going through some old computer files and found some bullet points that I must have written in 2018 as content for an internal program on pre-tenure scholarship we never formally conducted.  I'm sure I said all of these things informally to somebody at some point.  In the spirit of Jeremy Telman's views on scholarship in the "Other [non-elite] Legal Academy" and my response (to the effect that I never felt that level of distance from my perch in a law school ranked somewhere outside of the US News top 100), I offer them  in their almost unexpurgated original.  They are one person's view; your mileage (and that of equivalent committees or faculty members at your particular school) may vary:

1. Don’t get hung up on rankings when placing articles.  Yes, if you are on the faculty at a top 50 school, the placements may make a difference.  For everybody [else], except at the extremes, there are no significant pluses or minuses.  Yes, a placement in a T17 flagship will get you lots of points, and a T50 placement significant points, and a placement in a specialty journal in the unranked 4th tier will get some head scratching, but in between it doesn’t make a lot of difference.  The key thing is to be good and to be productive.  See histogram in the blog post.*  (I don’t like many of the heuristics, but the idea of placing articles in law reviews at schools ranked higher than your own doesn’t offend me.)
2. Aim for one traditional law review behemoth a year.  But don’t overlook short pieces - reactions, brief essays, and so on.  The online supplements are nice for this.  You read a piece and have 3,000 to 5,000 words (or fewer) to say about it.  Do it!
3. With the shorter pieces, take a shot at a peer reviewed journal.  It takes longer, but it really is a professional affirmation.  Steel yourself for evil reviewer #2, however, who hates your piece, your school, and you.  (Most peer reviewed journals have a word limit - usually 10,000.)
4. People react far more to the gestalt of your CV than to individual items.  Hence, a lengthy list of long and short pieces has a nice visceral impact to the point of “productive scholar.”
5. “Law and ....” is good.  So is borrowing from other disciplines of law.  But it is a two-edged sword.  If you are a tort specialist borrowing from Nietzsche, show the piece to somebody with Nietzsche chops and then put that person’s name in the starred footnote.  Disingenuousness is not your friend.
6. When you submit, you certainly can play the expedite game, but my personal view is that it’s moderately unethical to submit to law reviews for which you would not accept an offer if it were the only one you got.  
7. Network in your area.  If you read somebody’s article and like it, send the person a note with this in the subject line “Loved your piece....”.  Be a commenter on others’ work.
8. Blog.  PrawfsBlawg was founded as a forum for new (i.e. “raw”) professors.   Again, it’s a two-edged sword.  If your stuff is good, it helps.  If not, it doesn’t.  When I was unsure of a blog post, I would send it to a friend first.

* That is exactly what my notes say, and I've linked the PrawfsBlawg post from 2018 to which I was referring that included the histogram.

Passages

Earlier this year, I signed a phase-out agreement with Suffolk University, probably two years earlier than I had originally planned.  You give up your tenure and agree to teach half-time for up to three years (at your option) and there's a small (nay, insignificant) financial incentive.  You have to take the deal before the end of the year in which you turn 70, which for me is still two years away.  But I think COVID and Markie (see left) pushed me to pull the cord sooner.  On July 1, 2022, I ended fifteen years of tenure-track and tenure (begun when I was 53), the longest I ever kept one job.

My relationship with PrawfsBlawg spans more than my academic career. I started as a frequent commenter back in 2005 or so, while I was still the GC of a chemical company. Dan Markel invited me to guest blog in the summer of 2006, just before I started a visiting gig at post-Katrina Tulane. The "raw" in Prawfs still lingers in the annual hiring and law review submission posts, but the raw profs I met in 2006 (particularly at the Law & Society meeting in Baltimore) are mostly now well-established mid-career or senior scholars and teachers.  Some are even deans.  Since I was already medium well done when I started this, I'm now well overcooked.  But I've succumbed to the self-indulgence of semi-biographical work along the way, like how to get hired on tenure track when you've been out of law school for twenty-six years or reflecting on law scholarship and teaching having gotten tenure at age 59.  Why stop now?

This is the first summer since 2008 (I think) that I've not committed myself to publishing a piece by getting a summer research stipend.  Over the last several years, I have written a lot about computation and lawyering. That included positing a robot lawyer that I named after Judge Amalya Kearse, predicting the persistence of "dumb" contracts, and comparing human and computer decision-making.  It involved digging deep into the differences between, on one hand, the discrete and binary and, on the other, the continuous and analog.  But my actual coding experience was limited to the Basic we spent learning in my high school pre-calculus class in 1971, some Boolean stuff on an Excel spreadsheet,

and knowing how to click "HTML" in the upper right corner of TypePad to code a block quote that looks like this.

Hence, my summer project was to learn enough computer coding to make something of practical use.  I started with "Hello, World" exercises in C, then Python, then Javascript and HTML (all in my Visual Studio Code text editor).  By the end of August, I'd created two online interactive exercises to teach accounting to my business law students and a self-executing practice exam review for first-year contracts.

So stay tuned if you like.  I am going to post a little bit this September about being in the September of one's career and about computer coding and lawyering.

Welcoming the Transnational Litigation Blog

My UNC colleague, John Coyle, along with Ingrid Wuerth (Vanderbilt), William Dodge (UC-Davis), and Maggie Gardner (Cornell), have recently launched the Transnational Litigation Blog.

The editors have been very active, posting on topics including the legal challenges presented by a possible Russian bond default, evaluating whether the U.S. should seize Afghan central bank assets to pay judgments against the Taliban, weighing the foreign relations aspects of contemporary climate change litigation, and recounting the disquieting origins of the modern doctrine of forum non conveniens. In addition to traditional blog posts, TLB includes pages that explain various topics, such as forum selection clauses, choice of law clauses, and the presumption against extraterritoriality.

For those of you who are interested in transnational topics--or for those of you who just can't get enough legal blog content--I hope you check it out!

Why I stopped allowing comments to posts

This was an attempted comment on my post (on which I forgot to close comments) about a First Amendment controversy that garnered national media coverage and a federal court of appeals opinion. I think it shows why I made the correct decision.

That's OK, Howard. You can keep deleting my posts. Just know that when you post incessantly about Jews and Israel (including in the context of baseball, where 99% of the players obviously aren't Jewish), let alone prohibit comments on such posts, you confirm most of the world's views about American Jewry: you are self-obsessed, selfish, and lack any ability to see how you are perceived by others. I sincerely wish you knew, for EVEN ONE MOMENT, how much harm and grief your lot causes Jewry in other countries. For the love of Hashem, stop and think about why you're posting so much about the tribe and the Aretz on a blog that's ostensibly meant for ALL American law professors. Get your head out of your own ass, for fuck's sake.

Prawfs' moment in the sun

One drawback to paying zero attention to the Barrett confirmation hearings: I missed that Barrett did a guest stint here in March 2008 (I was doing a semester-long guest stint at that time that led to Dan inviting me here permanently). Her six posts are listed among her "Opinion, Editorals, and Letters" section in her CRS bio. One post, about potential retroactivity problems in eliminating the crack/powder distinction, was the subject of an exchange with Sen. Booker; Booker asked why she did not discuss the injustice of the distinction--a stupid question justifying the amount of attention I devoted to the hearing. (H/T: Josh Blackman, who pays more attention than I do). (If you want to subject yourself to it, it is around the 7:17:00 mark).

Booker described us as a "well-known legal academic" blog, which is nice. Barrett called us "LawPrawfsBlawg." Oh, well.

July Guest Blogger: James Phillips

Please welcome James Phillips, who will be guest-blogging this month. James is a nonresident fellow at Stanford's Constitutional Law Center and will begin at Chapman's Fowler School of Law in August, teaching First Amendment and Civ Pro.

May Events

As we enter May from the longest April in memory, I am pleased to welcome returning guest Adam Kolber (Brooklyn). In addition to his regular posts, Adam will run an online symposium on "Legal Discontinuity," based on a conference he organized in Tel Aviv in December; the symposium will begin around May 11. Participants include Saul Levmore, Lee Fennell, Ronen Avraham, Re'em Segev, Talia Fisher, Eric Kades, Julie Roin, Omer Pelled, and perhaps others. Details as the start date draws near.

In the meantime, please welcome Adam back to Prawfs.

More on the demise of blogging

One of my favorite non-law policy blogs was the Reality-Based Community ("RBC"), started by UCLA public-policy professor Mark Kleiman^Z"L and then expanded to other academics. Kleiman died last summer and RBC closes shop at the end of April. The remaining bloggers are offering final posts with thoughts and memories of RBC.

Yesterday's post was from Keith Humphreys (Stanford Med School) reflecting, as I have in the past, on the decline in law-and-policy blogs in the face of the decline of paid journalism and the rise of social media and the gravitation of many bloggers and readers to Twitter and other social media. Fortunately, some of us are still going, perhaps more so in the current environment when we have nothing but time on our hands.

JOTWELL: Thomas on Green on wage claims by low-wage workers

The new Courts Law essay comes from Suja Thomas (Illinois), reviewing Llezlie Green, Wage Theft in Lawless Courts, 107 Cal. L. Rev. 1303 (2019), discussing the difficulties for low-wage earners bringing wage claims.

Upcoming guests

I am thrilled that we are going to have some guest-prawfs joining us in the coming weeks.

Beginning later this month and into February, we will be joined by Tuan Samahon (Villanova) and Christine Chabot (Loyola and a fellow former Jane Roth clerk). Welcome to both and I hope you enjoy their contributions.

In late February and March, we will have an on-line symposium on Ben Barton's new book, Fixing Law Schools: From Collapse to the Trump Bump and Beyond (NYU). More details to come.

Segall on the role of law professors

Eric Segall has an excellent post at DorfonLaw about the proper role for law professors in controversial legal and political disputes. The obvious trigger was the four prawfs who testified at the impeachment hearings. But Eric expands it to participation in congressional testimony, confirmation hearings, amicus briefs, letters on public matters, etc. And blogs--he questions whether writing publicly, in our professional (and professorial name) about matters beyond our scholarly expertise either trades on the professorial name or dilutes it.

Two thoughts. First, Eric references the letter that 2000 law professors signed arguing that Brett Kavanaugh's demeanor at his hearing was not judicial and should have been disqualifying. I did not sign for the reason Eric offers for not signing--the question of Kavanaugh's demeanor did not call for any scholarly expertise and was really a cover for political opposition to Kavanugh's appointment.* I had a heated debate with my wife and overly engaged daughter, who did not buy the distinction or the idea of trading on my position to suggest expertise on a contentious political matter on which I could speak not as an expert but as a "concerned citizen."

[*] Which I shared. And which I offered in emails to several Republican Senators (not my own, because I chose not to waste my breath), using my name but not my title or position.

Second, a blog, like other social media, strikes me as a different medium of work. I am trading less on my position and expertise and more taking an opportunity to write for a regular audience about things that interest me and about which I know something (even if I do not know as much about these things as I do about universal injunctions). Regular readers of the blog know and expect that some of what I write about is going to be non-expert interests (baseball, Judaism) or personal matters (family, etc.). And you understand that this is part of the forum and what I like to do here. That is different than using my professorial cache (such as it is) to talk about a non-expert matter to a new, unfamiliar audience in a different forum, such as the op-ed page of the The New York Times or an advocacy letter to a congressional committee.

Blogging with Outtakes - Existentialists, Asymptotes, and Parachutes

The bad news is that I missed the start of the guest blogging I promised Howard by a full month.  The good news is that I had two excuses (a) our first grandchild was born on July 3 and I seem to waste inordinate amounts of time curating baby pictures, and (b) I was finishing this summer's project.  The upshot of (b) is that by the process of some fairly brutal self-editing I have the drafting equivalent of a portfolio of outtakes.

The piece isn't quite ready for prime time via SSRN, but its title is Unsure at Any Speed: Lawyering Somewhere Between Algorithms and Ends.  It's a contemplation of how we'll reconcile the capabilities of digital lawyering and human lawyering. That means I thought a lot about the differences between what it means to have a brain comprised of flip-flops and P/N junctions, on one hand, and neurons, on the other.  And as it's where science melts into philosophy, it's just made for metaphors that live for a time between drafts 1.2 and, say, 1.9.  Alas, they ultimately have to be sacrificed in the interest of the reader's patience with the filigrees of my cranial neurons.

The risk of metaphor overload is highest when you are wrestling with the very concepts of complementarity, irreconcilability, paradox, and  irreducibility. Those are at the core of what I think is the difference between not just thinking like a human versus a machine, but also being like a human versus a machine. Hence, my existentialist turn. I am more than the physical or social properties a third-person could observe about me. What makes me “me” is that I am capable of having an attitude about my own objective existence, that I am engaged practically in the world, that I am a subjective agent capable of action by way of my own will.  Give that one a try, ROSS.  Unless a human like me programs you otherwise, you are doomed to be the two-handed lawyer ("on the one hand; on the other hand") that business people despise.

So I'm fascinated with the ways we can try metaphorically to capture the complementarity of just thinking or even deciding, on one hand, and acting, on the other. Think about that moment after you've clicked "Start New Submission" on SSRN, uploaded the draft and the abstract, chosen your journals, and are about to submit. If you are like me, that is the equivalent in academia to stepping out of the airplane in sky diving. No amount of thinking about it substitutes for the act itself.

I wrote and never used, much less edited out, a metaphor from mathematics.  "Discrete and continuous" is another irreconcilable complementarity. In mathematics, every real number is something of an illusion.  The simplest numbers to understand are “natural” or “counting” numbers like 1, 2, or 154.  They are discrete.  You could use your and other peoples’ fingers and toes to represent them.  Rational numbers are slightly more abstract: they are numbers that can be expressed as a ratio of two natural numbers.  A fraction like 1/9 is rational, even though its decimal representation is an infinite string of ones to the right of the decimal point.  Irrational numbers are those that cannot be expressed as such a ratio; examples are the square root of 2, pi, and e, the base number for a natural logarithm.  Real numbers are the continuum of all numbers that are not imaginary, i.e. any number you could think of that is rational or irrational or sits somewhere between any two rational or irrational numbers. 

But that is the very point of the illusion of continuity.  The mathematician Richard Dedekind showed that a real number is a cut or a slice – in the jargon of calculus, a limit or asymptote – that separates all the numbers below it from all the numbers above it.  In the case of a real number that is not rational, the set of all numbers below it does not have a greatest element; it merely converges on the real number. It is, paradoxically, both a spot on the continuum of all numbers and not a spot in the sense that you can ever actually reach it.

I wanted to say in the article that one's passage through time and the actions one takes at any moment µ in that passage create a similar illusion of discrete and continuous. A single moment µ in which we act separates the set of all past moments from the set of all the future moments. All past events converge on µ, a moment which is not a member of the set of all past moments. And in that moment µ randomness, luck, or will may operate.  Yet we are inclined to see past and future moments as one continuous set, most because we cannot re-experience µ.  By the time we are considering µ at moment β, µ is merely a member of the set of all moments preceding β.

I didn't say it then.  Now I will.  "Status: Publish Now."  "Publish."  Click.  Oh no. I hope the parachute opens.

"Over My Dead Body"

We have intentionally avoided talking about Dan's murder, the investigations and prosecutions that have followed, and various stories and speculation about all of it.

Nevertheless, I want to flag the new Podcast Over My Dead Body (from the same company that did Dirty John, which I did not listen to, and Dr. Death, which was great), which will spend the first season talking about Dan, the marriage, and the case. The first three episodes dropped this week; I am about halfway through # 1. So far, the reporting is straight-forward and not salacious or tacky, if a bit tongue-in-cheek at points (as most podcasts are). Dan's parents are interviewed and are sources for the material, as is David Lat of Above the Law.

Blogging's Future

Rick Garnett writes at Mirror of Justice that this week marks 15 years of his blogging there (and slightly less time blogging here). He closes the post as follows:

The flow (as well as the speed and, perhaps, the snarkiness) of the public conversation has changed over the last 15 years.  Twitter wasn't around.  Facebook, believe it or not, was launched on the same day as Mirror of Justice.  (Arguably, we've done better at our mission than they have at theirs!)  Legal practice, legal scholarship, and legal education have changed significantly, reflecting the ongoing Digitization of Everything.  A lot that used to be said, in paragraphs, on blogs is now said, with a few words (or emojis or gifs) on Twitter.

It's not clear to me what the future holds for this blog-venture, or for blogging generally.  I'd welcome others' thoughts! 

Paul has thought and written about this question in the past, so he is the best and most thoughtful person to answer. We had a brief exchange here about the migration of some blog writing to Facebook and, as Rick notes, to  Twitter in fewer words and emojis; there is some debate about how heavy that migration has been. As someone who is not on Facebook or Twitter and believes both have made discourse worse, I hope blogs do not go the way of the 8-track.

It may be that fewer blogs remain, but those that do will keep going strong, whether as a replacement for or complement to Facebook and Twitter. The Volokh Conspiracy announced that Irina Manta, Stephen Sachs, and Keith Whittington have joined as permanent authors. I am thrilled that Gerard has joined us, a move I expect will add new life to this site. And MoJ serves a particular and special message that is not easily replaced and so should continue.

In any event, congrats to Rick on 15 years.

Fitzgerald was Wrong

Thanks to the generosity and at the invitation of this lively group of scholars, I now begin my second act as a blogger. To those of you who read my posts at Concurring Opinions, I think that my writing over here will be a little different in style, but I'm not sure. We'll see starting tomorrow. I can't wait.   

Sad law-prof blogging news

Concurring Opinions is shutting down at the end of the year. This is sad news. CoOp spun out of Prawfs in its earliest days and I experienced them (as reader and then as author/guest-author) as companion sites, covering similar issues of law and legal education with a similar sensibility. The posts containing the table of contents from new issues of law reviews will be missed. And this closing reflects the broader migration of this sort of legal writing to Twitter and Facebook.

Gerard indicated that there would be some farewell posts over the next two weeks.

Rotations

Thanks to our September visitors. For October, we are joined by returners Eric Miller (Loyola-LA) and Emily Gold Waldman (Pace).

And a reminder that we are always looking for visitors, so please reach out to me if you are interested in joining us for a month.

Note to PrawfsBlawg readers: Appearance of comments

A note to readers and commenters:

Comments to posts now appear newest to oldest. We did this to accommodate our annual faculty hiring post and our semi-annual submission post. Both posts generate hundreds of comments, requiring readers to scroll through multiple pages to read new comments. The old hack for this problem--a jump link--no longer works and Typepad recommended this as the solution. So this is the workable solution--new comments appear immediately below the post.

Unfortunately, we only could make the change globally, so comments must appear this way for all posts.

This format is necessary while the hiring and submission threads are alive and active, which should be another few months. After that, we will evaluate the appearance and decide whether to keep it or switch back. We already have heard from one reader who describes it as "crazy and moronic," so we will take that under advisement.

Rotations

Thank you to our summer-long visitors, who joined us for July and August.

With September upon us, welcome back to Jennifer Bard (visiting at Georgetown's O'Neill Institute and Harvard's Petrie Flom Institute), Oren Perez (Dean at Bar Ilan), and Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indianpolis).

Further Reflections on the End of Ambition

Almost exactly three years ago, on the last day of my guest-blogging month, I posted a piece entitled The End of Ambition.  Sometimes I go back to what I wrote long ago and cringe (I was tempted to link the piece that most makes me cringe, but nah) but this one I like.  It started as a contemplation of what it's like to face the end of your career and turned into a broader assessment of what it means to grow up, to be an adult (something we've recently explored in connection with law students).

Well, here we go again, except now I'm 1000000 (Aside #1: as my friend Raffael Cavallaro said, "there are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't") and looking pretty good for 1000000. (Aside #2: if horses ruled the world, "digital" really would mean "binary".)  But when you hit 1000001, you hit the normal age for filing for Social Security, and at 10000110 you have maxed out on the value of deferring your benefits.  (For those of you who have many years yet before this becomes an issue, it involves the uncomfortable evaluation of how long past 10000110 you and/or your surviving partner think you will make it.  The longer the period, the more sense it makes to defer.)

What prompted the re-reflection is being on this blog extensively at the same time the "submission angsting" and "hiring committee" posts have gone up, and my recent pontifications (sparked by Kaci Bishop's article) on fear and failure.  What I want to do here, from the perspective of one who has achieve the ripe old age of 10 to the 110th power, is link fear and failure to ambition.  My thesis here is that there is a continuum of ambition from the macro to the micro, and our brains don't do a great job of making that clear, hence causing our nervous system to spit out fear of failure juice in many of the wrong places. 

Here are prototypes of macro ambition:  getting hired as a tenure-track law professor or being awarded tenure.  Placing law review articles have a lot to do with both (so it seems).  I do very much understand macro-ambition.  My school and professional lives were a continuous series of them - grades, class standing, university admissions, law school admissions, getting a law firm job, making partner, getting the in-house job, becoming the GC.  I've said this before - when you attempt to break into academia and then climb the tenure ladder as a superannuated newbie, the actual consequence of failure is, I think, less significant in one's life than if you start out young.  I think there is also a lower fear factor - and thus more willingness to swing for the fences. (By the way, it's been around for well over a decade now, but you can find that particular story in Memo to Lawyers: How Not to "Retire and Teach".)

Here is my prototype of the micro-est of micro ambitions. When you get to be 1000000 and you worry about the increasing number of senior moments, you do things to assure yourself that you aren't losing it.  One of mine is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.  Monday and Tuesday are too easy, so I do them online and see how fast I can complete them.  Wednesday through Sunday merit printing them.  I do them in ink and my goal is not to make a mistake.  I can annoy my wife no end by finishing the Saturday or Sunday puzzle perfectly and then proudly displaying it as though it is actually some kind of meaningful accomplishment. 

Now some people never stop having and acting upon macro-ambitions. Joe Biden is thinking about running for President, I'm pretty sure.  I am in the process of coming to terms with the end of mine. (Trust me, I had them and could tell you stories.) What I'm thinking now is that there isn't really an end of ambition.  It's just that most of the macros get taken over by the micros. Not going to be a CEO. Not going to be a university president. Not even going to be a lateral hire. It's now a bucket list.  Yeah, it would be cool to place an article in the Yale Law Journal.  It won't make a helluva big difference to anything, but it would be another thing to check off, somewhere between doing the Saturday puzzle completely correct in ink and being President.

The thing is the fear. I've already admitted publicly that I have the typical type-A failure dreams.  I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg - ambitious goals or fear of failure - or if maybe they are the same thing.  But it has made me think about Woody Allen's observation on this in Annie Hall:  "You know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken.  Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in?  Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs."

Woody was talking about relationships, but I'm talking about fear of failure. I still get slightly (not pathologically) annoyed at myself for screwing up the crossword. If you lose the fear, do you also lose the ability to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve?

UPDATE:  I corrected my age from the original posting (h/t Dean Andy Perlman).  I am 1000000, not 100000.   When you get to 1000000, it's hard to see all those zeroes.  Another damn failure!  There goes the brain again, releasing those fear of failure juices.

There Is Nothing New Under the Sun - Xenophobia Edition

Part of this is recycled from something I posted (can it be?) on Christmas Day, 2007 over on Legal Profession Blog.  At the time it was a tribute to my wife Alene's grandfather, Nathan Milstein, one of the longest serving lawyers in the history of the Michigan bar.  (That is him on the left, Alene on the right, and our niece, Paris Franklin, in the middle.) The last couple paragraphs in that post prompt me to reprise much of it.

Nathan was born in 1907, graduated from Detroit Central High School in 1924, and attended the Detroit College of Law (then the Detroit City Law School and now the Michigan State University College of Law) and Wayne University Law School, receiving his LL.B. at age 21 in 1929.  Nathan passed away in 2003, having continued to practice until his late eighties.

Nathan's practice in the 1930s included, among other things, immigration.  That came up in a conversation Alene had with my colleague, Prof. Ragini Shah, who founded Suffolk's Immigration Clinic.

I am burying the lede here, so bear with me.

What prompted the post over ten years ago was the renewed interest in Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Our family takes a special interest in all things Rivera and Kahlo as a result of a particular historical interlude:  their four year stay in Detroit, beginning in 1929, when, at the behest of Edsel B. Ford, Rivera painted his monumental murals on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts.  We have hanging in our living room three prints signed by Rivera, part of a collection of ten he gave to Nathan, who represented and befriended Rivera and Kahlo during their stay in Detroit.  (Family legend has it that Kahlo made a pass at Nathan, but this is unconfirmed.)  

After Nathan passed away (at 96), Alene and I spent many hours going through his voluminous files.  One truly appreciates the historian's and the biographer's art of distilling the story from the data when looking at records like these.  The documents are tantalizing. 

For example, Nathan was a bachelor until 1946, when he married Alene's grandmother, who was a widow with two children.  Before that, he was supporting his mother and sisters.  When the war broke out, he tried for years to find a way to serve without being drafted as a private (which in 1941 paid $21 a month, not enough to support the family.)  Ultimately he found a job as a civilian flight instructor, but the file of letters and rejections to almost every branch of the military and government agency is about two inches thick.  I have framed in my office my personal favorite:  the letter signed by John Edgar Hoover advising Nathan he had failed the F.B.I entrance exam, which I had first interpreted as having been on account of Nathan's being Jewish while taking it.

Back in 2007, the interest in Rivera inspired me to go back through some of Nathan's files. What became clear was that it was likely Hoover objected to Nathan not only because of his ethnicity, but also because he consorted, in the course of his immigration practice, with all sorts of "undesirables," and espoused public positions to which the FBI director of long memory must have objected.  (I like to think that Hoover's two issues with Nathan were related to each other.)

For example, there was a file of correspondence relating to his representation in late 1932 of one Halvard Lange Bojer, the son of noted Norwegian author, Johan Bojer.  The younger Bojer, an engineer who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1928, was working for General Electric in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he was arrested by the Immigration Service, and transported to the Wayne County Jail in Detroit, on the grounds that he was a member of the Communist Party.  Bojer himself described it to a reporter as follows:  "They tell me that I'm a Communist. . .It so happens that I'm a member of the Communist Party Opposition, whose headquarters is in New York.  Members of that Party, though glad to take Moscow's advice, refuse to take Moscow's dictation.  There are other differences, such as our belief that the worker's solution is in the organization of a Labor Party, comprised of Trade Unions, similar to that of England.  Also, we disbelieve in Moscow's theory that existing labor organizations, such as the A.F. of L., should be wrecked for the formation of Communist units."

The American Civil Liberties Union attempted to intervene on Bojer's behalf.  (I couldn't tell if Nathan was already representing Bojer or if the ACLU retained him on Bojer's behalf.)  On December 12, 1932, Roger Baldwin, the ACLU Director, wrote to Nathan, urging Bojer to fight deportation as a test case.  Baldwin stated:  "The issue is far more than personal to him.  This is the first case, so far as we are aware, when a member of his particular Communist group has been held for deportation on the ground of membership.  It is worth fighting through because it offers a test of the application of the law to other than members of the Communist Party."  Nathan met with Bojer in the Wayne County jail, where Bojer, "a very affable and highly cultured young man," advised that he had no desire to appeal the deportation, and was willing to return to Norway.  He was released pursuant to a bond posted by his friends in Fort Wayne, and joined an "East bound deportation party" on December 29, 1932.

There was an interesting postscript to that story.  Bojer's son or grandson (I don't remember which) in Norway somehow saw the blog post, got in touch with me, and I ended up sending him copies of all the papers.

So finally here is the lede, which was something of an afterthought in the 2007 post, but which in the past two years takes on relevance if not prescience.  The files contained an excerpt from Nathan's tribute to Judge Arthur C. Denison on the occasion of his retirement from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in January, 1932:

Humanizing the enforcement of existing laws relating to admission and deportation of aliens has become a serious problem confronting social leaders throughout the country.  In the present delirium of unemployment when a vague terror seizes the nation, this fear is translated into alien hatred.  Public discontent must be directed away from the cause of the unrest and to accomplish this, a counter irritant is administered.  The ever oppressed alien is again victimized.  The term alien becomes synonymous with undesirable.  Deportation "drives" and "spectacular raids" then become common occurrences.  Wholesale deportation follows as a panacea for what ails the nation.  This national hysteria influences the action of public officials and finds expression in more rigid and relentless enforcement of deportation laws.  Even the courts are sometimes swept into the whirling cyclone, marring the annals of juridical science with unprecedented decisions.  To espouse the cause of the under-privileged requires great courage.  Those who bear the courage of their convictions and refuse to be swayed, belong to the school of Holmes and Brandeis.  So few do they number that a loss in the ranks is keenly felt by liberty loving citizens.

And here's more.

The recent resignation of Judge Arthur C. Denison of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is such a loss.  As a student of social conditions, he has clearly recognized a festering condition to which the Congress of the United States has closed its eyes.  Dwelling above the sound of passing shibboleths, he has refused to harken to the murmur of the moment.  Recognizing that immigration statutes are very drastic and deal arbitrarily with human liberty, he has found it necessary to remind Immigration Authorities that aliens are human beings and as such have rights in any country in which they are domiciled, not under the principles of natural justice, but under the Constitution itself.  Aliens help to create the wealth of our nation; they are subject to its laws and must comply with all its demands of taxation.  Aliens, therefore, who have become part of our household and who have cast their lot permanently with ours, must be accorded the protection of law that is granted our citizens.

 Oh, and by the way, Nathan insisted to me many years ago that he was a Republican.

Compliance

Many thanks to Howard for arranging to have me contribute as a guest blogger this month!    

A few months before I began my tenure-track position in 2014, I was nervous that my seemingly diverse research interests were going to create problems for me down the line.  I had interests in professional responsibility, corporate governance, workplace law, and organizational misconduct, which meant I did not feel like I “fit” neatly within a field of legal research. I knew that my research was all connected, but I felt like conveying that connection to others was sometimes a bit difficult.  Thankfully, I had a wonderful conversation with a senior scholar who said something to the effect of:  “You just research compliance.  It is kind of new, so people may not realize it, but that is what you are doing.”  These words were instantly clarifying and gratifying.  I suppose I knew I was researching compliance issues, but not having met many scholars who defined themselves in that way at that time, I did not realize it was legitimate to actually use the compliance title to describe my work. 

Today, compliance has developed into its own, albeit some might still say new, field.  There are several law schools with centers, programs, or areas of study in compliance.  The ALI is working on a set of Principles of the Law in Compliance, Enforcement, and Risk Management.  And there are a variety of compliance-specific conferences that I can attend.  Compliance is, however, an interdisciplinary field.  Some people writing in the space describe themselves as corporate law scholars, some as criminal law scholars, and there is quite a bit of very good work being done by business school professors.  Personally, while I self-identify as a compliance scholar, I do so with the caveat that I draw on research from several areas within legal scholarship and organizational behavior.  More specifically, the underlying research question that motivates my scholarship asks how one might address dysfunctions within organizations in an effort to create more productive, healthy, and ethical environments within firms.     

This month I’ll be blogging a bit about my compliance research, but also about the experience of working within a field that is (i) still emerging and (ii) interdisciplinary in scope.  For me this has been a really exciting endeavor, but it does have its own set of challenges to work through.  But for now, I will just wish you all an early Happy July 4th. 

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Welcome to July. Thanks to the participants in our second annual End-of-Term symposium, which turned out to be a lot more eventful (and depressing, for some of us) than expected; they will be finishing up this weekend. We will see you all again next June.

And welcome to our July visitors--returning guests Hadar Aviram (Hastings) and Jeff Lipshaw Suffolk) and first-time guests Dorit Reiss (Hastings) and Veronica Root (Notre Dame). Thank you for joining us.

Farewell! (Derek Muller)

Thanks to Howard and the crew here at Prawfs for indulging me for nearly two months. I deeply appreciate the conversation and hope I provided some content prawfs found valuable!

If you'd like to read more of my work, I blog at Excess of Democracy, which I launched five years ago and named after a phrase used by Elbridge Gerry during the constitutional convention. It has some election law content, but it includes a variety of topics, especially on legal education. You can also find me on Twitter.

Finally, I'll highlight a few of my articles in the event any piques your interest! (More drafts to be posted this summer....)

• Hot off the press is Legal Quandaries in the Alabama Senate Election of 2017, 69 Ala. L. Rev. 983 (2018), examining the many complexities of the Seventeenth Amendment, special elections generally, and Alabama state law specifically that arose with the controversy surrounding Roy Moore.
• The High Cost of Lowering the Bar is a work in progress with my colleague Rob Anderson. Through a study of bar discipline rates in California, we conclude that lower bar exam scores are correlated with higher discipline rates, and that lowering the passing score would result in higher discipline rates. We acknowledge we lack a causal relationship, and we offer different ways of thinking through the costs and benefits in a more holistic way when it comes to evaluating bar exam cut scores. (Feedback welcome as this remains a work in progress!)
• 'Natural Born' Disputes in the 2016 Presidential Election, 85 Fordham L. Rev. 1097 (2016), notes the many problems, mostly jurisdictional, that arose during questions surrounding the eligibility of Ted Cruz and other candidates in the 2016 election. It calls for a constitutional amendment to quash future disputes. (For a much more robust treatment of the constitutional amendment question, check out Kevin Walsh's forthcoming piece in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy, The 'Irish Born' One American Citizenship Amendment.)
• Ballot Speech, 58 Ariz. L. Rev. 693 (2016), identifies the ballot itself--the names of candidates, their party affiliation, descriptive terms--as an essential resource for candidates to speak to voters and offers a framework that would better protect that forum.
• Finally, as the Connecticut legislature recently passed the National Popular Vote Compact, I thought I'd share a couple of older pieces on why I think such a compact requires congressional consent under the Compact Clause, and a piece on the practical difficulties of a national presidential election while administration of the Electoral College and the right to vote remains largely left to the states.

On mixing academic and journalistic writing (Updated)

Olga Khazan at The Atlantic summarizes a new article by Austin Frakt, Aaron Carroll, Harold Pollack, and Keith Humphreys--all academics who write for newspapers, blogs, and other popular outlets--discussing the rewards and challenges of writing for popular journalistic outlets and audiences as an academic.

From my limited experience writing regularly here and at SCOTUSBlog and dabbling with op-eds in newspapers or magazines, it seems to me there are two issues--one is style/tone, the other is level of detail and support. The latter obviously decreases in these formats--writing 500-1000 words on a germinating idea that will get 20,000 in a full article means less detail and support. A blog post or opinion recap is not meant to be a full scholarly analysis. I find style/tone to be trickier--I assume readers here are law-trained, which I sometimes forget when writing for a different audience that is law-interested but not law-trained.

Update: I also agree with Frakt, et al. about speed, which is unnecessary for academic projects. I am a slow reader and processor, so the process of quickly turning around a report on an argument or opinion is painful for me. I also tend to rush when pressed for time and make bad grammatical mistakes or fail to provide the right links (as happened in this post--the link to Khazan's piece is fixed).

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May is upon us, and so is the start of visits from returning guest David Orentlicher (UNLV) and newcomer Justin Murray (Climenko Fellow). In addition, Adam Kolber and Derek Muller will continue their late-starting  April stint into May.

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A flurry of final posts for our Futures of Legal Education Symposium are going up this weekend. We will put up a single post with all the contributions next week.

Our late-starting April/May visitors will be Seth Davis (UC-Irvine), Andrew Ferguson (UDC), Adam Kolber (Brooklyn), and Derek Muller (Pepperdine). They will be here through April and into May.

And June will feature our second End-of-SCOTUS-Term Symposium; stay tuned.

Writing is Architecture First, Interior Design is Secondary: On Trains, Houses & Pyramids

That's a variation on Hemingway, again. I posted a few days ago a fun, though a bit random list of quotes about writing (oh the Internet, where curating quotes has become the soul-less pastime of too many who've never actually read those they quote. May we always quote soulfully is my wish to us prawfs and writers at large...). Hemingway said prose is architecture, not interior design and that the Baroque is over. I think he meant that the substantive of what you want to say needs to guide the writing and that you need to write in a punchy concise way, avoiding fluff for merely decorative purpose. Say what you mean and mean what you say and get rid of all the garnish. I like garnish and I think interior design is important too. I'd even argue for bringing a bit of Baroque back (Bach J), carefully . But I completely agree that the structure is first and foremost in writing a good article or book. The bare bones are the piece of the writing puzzle that needs to be done right.

Today I spoke with my seminar students about their research projects and I thought I'd offer here, as a second installation of posts about writing, the metaphors I use with my students to help us think about structure. One of my favorite teachers in law school, who later became one of my doctoral advisors, was Martha Minow. I remember her telling us in a seminar on law and social justice, similar to the one I teach today, that you can write a house or a train. I think she said houses are what books look like and trains are articles. I don't agree with that division, I think both articles and books can be houses or trains. But the visual I've always found useful in thinking about what I am doing and how to build my project. If you are building a house, you take the reader with you through a pathway into a place where you have a nice entrance, a main hall and some public spaces, and then doors, and windows into rooms, each holding an interesting set of ideas about a related topic. Together the house makes sense but each room also stands on its own. If you are building a train, you think linearly about your project. It could be chronological or it could be a problem in search of a solution and the solution unfolds as your present and analyze layers of evidence, perhaps empirical data, theoretical arguments, policy claims. To the houses and trains I added today in class the visuals of pyramids and reverse pyramids. In every discipline, a good portion of research involves the qualities of lumping or splitting. In legal scholarship, often insights come from taking a broad issue, a broad base of a pyramid, a classifying and regrouping the issues to show how we actually have separate questions emerging from different subcategories and these should be addressed distinctly. We also often have insights when we look sideways, from a reverse pyramid narrow tip into horizontal fields, related topics that offer new insights. Research is often an import-export business.

I don’t know if these visuals are useful only to me or beyond but I’ve found that sketching my next writing project, including actually drawing stuff, not just outlining gets me into better architectural shape and only then can I begin to think about the décor.  

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Thanks to our January visitors for a good start to the new year.

Welcome to our returning visitors--Jen Kreder (Northern Kentucky), Corinna Lain (Richmond), and Jordy Singer (New England).

As always, if you will be in the Los Angeles area and would like to be a guest at a live taping of PrawfsBlawg (especially if you have never visited), email me.

Thanks for Having Me, and New Year's Resolutions

*Tap, Tap*   Is this thing on?  It's probably been... well, an eon (in cyberyears) since I was last blogging.  Thanks for having me back and for the warm Prawfsblawg welcome.  Here's my Jan. 1st resolution.  Do any of you have new year's resolutions about scholarship?

  

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Happy 2018 from everyone at Prawfs. And welcome to the new year with our January returning guests--Miriam Cherry (SLU), Megan LaBelle (Catholic), Ann Marie Marciarille (UMKC), and Mark Moller (DePaul). Our December visitors may stick around for a few weeks.

We look forward to another great year at Prawfs.

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Welcome to December and returning guests Andra Robertson (Case Western) and Michael Mannheimer (Northern Kentucky). And thanks to our November visitors for a great month.

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A belated welcome to our October guests--Deborah Ahrens (Seattle), Elizabeth Dale (Florida), Tessa Davis (South Carolina), Josh Douglas (Kentucky), and Michael Morley (Barry). And thanks to our September guests, who may stick around for a few final posts.

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Happy September. Thanks to our August guests.

And welcome to a big slate of September returning guests: Jennifer Bard (Cincinnati), Ian Bartrum (UNLV), Elizabeth McCuskey (Toledo, visiting at SLU), Eric Miller (Loyola-LA), and Jack Preis (Richmond).

Opinions About Giving Legal Opinions

Nowadays, news reports resemble the sorts of crazy hypotheticals that law professors love (and law students loathe).  And since we love far-fetched hypotheticals, many law professors have taken to giving our legal opinions about the political news item of the day.

In addition to having our own opinions about the latest news, law professors are often confronted by the opinions of their colleagues.  Newspapers, blogs, and Twitter are full of divergent opinions on these topics, and many of us end up having strong opinions about our colleagues’ opinions. 

Given the ubiquity of legal opinions (and opinions about those legal opinions), I’d like to offer five opinions about how I think law professors ought to share their legal opinions with the public.

First, be careful when you offer opinions that are available to the general public.  It used to be that law professors had to wait for a media call or have an op ed accepted in order to share their views on the legal topic of the day.  Not so anymore.  Blogs and Twitter allow us to give our opinions easily – perhaps too easily at times.  And although these platforms might seem like social media, it is important to remember that the opinions you give in these fora are public statements.  Even if you have only 70 followers, and most of those are your family and college friends, something that you tweet could be shared and read by total strangers with no background in the law and no sense of who you are.

I say “be careful,” not only because you are stuck with whatever reputational fall out might occur from a publicly expressed opinion, but also because your public statements come with an implicit aura of authority.  When we identify ourselves as law professors, that signals that we are experts whose opinions ought to be taken seriously. We should remind ourselves about that explicit claim of expertise when offering a public opinion.  And if you aren’t actually claiming that expertise—say if you are offering an opinion outside of your field—make sure to offer that qualification, and seriously consider whether you ought to share the opinion publicly at all.

Second, certainty when expressing a legal opinion is rarely warranted.  Just as we often respond to student questions by saying “it depends,” we should also acknowledge the same uncertainty in our public statements.  I’ve found it useful, for example, to remind myself that a legal opinion is no more than a prediction about how a court will rule in a given situation.  I don’t mean to suggest that legal opinions should be nothing more than psychological predictions about how certain judges will rule.  (I personally find those sorts of opinions a little tedious and somewhat presumptuous.)  But most legal opinions are offered in circumstances that are not identical to prevailing Supreme Court case law, and so all that we are offering is a guess about how courts will decide a case using existing statutes and case law.

There is real temptation to project certainty.  It may make us feel more confident to sound certain. Or we may want to impress the journalist who has called us.  Sometimes reporters are just looking for a sound bite to drop into their article, and at least some of them want you to speak definitively in that sound bite.  But a journalist’s job is to inform the public; and if we make it seem as though the law is clear in areas where it isn’t, then we are misleading the reporter (and in turn, the public) rather than informing them.

Third, be willing to rethink your opinions and to admit your mistakes.  The law professors that I admire the most are those who have changed their minds.  For what it is worth, this is easier to do if you don’t initially express your opinions with too much certainty. If you couch your opinion in terms of “here is what I think at this point,” you leave your ego plenty of room to walk away from that opinion after further reflection or after new information comes to light.

Fourth, be measured and thoughtful when you disagree with the legal opinions expressed by others.  Law professors are human, and they are more likely to engage with you on the substance of an issue if you are respectful in your disagreement.   I don’t just mean avoid being a jerk. I mean you should go out of your way to frame your disagreement terms that couldn’t possibly be mistaken as hostile or aggressive.  It is easy to mistake tone online, so you are better off saying “I really enjoyed this interesting post.  Do you have any thoughts on X?” where X is a piece of information that contradicts a factual point the other professor made, or where X is an opinion by someone else that goes the other way.  A less conciliatory tone is likely to get the other professor’s hackles up, and if someone’s hackles are up, then he or she is less likely to engage your substantive concerns.

Fifth, don’t assume that people are acting in bad faith when they give legal opinions.  In particular, please stop accusing people of giving legal opinions only because those opinions happen to align with their political preferences.  This sort of finger pointing gives further ammunition to non-lawyers who insist that law and politics are indistinguishable.  That isn’t true, and it is extremely corrosive to the legal academy when those legal naysayers can point to law professors accusing each other of partisan hackery in their expert opinions. 

We should, of course, all be careful to push ourselves on our own opinions to ensure that those opinions are impartial predictions of legal outcomes rather than partisan preferences. (There is evidence suggesting that confronting our biases can lessen or eliminate their influence.)  But we should assume that our colleagues are smart enough and honest enough to have done this themselves.  And if you are genuinely worried that someone’s opinion can’t be supported as anything other than political wishful thinking, I recommend trying to have that exchange with him or her in a non-public forum.

There you have it – my five opinions about how to give legal opinions.  I’m interested to hear your opinions on legal opinions. And I am quite open to being convinced that my own opinions are wrong. (Except for number four --- I feel quite certain about that one.)

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Thanks to Ben and Andrew for visiting in May; they will be around for a couple final days.

For June, we are going to run a symposium on the end of the October 2016 SCOTUS Term. This will be a month-long exchange of posts,  in a conversational and interactive manner; we will be discussing final decisions of the Term as they are released, as well as other issues surrounding the Court, such as new cert grants, the influence of Justice Gorsuch on the Court's dynamics, and the rumors of Justice Kennedy's retirement. We will be talking with you and with one another.

Guest-bloggers are Will Baude (Chicago), Daniel Epps (Wash U), Leah Litman (Irvine), Andra Robertson (Case), Stephen Sachs (Duke), Ian Samuel (Harvard),  and Chris Walker (OSU) [ed: and late additions Joseph Miller (Georgia) and David Fontana (GW)]. In addition, the regular Prawfs who write on SCOTUS issues will be joining in the mix. This is something a little different for us. I think it will be fun and interesting.

Because there may be opinions released on Tuesday, we are going to start a couple days early.

 

Joining the Prawfs Community

I am extremely excited to join the Prawfs perma-blogger roster.

I started reading Prawfs in 2005, and I followed it kind of obsessively as I left my clerkship and started a teaching fellowship.  I did my first blogging here as a guest.  And it was the Prawfs community--Danny in particular--that introduced me not only to rigorous scholarship workshops, but also to a great number of people that I now consider to be close friends.

In short, PrawfsBlawg helped shape who I am today.  And I'm absolutely delighted to be a permanent part of the community.

Welcome Carissa Byrne Hessick as perma blogger

We are happy to announce that Carissa Byrne Hessick of UNC has joined PrawfsBlawg as a permanent blogger. Carissa, who has visited hear many times in the past, writes on criminal law, including Redefining Child Pornography Law: Crime, Language, and Social Consequences.

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Welcome to our May guests--Ben Edwards (Barry, headed to UNLV) and Andy Ferguson (UDC) and thanks to our April guests, some of whom will be sticking around for a few more days.

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Welcome to April. April Fool's Day jokes have never been a Prawfs thing, but here is one from Mike Dorf.

Thanks to our March guests. David Fontana will continue from March, joining our returning April visitors of Mark Fenster (Florida), Corinna Lain (Richmond), and Mark Moller (DePaul).

Welcome to Max Stearns and "Blindspot"

Max Stearns (Maryland) has joined the law professor blogosphere with Blindspot, which he describes here. Posts so far have covered the Gorsuch hearings, coffee, the TV show "Rectify" (whose final season I need to watch), and ideological blindspots of both political parties.

Definitely worth adding to your regular blog stops.

Thanks, and More on Interdependent Courts

Thanks to Howard and the gang for letting me blog here this month.  For those who are interested, I’ll be continuing my discussion of court organization, structure, and strategy at a newly launched blog, The Interdependent Third Branch.  After you peruse Prawfsblawg, I hope you’ll take a moment to check it out!

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Thanks to our February visitors, who may be sticking around for a few more days. Thanks especially to our symposium participants, who definitely will be around for a few more days. That seems to have worked well and we look forward to doing more things like this in the future.

Welcome to our March visitors: Seth Cavis (UC-Irvine), David Fontana (George Washington), Jack Harrison (Northern Kentucky-Chase), and Brad Snyder (Wisconsin).

PrawfsFest! 2017

The following is posted on behalf of Jake Linford at FSU ([email protected]), who is hosting the first PrawfsFest! since Dan's death.

I am among the many beneficiaries of that most Markelian (Markelish?) of workshops, the Prawfsfest! It has been too long since the last Prawfsfest, and so I will be hosting a new session at Florida State University College of Law in Funky Tallahassee. The plan is to gather on April 27-28, during FSU’s exam period, but before the weather turns too hot.

The point of the gathering is to be an incubator for half-baked scholarship and early works-in-progress (pre-submission, pre-SSRN).  Each participant is expected to produce of a draft of no more than 10,000 words.  The author does not present the paper, but instead we spend an hour on constructive criticism of each paper, which everyone will have read.

I have 6 available slots, open to any former or current PrawfsBlawgger, which will be distributed first come, first served. Each participant must cover their own travel expenses and hotel accommodations, but FSU will pick up meals. Historically, the conversation and feedback have justified the cost. I'm hoping to finalize the list of attendees as soon as possible, so please let me know ([email protected]) if you plan to attend by March 15, 2017.

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Welcome to February.

Thanks to our January guests, who may stick around for a few extra days. For February, our month-long guests will be Ian Bartrum (UNLV), Megan LaBelle (Catholic), Robert Mikos (Vanderbilt), and Jordy Singer (New England).

In addition, February will include an on-line symposium, something we have done in the past and hope to do more of in the future. Organized by Dan Rodriguez, this month will be Law's New Frontiers, a discussion sparked by Richard and Daniel Suskind's The Future of the Professions and Gillian Hadfield's Rules for a Flat World. Participants will be: Daniel Rodriguez (Northwestern), Daniel Katz (Chicago-Kent), Daniel Sokol (Florida), Phil Weiser (Colorado), William Henderson (Indiana-Bloomington), Renee Knake (Houston), Andrew Perlman (Suffolk), Stephen Denver (Law Society of England & Wales), and Javier de la Cendra (IE-Madrid). Dan (Rodriguez) will have more when it is about to begin.

MarkelFest! at AALS on Wednesday (Moved to Top)

We will continue a PrawfsBlawg tradition with another MarkelFest! Happy Hour at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. It will be at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, January 4, at Romper Room, 25 Maiden Lane in Union Square; go to the private room upstairs, called the Leopard Lounge (buy drinks at the bar downstairs). The bar is about a 10-minute walk from the Hilton (walk up O'Farrell, left on Grant, right on Maiden Lane).

Please spread the word. And come join us for drinks and conversation. See you all there.